The tycoon owner of this 720 has gone bust. Now a bailiff has to take it back. The only problem? He can't let anyone see him do it



Shot at, imprisoned, threatened with death: Live reports on the extraordinary men playing a deadly game of global hide-and-seek

If someone has missed their payments, skipped a mechanic's bill or broken the terms of the lease, the owner (often a bank or leasing company) will want to recover the plane. So they call in repo boss Nick Popovich

A private-jet terminal, London



The sky above is azure and dotted with cotton-ball clouds. It might be a beautiful day to fly, but the shimmering white £12 million Challenger 604 ticking over on the hot Tarmac isn’t going anywhere. It’s just seconds from take-off and air traffic control have withdrawn the pilot’s flight clearance.

Over the radio the message comes in: ‘The managing director of the airport would like to speak to the person in charge.’



The jet’s door opens and a lean man with a handlebar moustache walks down the steps. Kevin Lacey, a high-end repossession man, has tracked this aircraft across the world (starting in the dentist’s chair in Texas where he first received his orders to grab it), from West Africa to Switzerland.



Two days ago he finally caught up with it here, at a swanky private-jet terminal in London. Right now he and his crew should be flying away over Gatwick Airport, but instead trouble is rolling in like a storm over an open plain: a fire engine is racing up the runway and a navy blue BMW 4x4 has just pulled up in front of us, disgorging security men, to prevent any chance of a getaway.



As if things couldn’t get any worse, the enraged wife of the man Lacey is seizing the plane from has appeared in the plush departure lounge and is waving a piece of paper over her head and freaking out. She arrived at the terminal expecting the jet to be fuelled up for a quick hop over to Disneyland Paris with her three children.



She hadn’t counted on Lacey slapping a repossession notice on the plane door. He showed up at the airport just half an hour before her scheduled departure and paid her outstanding £35,000 maintenance bill on his Mastercard, before wangling his way inside the cockpit to grab the all-important logbook (think of a game of ‘capture the flag’ where the flag is worth £12 million).



The laconic Lacey smiles, and scans the kerfuffle 30ft away in the terminal building.



‘Yeah, things got a little colourful at this point,’ he says. ‘She was screaming and wailing, “You cannot come here and do this to me! I dine with kings and queens. You are a nobody!”



Repo pilot Kevin Lacey in front of the disputed Challenger 604. The problem with grabbing a plane is that the errant lessee will often try to conceal it in the remotest place possible to prevent the bank from finding it

'It turns out that the guy is friends with the new president of a West African country. He’s been supporting him, flying him around in his Challenger. Well, I’ll tell you, his insurance specifically prevents him from flying to the exact countries where he keeps the aircraft – that’s a violation of the lease agreement.’



So he’s flying a £12 million plane without insurance?



‘Exactly. He’s basically using it as his personal transport like you’d use your car. And I’ll tell you something else: it’s staying right here. I just spent eight months in Africa recovering a Boeing 747. I do not want another one of my aircraft to go down there again.’



According to Lacey the man’s wife then called the police and told them she’d been locked in a cupboard by terrorists who were stealing her plane. Half an hour later he was conducting a mechanical check when 40 armed police poured into the hangar.

‘I took one look at them and said, “Oh boy, they must be here for me.”’



Lacey showed the police his power of attorney and notice of default, and explained he was here to recover the aircraft.



‘Half of them stayed with me, the other half visited the lady. She started yelling and swearing and screaming at them. But they quickly concluded that I was in the right here, and she was in the wrong.’



As we talk, the manager of the jet terminal arrives with what appears to be an emergency High Court injunction, ink still wet, clenched in his fist. Back inside his swanky terminal the woman is screaming at the staff, and her kids are climbing over the furniture.

He starts pleading with Lacey: ‘Please come inside and talk to her. Take the paper. You have to. Please take it so I can get this woman out of here!’



The veteran repo man folds his arms and ignores him, raising his eyes to the heavens.



‘I’d love to help you, but I haven’t seen any piece of paper and I don’t know what you’re talking about.’



But I can see it. It’s right there in the man’s hand. Funny – it must be a trick of the light…

Gary, Indiana



Bear-like repo boss Nick Popovich steers his Bentley into Gary Jet Centre, 25 miles south-east of downtown Chicago. The London job is just one of a number of repossessions that he, and his company Sage-Popovich, is currently engaged in around the globe. Kevin Lacey is one of his top men.



If someone has missed their payments, skipped a mechanic’s bill or broken the terms of the lease, the owner (often a bank or leasing company) will want to recover the plane. So they call in Popovich, who, for a percentage of the value, will hunt it down and repossess it. That can mean earnings of £15,000 up to over £500,000 for a tricky job.



A warehouse filled with spare aeroplane parts owned by Popovich

The problem with grabbing a plane, though, is that the errant lessee will often try to conceal it in the remotest place possible to prevent the bank from finding it. Popovich’s speciality is winning these multimillion-dollar games of global hide-and-seek.



He has operatives and informants all over the world staking out airfields and feeding him tips. He has grabbed planes from Russian airstrips at the edge of the Arctic Circle and from camouflage nets on jungle landing strips. He’s been locked up in a holding cell at Charles de Gaulle Airport and imprisoned in Haiti (accused of the attempted theft of a Boeing 720 jet), he’s been shot at, and he’s swiped planes from a beer magnate at Stansted, François Arpels (a member of the Van Cleef & Arpels clan), a New York Mob boss, a Ponzi schemer and a white supremacist. He has developed an uncanny knack for finding planes and fixing them enough to fly home – mostly legally, sometimes with the authorities in pursuit, with a door missing, an engine out and a tank full of spiked fuel.



‘I have a death warrant out for me in the Congo,’ he says. ‘We snatched the president’s G2 jet after we got a call from the lender to say they wanted it back. Snatched it while his wife was shopping in Switzerland. But I can’t go to the Congo now.’



So is there always a risk?



‘There’s an average of three repo guys a year killed doing car repos. So think: if someone’s going to kill you for a $60,000 car, what are they going to do for a $60 million plane? Sometimes it’s not just the airline; sometimes the whole country is going down and you’re taking this aeroplane. The union guys at the airport haven’t been paid and they see this aircraft as their way of getting paid. It’s their collateral and you’re there to take it. There are countries we go through, like Colombia and Ecuador, where the biggest industry is kidnapping. They know someone is going to pay the ransom. You start combining that risk with everything else.



‘You have to tell these guys (the repo pilots) to be ready for anything. They think that if they’ve done four or five repossessions and haven’t had any trouble that it’s just a piece of cake. I tell ’em – it takes just one missed step and you are off the map.’

Popovich found himself in a spot of bother while repossessing a helicopter in Mexico. Despite a Mexican federal court order and back-up from a federal marshal, things didn’t exactly go to plan.



‘The owner came out with an Uzi. The marshal looked at me and then just left. That Uzi trumped that court order pretty quickly.



‘But the guy that has taken the time to talk to you, you can reason with him. It’s the guy who isn’t doing that that you have to worry about – that’s been my experience. The guy who’s going to shoot you is going to pull the gun out and pull the trigger before you can do anything. That’s the guy you have to worry about.’

Popovich at home in Indiana. In 30 years he has only failed to retrieve one plane

Popovich got his start in the airline business as a pilot for Braniff International Airways.

‘I thought I was going to see the world, but I got to see the hellholes of the country. I used to fly from Chicago to Kansas City, Kansas City to Wichita, Wichita to Dallas, Dallas to Fort Smith, Arkansas, then a layover in Fort Smith, and do the same route in reverse the next day. It was like driving a bus. I would get in trouble with the airline for just walking in the concourse without my hat on, or for not wearing a tie.’



He conducted his first repo in 1978. He’d become bored while setting up his own airline in St Kitts and accepted what amounted to a dare from a banker friend to repossess a couple of 747s from a defaulting Sri Lankan airline. The planes were rotting on the Tarmac and parts were being stolen. Popovich accepted the challenge, and banked the huge cheque.



Repossession is just a small part of what he does. He also advises banks and insurance companies, provides expert testimony in court cases, charters and manages jet fleets and has helped build planes to order. One of the most lucrative parts of his business, though, is the parts trade – he has a warehouse full of broken-down components from hundreds of repossessed aircraft, complete with the essential ownership documents.



Back at Gary Jet Centre, Popovich walks me through the hangar where he keeps his own jets (a Hawker for use inside the U.S. and a larger Challenger that can cross the Atlantic). Both are essential business tools that enable him to roll his repo crews right up to the doors of the planes they’re looking to capture.



‘Usually the captains I hire will have 2,000-2,500 hours’ time inside that specific aircraft. They’ll have had training in the emergency procedures in the last six months. They’re guys that know what they’re doing. They feel comfortable with the aeroplane. There’s nothing worse than a wimpy pilot who gets there and doesn’t feel like going because some light doesn’t come on in the cockpit. Over the years we’ve had a few of those. You learn there are guys who say, “Hey, if it starts, I’ll go.” You want them to be a little cocky.’

Each repossession works much like a legalised heist. Banks and leasing companies have ‘work-out guys’ who will turn defaulting leases over to ‘watch groups.’



When a deal gets into trouble the ‘watch groups’ will call Popovich and he will locate the plane and assemble a team. The moment that negotiations break down, he and his team have to be ready to grab it.



‘The first thing we do is make up a “repo book” with all the documents that give us ownership of the plane. We need the power of attorney to act on our client’s behalf and take possession of the aircraft, copies of the original note of lease, the demand notice, the default notice, a sworn affidavit showing how much they’re in default and that they’ve had their notice period.



‘We have to get the right crew to fly the aircraft, think about fuel stocks, customs, air traffic control and over-flight permits.’

A spare engine is needed in order to reclaim a jet abandoned in Nairobi

In 30 years he has only failed to retrieve one plane. In 1986 he was tasked by an Ohio bank with repossessing an old Boeing 720 from the sunny Dominican Republic. The job should have been a milk run.



‘It turned out that the guys who owned the airline had hidden the plane in Haiti, under the protection of the corrupt regime run by dictator “Baby Doc” Duvalier. We got down to Port-au-Prince and scouted the airport from every angle. I met this guy called Eddie Celesan who ran the airport. It was early in my career, and being stupid, I was direct. I said, “We’re here for our aeroplane.” “Sure,” says Celesan. “As long as you pay the airport fees… one million dollars, U.S.” At the time the aircraft was worth $780,000. I get on the phone with my client. I know we’re not going to pay it, but I’m trying to buy time. My client is saying, “I ain’t paying ’em a dime, tell them!”



‘So I press the phone tight to my ear and bluff it: ‘Yes, yes, OK, great, have the money in the account tomorrow.” I put the phone down and assure Celesan that he’ll get the money, but only if he lets me run the engines and make sure the plane is ready to go. “Absolutely,” he says, and he sends me out there with seven armed guards, kids with AK-47s.



‘So we go out to the plane. It’s a 720, so it needs a ground power unit, a “huffer cart”, to start it. The operator drives the huffer cart out to the plane, and we start the engines. It’s working fine. I get off the aeroplane, wave goodbye to the soldiers and track down the guy with the huffer cart to settle the bill for the day’s work. I give him an extra $5,000 in cash, and tell him to be back here to start the plane up at 1.30am.



‘That evening the team assembled in my hotel suite. The mechanics sat perched on the ends of the beds, while the first officer and the engineer worked at the small round table where they’d been going through the charts. I ran through the entire plan – from cutting a hole in the airport fence to meeting the huffer-cart driver to our planned route home.



‘At 1.30 in the morning I cut through the chain-link fence with my co-pilot and my flight engineer and the two mechanics behind me. I’m familiar with the aircraft, so I’m going to fly it. We dash across the Tarmac and find the huffer driver waiting by the door. We start up the engines, we taxi out with no lights – the airport is closed. We get on the runway; I whistle through the final crew briefing and start our take-off roll.



‘We’ve hardly got 1,500ft down the runway when all these headlights come out of the reeds along the side and red tracer rounds are flying over the top of the aeroplane. Two thousand feet in front of us, a fuel truck is parked across the runway.



'To prevent a catastrophic accident I had no choice but to turn the plane into the jungle. I shut down the systems and I directed the crew to the aft doors – at least they would get home. I looked out of the cockpit window and saw soldiers spilling out of the trucks and jeeps. I can see soldiers are underneath the plane, taking out bayonets and stabbing the fuel cells. I kick the door open and am yelling at them, but they don’t stop, so I jump down. One is just about to stab the fuel cell next to the number two engine, and I go to push him out of there because that’s a valuable commodity, and that’s it… something massive hit me in the side of the head and I lost consciousness.



‘The next thing I remember is waking up in jail – my face was the size of a watermelon; I was just black and blue. I don’t know what they got me with. The dirt cell was like a human pigsty with 35 guys, one toilet and no roof and the hot sun beating down on us. I had no idea how I got there or where I was; none of my crew was there.



‘It was probably a day or two before the guy from the consulate came. He said, basically, you’re screwed – they want $100,000 to let you go. That was hell.’



Eight days later “Baby Doc” Duvalier was overthrown in a military coup and the prison gates were thrown open. Popovich found himself running through the abandoned streets of Port-au-Prince with no money and no passport. He stumbled into the nearby Sheraton hotel, called his fiancée Pat and told her to call his buddy Phil from Florida who owned a Learjet.



Popovich stole a hotel bus (he vividly remembers the air conditioning) and drove to the airport. At around midnight he saw the landing lights of the Learjet appear in the distance, slipped through the hole in the airport fence and rushed onto the runway.



‘I remember running and seeing that split door open. I just jumped in there and lay right down in the aisle and figured that if they started shooting now the bullets would go over my head. I stayed there as Phil’s pilot took the plane up almost vertically. Once we were airborne I finally spoke. I told Phil I would never be able to repay him, and I felt like that for a long, long time.’



In a final twist, the Boeing 720, worth a little under £500,000 intact, was actually insured by his client for £2.5 million. Popovich’s do-or-die attempt to pick up the plane netted his client millions and made Popovich’s reputation as a man who could provide solutions to apparently intractable problems, no questions asked.



Back at the London jet terminal, the airport managing director, three security guards, the head of maintenance, the head of operations, a girl from the office, the enraged lessee’s wife and a little girl who wanted to go and see Mickey Mouse; all want Kevin Lacey’s head on a platter. But having gone three days without sleep, Lacey won’t quit. A final burst of negotiations sees the airport agree to put the plane back in the hangar with Lacey’s own security detail sitting on it 24 hours a day.



We stand in the lift with the airport boss, heading up to a vacant office where Lacey can scan the court injunction into an email for the lawyers in Toronto. Did he think about just taking off? He leans back against the side of the plush silk-wallpaper-lined lift and smiles at the idea.



‘This old cowboy here had it running through his mind to just go… but in light of the fact that this got called as a terrorist threat, I thought maybe it wouldn’t be such a good idea. Taking off with a £12 million aeroplane, flying out to the west? Which would take us over Gatwick? We might find ourselves with a fighter escort a little sooner than we’d like…’



He grins and pats the logbook tucked tightly under his arm. Without it, without the maintenance history that he logged yesterday, the plane would be worth a third as much. The other side has no plane, no leverage, nothing but a flimsy injunction. Now the lawyers will do their thing.

Will he sleep now?



He laughs. ‘