The last Nazi hunter

Dr. Efraim Zuroff, as told to Robyn Stubbs

I am one of those lucky people who gets up every day with a smile on his face, knowing that’s he’s doing something important.

I am actually named after the only person on my mother’s side who was murdered in the Holocaust. When I was born, my father sent a cable to my mother’s father, who was in Europe helping the survivors, indicating that my mother had given birth to a boy. My grandfather sent back a cable saying, “Suggest: Name him Efraim.” Efraim was my grandfather’s brother who had been killed in Lithuania during the Holocaust.

The Chase Is On: Hunting Dr. Death

Each case is a different story, depending on where the people are living and where they committed their crime. I have personally gone to different countries to find these people but I don’t do that in every case.

Our operation is run exactly the opposite of regular criminal investigations and that’s because as Nazi war criminals age, time is running out. We don’t start with the crime and then try and find the person who committed it – we start with a suspect against whom there is valid evidence and indications of his or her participation.

The biggest reward is currently 310,000 Euros for information leading to the capture of Dr. Aribert Heim, also known as "Dr. Death." Heim murdered hundreds of inmates at the Austrian concentration camp, Mauthausen, by injecting phenol (gasoline) directly into the victim’s hearts.

Heim is now in his 90s. We’re hoping he’s in good shape; he was actually a professional athlete who played ice hockey in his youth. The question is not his chronological age but rather, his physical and mental state.

At one point, we were fairly convinced that he was in South America. We had what appeared to be an excellent lead – a person who ostensibly fit the description to a tee living in Chile – but when we got there, it turned out this person was not Dr. Aribert Heim. That was a great disappointment and it was back to the drawing board. Since then, we have received a lot of leads from South America and we’re working very closely with the German police special task force out of Stuttgart to find him. Aribert Heim is the only Nazi war criminal in the world for whom there is a special task force.

Many Nazi war criminals we have caught lived in countries where much has been written about the Holocaust. In theory, you would assume that some of the people who carried out the Holocaust have learned about the nature of the Holocaust and its terrible tragedies, and in their latter years, might have reached the conclusion that they were part of something terrible and had made an awful mistake. But, in the 27 years that I’ve been involved in facilitating the prosecution of Nazi war criminals, there has never, ever been a case of a Nazi who expressed any remorse.

You Can Run But You Can’t Hide

After Germany fell, Nazi war criminals wanted to get as far away as possible from the scene of the crime; most of them were coming from countries that then became part of the Soviet Union, which was making serious efforts to find these people and bring them to justice (not so much because they murdered Jews but because they collaborated with the Nazis). In that respect, the major Anglo-Saxon western democracies (United States, Canada, Australia and the UK) really fit the bill.

They were far away from the scene of the crime, they were anti-communist countries who would not readily turn these people over to the Communists, they had not been invaded by the Nazis, there were already local émigré groups from their own country there who didn’t really care if these people murdered Jews, and they were countries of immigration and economic opportunity: It was a perfect fit.

Bringing Nazi war criminals to justice is more difficult in some countries than others. This has to do with the historical record in these countries and the lack of willingness to face both the past and local complicity. This has led to a very dangerous phenomenon that could be called either Holocaust distortion or Holocaust deflection, which is actually more dangerous than Holocaust denial.

The Holocaust is the most documented tragedy in human history and I don’t think anyone actually believes it that didn’t take place, even the people who supposedly claim that it didn’t. But Holocaust distortion is a way of presenting the events of the Holocaust in a way that deflects blame from local killers onto German and Austrian Nazis.

Let me explain. Wherever the Nazis were, whether it was the countries they occupied or the countries they allied with, they found willing and zealous collaborators who helped implement their plan against the Jewish people. The collaboration in Western, Southern, Northern and Central Europe generally stopped at the train station.

In other words, Dutch police rounded up Dutch Jews, Norwegian police rounded up Norwegian Jews, Greek police rounded up the Jews of Greece, French police rounded up the Jews of France and the same is true in Belgium and Luxemburg and other places. Those collaborators in those countries did not carry out the murder themselves. They brought the Jews to the trains and those trains took them to Nazi death camps.

But in Eastern Europe, the situation was very different. Over there, quite a significant percentage of murders were carried out locally and by the locals. Take a country like Lithuania, for example, where 212,000 of the 220,000 Jews living in Lithuania under Nazi occupation were murdered. There was only one train to Auschwitz – that’s because the overwhelming majority of Lithuanian Jews were murdered within Lithuania and in many cases, by their neighbors.

This is a very difficult historical record to accept and it’s much easier for Lithuanians to say that the Holocaust is really when those “nasty Germans and Austrians came and murdered our Jews.”

One of the most dangerous Holocaust deniers is David Irving , who served a prison sentence in 2006 for denying the Holocaust. He’s one of the only people with the charisma and the intellectual capabilities to convince anybody of such a ridiculous presumption that the Holocaust never took place.

David Irving is an English author and Holocaust denier

Why I Hunt

One of the greatest achievements I was involved in was the prosecution and conviction of Dinko Sakic, who was the commandant of the Jasenovac concentration camp in the Balkans, a camp where at least 90,000 civilians were murdered. We found him in a casino with the help of an Argentinean journalist and orchestrated his extradition from Argentina to Croatia, where he was put on trial. He’s still in prison today, thank God, having received the maximum sentence of 20 years. My sense was that in Croatia, they could not try him for genocide so they tried him for the criminal responsibility for the people who were killed during his tenure as camp commander. But if you have to choose between imperfect justice and no justice, it’s a real no-brainer.

I want to remind you of the basic principles of why this work is still so important.

One: The passage of time in no way diminishes the guilt of the perpetrators.

Two: The people who reach old age don’t deserve a medal simply because they reached old age – if someone committed murder as a young man and he’s not brought to justice, the fact that he becomes an old man doesn’t change his crime.

Three: If we were to set up an artificial chronological limit on prosecution, it would basically mean that we’re saying you can get away with genocide. If you’re lucky enough, smart enough, rich enough to elude justice until you reach old age, you’re off the hook.

And finally, something which was always emphasized by our mentor, Simon Wiesenthal, the great Nazi Hunter, our generation has an obligation to the victims of the Holocaust. That obligation is make sure everyone who was turned into a victim has an effort made on their behalf to see their killer held accountable.

What everyone has to remember is that all the victims of the Holocaust are someone’s grandmother, grandfather, father, mother, son, daughter, nephew, niece … if someone murdered your grandmother and many years went by and suddenly the murderer was found, you wouldn’t say, “Ah, to hell with it – let him off.” You’d say, “Why? You murdered my grandmother, my wonderful grandmother! She never hurt a fly!” They obviously have to be punished.

Every one of the victims of the Holocaust was someone’s family member and as such, worthy of an effort being made to bring their killers to justice.

Escaping the Jehovah's Witnesses

by Joy Castro

There were problematic things in my particular situation growing up, aside from issues of blood transfusion, which were not necessarily related to our religion. I realized my family was different beginning when I went to preschool in England. I was three years old then, and my understanding of the difference between me and other students just continued to grow as I continued on in school.

There were particular activities that I was not permitted by my mother to take part in, such as birthdays for the other children. If someone brought birthday cake or cupcakes, I was not allowed to partake. If the children made decorations for different holidays I did not celebrate, I would go sit in the hall or another room away from the class. Jehovah's Witnesses at that time and I believe still, did not celebrate Christmas or birthdays, Halloween or Easter. There were numerous occasions during the year when other children would hold celebrations and I would not participate.

When we returned to the United States, I was six years old. I attended first grade in the U.S., and of course, then there was the Pledge of Allegiance. Since Jehovah's Witnesses don't pledge their allegiance to any nation, sitting still and silent in my chair was a daily reminder of the fact that I was different.

In my particular household, we prayed at least twice a day, attended "meetings" (which is what we called church services) at the Kingdom Hall or at the home of another member three times a week: two hours on Sunday, one hour on Tuesday evening and two hours on Thursday evening. Each of these meetings required a certain amount of preparation, so we would read texts published by the Watchtower Bible & Tract Society in advance. Participation, in my experience, simply meant that when the brother, or the man in charge, would ask the pre-printed questions in the text, one of us would volunteer to answer. As much time as possible was spent going door-to-door preaching or 'out in service,' sharing principles of the Jehovah's Witness faith with other people, whom we called 'worldly people,' with the intention of saving, helping and converting them.

Because I was doing this from an extremely early age, it just seemed normal. I thought it was right; I thought it was for God. I was a believer, I think the way almost anyone born into a religion is a believer. But I was also kind of shy and didn't really enjoy going up to the doors of perfect strangers and knocking and telling them stuff I was trained to tell them. There's a lot of preparation and coaching for that. The Jehovah's Witnesses have what they call a Theocratic Ministry School, and they give practice presentations so that people of all ages can learn how to present materials at the doors of worldly people. I had been trained in that from the age of five. It was uncomfortable, but I thought I was doing a kind thing for worldly people.

I ran away from home at 14 years old and continued to go to the Kingdom Hall on my own for about a year afterwards. I had started to have questions about the belief system starting at about 11 or 12, and when I finally did run away, I was able to pursue those questions more vigorously. For me, the religion just didn't hold up logically, and it didn't feel like a compassionate religion. And so at 15 years old, I ceased going. I had been expected to become baptized, which is what Jehovah's Witnesses encourage children to do when they are at the age of reason. For most, this is during the early teens, and that had been the expectation for me, but I quit before I went through baptism.

When I was a younger child, my mother was certainly aware I had questions, because I asked some of them of her. I think I was a frustrating child for her in some ways because of that. During the period when I was 12 to 14 years old, she was remarried to an extremely abusive man, so the three of us - my mother, brother and I - were basically in survival mode, and my questioning was pretty dormant. But before that, I had bothered her with questions about various beliefs we held.

My parents had been divorced for two years at that point, and my father had been disfellowshipped by the religion, which is comparable to being excommunicated. He was expelled for smoking cigarettes, and when my mother remarried, we were forbidden to see him at all, and that was represented to us by our new stepfather, a Jehovah's Witness, as being based in scripture. I had not seen my real father for over a year, and so when I ran away, I ran away to his house, which was an hour away in West Virginia. He was worldly and disfellowshipped, which meant he was considered an 'apostate.' An apostate is one who has known Jehovah and the 'true faith' and who has turned their back. It was really quite heretical for me to go to my father's home.

My brother is five years younger than me and was the biological child of my father and mother. Our mother, for reasons that I do not know or understand, was not a particularly attentive mother, and my brother was a particularly curious child. So, he would get into trouble physically and put himself in risky situations. I was worried about him and tried hard to protect him and keep him from danger. We lived in a very remote rural area, so I was concerned about the fact that if one of us was badly injured, it would take an hour or more to get to the hospital, and blood transfusions were not an option for us because of our faith. But, having been raised that way, I did believe that was morally right. It was just a chronic, low-grade fear - just something in the back of my mind.

I've heard of instances where parents refuse their children certain treatments based on the faith, such as the case of the sextuplets born in Vancouver, Canada. I'm relieved for the sake of the children that the state stepped in to allow the blood transfusions. There are many religious systems around the world that feel it's okay to physically damage children in the name of God or faith, and that's a concern for me. Children don't have autonomy yet; they can't speak their choice, and the parents are making it for them. Of course, I understand that parents make most choices for their children, but when we see a parent abusing a child or starving a child, we intervene. I think it's appropriate and humane for us to do that.

However, if children have already been given blood transfusions, I believe that most Jehovah's Witnesses are compassionate and kind enough to not hold that against the children. It was not an act of the children's will either way. If the children grow up to be Jehovah's Witnesses, presumably they'll be treated well in a warm and friendly environment.

I formed a lot of insights about hypocrisy growing up. I learned that sometimes the idea of love is absent in religion, that systems of belief can have logical inconsistencies and that people are perfectly willing to be hypocritical when it serves their needs. I learned that someone who holds a position of religious and moral authority isn't necessarily a good person. It was surprising to me as a young person that violence could be employed in the name of God and of love.

That happened in my family. My mother's husband was physically violent with her, my brother and me to a severe extent, in the name of the faith. He quoted scripture and made sure we got to every meeting, but he was also emotionally, physically and sexually abusive, and he ritually underfed us; I ran away because I feared being raped by him. (Not long after I left home, he was arrested, convicted, and imprisoned for molesting a nine-year-old girl.) I don't blame the Jehovah's Witnesses for my experience. Abusers can exist in any kind of organization. Most of the Witnesses I knew were kind, gentle people who meant well and whom I liked and respected.

For me, the source of strength and hope in my life has always been connected to love of people and treating them compassionately. Today, I meditate and pray, though I do not belong to an organized religious structure. I'd be one of those spiritual, not religious box-checkers. I studied religion in college, trying to get an objective handle on it. I'm interested in the essences of world religions, and I try to live by the Golden Rule of treating others with as much love and respect as you want to be treated.

I think my mother felt very betrayed that I ran away and that I would choose to leave her religion. We did try over the years, sporadically and with good intentions, to have some kind of relationship. But then we'd go through long fallow periods where it was too difficult for one or both of us to communicate. At this point, after the publication of my piece in the New York Times Magazine [3]
and the subsequent publication of my book, she does not communicate with me at all. She's now a nurse and hospital administrator specializing in 'bloodless options,' which are alternatives to blood transfusions. I don't have a clear sense of what those medical options are, but I think they have to do with plasma. I could be wrong.

My brother and I are very close. About six months after I ran away, we were able to have him removed by the police from my mother and stepfather because of my testimony. He went to the Kingdom Hall with me for a little while and then stopped when I stopped. He is now not a member of an organized religion and is a happy, productive working adult with a family.

I've moved on, too. Writing a book that allowed me to process, re-live and deal with it all has made it less painful to talk about now. Writing a memoir is cathartic and puts some kind of order into the chaos of a life. But the scars don't just disappear. Because of the violence in my childhood, I struggled for years with symptoms of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. I've been helped with that by some great therapists.

But it's also been lonely. If you grow up very abnormally and then decide to join mainstream society, there are just all kinds of gaps and absences, and you have to go back and fill in a lifetime of feeling odd, strange, outcast, excluded, et cetera. Jehovah's Witnesses are very socially exclusive in that they hang out mostly with each other. That was my whole social life growing up, and when I left, I left behind the only friends I had, the only social norms I knew.

Growing up in such an isolated, exclusive way damaged my social skills as a kid, which is probably why I became an academic. (laughs) You feel very alone in the world, and then when you join that world, you don't necessarily have the skills to integrate. And then there's the pain of losing family. I miss my mother. I know she meant well and was motivated by love, but she loved her religion more than she loved me and my brother. That's painful. It's a very demanding faith system.

When Jehovah's Witnesses approach me now, I tell them I'm an apostate, and that ends the conversation quickly. I don't know if it's a polite way to end the conversation, but it's certainly effective.

=======

Born in Miami, raised in England and West Virginia, and educated in Texas, Joy Castro is the award-winning author of the memoir The Truth Book

There's an emu in by backyard!

I blinked and shook my head and looked again. It was still there. My mind struggled to grasp what my eyes had seen. No way. Emus are wild, this is a city and this is a locked gated backyard. The sensible fairy jumped on my shoulder chattering away, denying what my eyes had seen.

by Margaret Holborow

"Um dad," I said. "An Emu just ran across our backyard."

Dad looked up at me with a frown on his face, oblivious to the scene unfolding behind his back. "Will you just eat up and be quiet?" He said.

I didn't blame him, I was the one that had seen the Emu and I wasn't sure whether I believed it either.

"No dad, turn around, there is really an Emu in the backyard."

Mum raised her eyebrows and glared at me, as if I was making up stories and went to silence me again but curiosity and the dumbstruck look on my face caused Dad to turn and peer out the back door into the late afternoon sunlight.

There staring back at him, not six metres away was a huge rag tag, exhausted and scared-looking Emu. It just stood there, staring and panting, with its huge eyes blinking warily at us. Dad and I both started to stand up and all of a sudden two men ran across the backyard towards the Emu, who of course bolted towards the side fence. Hot on their heels followed a fat out of breath, grey-haired police sergeant with a young eager-eyed rookie constable tagging by his side.

By this time mum had poked her head around the door to see what the commotion was and then promptly screamed when she saw the hive of activity in the yard. More people began wandering in the side gate and spilling into my backyard. I ran to the front window and was amazed to see police cars, fire engines and about fifty cars pulled up outside in my suburban street. People came piling out of the cars and out of the houses around us and they all streamed on into our backyard, where the Emu was by now backing into the corner with a terrified look on its face.

My next-door neighbour Kylie, who was a close friend of Cathy's and Mine, stood at the side gate greeting the people streaming into now opened side gate with her usual classic dry humour. "Welcome, come right in ladies and gentlemen, make yourself at home. Cup of tea and cookies while you are here?" I don't think they quite appreciated her dry sarcasm. They stared at her blankly and kept on streaming in.

In the kitchen our meals were left uneaten on the neatly laid table, Mum and dad had moved over to the kitchen window to get a better view of the proceedings and Cathy had long since disappeared into her bedroom, probably hiding under the bed by now, as far away as she could get from the Emu. She hated them. I grabbed my old camera and walked out the back, deafening myself to mum and dad's half-hearted attempts to call me back in.

I called out to Kylie over near the side fence as I walked out. "Doesn't seem to be working, try charging them a dollar each admission."

By now our backyard was absolutely trampled and distinctly overgrown with police, fire officers and hundreds of sightseers everywhere. All of those sightseers had one mission, to see the apprehension, arrest and take-down of one sore, sad and sorry Emu.

The two police lined up the Emu in their sites around the clothesline, that still had mum's towels wafting around in the breeze and they charged. The Emu stepped sideways and hopped off to the far corner of the yard as the police landed in a heap with half the towels torn off the line and scattered around them on the ground.

The police got up from the ground and with added determination from the embarrassment of being outsmarted by a bird who can't even fly, set off towards the Emu who stood shaking with his head darting around for an exit.

I watched the Emu and saw his next move as he did. The police moved towards him and I grinned as he turned and quickly jumped over the wooden fence that separated our yard from our neighbours.

Next to the fence with a gap of only about a metre was the neighbour, Mrs Morgan's garage. It was old hat for me to jump on top of the fence and shimmy along a bit until the roof was in easy reach and I would climb on their garage roof. Mrs Morgan and her unmarried daughter were quite accustomed to me poking my head over the other side of their garage and saying hello to them down below in their garden.

So here was the Emu, stuck in the gap between the neighbours garage and the side fence, with only his head visible to everyone in my backyard, his beady big eye peering at us all rather angrily by this point.

The police jumped in front of the garage and started moving up the gap towards the Emu, thinking they had him trapped when I called out to them. They stopped moving and I quickly explained that if he turned and backed up the other way towards the back corner he could easily escape up the back neighbours yard to the next street and traffic chaos.

I ran to the corner and jumped to the top of the fence and squeezed through the gap. It was too small for an adult to even contemplate and I grinned as I thought of the fat sergeant trying to attempt it.

The Emu turned his attention to me as I started waving at it. The two police officers stood out of sight at the front of the garage and the crowd lined up on the fence like they were watching the latest play at a football match. And that is exactly how it played out.

The Emu made a kid of chortling sound and turned tail to me and made his run toward the front of the shed. The two policemen made the grab for him, the fat sergeant was just way too slow and ended up grabbing dust but the younger officer managed to get hold of one leg as the Emu ran passed.

It didn't seem to deter the Emus progress, he kicked out and kept running down the yard towards the street, dragging the police officer with him.

In sight was his exit to freedom but just as he lined up his final dash, a group of firefighters ran in the front gate and piled on the Emu in a rugby tackle and scrum that the great Australian legend Wally Lewis would have been proud of.

The poor Emu struggled hard and got a few good kicks into the guys holding him but eventually, the young officer reached down to his belt and after a minute or so managed to get his handcuffs around the Emus legs.

One of the fire Officers then threw a sack over the Emus head and they continued to truss him up with some rope. A couple of fire Officers were almost sitting on him to hold him still and the Sergeant by this time had back his police paddy wagon up to the driveway and opened the rear.

I heard Kylie yell out behind me, "Did you read him his rights?" and there was a snicker amongst the crowd which had now split, with my back fence still lined with people and even more spilling out in the street around the fire truck and police van.

The police picked up the Emu, by this stage I had got some beautiful photos with my old camera and I was right beside the Emu as they walked him down and tossed him in the back of the wagon. The crowd slowly drifted away, the sounds of doors slamming and motors starting up replaced the crowd excitement of the Great Emu Takedown. My back yard was soon left empty again, with only the masses of footprints and torn up turf to signal that anything so odd had ever taken place.

That was when the curiosity that was my afternoon was explained. A few miles from where I lived on the escarpment, was a tiny native animal park. One of the Emus had made a giant bid for freedom and escaped to travel through peak hour outskirt city traffic, and four suburbs to my place.

The police and emergency services had hundreds of calls out to it, two minor accidents had occurred from motorists trying to avoid it, a helicopter had been called out to respond, traffic had been stopped on two major routes and the poor Emu ended up a bit like the pied piper of Hamlin with a stream of cars and vehicles following him in lineup formation throughout his various wanderings, detours and sidetracks and quite a few miles of humanity and concrete hell.

And he ended up in my backyard. To this day I look back at that mild spring afternoon, I can still picture myself sitting at that table, feeling the breeze on my face and I can still remember the shock registering as that Emu ran across in front of my eyes. Nothing more bizarre could have taken place at that moment in time than did occur.

I stood speaking to Kylie for a moment before going back inside. She was laughing as much as I was and showed me the four dollars that some stupid idiot had given her when she stood at the gate jokingly calling out for $1 per person admission to my backyard. This cracked me up even further and we both shook our heads we left the now quiet yard to go in our respective houses.

I walked inside and sat back at the table. Cathy appeared from her hidey hole in the bedroom and sat down. Dad was already seated and mum placed our reheated food in front of us rather shakily. We ate in silence, each lost in our own thoughts. There was nothing to say. What could you say, though I kept one eye out in the backyard at all times after that day. You never know what is going to wander in the side gate.

...as he lined up his final dash, a group of firefighters ran in the front gate and piled on the Emu in a rugby tackle and scrum that the great Australian legend Wally Lewis would have been proud of.

Dog The Bounty Hunter: Struggle In Paradise

by Duane "Dog" Chapman

If you believe all heroes are dead, chances are you haven't heard of Dog. Duane "Dog" Chapman is the owner of Da Kine Bail Bonds in Honolulu and at 6,000+ fugitive captures, he is living up to his legend. His TV show Dog The Bounty Hunter is number one on A&E, his book You Can Run But You Can't Hide is #1 on the hardcover non-fiction list...Not bad for a guy who was once incarcerated for first-degree murder and addicted to hard drugs. Dog says it was a few special individuals who helped him see the light, and now he spends his days doing the same for wanted criminals, and he does it in front of millions every week. Life brings struggle, Dog brings the law, and now we bring you Dog:

Duane "Dog" and Beth Chapman (WGN)

Going #1

We just finished a huge book tour and we're back in Honolulu now. It was great - We broke attendance records in about 11 different cities. Mrs. Clinton beat me in one by a hundred, so we went to work and won from then on. We loved it.

Our show Dog The Bounty Hunter is #1 on A&E-the book You Can Run But You Can't Hide has gone #1. That's a blessing. Thank God.

Americans are intrigued because bounty hunting is one of the oldest laws on the books, and what we do is real life. It's unplanned, unscripted and happens every day. Some game shows call themselves reality television...they're not. We are true reality, shot exactly the way the bounty goes down.

People watching our show know anything could happen at any time. People like it for excitement. People want to know what a criminal looks like. Cops like it because they learn new tricks. We reach just about every demographic.

As a kid, I identified with vigilante legends because that's what I was meant to be. It was my mission. Television was probably also an influence in my life, although my parents were Christian, so back in those days we barely watched television. I remember Cat on a Hot Tin Roof wasn't allowed in my house. (I watch it now and still can't figure out what my mom was mad about.)

A lot of people write their memoirs once they've come full circle, and I've been saving notes since I was 14 years old. I always knew there would be a book one day. Once the Mexico problem was over, it was a huge relief and freed me up to focus on the book. Also, people were always asking me, "Who are you? Why is your name Dog? How'd you become a bounty hunter? Why were you in jail?" There were all these questions that I spent hours and hours explaining the answers to, and so I realized it was better to just write it down.

You know, people always used to come up to me, saying they felt like they knew me, and I just thought, 'I wish you did brah.' There was a lot of speculation about different things, and so I thought, 'I'm just going to do all this right here so that people do know me.' It was like a confessional, and people who had read it started coming up to me saying, "We still love you Dog, even after we read your book." (laughs)

A Dog's Strength

When I was a kid, my father taught me that strength was being able to deliver and take a hit like a man. Masculinity is physical; it shows from the outside. Strength is something else; it comes from within. For example, there aren't a lot of tough gay guys. Even if you're gay, you can have a lot of strength.

You don't have to be a heterosexual, kick ass and take names kind of guy to have strength. You can be a woman and have as much strength as a man, believe it or not. I didn't always know that, but that's what I've learned through life.

I used to carry a lot of aggression, and it all went away in 1978. I was standing in line on Saturday to buy candy bars in prison, and the line was really long. I got mad and lost my temper. A guy named Skinner beat me to the ground. The guard told me, "If you ever lose your temper again, we're going to beat you again." I've never really lost my temper since that day. It sounds terrible, but my aggression was beaten out of me. Adrenalin is a different story - I like the rush.

You can trade anger for determination. I think anger and determination run hand-in-hand, like fear and respect. You can change anger for, "I'm gonna do that," instead of, "Dammit, I'm mad enough to do that." I think it's really close. There's a fine line between the two.

Faith Locked Up

In my book, I talk about re-discovering my faith in prison. I was all alone in a cell, and I either talked to God or myself. We're talking days or months of solitude, no other inmates, and barely even seeing the hand that feeds you. In those times, you discover for sure that there's a God - that there must be someone there to talk to.

Why does the Lord test us? I know for sure why, and I just found this out. The more struggles that we go through, we then go through the next struggle, and if we realized, "Okay, I got through that last struggle by using this and thinking that (and I use the faith), I can get through the new struggle." I think that every struggle in life builds faith and gets you ready for the big one, the next one.

Once you get older like I am, and you've lived through so many, you realize "I beat that last time by using faith; I know for sure that God loves me, that I love God, that I'm not a scum bag, I'm not a felonious person, I really would give my life for a woman or a child or a best friend, I really am that kind of guy deep inside when the Lord looks, and I am going to do this." Once you get to that point in your life, then everything is cool.

Why Crime Exists

I don't think we'll ever have a perfect world with no crime. Crime exists for several reasons. I used to break the law because chicks liked to see tough guys, and I liked chicks. But in my day, drugs weren't as prevalent and I didn't do it for the dope. In today's day and age, 90 per cent of the crimes we're arresting for involve substance abuse. The drug grows on that person and they develop a personality from that drug.

Crime will always be here, but crime is also the other side of good. If you robbed an elderly person while they're crossing the street because they can barely walk, the opposite of that would be helping them cross the street. Good will always be the other side. It's good versus evil, and I'm happy to be one of the good guys.

The Cigarette And The Talk

A lot of people ask me why I'm so nice to people once I've got them handcuffed in the backseat. Years ago, police officers, counselors and friends said some good words to me that brought me around. I can't remember exactly what words they said - it was a combination of people and words - but they taught me.

I hope that the words I say to people start the ball rolling. I just hope that they listen to me, and they do. I've known guys who have changed because I showed them the way, so to speak.

Bounty Hunting In Paradise

We've just left the mainland, and let me tell you, it was just like picking fish out of a barrel. We got 12 guys in nine days. Seven of the guys had firearms, and four of the girls had knives. It was unbelievable - guns everywhere!

It is so much easier catching criminals in the United States mainland, where there's no jungle, everybody's not related, you can't stay out all night, you can't live off the land. It's hard in Hawaii, believe me.

Not to sound boastful, but people always say, "How can you let 'em get away on an island?"

I tell 'em, "Listen brah, you come here, I'll give you a traffic DUI kit, a $500-bond, and you catch him."

"I'll catch him," he says. Three weeks later, he was out of gas and food. He calls me and says, "I can't find him."

I go, "We'll send you back to New York homey."

Danger On The Job

People always ask me if I fear retaliation by criminals during the arrests. We carry non-lethal weapons, but we can knock a mule or an elephant to his knees. We can do the same things a weapon-bearing criminal can do; only our bullets don't kill. And I'm even quicker on the draw than any of them.

As a matter of fact, a guy tried to out-draw me - this drunk cowboy who was acting all crazy. I shot him first with my pepper ball gun. Our guy goes down and gets back up. If anyone ever comes after us, we're taking him out right there. We'll shoot him up and take him right in to the cops, but we won't kill him.

But we don't deserve retaliation. We don't dog them; we don't spit on them and make them fight. There are ways to make people fight - you can call their mothers names and whatnot, but we don't do none of that. We don't have karma chasing us down to get even with us. The guy who comes after us for no reason will have hell to pay.

People also ask me if I worry about my wife and daughter, and the answer is, "Yes I do worry," but I'd rather know where Beth's at. I know where Baby Lyssa is. Sadly I don't have my Barbara with me. But you know, I want to teach them how not to become victims.

There are a lot of female cops, firefighters, and believe it or not I found a couple female marines out on this tour. If I was Al Qaeda, I would give up quick! I think that if they have vests on, are armed with non-lethal weapons and are ready, they can handle it. I'm a dad and a husband, and so yes, I worry, but I know they're well-trained. Baby Lyssa just got beat up in an episode, and she came out of it alright. It's the game that she picked and the life that we picked. There are far more dangerous jobs than we do. We're just on a mission.

Dog's Secret Weapon

People ask me all the time, "Dog, do you carry a gun?"

I say, "Yes I do, and her name is Beth."

I love her body, you know. I just stare at her. How do I say this without sounding like a horn dog? I'm like Tarzan and she's my Jane. Woman! You know what I mean? But I'm not nasty kind like that - I just love to stay in and touch her because she's so soft. I don't mean to sound like a freak, but I'm just like that.

She's got attributes that I love and I love her. She gets mean though, and sometimes she hurts my feelings.

But she's like me. I've never said this before, but Beth was the girl who, when she was a kid, was dancing in front of the mirror for television. She wanted to have everyone love her, her whole life. Same as I did, she had a dream that everyone would know her. There are some people that I've known, in my past marriage, that wanted to live in a little cave like. You gotta be cut out of the same cloth.

Beth gets more aggravated when people come up to her when she's eating, or you know, like right now during an interview, I had to tell her to get back a bit.

How do I say this? She just has more sophistication than I do.

Mess In Mexico

If we knew then what we know now, we wouldn't have gone into Mexico like that. We learned not to do that ever again. Things just went wrong. We had a police officer with us, but the cop was not a real good cop.

I'm very proud of Mexico though. I learned that the stories that we're hear about them are not true. Mexico is predominantly women and children and they are hard core Catholics. They see the Virgin Mary in the rock. As Americans, we don't know that. I saw Americans wanted for raping, stealing and pillaging, living in their neighborhoods, and there's nothing those people can do about it.

But another thing I learned from Mexico is that you can do the impossible, just by doing it. You can find anybody, anytime, anywhere.

Andrew Luster was the hardest person in the world to find, and no one could find him but our family.

The Loss Of A Daughter

It's been a year and a half since we lost Barbara Katie, and today Beth, Baby Lyssa and I were talking about her. She was the happiest about the TV show, she loved the most, she cried when I cried - she was like my cry partner. I cried and she was there. And I lost my little baby, so I cry alone now. (breaks down)

Reputation Is Everything

A bounty hunter's reputation is everything. When they see Dog, they know what he stands for. In order to be #1, you have to be number one. Do you know what I'm saying?

We're as unique as hell. I can't compare us to anyone because there isn't anyone like us. That's me speaking as a family, not just as Dog. We're very lucky to live as a family and work as a family. We're all nuts, and all the bad guys we're chasing are all nuts. But we're having a ball. We live in paradise. Life has brought us struggle, so we struggle in paradise.

People ask me all the time, "Dog, do you carry a gun?" I say, "Yes I do, and her name is Beth."

The life of a seal hunter

By Jean-Claude LaPierre , Canada

I was 12 years old when I killed my first seal. 1952. A huge male. He charged me when I got within 15 feet of him, and I was so scared, I swung away at him with the baseball bat I had in my hands. I didn't have a hakapik -- a heavy wooden club affixed with a sharp spike, used to kill seals -- back then. I must have hit him about 50 times before I was convinced he was dead. When I stopped, I realized my Dad and the rest of the crew were all laughing at me, at how excitable I was, wielding that bat. I think my father decided to throw me into the deep end of the seal hunting pool when he chose that male for my first kill. After that, anything would be easier.

On that same outing, I took 25 whitecoats (newborn harp seal pups). Back then, there were no regulations or government laws that banned killing the baby seals. It was much harder for me to do that. When you approach the babies, they become scared and tuck their heads into their bodies to protect themselves. It was terrible. It hurt my heart. But I didn't have a choice. Either I followed through to become a part of my Dad's crew, or I didn't, and I would go home for good. But I wanted to be part of the crew, so I did it. On the way home, he didn't say anything about my first outing with him and his crew. My mother asked him how I did, and she told me he was impressed. "You done good,” was what he said.

My mother was the one who convinced my Dad to take me on my first hunt. I begged him several times to take me, but he wouldn't budge, and I would end up crying for hours. He said I didn't have any experience, but the spirit? of adventure in the stories, he told about past hunts excited me. He would often recount a story his own father told him about an entire family who drowned on a hunt in the 1940s when their boat went adrift, hit some ice and went down. Nine of them. They didn't have any way of communicating what happened, and there were no helicopters then to make a rescue. There's a song about them – "La famille Lebel." I think my father told the story to show how dangerous life on the hunt could be. Respect the sea, respect the ice, he would say. They are more powerful than you. I learned the hard way.

It was sometime in the early 1970s. I went hunting with my cousins on the north point of Prince Edward Island. We had a 60ft. wooden boat and made a good haul, something like 2,100 pelts. But we ran into gale-force winds and drifted about 90 miles into Cabot Strait - into some heavy ice. We had to line the outside of the boat with pelts so the ice wouldn't pierce the hull. We were very nervous. But we had good communications, and were able to contact an icebreaker to help us out.

When the weather cleared, the coast guard came and got us. I've hunted seals for more than 50 years. It's easy to do, but you have to control your emotions. I used to question my actions, to try and figure out how I felt about what I was doing. But we humans are predators. Seals prey on other species. We kill other animals too. The cameras don't capture all the killing humans do. Cameras aren't allowed in many places where animals are slaughtered. The seal hunt, however, is out in the open, very public and easy to film. The important thing is to have respect for the animal. I wouldn't be able to kill knowing that the animal would suffer, so technique is very important. A quick kill, a quick blow to the top of the head with a hakapik is usually enough. Sometimes a seal continues to move after being hit, but that's normal. It's already dead. A biologist told me that that's the body's normal reaction.

Sometimes you hear people say we skin seals alive, but that is a lie. We are professionals and we follow the rules. Actually, we train young people how to handle seals humanely. I hunt seals because I need them. It's how I make a living. It's my life. Three of my sons are now part of my crew. It's their life now. I have a grandson who's just turning 12, the same age I was when I went on my first hunt. He asks a lot of questions about hunting. He is as excited about it as I was when I was his age, and is often on the shore with his mother, waiting for us to come into port at the end of the day. *** It used to be quiet on the ice. You were out there, hearing nothing except your own breath. When I went with my father that first time, we walked on the ice to get to the seals.

We used a row boat at certain points, but we did a lot of walking on shore ice. My Dad said it was important to pay attention to the color of the ice. White or blue ice was solid underfoot. Walking on grey ice would guarantee you an icy bath, or worse. When we came across higher cakes of ice, sometimes ten feet high, we would use an axe to make a path so we could continue on our way. Very low tech. No motorized boats, no helicopters, no noise back then. It's not quiet anymore. There's a lot of traffic above and on the ice now. There can be 50 helicopters hovering with protesters and tourists. I've hunted from helicopters and planes myself, and the catch is huge. One season, my cousins and I used a Cessna, and we took in 25 pelts per trip. We made quite a few trips and ended up with 400 to 500 pelts in one day. But I realized the noise scared the seals, and this affects their growth and the hunt. The noise frightens the mother seals, especially, and they leave their nursing babies and slide underneath the ice for cover. Sometimes they don't come back for hours, and this affects the babies' maturing process.

The protesters and all these celebrities say they care about the animals, but they don't seem to care about the mothers. Only the babies. They take the babies away from the mother and pose for pictures. They forget the mother. How is that respecting the animal? It's hypocritical. *** The Gulf hunt around the Madeleines was poor this year. It was the worst I've seen since I began hunting. There are about 75 to 80 boats, including my own, from the Madeleines. My own crew only took in 200 seals over three days. Normally, we can harvest 1,500 to 2,000 per season which lasts 5 or 6 days. There were lots of challenges this time around. Conditions were not conducive for hunting. The ice was not as widespread as before. Not many of the young seals had matured enough for us to take. Something is going on with their maturing process.

The DFO hunt quotas are also affecting us negatively. The quota for the Madeleines was 18,200 this year. To make a decent income, our crews would need to take 50,000 seals. We have to go farther and farther away from home base, sometimes 300 miles, to get to the seals - the beaters - that we can hunt legally. As crew captain, I can make $25,000 to $30,000 for the season – in a good season. This year, I didn't come to close to that. I only paid off my expenses. I didn't make any money. I have a contract, going on 12 years now, with Fisheries and Oceans Canada to put out and check their navigation buoys. That is an extra source of income for me.

Others are not so lucky. We're going to have to be very proactive in the coming years if we are going to maintain our way of life in the Madeleines. We just revived the islands' sealing association and we're going organize boycotts of those businesses and agencies that facilitate the protesters' activities. Rental car agencies, places that rent out helicopters, the hotels protesters stay in, the companies that provide fuel for the protesters' planes and helicopters. We're going to use the protesters' tactics against the protesters themselves. They only show up and spend money for about a week or two out of every year, but we live here. We are here all year round and are a major part of the economy here. We're going to have to advocate for ourselves to counteract the negativity around the hunt. The negative publicity about the hunt began to circulate in the 1970s.

First was the film that Quebec journalist Serge Deyglun shot. Then Brian Davies of Greenpeace came, and soon the word spread that we were bad people. I remember a group of sealers attacking a helicopter that was going to take Davies on the ice to film the hunt. After they were finished with it, the helicopter couldn't fly. But that didn't help our cause. The damage was shown to people all over the world, and the tide began to turn against us. In the 1980s, another Greenpeacer, Paul Watson, spoke against the hunt on a Madeleine radio station. But people knew what hotel he was staying in, and a crowd of about 300 found him, broke the door down, and took him off to the airport. I was frightened for him. Fortunately, for him he was only missing a few hairs on his head that someone grabbed while they dragged him out of the hotel. Somebody has a souvenir of the occasion. There were only 10 police officers on the Madeleines, so they couldn't do anything. Watson was put on a plane to Charlottetown, PEI.

Before the hunt started this year, I tried to talk to the Humane Society people, with Rebecca Aldworth, the director of the Canadian Wildlife Federation. She wished me good luck on the hunt this year. She said it was going to be my last. I told her that my sons and I were going to be back for sure. It was she who wasn't going to be here next time. She just laughed. She is Canadian herself, but her actions are not Canadian. We're going to make sure there'll be no planes and helicopters disturbing the animals and interfering in the hunt. This year? we managed to get Esso in the Madeleines to stop providing fuel to the protesters. We were happy we achieved that.

I called the head of the Sealing Association in Newfoundland, Frank Penhom, and asked him to do the same where he is. To get the oil companies to stop selling fuel to the activists. We're going to work hard on making that happen by the time next year's hunt starts on the front (another name for the hunt off Newfoundland). Our way of life didn't start a few years ago. It's hundreds of years old. I myself am Acadian, Quebecois and Canadian. Melting ice, the changes we're seeing to the seals' maturing process, new DFO hunt quotas and, especially, protestors, are driving me away from the life I know. I heard on the news that a beauty products' executive wants to buy us out, something like $16 million was offered. But that's not enough. She could offer $50 million or even $100 million, but no amount of money is enough. My father taught me this way of life. It's a tradition and I have respect for it. I can't be in a building in Vancouver or Montreal. That would destroy my life. Fishing, being on the ice, hunting for seals…that is my life.

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About Sharp Corporation of Australia Sharp Corporation of Australia is a subsidiary of Japan's Sharp Corporation. Sharp is a worldwide developer of one-of-a-kind home appliances, multifunctional (MFD) office solutions and professional and commercial visual displays. Sharp was honoured as an inaugural Thomson Reuters Top 100 Global Technology Leader in 2018, recognised as one of the tech industry's most operationally sound and financially successful organisations.