Air Raider

When bankrupted airlines, corrupt dictators, and broke money managers stop paying for their jumbo jets, expect to see Nick Popovichthe worlds top airplane repo man.

- Eric Spitznagel

Nick Popovich woke up with two black eyes, several missing teeth and no shoes or wallet. His face was swollen “to the size of a watermelon,” and he was pretty sure he had a few broken ribs, too. To make matters worse, he was in a Haitian prison.

How Popovich ended up there is a long story. He’d come to Port-au-Prince, Haiti’s hard-bitten capital, to track down a Boeing 720 jet owned by a small Caribbean airline. The company had skipped a few payments, and their lender, a U.S. bank, had hired Popovich to repossess it. Though the plane was only worth $600,000, the airport manager in Port-au-Prince demanded a million in “service fees.” Popovich tried to make a late-night getaway without paying, but a jeep full of kids with machine guns stopped him on the runway and, in his words, “beat the crap out of me.”

Popovich might still be in that prison today, if not for some fortuitous timing. Just a few weeks into his prison stay, there was an uprising in Haiti and President Jean-Claude ‘Baby Doc’ Duvalier was overthrown. Port-au-Prince erupted into anarchy, and one of the rioters ran into the prison and opened all the cell doors. In the ensuing chaos, Popovich and the other prisoners made their escape. He walked several miles barefoot to a Sheraton hotel, called a pilot friend with a Learjet in the U.S. to fly out and get him, and then stole a courtesy van to get to the airport. “I showed up in Florida with no shoes and no passport,” he laughs. “But I was alive.”