A bounty hunter who's a quicker picker-upper of 'Fugitivos'

A bounty hunter who's a quicker picker-upper of 'Fugitivos'

Roman Morales (c.) stars in 'Fugitivos de La Ley,' a reality show about bounty hunters on Mun2. @nydailynews.com>

ROMAN MORALES admits it: The naked guy threw him off his game.

Morales is the really big guy on “Fugitivos de La Ley,” a reality show about a team of bounty hunters that airs Sundays at 8 p.m. on Mun2.

Like Luis Fernandez, who heads the team, Morales is a former Marine. Also a former policeman.

After he left the force, Morales says, he missed the action. “Going after bad guys is what I was trained to do,” he says. “I needed the challenge.”

So he joined he team, and he feels like he’s doing his part again.

“It’s a good feeling,” he says. “Every capture we make is one more knucklehead off the street.”

That doesn’t mean it’s easy. Some of the knuckleheads have guns and more than a few of them are hopped up on who knows what.

“I’ve never had to shoot anybody,” Morales. “I’ve come close. And there are times I would have been justified. But I gave them a chance to put down their weapon, and they did.”

The naked guy, who makes his appearance in episode two this season, clearly didn’t have a weapon. In this case, that wasn’t the problem.

Morales said, “The big question was ‘Who takes him down?’ I mean, he’s naked. He’s probably sweating. Sweat is an issue. We normally have a system for subduing somebody. But in this case, we were just standing there for a minute, thinking, like, ‘Isn’t it your turn?’”

Besides the occasional naked guy, Morales says that oddly enough, he has more trouble with small fugitives than big ones.

“It’s the hesitation factor,” he says. “I’m a big guy, so if I go after a small guy, I stop to think about it, because I don’t want to hurt him. If it’s a big guy, that’s not an issue. I just plow right in.”

He’s not a reluctant combatant.

“From all my training, I know how to fight,” he says. “I see what they call ‘Ultimate Fighting’ on TV and I drive my wife nuts because I keep yelling. ‘That’s not street fighting!’ In real street fighting, you don’t have rules. There’s no referee. If you have a broken leg, you keep fighting. You fight until somebody doesn’t get up.”

For obvious reasons, substantial parts of “Fugitivos” are re-enacted for TV purposes and oddly enough, says Morales, that has made the show interactive.

“We get letters from people all the time saying they want to be on the show,” he says. “So some of them are in the re-enactments. For some reason, they all want to be bad guys. We tell ’em if they’re going to be bad guys, they might get hurt.

“Because we’re the good guys.”