I’ve been scrambling from project to project, but this feature always lingered in the back of my mind. I picked it as the Long Beach Ultimate Builder Bikernet Editor’s Choice winner, and Peter Linney immediately shot it for a feature, and then he wanted his payment. I didn’t like the way he shot this bike, but I was also very aware how difficult a twisted chrome frame is to photograph under any conditions.
Freelance magazine contributors were once very proud to see their material featured, but since the economy tanked and the Internet drove magazines to cut budgets, these poor bastards struggle to get paid at all. Plus the advent of digital cameras and computers upped the competition.
We do our best for moto-journalists here at the Bikernet Headquarters. Even when time is tough, we try to pay a handful of talented journalists, who contribute to our ever-growing content base. Anyway, this feature hung around and I struggled for the time to investigate the twisted story. Another project was always in the way.
I didn’t realize the mountain of substance behind the twisted chromed frame, but found out once I picked up the phone. I met a couple of the builders at the show, and for a minute we discussed twisting metal, since I had recently scavenged through a wrought iron metal yard, where I bought a massive plumber’s pipe threader. This shop, Coast Welding, bolted these units to the tops of steel tables and used them to twist square stock for wrought iron gates. So, I was intrigued when I saw this frame.
I finally hooked up with Quentin and quickly discovered another connection. When I rode north with Billy Lane, Christian from Sucker Punch who passed away, and Phil Z, we stopped at this shop, Top Dead Center, in Oxnard, California. I remembered the multitude of rusting twisted projects. This was a group of talented builders just on the outskirts of the county of Los Angeles. The family story was even more twisted. Seems Andy, the Top Dead Center shop owner, was driving a van when a brother was killed. He ended up adopting the man’s kids, and hooking up with the dead brother’s wife. He’s been watching over the kids ever since.
Seth, the young stepson became an integral member of the shop and learned the twisted methods from Andy. Quentin has his own twisted tale. According to the TV show NightLine he is considered a celeb repo-man, and he was recently tailed for several days by journalist from Los Angeles Magazine and I’ll snatch a couple of paragraphs below about his repo mission.
Repo Man by Chris Nelson, Los Angeles Magazine
Quentin is a repo man. He is five feet eleven, as smart as two foxes, and as ballsy as Dirty Harry on angel dust. On this Tuesday afternoon we are in his Ford Crown Victoria P71, bought at a police auction. Quentin is on this quest at the behest of the bank, because the trucker is eight months behind on his payments. I’m riding shotgun. The phrase is apt, derived from the stagecoach days when drivers needed protection—except I’m smaller than Quentin and only half as smart as just one fox, or I wouldn’t be here.
Repo men are financial scavengers. When people don’t make the payments on their cars, trucks, mobile homes, even Caterpillar tractors, the repo men—there aren’t many women—hunt down the vehicles and take them away. Some they tow, others they haul, most often to impound lots where the vehicles can be redeemed if the owners are able to catch up on what they owe.
Otherwise their wheels are sold at auction, and the price goes toward the payoff. People don’t like to lose their rides, which makes Quentin Gutierrez’s job tough, often dicey, and occasionally dangerous. He is from East L.A., grew up around gangs, and has the street savvy of a survivor. There are times, though, when crises whirl out of control.
Once or twice Quentin has come close to being killed. He is a fast talker, salty, with an irreverent sense of humor, but he does not take confrontations lightly. When his life is at risk, he prays. Clearly, he earns his money. These days, one might even think he is well off. After all, when the economy goes down, repossessions go up. Indeed, Quentin’s business has climbed. A growing number of people are losing their jobs, and many can no longer afford their cars, including some who bought them during Cash for Clunkers. For Quentin, however, there is a catch. Some of the banks, credit unions, and finance companies that hire him to retrieve vehicles for nonpayment don’t pay their own bills. One bank alone has stiffed him for $35,000, he says, and a finance company owes him $30,000. What’s more, it is risky to badger the auto lenders to pay up when they are the sources of his business. “You don’t want to piss somebody off,” he says. “It’s like accusing your girlfriend: ‘Is that Brut on you?’?”
His dad owned an auto shop, and Quentin ditched school to hang out with him. Quentin spent hours at the shop. In addition to the five boys, the Gutierrezes had three girls. They owned their home and another house, which they rented out. With such a big family, however, much of their furniture came from Goodwill, and dinner sometimes was powdered milk and macaroni and cheese.
His brother Joe joined a gang. A neighbor taught Joe to box and was coaxing him out of the gang when five rivals jumped him and cut his throat. Joe bled to death. Quentin was 11. He remembers a deputy sheriff coming to the house. Quentin was sleeping on the couch. He heard the deputy tell his mother, “Your son died.”
Quentin began to cry, weeping under a blanket, trying to be strong because he was a boy, and his older brothers had instilled in him: Boys don’t cry. Now he had lost one of his brothers, and he loved him and missed him. “You’re angry,” Quentin says. “You want to get revenge, so you turn to the gang as your backup.”
Another of his brothers, Jimmy, was hit by a bullet. “He was sitting in the car, parked in the driveway across from our house. They shot several times. I ducked, and when I got up, I saw my brother bleeding.” Quentin drove him to an emergency room. “They said they didn’t do head injuries. I said, ‘Give him oxygen! Do something!’?” Jimmy died. Quentin was 16. The shots had come from a car. “I saw the car,” Quentin says, “but the cops said, ‘Did you see [the shooter]?’ I couldn’t lie. I didn’t see him. I wish I could have said I saw him…. It really puts a scar on you.”
Quentin got into a lot of trouble. He says he smoked a little of this, snorted a little of that, and was caught trespassing. “The cops beat the shit out of me,” he says. He went through the windshield of a car, crashed in a van, and got into a motorcycle accident, which broke his back in three places. “All the pain I felt…it’s like God saying ‘You’ve got to straighten your shit up.’ It was like getting another chance.” So was support from his godparents. They ran In Jesus Sí Se Puede, an afterschool program for troubled kids, in East L.A. While he was still a teenager, they took Quentin in and had him baptized. “They believed in me and prayed,” Quentin says. “They put their hands on me. ‘In the name of the Lord, please take any badness out of him.’ It’s funny—you’re smart, and you grow older. One day I just quit it all.”
By then Quentin had watched countless people pay to have their cars towed to his father’s shop to be repaired. He asked himself, “Why can’t I make the money?” When he was 17, he sold a motorcycle and bought a beat-up truck with a yellow fender, a blue fender, a black door, but no engine. He installed a motor and drove on bald tires until he could afford new ones. He used the truck to begin towing cars. Because he was working for his father’s business, he did not need a commercial license. He spent hours on the freeways bird-dogging people who needed help. When a prospect said AAA was on its way, Quentin pointed out that the auto service would begin charging after only a few free miles—and that he would charge less. It was his little hustle.
Some nights he bird-dogged until 3 or 4 a.m. and came home with $300 to $400. One day he picked up a car for a man from a finance company. “It didn’t dawn on me until later that he had given me a repo. I only charged him for a tow. He was burning me, but I wanted to work, and I was excited. He said, ‘We’re paying you $150.’ Nobody told me the rate was $300 to $325. In one night I would pick up five to eight cars—times $150. I couldn’t complain.”
With that, Quentin became a repo man. During his twenties and thirties, he repossessed cars and trucks at an enviable clip. Before long he was hiring help. “I had a guy with one arm, used to pick up 15, 20 cars a week,” he says. At one point he hired a young man named Mike. “He was always mad. We called him Mad Mike.”
Quentin paid his men on commission. “I had Buster, Lefty, me, Chuy, four or five guys. It was good.”
From the annals of Quentin the repo man:
“Some stuff’s easy, bro. They leave it on the street and you just back up to it,” he says. Some repos are even fun. One was a Batmobile used at the premiere of Batman. He put on a Batman suit to pick it up. “When I was coming down the freeway, every kid in a car was glued to the window, like, ‘Batman! Batman!’ We all need heroes, man.” Other repos can be heart-wrenching, and Quentin has a soft spot. He retrieved a Chevy pickup that belonged to a woman on dialysis. She cried. “If you take my car,” she said, “how am I going to go see the doctor?” Not long before, Quentin had gotten a good deal from a friend on a Chrysler Cordova, and he gave it to her.
Many repos are tricky. As he hooked a pickup in South-Central, a man charged him with a trashcan. “He was screaming: ‘Motherfucker, aaargh! Why did you do this to me?’” On another occasion, also in South-Central, Quentin jumped into another pickup. “It didn’t want to start. Finally it did, and a guy dived out of the kitchen window in his underwear, a young little gangster. He grabs a sledgehammer, and he’s chasing me up the street in his underwear, trying to throw the sledgehammer into a window.”
In San Pedro one day, a woman and her son accosted one of his drivers, broke a window in the driver’s tow truck with a baseball bat—and then all the windows in the car he was taking.
“It’s like a bank robber,” Quentin says. “He’s either going to get away, get killed, or get put in jail. A repossessor, you’re either going to get away or make money, get your ass kicked—or get killed. You run across cops, and they tell you, ‘Man, you’ve got a dangerous job.’” Indeed, Quentin has been shot at. “Right off of Fair Oaks, off the 210 freeway,” he says. “We scoped out the car about three o’clock in the morning. These guys pop out of a house and start shooting. These guys shooting at us were following us. They were chasing us in the damn car.”
While Quentin was repossessing cars, he also did some acting. A friend in the Screen Actors Guild steered him into it. Quentin played in commercials for 7-Eleven stores, Budweiser, and Kentucky Fried Chicken, appeared in the soap opera General Hospital, and portrayed a drug lord’s brother in The Killing Zone, a 1991 low-budget thriller. He supplied cars for the 1984 cult movie Repo Man, in which he was a tow truck driver, and he gave actor Harry Dean Stanton one of his lines: “I’m going to buy myself a tow truck, a couple of pit bulls, and run a yard.”
During 1979 and the early 1980s, Quentin chauffeured comics for Mitzi Shore, owner of the Comedy Store in West Hollywood. “Howie Mandel, when he was nobody. Dice [Clay], when he was nobody. [Sam] Kinison, when he was nobody. Bob Saget. Arsenio Hall. Paul Mooney. You ever see him live? Just yell out ‘Repo!’ and he’ll say, ‘Where’s my Mexican friend Quentin?’?” Quentin maintained Shore’s V-12 Jaguar and sold her son, the comic Pauly Shore, who now runs the club, his first car—a repossessed station wagon. At one point Quentin produced and hosted a Comedy Store variety show, did stand-up, and performed sketches.
After a brief marriage and the birth of two daughters, Quentin divorced. He won custody of the children. “I walked away from comedy and acting because I needed to raise my kids,” he says. In addition to recovering cars, he got a job repossessing furniture and appliances. “I couldn’t do it.” That soft spot again. “I didn’t have the heart. You walk in and see a kid’s bunk beds. They wanted us to take the bunk beds, somebody’s refrigerator. It’s just not right.” Even today, Quentin buys homeless people breakfast whenever he sees them at McDonald’s. He and his ex-wife are friends. His daughters are still a big part of his life, but now that they are grown and training to become nurses, Quentin uses some of his time speaking at programs like the one his godmother ran. “I talk about the things I did,” he says. I show my gang pictures. I talk about how I changed. It means something to those kids.”
More recently a bank sent Quentin to repossess a man’s car at a Chevron station where the man worked. Quentin told the bank: “We have to stake him out and catch him later. ‘No, no, get him now!’ So we get the car, and we get chased down. The guy comes up to me with a Glock. He had a neck the size of your head and a gangster jacket. He’s going sideways with the Glock to my face. I had a bulletproof vest under my shirt, so I’m thinking, I’m going to grab the gun and put it to my chest. Right there, that day, I was praying to God, saying, ‘Fuck, what did I do wrong?’ As the guy got closer, I started saying, ‘Forgive me for my sins. I’m sorry.’ Whatever happens, you just have to deal with it. I started talking, defusing him. A detective had busted his brother. He started telling me about it. ‘No,’ I said, ‘that wasn’t right….’ Then I heard tires squealing. It was the LAPD coming to rescue me.”
If Quentin can’t find a car with information from a bank, he calls it a dry run. He tries computer programs that offer ways to search for people as well as the post office and credit bureaus that provide new addresses. He even calls 411 and knocks on doors. If the owner surrenders the car, Quentin calls it a laydown, or a gravy job. Otherwise it becomes a hook and book. “You want to hook it and get the hell out of there without being confronted,” he says. “I’m best at night. Basically, I’m a professional car thief. I’m licensed to steal.” He tries to be invisible. “The art to repossessing is being sneaky and never being caught.” 
If a car is blocked in a driveway or locked in a garage, he waits, then follows the driver to wherever the car becomes accessible—at a parking lot, for instance. Quentin crawls beneath it. “Every car has a linkage to put it in neutral. My guy Lefty got smart. He started making a little book. He would write down which size wrench went for each car. Then he would write a diagram—what it looked like under there. Einstein said, ‘Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.’ And that’s what he was doing. If the car is in a driveway, you push it out, because then you’re away from the house, so you’re quieter, you’re sneakier—more stealthy.”
In some cases he can have a locksmith make a key based on a car’s vehicle identification number. Some vehicles, however, have computer chips that foil these keys. Then towing is the only option.
Another way to get into trouble is by stealing personal property from repossessed cars. Most of what Quentin finds is trash. “Pigsty, everything’s a mess,” he says. “You try to bag it, tag it, inventory it.” Dog treats. Gas cans. Jumper cables. Cheap floor mats. Dirty baby seats. Air fresheners hanging from rearview mirrors. Chicken bones. Hamburger wrappers. “I could do a survey of junk food, what sells the most. It’s either Burger King or McDonald’s.”
Repossessors must hold the personal property for 30 days. Quentin has held valuable items for up to eight months. The most money he ever found was $25,000 in cash. “The temptation’s always there,” he says. “But if it catches up to you, you lose everything that you’ve worked for.” In another story told at the recertification seminar, a woman’s family Bible was stolen from her car. “She sued the repo company for loss of property, and I think she got maybe $300,000 for the Bible, a family heirloom.
“Basically, you get good money,” he says. “If you know what you’re doing and you’ve learned from your mistakes, it flows.”
He thinks for a few seconds, an eternity for him. I remember something he said one day when we were searching for a car. “Some people, I feel bad taking their stuff, because they’ve hit hard times. Some repo men say, ‘They deserve it.’ Some people, granted, do deserve it. But I know we all screw up, and some people fall into a hard time: The husband who lost his job, or the lady living in the hotel with the dialysis. There’s some good people out there, real good people. And there are people you respect, because they’ll come out and say, ‘Here, take it, I’m sorry.’ You try to make them feel comfortable. It happens to everybody.”
Now, in the nippy air outside Don Cuco’s, Quentin Gutierrez says, “Ernest Hemingway said it the best. ‘There is no hunting like the hunting of man.’ I guess that’s my high. Tracking people.”
He pauses for another small eternity. “Twenty-nine years as a repo man, and I’ve seen the good, the bad, and the ugly. I believe the more bad you do, the more bad you’re going to get. The more good you do, don’t expect anything back, but the road gets a little easier.”
“I’m hustling it. A hustler’s always gonna come out on top. That’s how it works.”
Andy and Seth are the type of builders who don’t let anything stand in their crafty ways and they rarely use aftermarket parts. “They build everything,” Quentin said, “from frames to sheet metal, and small machined parts.” For example the frame was made from hex stock, heated, twisted, formed, shaped, then jigged, and welded into a VL style frame to fit an Evo and 6-speed tranny. Then the real work started. All the joints that where welded where ground filled and shaped to make them look like they were casted pieces, then sanded and polished to prepare for chrome plating.
“The gas tanks started out as, I think a ‘05 Sportster tank that was split and made too fit the frame and motor,” Quentin said. The right side has gas that was made to cross over into the other side to make more room for gas, and the left side is set for the oil and some gas. “What looks like the oil tank, does not hold any oil. It actually holds the coil, battery, and the rest of wiring.”
I need to get to the bottom of Handcraft and Top Dead Center. There’s an OCC-like relationship going on at the shop, but what they create is amazing and I want to study their actual twisting methods. Quentin owns four bikes built by Andy, who started twisting frames with solid square stock, and round stock packed with sand, before Indian Larry, and Seth. I plan to make a run to Oxnard with Quentin in the near future to dig in and find out more.
Seth is also a certified welder, and from time to time is called to oil refineries to make repairs, sort of like our Tobey, the Bikernet Certified Welder here in Wilmington. Quentin knew Andy, as a Knucklehead expert, as a kid and watched Seth grow up around the shop. Peter Linney shot another bike built by the Top Dead team, and I’ll bring you more stories from Oxnard in the near future.
–Bandit
Owner: Quentin Gutierrez
Address: Twisted lane
City: LA
Zip: 99999
Make: TWISTED FRAME EVO
Year: 2011
Model: SETH#5
Type: BLOCKHEAD
Year: 2011
Fabrication: SETH SLAGIEL @ HANDCRAFT
Finish: SETH SLAGIEL @ HANDCRAFT
Time: 1 YEAR
Hardware: CHROME
Assembly: SETH SLAGIEL @ HANDCRAFT
Assembler: SETH SLAGIEL @ HANDCRAFT
ENGINE:
Type: S&S
Displacement: 100-inch
Year: 2011
Horsepower: IT HAS SOME
Heads: S&S
Valves: S&S
Pistons: S&S
Cylinders: S&S
Camshaft: JIMS
Lifters: JIMS
Pushrods: JIMS
Carburetor/Injection: S&S
Air Cleaner: OLD
Transmission: JIMS
Blower/Turbo: I WISH
Ignition: ULTIMA
Exhaust: SETH SLAGIEL @ HANDCRAFT
Mufflers: SETH SLAGIEL @ HANDCRAFT
Fasteners/Hardware: CHROME NUT/BOLTS
Finish: Black Wrinkle powder and chrome
TRANSMISSION
Finish: BLACK WRINKLE and chrome
FRAME
Type: TWISTED # 5 BY SETH SLAGIEL @ HANDCRAFT
Year: 2011
Builder: SETH SLAGIEL @ HANDCRAFT
Stretch: None
Rake: 30 degrees
Swingarm: DON’T THINK SO
Shocks: Nope
Modifications: EVERYTHING BY SETH SLAGIEL @ HANDCRAFT
Molding: None
Finish: ALL METAL WORK DONE BY SETH SLAGIEL @ HANDCRAFT AND THERES A LOT
FRONTEND
Forks: SPRINGER
Type: VTWIN AND SETH SLAGIEL @ HANDCRAFT
Year: 2011
Builder: V-TWIN AND SETH SLAGIEL @ HANDCRAFT
Finish: CHROME/ POWDER-COAT
Triple Trees: HARLEY
Modifications: NOT A LOT
PAINT AND FINISHES
Colors: CANDY BLUE, WHITE
Type: HOUSE OF COLOR
Special Paint: SETH SLAGIEL @ HANDCRAFT
The Painter: SETH SLAGIEL @ HANDCRAFT
Chrome: R&E
WHEELS
Front
Rim: I don’t know
Size: 21-inch
Hub: SPOOL
Finish: CHROME
Tire: AVON
Brake: Nope
Rear
Rim: HARLEY
Size: 16-inch
Brake: Performance Machine
Builder: SETH SLAGIEL @ HANDCRAFT
Finish: CHROME
Fender: SETH SLAGIEL @ HANDCRAFT
Tire: Not sure, what’s it say?
Hub: HARLEY
ACCESSORIES
Handlebars: SETH SLAGIEL @ HANDCRAFT
Risers: HARLEY
Headlights: HARLEY
Taillights: HARLEY
Speedometer: Nope
Gauges: None
Electrics: SETH SLAGIEL @ HANDCRAFT
Seat: SETH SLAGIEL @ HANDCRAFT
Pegs: SETH SLAGIEL @ HANDCRAFT
Oil Tank: SETH SLAGIEL @ HANDCRAFT
Fuel Tank(s): HARLEY AND SETH SLAGIEL @ HANDCRAFT SETH SLAGIEL @ HANDCRAFT
Contact:
SETH SLAGIEL @ HANDCRAFT
(805)248-8073
Facebook/Handcraftbyseth
HandcraftBySeth@gmail.com
