Today, RMG News is a well-oiled news-gathering force. Along with a third cameraman poached from their main competitor, On-Scene Video, and a younger Raishbrook brother who occasionally joins in, they fan out to several scenes in a night, each often logging 200 miles.
Within minutes of leaving a scene, they blast e-mail alerts from their laptops in their cars to producers at all the local TV news programs.
Local stations pay about $150 to use a clip, while the rate can go as high as $600 for CNN and other national outlets. Each brother routinely pockets between $1,500 and $2,500 a week. In addition, resales of archived footage to shows like "World's Craziest Police Chases," earned RMG about $100,000 last year.
And the Raishbrook brothers are quickly becoming their own product. A show scheduled to launch tonight on the TruTV cable channel chronicles the brothers' work. It seems surprising that it has taken so long for the duo to be discovered. Their adrenaline-soaked nights are custom-made for mass consumption.
On a recent night, Howard was idling in a downtown parking lot around midnight, annoyed with what had been a disappointing night. He had been a few minutes late to a police chase, and a small rubbish fire hadn't justified even turning on the camera. That all changed when a call came over the radio: a rescue on the southbound Pasadena Freeway.
Howard froze, listening to the few available details. He slammed the car into drive. Peeling onto the serpentine freeway, he topped out at 106 miles per hour .
In the hierarchy of local TV news programs, video of firefighters using the jaws of life or other heavy machinery to extract people from a wrecked car ranks high. Perhaps only police chases are better, the brothers believe.
Within minutes Howard found the wreck in the inbound lanes. Taking an exit, he doubled back through a neighborhood above the freeway. He jumped out of the car, took a running leap and pulled himself to the top of an 8-foot wall. Peering down the steep embankment, he saw the car below, badly smashed and teetering at a sharp angle.
He retrieved his camera, cleared the wall and scampered down through loose dirt, rock and underbrush. A pair of CHP officers had stopped traffic.
"Where the hell did you come from?" one asked with a bemused but wary look on his face. Howard promised to stay out of the way, flipped on the camera's high-powered light and zoomed in on the car's unconscious passenger just as the first ambulance arrived. Nearly all the local news programs would buy his footage and play it the next morning.
