Patti Goldberg is a third-generation bail bondsman. Yeah, she knows what you’re expecting: some seedy character who the hero in a hard-boiled detective story would have to slap around. So let her straighten you out. Very nicely.
Goldberg, 51, is the owner of Goldberg Bonding Company, a business founded 100 years ago in St. Paul by her Prussian-immigrant grandfather, Morris Goldberg. If you had to pick a single word to describe her appearance and manner, it might be “motherly.” She says her company is “a family dedicated to helping other families through hard times.” So much for hard-boiled.
As she sees it, her job is not to judge, but to cushion blows. If she were a nurse, her customers would need their wounds bandaged. As it happens, what they need is to get out of jail.
What Goldberg needs, of course, are customers who will pay her fee with checks that don’t bounce, and will show up for all of their court appearances. Above all, they should resist the temptation to skip bail, leaving her holding the bag—or chasing the assets of the person who cosigned for the bond.
In her grandfather’s day, and even her father’s, Goldberg says, bail bonding was more often a handshake business. “A person would shake your hand and say, ‘I’ll come back and give you the money.’ And I’ll tell you something, they did come back and give you the money.” Now they don’t.
So these days, with rare exceptions, Goldberg’s fee must be paid up front and a cosigner must accept a binding agreement to cover the full bond amount in case the defendant skips. On large bonds, she gets collateral as security. “And we ask questions,” Goldberg says. “We know what the charge is. We know what we’re getting into.” Based on everything from credit checks to a neighbor’s good word to gut feelings, she might write a bond “weaker” (with little security) or “stronger” or not at all.
“My goal with every phone call that comes in is to get that person out of jail,” she says. But family feeling for her clients notwithstanding, Goldberg is in the business of assessing risk.
“Hi, Dad, I’m in jail!”
Inside Goldberg’s headquarters, long since moved to Minneapolis, the only clue that this isn’t some other kind of risk-assessment business—banking, say, or insurance—is a promotional T-shirt framed behind glass on a rear wall: A smiling cartoon teenager says, “Hi, Dad, I’m in jail!”
The dozen or so people in the cubicles look like cubicle workers anywhere. Goldberg Bonding has six locations in Minnesota, agents in every county in the state, and a few agents in Iowa and South Dakota—about 100 full- and part-time employees who are trained and authorized to write bonds. Patti’s father, Bud Goldberg, now 80, retired in 1997, but he still drops in on Mondays on his way to weekly lunches with old pals, many of them lawyers.
