How to Lose a Car in 15 Days

ProPublica, investigative journalism in the public interest. Getting your car towed is one of those life experiences that is so common and yet can completely ruin your day.

That feeling of walking out to your car and it's just It's just vaporized. Whatever you wanted to do that day, it's over. And that's sort of on the low end of the consequences.

Go co go for your case for me. So one w w was your car a Dodge was it a Dodge Neon?

Yeah.

Okay.

Take the case of Melissa Anderson. She lives in Hampton, Connecticut.

You just bought the car?

Reporters at the Connecticut Mirror interviewed her.

Literally.

Melissa had just bought a used nineteen ninety eight Dodge Neon.

Took it almost a year to give up.

She said it had taken her about a year to save up the$1,200 to buy it. One fateful day, she comes home, parks the car at her apartment complex, because she just got her car, she hadn't updated her parking permit yet.

real quick I come upstairs

We're putting it

Call on the baby.

She said she was coming right back down when she heard yelling outside.

going down this here's my knee

Percurs.

Just breathing.

A tow truck had arrived. The neighbors were shouting, she'll be right back.

Oh, too late, already hooked. Like she's and you didn't even tie it down, you can drop it. Right away.

She called the towing company to try to get it back, but the bill to bail out her car was over a thousand dollars. More than half what she paid for the car in the first place.

I just want my car, it's the old car. What do you want with it? the crap. Gracias por ver el video.

Right. Right.

Okay.

Yeah. No, I I mean literally you had just bought him.

Томек матерс worse, her husband's a chef, and he said he left his supplies in the car.

Well my knives in the back of the car? Wow. Yeah, one that works.

Chef cool.

Without their only cart, she says her husband's 22-minute commute turned into two hours on buses and trains. She says he eventually lost his job.

It was a lot taking the bus to downtown and another bus to the

Two reporters at the Connecticut Mirror learned lots of people in Melissa's apartment complex kept getting their cars towed.

What kind of vehicle was it again?

It was a Chevy Trailblazer.

They discovered something kind of wild happened to these cars.

The car was sold.

The towing company was selling the cars. Meaning an expired parking pass or a bad park job could turn into never seeing your car again. Not only were these towers selling the cars and pocketing the money, they did it in some cases in just 15 days after they towed it. When some of the residents heard this, they thought there was no way this could be legal.

I didn't call the police. They said it was legal. You know, we called the state, they said it was legal, like we called the town, they said it was legal, like anybody we talked to was like there's nothing we can do.

We've all had an experience like this, where something that feels so unfair has happened, but the whole system seems stacked against you and it's easier to just take the L and walk away. But this story has a different ending. because these two local reporters, Jenny Monk and Dave Altamari, they did not walk away. They got ProPublica involved and started asking questions.

I think one of my biggest questions was why is this allowed?

It's kind of a like wait what kind of story.

Right. It is kind of uh holy shit, that's I don't believe that kind of a thing, right? And so that to me made it seem like it was gonna be a pretty good story if we could figure out how to do it.

On this episode, how a seemingly small thing, a very common experience like getting towed, sent two reporters down a rabbit hole as they tried to figure out what was going on with these cars in Connecticut. How many people was this happening to, where their cars were being towed and sold in 15 days? Who was making money off of this and how could any of this be legal?

Thank you.

The reporters went on a two-year journey to expose a problem much, much bigger than they expected.

It really is an abuse of power. They have the power to control, right? I mean they could have left your car. have all the power.

I'm Jessica Lessenhopp. This is Paper Trail.

My first reaction when my source told me is I don't I don't believe that. That can't be true that they can Potentially sell you a car in two weeks.

This towing story crossed the desk of this journalist.

My name's Dave Altamarry. I'm an investigative reporter at the Connecticut Mirror. Been a journalist for almost forty years now.

Local investigative reporters like Dave are kind of an endangered species these days. We're in a moment where a lot of local newsrooms don't have time or money to do investigative work. Which sucks. Local reporters make great investigators. They know their home states inside and out. And they have sources everywhere. I've heard that you're possibly the best sourced reporter in Connecticut. Um is would you uh how would you agree with that?

Um oh I don't know. I've been doing it for a long time, so I do have a lot of sources. Um you tend to accumulate them over the years if you stay at it long enough.

Dave's well-sourced reporting once put the governor of the state of Connecticut in prison. Dave was on the team that found he was giving out government jobs in exchange for personal gifts. Notably, a hot tub for his vacation home. And it was one of Dave's sources that gave him a tip saying, Hey, did you know that in Connecticut, there's this crazy law that lets towers sell your car in fifteen days?

That that that that can't that can't happen.

I at first was like, that can't be right. That must be an anomaly.

Right around the same time he got this tip, another reporter in his newsroom.

So I'm Jenny Monk. I cover housing and children's issues at the Connecticut Mirror.

Ginny's dogged reporting has led to changes in housing laws, and she even wrote a children's book to help kids deal with getting evicted. She'd been reporting at a housing complex and heard story after story of people getting their cars towed and then sold really quickly. Right after that, she was in the office and she overheard Dave talking about his sources tip about the law.

Serendipity. Kind of like a perfect storm to join forces.

When Ginny, Dave, and their editors had a hunch they were onto something big, they connected with ProPublica. ProPublica has an initiative called the Local Reporting Network that supports newsrooms like the Connecticut Mirror. We help cover reporters' salaries and team up on big investigations. For this investigation, Jenny and Dave's first move was to look up the law. When you were looking into the history of the law, like what what was sort of the like? How did this happen?

Yeah, I think the thing that was interesting to me is how absolutely logical it seemed at the beginning. So this law formed around the 1920s when people were starting to own cars more commonly. And it seemed like there was a big issue with folks abandoning their vehicles. Maybe they'd be in an accident and leave or it'd be stolen. They'd just leave it in the street.

If towns were having a problem with broken down cars being left around everywhere, it made sense for the growing towing industry to try to get them out of there and get them out of there quick.

But fast forward a century and the results of that law look very different.

When Ginny and Dave looked into it, Connecticut's law was uniquely harsh. The window of time between when a car was towed and when it could be legally sold was among the shortest in the country. If your car was worth less than$1,500, you could lose it in just 15 days. Now, by law, the towing company was supposed to notify you when they'd sold it. They were also supposed to give you a chance to collect any leftover money once their fees were taken.

So clearly the law was either being abused or wasn't being followed. This is not, you know, my car broke down on Interstate ninety five and the state police call a tow truck company to move your car. This is people parked in their private apartment complex and tow truck companies coming through. So it was clearly much more of a predatory thing than certainly what the original law was intended for.

They watched the way a once logical law over time created a nonsensical situation, at least at one private apartment complex. This tow truck company seemed almost relentless.

There were other people who had multiple cars towed and never got them back. The single mother, it was four times that cars ended up getting towed. She felt that they were targeting her. She was at her wits end, struggling to get by, uh, and just couldn't afford to get the cars back.

Yeah, at one point neighborhood watch groups formed that would walk around and Watch out for the tow truck and run and knock on people's doors if they were gonna get towed.

Just for the tow truck.

Just for the tow truck.

Did you think at that point that perhaps you were just dealing with maybe one bad actor?

I wasn't sure. We had a few examples of people who had lost their cars. We had no idea how big the problem was.

There were a lot of questions early on. Was this just happening at this one housing complex? Did this one tow truck company just have a scheme running there? Or was it possible that the law was enabling this practice all over the state? How many people could be losing their cars this way?

Actually that's where my source within the D M V came in very handy. It's a person I had known for fifteen, twenty years that could have gotten in trouble for helping me. So that's why we kept them anonymous.

This anonymous DMV source gave Dave and Ginny a backstage view of how things worked, how the DMV keeps track of cars that are towed and sold.

When towers want to sell a vehicle that they've towed, they fill out a form. estimating the value, offering the details of when it was towed, who the registered owner is, and they send that all to the DMV. The DMV then approves the form, and the sale can proceed.

So these DMV forms, the H-100s, they were the key to understanding how big this problem really was.

So we requested all of those forms.

like three years worth of these H one hundreds to try to get some idea of how many cars a year were they trying to sell, what collars were doing it the most and all that kind of thing.

That sounds like a a fairly simple record to request.

So I put in a freedom of information request to the DMV.

A Freedom of Information Request. An FOI. Quick Journalism 101, there's lots of information and data that the government keeps and you have a right to. It is your information. But you do still have to ask for it formally. That's what an FOI is. Anybody, any member of the public can file one. Sometimes the government will charge you a fee for the trouble of putting the information together.

They got back to me relatively quickly and told me it was gonna cost us forty seven thousand dollars to get the right.

Oh my god.

Ciao.

Even getting an estimate in like, you know, a thousand dollars is kind of like, oh boy, but forty seven thousand dollars?

Right.

Is astronomical.

I I've never seen a number like that, quite honestly. It kinda floored me.

That was more than we were able to pay.

I mean I can see a world where you get that response, this will be forty seven thousand dollars and it's just like story over.

Yeah.

Wow.

The Connecticut Mirror got a lawyer involved who negotiated the price down significantly.

Maybe eight months after I submitted it, they started giving us documents.

We started getting Friday afternoon document dumps, a couple hundred documents at a time.

What do they look like? What are they what do th what information?

A mess.

Literally a mess.

Some of which were handwritten.

Some of them were completely redacted.

Just black squares. For hundreds of pages.

Completely useless. There was no rhyme or reason to what they redacted. So it was very frustrating.

This really big piece of the story is out of our grasp.

While they were working out the mess with the paperwork, Dave and Ginny tried a new strategy to answer their very basic question. How often were people having their cars towed and sold?

Describing what we were looking for.

I believe it said have you been towed in really big letters? And we made a Spanish version as well.

Had a QR code, it had our numbers and names on it. And then Ginny and I started papering private apartment complexes across the state on weekends, trying to find people who had lost their cars.

Just knocking on doors.

Literally.

Did you have any memorable moments from those trips?

Yeah, constantly worrying that my car was gonna get towed. It's a miracle we all made it out of this story without getting towed.

Uh and we ended up getting I think it was over a hundred responses back from that.

Ginny and Dave started reading all these accounts from people getting their cars sold out from underneath them. For these folks, the tow led to a cascade of misfortune. A lost car metastasized into other losses. For some people, lost housing.

Traumatic. You know, I mean. You lose your car, you could lose your job.

But the next question was This all appeared to be legal under this hundred-year-old law, but the situation seemed ripe for scammers. Was there anyone in this vast statewide system of towers and government bureaucrats who was finding a way to profit from it? Even in some small way?

through my source and through, you know, as we started to get more documents and were able to get them into a database that we could look at. We found some other companies that clearly were also pretty high flyers. Uh one of'em called D and L towing in Meriden. And my source said you should also really look at this guy named Stefansky, who is a DMV employee, and his relationship with DNL.

Saying This guy still works at the DMV and he's still selling an awful lot of cars on Facebook Marketplace.

That was the first time I heard the name Stefansky, and that turned out to become quite a story.

A story involving allegations of larceny and fraud. It was all laid out in Stefansky's personnel file, which Dave's source told them to request. The DMV had been investigating Stefansky. What did you learn about him?

His name is Dominic Stafansky and he was what they call a document examiner for the D M V and had been for over twenty years.

The file portrayed this image of a rank-and-file DMV employee who had some power to move processes through more quickly, I think. We've all been to the DMV and waited a long time. Is that a universal American experience?

No kidding.

But he would move this particular towing company to the front of the line

I love that part of the scheme is just cutting the line.

Yes. And you think that's a little benefit, but I don't know. I mean, people go to the D M V, right? They know how long you have to wait in line sometimes.

Turns out standing in an hours long line at the DMV to submit paperwork can be a huge headache for the towers. Some of them have to do it almost every week. Investigators said Stefansky made that headache go away.

And in exchange for, you know, letting them cut the line, he would literally go to their towing lot in Meredith, walk through the lot and like pick out cars that he wanted that they had towed.

And then resell them for Thousands of dollars in profit.

He just turned around and flipped'em. So I could flip out house and made a lot of money. So this was literally all laid out on a record that we could use.

In this record, they could see a list of cars that were towed and then sold to Dominic Stevansky. Now, the owners of those cars were presumably victims of this car flipping scheme. Dave and Jinny wondered if the owners were aware of that, if they knew what had happened to them.

did they realize, you know, the the journey that their car ended up taking?

But the names of the owners were not in the document. All they had were vehicle identification numbers or VINs.

A van is not terribly helpful without the name of the person.

This was a true needle in a haystack situation. There's no easy way for a journalist to match a VIN to an owner name. At one point, Ginny walked into a city hall and said, I need to find out who owns this car, but all I have is the VIN. So they set her at a little desk and started bringing out gigantic books listing all the vehicles registered in that town, listed alphabetically by the owner's last names.

I think I was only on the letter D.

Someone who worked at City Hall finally came over and said

Hey.

What's the Vin you're looking for again? Just just write it down and leave it over here. So I wrote it down, folded it up. Without saying anything to me, they walked by, picked it up, went.

Somehow, this person looked up the VIN and found the owner's name.

About an hour later, they came back out, went to the bathroom, and on their way back said, There's something in the bathroom for you. So I went in there. And saw the same piece of paper folded up on a little table in there, and it had the last name. So this person had had his vehicle towed and ultimately sold. by Dominic Stevansky.

That's crazy!

I must have looked really pathetic.

The doggedness of Jinny Monk, ladies and gentlemen.

I believe it was st began with an R.

I just have to ask, if this hadn't happened, would you have sat there for however long it took to get to the Rs?

Absolutely. But it could have been weeks.

Good for you, man.

Once they had the owner's name, they called him up. Apparently he'd been going through addiction problems and abandoned his SUV at a motel. He knew the car had been towed and sold for a hefty profit. He tried to get some of the money, money he was entitled to by the law, but the DMV falsely told him it was too late.

Um so let me go back. Let me let me if you got a couple of minutes, I'm just trying to so I have a Mer I I have a Meriden police report.

Meanwhile, Dave went looking for the owner of another one of the cars sold by Stavansky. This guy had no idea what happened to his car.

It was a twenty ten Jeep Wrangler. I was able to track down the owner Hector Gonzalez by a police report. 'Cause they w we we got a police report that had his name in it. You got stopped by the state police or something and they said the car was stolen? Yep. So the driver had been stopped by the police Because they thought it was a stolen car.

Turns out it was stolen previously, not stolen by Hector or by his uncle.

It was

Bye-bye.

It belonged to his uncle and his uncle had given it to him. He told me he had spent a lot of money putting custom wheels on there. Some kind of a bar? What's the bar on top? What does that mean? The light bar. It got a light bar on top. You put that. Did you put that there? I put yeah, I put everything. I lift up the truck, put big rims, rockstar um rims. I don't know if you heard about them, rockstar. Okay. Almost $5.00 Rams. I have train horns. I have music on it.

Yeah.

Um as it turned out, DNL put in the H one hundred form that they needed to put in, and they claimed that the Jeep was worth less than fifteen hundred dollars.

Less than fifteen hundred dollars. That's the cutoff in the law. If the tow company wants to sell a car in fifteen days, they have to claim that the value of the car is less than fifteen hundred dollars.

And there's no way that Jeep was worth less than fifteen hundred dollars. And to buttress their claim that it wasn't worth anything. They submitted these photos of the Jeep with no tires, no doors, that it was basically worth nothing. Do you have a photo of the Jeep? That's a that's a long time ago. Yeah, I know.

I've seen this photo. A silver jeep, no tires, no doors. It must have snowed recently in Connecticut when they took the photo. There's snow on top of the car. Weirdly though, there's snow on the outside, but no snow on the inside of the car, even though the doors are gone and allegedly that's how the towing company found it. That's not how snow works.

No doors, no light bar and snow all over the place. No, the car had doors. It had all the doors. So they had clearly Fooled with the car before they submitted the photos to DMV to make it look like it was worth less than it was. So they they submitted a form to DMV to sell that Jeep. They turned around, they sold it to a DMV employee who they had a deal with. He let them cut the line at D M V and in exchange they let him walk around their lot and pick out towed vehicles that he wanted to buy.

And when Stefansky sold the supposedly stripped In the photos he posted on his Facebook Marketplace account, the Jeep miraculously had all its doors and tires back.

So he made uh quite a profit.

Thank you.

That it's crazy to have a reporter show up and just be like, Hey, do you have any idea what happened to your to your gene?

You never know what you're gonna get a phone call about, right, man? I bet you hadn't thought about that car in a long time. Um the D M B guys from Community? Oh yeah, he still works there. N nothing happened to him, believe it or not. They did a whole investigation and then D and V never did anything about the guys. During the time of this investigation, Stefansky got glowing reviews from his supervisors.

Seventy two grand a year it turned out. Yeah.

So what did you and Jenny once you once you had this story in your hands, what did you do next?

We had to go talk to Stefankey.

That's after the break.

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Yeah. My name is David Altamari. I'm a recorder from the Connecticut Mill. This is my college in So Ginny and I uh one night went and knocked on his door. And he came and didn't let us in. But he Didn't seem to have a care in the world about it. Right, right. I didn't do nothing wrong. Didn't deny it. Didn't think he had done anything wrong. He said uh it was investigated and you know, I um it's this little side business I had. Yeah, missing doors so we have to still put them on, even if they're

Ode to joy is just blasting in the background for some reason.

Yeah, I don't know why. Uh no idea what was going on in the background to be honest with you.

Particular.

So like I said, I I can't tell you what you're gonna write about me, you know what I'm saying? Because journalism never good stuff writing about people, so

Stefansky told them that journalists never write anything good about people, which is not true, but I get why he might think that. Being written about can impact your life. But that's exactly why Jinny and Dave were on his doorstep.

Sure!

Well so we're here'cause we

We wanna be sure to give you an opportunity to to close out your side and I know you gotta read this, but I just wanna be sure

They were doing what we do for every story at ProPublica. We go to people we're writing about, we tell them ahead of time what we plan to publish, and ask them to talk to us. Yeah.

Call email text whatever is fine.

Return call, that's right.

Yeah, that's fine too.

It's an opportunity for them to explain from their point of view what happened or to set the record straight if we got something wrong. It's about fairness.

DMV's internal investigation of Stefansky never seemed to go anywhere. At one point, they tried to get an arrest warrant to file criminal charges of larceny. But the state attorney's office said there wasn't enough evidence. There to prosecute criminally, they said the DMV could pursue a civil case. They could punish Stefansky internally or fine the towing company DL. But none of that happened back then.

Go away there.

Thanks for coming in.

Thanks for having us.

So we had to reach out to the commissioner of the D M V because the D M V is the agency that was in charge of this whole thing. Uh so we had to do a sit down interview with the D M V Commissioner, Tony Guerrera. Stefanski is still doing the same job. And as a matter of fact, is advertising on ma Facebook marketplace.

I'm sorry, I don't mean a song.

Thank you.

What is he doing?

Even though we had given them questions ahead of time. didn't seem to really know what we were talking about. So in exchange for allowing D and L to cut the line every time they I think he eventually realized that this was gonna be a big deal. And as far as I mean still working, huh? Had a nice random last year. Uh

I can't continent on it right now.

He was very quickly put on administrative leave just a couple days after the story. Wow.

And he wa he was fired like eight months later.

When the reporters called him back after the firing, Stefansky said no one at the DMV indicated why he was being fired close to seven years after the incident and five years after the DMV investigators learned what was happening. The termination letter notes he was fired for misconduct. Quote, when you used your position for financial gain, end quote.

So we have been collecting for over two years now. the forms that they are supposed to submit, which are called H one hundreds.

After years of manually reviewing redacted and handwritten H-100s, Dave and Ginny were finally able to analyze over 6,000 of them with the help of ProPublica's data team. Their analysis showed the towing companies routinely undervalued cars, which allowed them to sell more vehicles more quickly. And it highlighted just how little oversight was going on. That's the DMV's job.

Part of the law was that so once a tow truck company sells your car they're supposed to notify you that the car was sold The law's very old, but part of it is that there's supposed to be some kind of a setup where if Ginny's tow truck company sells my car. That money is supposed to be held. They were supposed to hold it for a year. So notify the car owner when they sell the car and give them the opportunity to get whatever money is left over once the tower takes their fees.

So under this law, which, you know, obviously seems like a f flawed law, but under the law, the owners of these cars should have gotten some of the money.

Yes, under the law if that doesn't happen, the extra money is supposed to be turned over to the state of Connecticut.

No money has ever gone to the state of Connecticut and we could not find anyone who had ever gotten money back from the sale of their vehicle.

No money, like not one cent.

Not one cent.

Never. Never.

We've talked to the treasurer. Yeah. Um, they have no records of any money ever going to the state from any tow truck company. so i'm hoping D M V had no idea that they were supposed to be doing this and certainly wasn't making sure they were doing it.

What did you make of the fact that you it felt like you knew more than he did about how this is supposed to work?

I think it spoke to the lack of oversight of this system. Just that this was kind of An unchecked system that people in charge didn't seem to be terribly interested in.

That is a wild conversation to have with a public servant.

With a commissioner, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yep.

Will the Senate please come to order and members and guests if you would please rise and direct After you started publishing stories about this, what was the response?

So kind of immediately after our first story published, we were talking with lawmakers who were calling for change.

We've learned over the years and particularly over the last uh years due to some investigative reporting of some particularly egregious circumstances.

I spend most days at the state capitol. This was the quickest legislative response I've ever seen. To a story.

An immediate roll call vote, we're voting on the bill. This is bill number seven one six two. And act reforming the motor vehicle towing statutes.

And they followed through on it. Um they passed a really broad overhaul of the towing laws.

Legislation passes. So what's the state of towing in Connecticut today? Is it still possible for a towing company to sell your car in fifteen days?

No. The fifteen day thing is gone. From now on in Connecticut, any car that gets towed that a tower wants to sell, they have to wait thirty days to seek permission from the D M V. That's been completely changed. In the meantime, the DMV is going to have to set up a public-facing database on their website where every car that gets towed will be entered. So if I wanna find out what happened to my car, I can go on to the DMV website, look it up and find my car and find which tower has it.

No more cars just like vaporizing.

Right.

How does that make you feel?

Oh, it was very uh You don't you don't get many stories where the legislature literally blows up a hundred year old?

You spend so much of your career kind of shouting into the void about problems people are facing and it can take so long to get any sort of change. So to have it happen quickly was Gratifying. And you know, I think One of the reasons I do journalism is because I want to make things better for people. And through so many points in this reporting, the experience of being non-consensually towed felt unfair.

He lost his job.

They look at Connecticut like it's this big rich state. Everybody's got money. Yeah. You know how much money we got? She's got eleven dollars plus the five she just gave me. There's my life savings. I'm just kidding.

What happened to the couple, Melissa Anderson and her her husband, the chef? Did did they know what had happened to the car?

She knew where it had been taken. She didn't know what happened to it. Melissa's car, we ultimately figured out that it had been junked. Which honest honestly made it worse for Melissa'cause, you know. The car was you know, it's not a Maserati, right? But it got them where they needed to go. It was certainly worth

Even if I don't get my click.

I'm really happy I'm really happy you knock I'm really really happy you knocked on the door like because like if somebody honestly

This episode was produced by me, Julia Lingoria, with production help from Gabrielle Burpe. Editing by Catherine Wells, sound design and mixing by David Herman, music by Julian Sartorius, Filippo Ansaldi, Simone Sims Longo, and Epidemic Sound. The Connecticut House of Representatives audio comes from the Connecticut. Our team also adds

Includes

Sabi Robinson. In the final stages of production on this episode, this reporting on towing, On the Hook, won the Pulitzer Prize in local reporting. We'll see you next time.