Bail bondsman a voice for clients [Daily Inter Lake, Kalispell, Mont.]

July 08--The bail bonds industry is one rife with stereotypes, many continued courtesy of a certain television personality, but at least one man is trying to change that perception.

Charles Pesola owns and operates Moonlighting Bail Bonds and Moonlighting Detective and Security Services in downtown Kalispell. The 29-year-old is not, however, your average bail bondsman.

The son of a pastor, Pesola was born in Milwaukee, Wisc. His family moved often as his father was shifted from church to church, and they eventually moved to the Kalispell area in 2003, just as Pesola was finishing a stint with a Christian music group based in California.

His family eventually moved, but he stayed behind and got a job at Glacier Nursery before getting into construction work. In July 2005, Pesola married his now-wife and New York native Becky, whose father is also a pastor who has served in Kalispell for 20 years.

"Then I realized crawl spaces and attics were not for me," Pesola said. "I started looking for investigative-type things, decided it was something I wanted to do. I wasn't sure if I wanted to go into law enforcement or the private side, so I just started looking for opportunities."

He would receive his first of those opportunities in 2006 when he was hired as the loss-prevention leader for Shopko. In addition, Pesola started working for local security companies on the side, "which is how you get into this industry," he said. "You almost have to freebie your way into it if you want to do it; it's difficult."

Through that side work, Pesola eventually met William "Ike" Eisentraut, a retired homicide detective from the Los Angeles Police Department. Eisentraut offered Pesola work with his company, Moonlighting Detective Agency.

So Pesola began apprenticing for Eisentraut while still managing security at Shopko, which he kept up until February 2010, when he began working at Moonlighting full time.

"I'd worked myself into a position where I couldn't afford to be doing both anymore; it was just too much work," he said.

THAT SUMMER, with just a few weeks of full-time employment at the detective agency under his belt, Pesola took the first in what would become many steps to expand and improve the company.

He did that by launching Moonlighting Bail Bonds, a separate company associated with Moonlighting Detective Agency. Up to that point, Moonlighting had only provided private investigation and some security.

"The intention when I came to Moonlighting as an employee was, over time, to acquire the entire company [from Ike]," Pesola said. "Our agreement together was that I'd work for him for a while and then we'd switch roles. So I knew that bail was something that would help supplement the company and would help grow the company."

As the final part of that process, after all control was shifted to Pesola, he merged the disparate parts in March 2012 under one corporation, Pesola Inc., which provides services under the company names of Moonlighting Detective and Security Services and Moonlighting Bail Bonds.

The most recent change occurred in August of last year, when Pesola moved his business from an out-of-the-way house on First Avenue West North to a downtown office space on Third Street East across the street from the Flathead County Library.

"It was part of my strategy in getting us closer to downtown, closer to where things are happening, a little bit more visibility," Pesola said.

He explained that part of the reason he wants that visibility is to buck the trend and preconceptions surrounding the types of business in which his company deals.

"I think detective agencies and bail companies have a couple of TV ideas that people have," Pesola said. "With detective agencies it's the full-brimmed hat, in the corner in the shadows smoking a pipe, nobody knows who or what they are, and bail has the whole neon lights and scuzzy-haired Dog the Bounty Hunter people. I wanted to kind of change that, let people know that it's available, it's not a dirty industry all the time. There are good companies that do good things."

And if they are good companies doing good things, Pesola said, they should be looking to advertise what they do, because nurturing and encouraging a positive public perception of the industry helps the business.

AMONG THE MISCONCEPTIONS about the industry, those involving bail bonds are the most inaccurate, according to Pesola.

To give a clearer explanation of what the bail-bonds game is really like, Pesola used his company as an example. At the end of June, Moonlighting had active bonds posted for more than 980 clients. Of those, just nine were on Pesola's board of problem clients.

But that low number of bonds that pose an issue is still high enough to risk the company's profits if they are not managed properly.

"Let's assume for a minute that all nine of those people paid me $200 to get out of jail," Pesola said. "So I've got $1,800 out of those nine people. One of those, if I don't catch them, costs me what I made on all nine of them."

He explained that because of that low threshold for financial issues when dealing with problem bonds, every decision a bail bondsman makes about which clients to take on is much more complicated.

"You can't look at it and say 'Well this is easy, because nobody causes any problems,'" Pesola said. "If you look at it, when a bail bondsman charges 10 percent, that means that I don't make money for 90 percent of that, so I've got to have that flip because it only takes 1 percent [of losing money on clients] to screw that up for a while."

The other major factor in how much business a bail bondsman will do is the obvious one -- how many people are arrested that need to post bail.

Pesola said while there are historical timeframes when the number of people who need to bond out is higher, it changes from day to day and week to week. He sees a range from zero to about 20 over the course of any given week.

MOONLIGHTING IS MORE than just a labor of love for Pesola because he truly loves what he does, namely interacting with his clients. Or at least the vast majority of them, as indicated by a sign in the front of the Moonlighting office that reads "most walk-ins welcome."

"Most of our people I really enjoy getting personal conversations with and talking to and seeing what aspect of their life they came from and where they're going to and what we can do to help in some way, whether that's a bail thing or whether it's an investigation or whether it's a security job," Pesola said.

In particular, he enjoys taking advantage of opportunities to provide a positive note in what is usually a negative situation.

"My goal is to always let people see that everything we do that has a negative connotation -- which is a lot of our stuff, whether we're investigating a spouse that's cheating or a guy that's cheating on workman's comp, or chasing somebody for stealing videotapes at the Salvation Army or whatever we do -- It doesn't have to be negative," Pesola said.

"Things have happened, past is past, move on and redefine your life. We get to help people redefine their lives sometimes. It doesn't always turn out good, but we try."

In addition to running his businesses, Pesola is also a firefighter with and president of the South Kalispell Fire Department. He's a member of his church's governing board, and a member of the Kalispell Planning Board.

Reporter Jesse Davis may be contacted at 758-4441 or by email at [email protected].

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