The hunt is on.
Max Pineiro and his men are searching for a Staten Island banker, who shouldn’t be surprised if his 32-foot Carver yacht one day sets sail without him.
He’s $6,068 behind in payments.
An accountant living in West Paterson, NJ is on the list as well – he’s delinquent on his 2007 BMW 735.
Pineiro is also scouring New Jersey for a 2003 Lamborghini Diablo. The owner, who runs a marble quarry, is deep in the hole, owing $181,000 on the car.
Then there’s the New York Giant’s 2006 Jaguar X-Type. The member of the Super Bowl-winning team owes $3,036 in car payments.
The repo man is coming for them all.
As layoffs hit Wall Street and the economic downturn batters portfolios, defaults on payments for flashy cars, boats and even planes have skyrocketed in the city and the metro area.
“The housing market went south, and it wasn’t too long after that the auto market was hit,” said Pineiro, 45, whose Elizabeth, NJ, office is flooded with e-mails and faxes from creditors requesting a repossession.
The owner of Elite Collateral Recovery and Investigations, Pineiro said business has more than doubled in the last six months.
The company repossessed 586 vehicles in March, compared to the 270 they picked up in March of last year.
Right now, his team has 600 cases.
His clients include Capital One, HSBC and American Honda Finance Corp.
“One thing I’ve noticed is that a lot of good people and a lot of professional people – doctors, even celebrities – are losing their cars,” Pineiro said.
“Before, the Honda Civic was the top car. Now, it’s a Mercedes.”
He is not the only repo man in town getting rich.
Art Christensen, head of Commercial Services Corp., another repossession company covering New York City, said his business gets as many as 50 repo requests a day from lenders.
“It’s been about a 20 percent increase,” he said.
Pineiro works with a team of 22 repo men day and night in tricked-out tow trucks, hunting in the five boroughs, New Jersey and parts of Florida for their steel bounties.
Sometimes, the gimlet-eyed, mustachioed Pineiro receives assignments to find yachts. He’s comfortable sailing the vessel away himself if it’s under 32 feet long.
The licensed pilot has also been commissioned to retrieve planes.
If the aircraft is working, he will fly it to a hangar at Linden Airport in New Jersey, where it’ll sit until auction. Otherwise, he and his men will put a propeller lock on the plane, grounding it until the owner catches up on credit payments or it’s auctioned off.
Three weeks ago, while following a tip that a yacht was docked at a specific marina, he took to the air in his Cessna 172, flying at a low altitude down the Hudson River. An employee in the plane used binoculars to spot the boat.
“I bought it mostly for pleasure,” Pineiro said, referring to his plane. “Now I use it more for business.”
The car snatcher has been repossessing for 27 years. Although he said he initially got into the business for the thrill of absconding with a vehicle in the night, he admits that the adrenaline boosts are few and far between.
However, he does remember a run-in five years ago with a famous disco singer, who, while dressed only in a silk robe, put a gun to Pineiro’s head after spotting him taking his Mercedes-Benz from his driveway.
“I said, ‘Listen, man, your business is not worth my life. Your car is not worth my life,’ ” Pineiro recalled.
The job is mostly a game of patience and driving for hours until a car is located, he said.
If a delinquent owner dodges calls and a bill remains unpaid, a lender will hire the repo man to find the property and seize it.
Via e-mail or fax, the lender sends the borrower’s home address, Social Security number, phone number and often a work address.
Pineiro starts with a trip to the owner’s home at night. If after three or four visits he is still unsuccessful, he will hit the owner’s work address during the day.
Next come hangouts or relatives’ and friends’ homes, whose addresses are gleaned from references that the borrower listed on a credit application.
A repo man will also run a borrower’s license and motor-vehicle registration through state databases to search for alternate addresses.
All of Pineiro’s tow trucks are equipped with wireless laptops, allowing the repo men to receive updates from lenders while in the field and then to do more research.
When a car is spotted but the owner is being elusive, Pineiro will put three trucks on the job and tail the vehicle until the driver parks to do something.
“We get a lot of cars at 7-Elevens,” Pineiro said.
Once they find a car, Pineiro strikes quickly. He adroitly uses a joystick next to the driver’s seat to maneuver metal pincers out from under the truck and around a car’s front or back tires. The truck can then pick up the car and tow it off on its hind wheels.
When in a pinch, Pineiro can tow a car without ever leaving his truck.
While the economic slump has been tough times for most, it has been a boon for Pineiro.
Creditors generally pay him an average of $400 per car. His employees earn a commission plus salary and haul in between $2,000 to $2,500 a week, he said.
For the entire process, from repossessing a car to storage to auction, a bank pays about $2,000, Pineiro said.
Although public opinion of him and his kind is low, Pineiro said his job helps keep interest rates in check.
Generally, Pineiro feels little sympathy for delinquent borrowers. But then there was that one time he let a woman who was nine months’ pregnant keep her car until she delivered her child.
“I’ve fallen on hard times,” he said. “It’s what a person is willing to do to get out of it . . . If [repossession] happened to me, it is my fault and my fault only.”
jfanelli@nypost.com