The Most Difficult
Tony Snesko
San Diego, California
The most difficult man I ever served was a man who had swindled millions of dollars from investors. I served him at least a dozen times and each time was a story in itself. But two services stand out more than the others and they just happen to be the first and the last time I served him. It was 1970 and I was riding my Harley when I pulled up in front of his office building. I walked into the receptionist area wearing my leather jacket and sunglasses and asked for the defendant by his first name. Pretending that I knew him and that he was expecting me, I said, “Just tell him that Tony is here.” The office was a large room full of cubicles with closed offices along the outside walls. Instead of calling him on the phone, she buzzed herself through an electronic gate and walked the length of the building (about 100 feet) to the last office on the right. She went in the office, closed the door, and a few seconds later a man’s head peeked out and looked at me. The receptionist returned to the front, stood blocking the electronic gate and informed me that the defendant was not in. I went back out to my motorcycle and removed my leather jacket and sunglasses and combed my hair (I used to have some then). I was hoping that my appearance would be significantly changed enough to keep the receptionist from immediately recognizing me. I waited for someone else to enter the office to distract her. Moments later, a delivery truck pulled up and seconds after the driver walked in and engaged the receptionist in conversation, I walked in, leaped over the electronic gate, and sprinted down the long line of offices to the last one on the right. I could hear the receptionist yelling, “You can’t do that!” But, by that time I was opening the door to the defendant’s office. He sat there sheepishly and didn’t say a word as I announced the service and dropped it on his desk. That would be the last time I would ever get that close to him. As I walked out, the dagger-like stare from his receptionist was almost lethal. In my twenty-five years of serving process, this man ranked in the top three of the most evasive. At his residence, his wife would go outside and check up and down the street. If she saw any strange vehicles on her block, the defendant wouldn’t come out.
Most of the time I served this defendant by just sneaking up on his front porch at night and standing there in the shadows until I saw him walk by the window next to his front door. I would then tap on the glass to get his attention and yell out the service. He always ran into the next room to hide and no one ever answered the door.
Late one night I noticed that they weren’t home so I parked my car about five houses down from his and sat low in the seat to avoid being seen when they returned. A short while later I saw them turn the corner; she was driving and he was in the passenger seat. They slowly approached their house, but then passed it and continued down the street toward my car, which they had never seen before. By the time they were alongside me, I was laying down on the seat. They then sped up and went around the block. One minute later, she came around the corner again but he wasn’t in the car. In the moonlight, I could see between the houses and noticed a shadowy figure leaping a fence and running toward their house. She had dropped him off on the other side of their block and he was cutting through the neighbor’s back yard to get home. I was really getting upset with this fellow’s shenanigans.
The next morning was Saturday. I never staked out on Saturday’s because you never knew if someone was going to leave their house during the weekend. Their house was located at the bottom of a very steep hill, one and a half blocks from the top. At 7:00 am, I parked my Harley around the corner from the top of the hill and stood behind a palm tree and intently watched their house.
Two hours later I saw his three children sprint to their car, followed by their mother and the defendant. The defendant jumped in the drivers seat, quickly backed out of the driveway, and sped up the hill toward me. When they got within 100 yards, I ran into the middle of the street and spread my arms out in an effort to stop him. He slammed on the brakes and backed down the hill at a high rate of speed. I ran to my Harley and began the pursuit. We were speeding through a lot of back, residential streets until he came to the main drag, Balboa Avenue. He turned onto it and I was right on his tail as he ran the red light and turned left onto Clairemont Drive. He was going about 60 miles an hour. Suddenly, in the middle of the block, he slammed on his brakes in an effort to get me to rear-end him. He then ran the next red light and we turned onto Clairemont Mesa Blvd. My adrenaline was at full throttle as I tried to figure out his next maneuver as he wildly weaved in and out of traffic. As we approached a green light, he stopped and waited for it to turn red and, as the cars began to cross in front of us, he honked his horn and then snaked his way through the intersection but I weaved through the honking cars and stayed right behind him. About a mile up the road, he turned back into a residential area and then turned up an alley that emptied into a large dirt lot. He sped through the lot, jumped the curb and got back onto Clairemont Mesa heading back in the direction we came. The dirt cloud he left behind had slowed me down, and by the time I got back onto the main road, there were several cars between me and him and he was stopped behind another car at a red light. As I came to a stop at the back of the line of cars, his son rolled down his back window, stuck his head out, put his thumbs in is ears and wiggled his fingers at me. I smiled, cut over, and rode the white line between the stopped cars. Before the boy could wind his window up, I had flung the papers over the defendant’s shoulder into the front seat and informed him that he had been served. I didn’t know until my front wheel touched down that, in my elation, I had done a wheelie across the entire intersection.