When X17 paparazzi photographer “Dano” describes the night an outraged Britney Spears attacked his Ford Explorer with an umbrella, it’s with an almost child-like glee.

“She was breathing like a bull,” the Mexican-American Angelino told writer David Samuels in a recent cover story for The Atlantic magazine. “It was like smoke was coming out of her nostrils. Then she leaps out of the door screaming ‘Motherfuckers!’"

Ironically, her rage-fueled lapse in judgment (perhaps spurred by being denied visitation with her sons minutes earlier) made Dano a star. His net profits from sales of the photos totaled $400,000.

According to the Atlantic story, Britney-related photos/videos/etc. bring the celebrity-stalking industry over $100 million in proceeds annually -- and that’s just Britney. With Paris, Lindsay, TomKat, and Brangelina in the mix, along with hundreds of other movie stars and socialites, we’re talking astronomical sums of money. Once a highly specialized business, it’s now a piranha pool roiling with opportunists.

Because it is so profitable, chasing celebrities has become a bloodthirsty game. And it may surprise you to know that its most successful players are former pizza delivery drivers, valet parking attendants, and other service industry rejects. The modern paparazzi are not professional, lone wolf photographers, hauling expensive camera equipment from location to location. They are mostly packs of immigrant kids, armed with simple digital cameras and camcorders, who are willing to risk life, limb, and incarceration to bag a “big money” shot.

X17 photographers are the biggest breadwinners in the business, mostly because they are so organized. Francois “Regis” Navarre, himself a Parisian immigrant, owns the company. He and his wife, Brandy, run a stable of 60-70 photographers which they pay, on average, $800-$3000 a week, to bring them fresh celebrity meat daily. They, in turn, sell the pictures and videos (of which they retain full rights) to outlets like Us Weekly, People, Entertainment Tonight, Access Hollywood and other national and international media outlets.

The promise of four and five figure bonuses for extra-hot stuff like the Britney head-shaving pics (which were shot by X17’s Luiz Betat through a one-inch hole in the salon’s plastic curtain) keep the paps poised and hungry. Betat is part of X17’s elite Britney-stalking force known as “The Brazilians.” He is loyal to Navarre, who plucked him from a valet parking job. “For sure I get excited, but I don’t have a shaking legs or bullshit like this,” Betat tells Samuels, of taking the famous shot. “You can tell from the first frame that she never saw I was there.”

While all of this sounds uncomfortably Mafioso, the other “reveals” in Samuels’ story are even more disturbing -- particularly when we learn that the informant that tipped-off X17 to Lindsay Lohan’s recent “family therapy session” was her own father, Michael. You can be assured that, like the rest of the company’s "tipsters," he was paid handsomely. Samuels also describes ride-alongs with the X17 paps that involve racing through the streets of Los Angeles like money-drunk Indy car drivers, swerving to the wrong side of the road and jockeying for position while in full pursuit of Britney.

“What the paparazzi have done is developed a lawless society where the rules don’t apply,” Los Angeles Councilman Dennis Zine told Access Hollywood, after proposing a law that would limit the proximity that paparazzi must maintain in regard to their subjects, “(driving) on the wrong side of the street, jumping out of cars at the red lights, swarming the car, you don’t do that.”

Zine says that when Britney is taken, by ambulance, to the hospital, it costs California taxpayers $25,000 just to cover the patrol cars, police motorcycles and helicopter support needed to keep the streets safe as the paps chase her. And while some argue that these actions are protected under the First Amendment, Zine points out that they are also "violating everyone else’s rights, freedoms, and privileges."

In the same story, X17 Vice President Brandy Navarre stated that such a law would mean nothing. “I don’t think it would change things that much,” she says. “I mean, the photographers would just stand back a little more.”

Though there seems to be no viable solution on the horizon, the problem is growing at a thunderous rate. Magazines rarely shell out for “exclusives” anymore as there are rarely any truly “exclusive” photos available – due to the sheer volume of photographers in constant pursuit of celebrity flesh.

“Fame is vapor, popularity an accident and riches take wings,” New York Tribune Editor Horace Greely once said. “Only one thing endures and that is character.”

Apparently, character is something Francois and Brandy Navarre have decided they can live without.

Wendy Case is the MOLI View's contributing editor for Arts & Entertainment.