Page 3 of 6

Benton first met Price in 1993 at Plum Crazy, a popular watering hole off Exit 9 that is now a strip club. Price was bouncing when Benton, a 20-year-old UNCC, student tried to get into the bar with a fake I.D. Price decided to confiscate it, but Benton protested. "I was like, 'Listen, dude, you're not keeping my I.D. It's one thing to not let me in this bar, but you're not keeping it. How am I going to buy my beer?'" says Benton. Later, Benton's bondsman brother-in-law, Toby, who started Benton in the business, hired Price.

That night at Plum Crazy marked the first of many arguments among Price and Benton. In 13 years of hunting together they've had the cops called on them more than once for arguing too loudly in public. One time, during a downpour, neither wanted to go around the back of a house and make sure the skip didn't sneak out. During their argument, the skip they were looking for pulled into the driveway behind them, walked up to their car and asked them to move out of his driveway. Benton was so caught up in the fight, he told his fugitive to get lost.

• radok
• THE INNER SANCTUM: Inside Price's skip-hunting van

"We call him 'Let 'em Loose Larry,'" Price says of Benton's reputation for bonding out desperate people with a higher risk of skipping. "He's the one with the kind-ass liberal heart that believes their sad-ass fucking stories: 'It wasn't my crack rock.' 'I didn't mean to hit her so hard her eye ball came out.'" Price says, "With me, they say, 'Why'd you send that fat fucker in the Hawaiian shirt?'"

Hawaiian shirts are Price's trademark. He has more than 20 and orders them from a Honolulu-based company that uses authentic bamboo or coconut buttons. When it's warm out, he orders one or two a month, but now only in rayon. He stopped buying the $100 silk shirts when he found they stained too easily. Blood from one guy's nose that Price "mashed in like a potato" stained his white silk shirt with yellow pineapples on it.

No one in the business has a bad word to say about Benton. Price is another story. One bondsman, who asked to speak anonymously, told CL that while Price has a reputation for getting the job done, it's not always by the book. "The line we have to walk is so narrow that we can teeter from one side to the other ... You've got to have common sense and enough smarts to know what line not to cross." Specifically, the bondsman said, Price has a reputation for using "excessive force."

More than just a bad ass, Price can be flat-out vindictive. While pursuing a 19-year-old man in Lake Wylie wanted on charges of statutory rape, Price became irritated at the boy's mother, who lied to him about her son's location and wouldn't let him enter her house to search. While Benton went up the front pathway, Price dragged his feet through the red clay outside. After forcing his way into the house, Price wiped his red prints everywhere he could, ruining the woman's white shag carpeting.

"It looked like a damn elephant fucking walked through there," says Benton with a laugh. (The 19-year-old was hiding in his room under the bed.)

Once they're caught, most skips want to know how they were found. If Price suspects his informant has lied to him or withheld information in the past, he'll give the skip that person's name, knowing that more than likely the skip will seek revenge. "He didn't provide me with the information I wanted, so I'll fuck him over," Price says.

"Loud" and "obnoxious" are the first two words Tammy, Price's girlfriend and the mother of his 6-month-old child, uses to describe Price. "But with a big heart," she adds.

Count on Price to put a profanity-laden spin on his own acts of good will. "You've got the green, we'll set you free. We don't give a fuck what you did," Price says of the bail bondsman motto. "Me, on the other hand, I won't touch people who've fucked with kids or serious shit like that. Drugs are like this, bro: I ain't never seen nobody twist an arm to go smoke a crack rock. You want to smoke the rock? Go smoke the fucking rock."

Recently, Benton asked for Price's advice on bailing out David Boland, a man charged with six counts of child porn. Boland's parents, the co-signers, put their house on the bond, meaning if Boland disappeared Benton could foreclose on the house. Benton wrote the $300,000 because with such a strong cosigner, it was basically guaranteed money. But after talking to Price, he thought better of it and sold the bond off to another bondsman.