L.A.’s newest publication isn’t a glossy with a celebrity cover. Rather, it’s printed on old-school newsprint and graced by a surveillance camera shot of the Make It Quick Bandit, a bank robber sought by the FBI.
Called Cuffed & Wanted, the paper is filled with hundreds of mug shots of felons and suspects, both snaggletooth and unremarkable.
In a digital age when the Internet is overflowing with crime news, it’s remarkable in its own right as a throwback to an earlier time.
The newspaper is aimed at concerned citizens who on a whim would pay $1 a pop at newsstands or convenience stores, perhaps feeling they’re lacking information about criminals who might be hanging out in their neighborhoods.
“Our plan is to educate the population with what’s going on with crime,” said publisher Don Abernathy, 47. “There’s a little bit of money to be made.”
The biweekly paper, which started publication Aug. 15, has 20-or-so pages featuring mug shots provided by agencies such as the state Department of Corrections & Rehabilitation, the FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. There isn’t a text article to be found.
It’s a novel concept for Los Angeles County, but there are mug shot publications in other parts of the country, such as the newspaper Jail in Orlando, Fla. There’s also an entire industry of websites that obtain mug shots of recent arrests en masse. Meanwhile, websites such as TMZ.com count on celebrity mugs to bring in major page views.
Abernathy is hoping his paper will play something of a more elevated role by helping the public identify and pass on information to authorities about sex offenders, murderers and other wanted criminals in the county.
Whatever its intentions, Samir Husni, who runs the Magazine Innovation Center at the University of Mississippi in Oxford, believes the newspaper, like others of its ilk, taps into a voyeuristic rather than crime-fighting impulse in those who pick up a copy.
“It’s aimed toward the folks who take a peek and see who’s out there,” he said, “people who want to feel good about themselves because their picture is not in there.”
Sprawling bureaucracy
Abernathy has never published his own paper before but has some related experience, previously working on product catalogs for a prison supply company. About a year ago, he and his brother, David Abernathy, who works in construction sales, begin talking about publishing the paper.
They had seen similar papers and thought there was an opportunity to make a local edition, despite the challenges of obtaining public information from a sprawling law enforcement bureaucracy in a county with 88 cities.
Don Abernathy took the lead on forming relationships with law enforcement agencies, reaching out to public information officers. Meanwhile, his brother took over advertising sales. The brothers also hired an employee to work on layout and design. Abernathy said he’s hoping to give the publication a more polished look than such papers normally have.
As last month’s launch issue neared, Abernathy decided to leave his job to devote his efforts full time to the paper, published through 614 LLC, a Signal Hill company the brothers formed.
Abernathy now spends much of his time filing public information requests with law enforcement agencies. One agency he’s established a cooperative relationship with is the Department of Corrections & Rehabilitation. The department has provided mug shots and other information about parolees being sought, such as those who have failed to register and keep in contact with authorities.
For example, the Aug. 15 edition of the paper includes a mug shot of a man who changed his name to James E. Herd and whose whereabouts have not been known since 1980.
“The more information we can get out to the public, it increases our chances of catching up with (criminals). We’re hoping they’ll make that phone call,” said Lupe Sanchez, a parole supervisor at the department.
Meanwhile, the FBI has been issuing press releases imploring the public for information about the Make It Quick Bandit, who is on the cover of the Sept. 1 edition. U.S. Bancorp, which has had branches from Gardena to San Pedro robbed, has been offering a $10,000 reward.
In the bandit’s case, Abernathy did not need much cooperation from the FBI. Instead, he simply made use of publicly available information, which included the mug shot and press releases. He said he thought the case stood out because the bandit has been linked to nine heists.
Bounty hunters
Even though the brothers have access to enough information to fill the paper, the financial viability of the publication has not been proved.
Abernathy said they’ve invested about $100,000, which has sustained the paper’s launch thus far, though they weren’t fully aware of just how costly the endeavor would turn out to be.
The duo learned the business on the fly, including hiring Freedom Printing, which prints the Orange County Register, to churn out 13,000 papers every two weeks.
Abernathy said his costs are below $1 per issue, but he’s planning to increase the number of copies he prints to get a better rate with the printer. He also hired a distribution company to help get the papers in about 1,000 stores and newsstands around the county, such as 7-Elevens and gas station marts.
It turned out that getting the paper carried by vendors was costly. Traditionally, vendors might take about half of the cover price for carrying a publication. Abernathy said he had to offer a richer deal than many established papers, though he would not disclose the percentage. (So far, two issues have been published and Abernathy said he has not yet received data on sales from his distributor.)
He’s now hoping to increase the number of advertisements sold, which go for about $1,000 for four issues, or two months. In the first edition, the only two advertisers were a female police officer-turned-lawyer who goes by the nickname “the Legal Diva” and a bounty hunter business called Resolute Recovery Services, whose ad features a picture of its lead agent, Bryan “Bear” Scott.
Plans also include dramatically increasing distribution, in part by introducing a Spanish-language version in coming months to penetrate the county’s huge Hispanic market.
Still, one big challenge remains: getting access to mug shots of recently arrested people.
As of now, the paper is mostly filled with wanted criminals, but has only text briefs of recent arrests, with information such as name, age, occupation and the charges facing arrestees. Abernathy hopes to eventually house all the mug shots from arrests around the county on a webpage. But the Los Angeles Police Department, which would need to supply much of that information, has proved difficult so far, he said.
“We do not have any working relationship with that news organization,” said a spokesman for the LAPD.
