The American Repossessor

PRESSED DEEP into the front seat cushion of an unmarked Chevy Silverado, Bill Leach grips the steering wheel with pudgy, calloused hands and checks the rearview mirror. In it, behind his doe-eyed wife smiling in the back, sways a wood and steel flatbed trailer loaded with a pair of motorcycles. Neither one belongs to him. Neither one belongs to the men who had them parked in their garages a couple of hours before, either. Both, in fact, belong to the bank, and the only one happy about that at this point is the man at the wheel. Leach is a repo man, and business is booming.

“I told you Saturday was a good day to catch ‘em,” he says with a lippy smile, accelerating onto Highway 1 and heading back to his home office in Watsonville. “I try and do the Lord’s work. I’ll listen to them, I’ll be their friend, but they got themselves in this situation and I still gotta pick up their vehicle.’”

Leach–who is short and heavyset, with a frizzled white goatee, mesh hat and oily jeans–looks the part of a repo man, although he could just as easily pass for an auto mechanic or long haul trucker. Devoted Christian, husband of 27 years and father of five grown kids, he’s been a tow truck driver for 24 years and a licensed California Repossession Agent since 2001. With his wife and business partner, Kathy, always riding shotgun, Leach still maintains Happy Hooker Towing, doing simple jobs for law enforcement and private customers on occasion.

His bread and butter these days, however, comes from the banks that fax him 20 to 25 requests each week to find folks who are two months late or more on their vehicle loan payments. His job is to take back the goods–everything from motorcycles and cars to jet skis, boats, ATVs and even, recently, a $125,000 road-paving machine. Leach has repo’d just about everything a person can purchase on credit.

Lately he’s got all the business he can handle. Since 2007, he says, the number of bank repossessions he has averaged has nearly doubled. Indeed, though giving a slightly more modest estimate, spokesman Mike Stoller of GMAC Financial Services, the nation’s top auto lender, says his company’s repossessions have increased 22 percent in that time. That’s a huge number for a lender that already repossessed about 70,000 vehicles per year before the current economic meltdown.