She’s their best . . . asset.
When a player in a bizarre Long Island insurance scam skipped bail, bounty hunters laid a classic “honey trap” — sending a curvy decoy to trick the wary young fugitive into opening the door to his Groveport, Ohio, hideaway.
“We sent a hot piece of p—y to his door,” explained bail bondswoman Michelle Esquenazi, who set up the caper.
Captured perp Jonathan Roth, 23, was tossed in jail without bail Friday after a week on the lam for admittedly helping his dad collect $410,000 in life insurance. It was the younger Roth who had made a frantic 911 call back in July 2012, reporting his dad, Raymond, 48, had disappeared into the waves off of Jones Beach. The dad was actually headed to his Orlando time share.
The next dumb thing the younger Roth did was on Thursday, when a shapely young brunette in high heels, a short skirt and a cleavage-baring shirt knocked, and he opened the door.
“I guess I was flipping my hair,” the pretty decoy admitted in an interview.
The decoy said she kept Roth off his guard by asking not for him, and instead asking for the pal he was staying with. Roth and his pal had met when they both served in the Marines, the decoy said.
“He was totally flirting back,” she remembered. “I said, ‘Oh, the Marines! That’s so awesome!’ ”
But before Roth could offer to show off his Semper Fi tattoo, three bounty hunters from Empire Bail Bonds had him in cuffs. “F—ing bitch!” he hollered as they hauled him off.
“Of course he’s going to open up his door for a nice piece of a–, it’s timeless,” Esquenazi, who is Empire’s CEO, said of the honey-trap collar. “Sometimes we have the girl say her car broke down — which I consider obvious, but it still works, who has trademarked herself “The Bail Bonds Queen.” “Or it could just be a wrong address.”
It works for both male and female fugitives, noted Esquenazi, whose company, the largest in New York state, is the subject of an in-development reality TV show.
“Once we were trying to get a woman who jumped bail on a narcotics sale case in The Bronx,” Esquenazi remembered.
“We sent a handsome black guy — a body builder — to the door, all oiled up and dressed in a wife-beater,” she said.
“That’s just what he looked best in,” she explained.
Empire goes after at least 10 bail jumpers a month, most of them in for far higher than the $10,000 bond that Roth skipped on, she said. “If they go overseas, we’re pretty much f–ked,” she admitted. “But in the US, we’ll track you down and we will find you.
“The thing about defendants is no matter who they are — they can come in white, black, green or purple polka dots. They’re all dumb,” she noted. “Every single last one of them is stupid.”