Description
Local reporters at The Connecticut Mirror heard story after story of drivers having their cars towed and then sold out from underneath them, sometimes in just 15 days. They teamed up with ProPublica to investigate why, how often this was happening and who was profiting from it.
This episode traces the history of the 100-year-old law that made all of it legal and follows the reporters as they try to track down drivers’ cars and confront the bureaucrats allowing a flawed system to take advantage of vulnerable people.
Transcript
Editor’s Note: “Paper Trail” is produced as an audio series. If you are able, we encourage you to listen to the series. Transcripts are for reference only and may contain typos. Please confirm accuracy before quoting.
Jessica Lussenhop: ProPublica. Investigative journalism in the public interest.
Getting your car towed is one of those life experiences that is so common and yet will completely ruin your day. That feeling of walking out to your car and it’s just gone. Vaporized. Whatever you wanted to do that day — it’s over. That’s sort of on the low end of the consequences.
But I want to take you to a place where for years, people have been having a funhouse mirror version of this experience. Where this annoying but pretty common thing becomes a life-altering experience.
And this place is called Connecticut.
IN-PERSON INTERVIEW, Dave Altimari: Go, go through your case for me? So what, um, was, was your car a Dodge? Was it a Dodge Neon?
IN-PERSON INTERVIEW, Melissa Anderson: Yes.
Lussenhop: Take the case of Melissa Anderson. She lives in Hamden, Connecticut.
IN-PERSON INTERVIEW, Altimari: So had you just bought the car?
IN-PERSON INTERVIEW, Anderson: Yeah.
Lussenhop: Reporters at The Connecticut Mirror interviewed her.
IN-PERSON INTERVIEW, Anderson: I literally had just gotten it.
Lussenhop: Melissa had just bought a used 1998 Dodge Neon.
IN-PERSON INTERVIEW, Anderson: We were saving up. Took us almost a year to save up.
Lussenhop: She says 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.
IN-PERSON INTERVIEW, Anderson: So I parked the car real quick. I come upstairs. We’re putting the coat on the baby.
Lussenhop: She said she was coming right back down when she heard yelling outside.
IN-PERSON INTERVIEW, Anderson: As we’re going down the stairs, my neighbors are screaming.
Lussenhop: A tow truck had arrived. The neighbors were shouting: She’ll be right back.
IN-PERSON INTERVIEW, Anderson: He said, oh, too late, already hooked. And she said, you didn’t even tie it down. You can drop it. Right away …
Lussenhop: She called the towing company to try to get it back, but the bill to bail out her car was over $1,000, more than half what she paid for the car in the first place.
IN-PERSON INTERVIEW, Anderson: I said, sir, I just want my car. It’s an old car
IN-PERSON INTERVIEW, Altimari: Right.
IN-PERSON INTERVIEW, Anderson: What do you want with it?
IN-PERSON INTERVIEW, Altimari: Yeah.
IN-PERSON INTERVIEW, Anderson: It’s a piece of crap? Like …
IN-PERSON INTERVIEW, Altimari: Yeah.
IN-PERSON INTERVIEW, Anderson: I said, but it’s mine.
IN-PERSON INTERVIEW, Altimari: Right. Right.
IN-PERSON INTERVIEW, Anderson: It’s my piece of crap.
IN-PERSON INTERVIEW, Altimari: Right. No, I mean literally you had just bought it.
Lussenhop: To make matters worse, her husband’s a chef and he said he left his supplies in the car.
IN-PERSON INTERVIEW, Anderson’s husband: I have my, all my knives in the back of the car.
IN-PERSON INTERVIEW, Anderson: All his work stuff.
IN-PERSON INTERVIEW, Altimari: Wow.
IN-PERSON INTERVIEW, Anderson’s husband: Yeah, all my work stuff. And …
IN-PERSON INTERVIEW, Altimari: And you never got any of it back.
IN-PERSON INTERVIEW, Anderson’s husband: Chef coats?
Lussenhop: Without their only car, she says her husband’s 22-minute commute turned into two hours on buses and trains.
IN-PERSON INTERVIEW, Anderson: And he lost his job.
Lussenhop: She says he eventually lost his job.
IN-PERSON INTERVIEW, Anderson: Because it was a lot taking the bus to downtown and another bus to the train station.
Lussenhop: Two reporters at The Connecticut Mirror learned lots of people in Melissa’s apartment complex kept getting their cars towed.
IN-PERSON INTERVIEW, Ginny Monk: What kind of, what kind of vehicle was it again?
IN-PERSON INTERVIEW, Paul Boudreau: It was a Chevy Trailblazer.
IN-PERSON INTERVIEW, Monk: OK.
Lussenhop: They discovered something kind of wild happened to these cars.
IN-PERSON INTERVIEW, Boudreau: Ultimately the car was sold.
Lussenhop: 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.
IN-PERSON INTERVIEW, Boudreau: I did 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.
IN-PERSON INTERVIEW, Monk: Mhm.
Lussenhop: 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, Ginny Monk and Dave Altimari, they did not walk away. They got ProPublica involved and started asking questions.
Monk: I think one of my biggest questions was why is this allowed?
Lussenhop: It’s kind of a, like, “Wait, what?” kind of story.
Altimari: Right. It is kind of a 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.
Lussenhop: 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.
The reporters went on a two-year journey to expose a problem much, much bigger than they expected.
INTERVIEW, Altimari: It really is an abuse of power. They have the power to control, right? I mean, they could have left your car, right?
INTERVIEW, Anderson: They could have.
INTERVIEW, Altimari: They have all the power.
Lussenhop: I’m Jessica Lussenhop. This is “Paper Trail.”
Altimari: 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 your car in two weeks.
Lussenhop: This towing story crossed the desk of this journalist.
Altimari: My name’s Dave Altimari. I’m an investigative reporter at The Connecticut Mirror. Been a journalist for almost 40 years now. [Editor’s Note: This interview was recorded before Altimari left The Connecticut Mirror in April 2026.]
Lussenhop: 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.
Lussenhop: I’ve heard that you’re possibly the best sourced reporter in Connecticut. Um, is — would you, uh — would you agree with that?
Altimari: Um, oh, I don’t know. I’ve been doing it for a long time, so I do have a lot of sources. Uh, you tend to accumulate them over the years if you stay at it long enough.
Lussenhop: 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 a crazy law that lets towers sell your car in 15 days?
Altimari: That, that, that, that can’t — that can’t happen.
Monk: I at first was like: “That can’t be right. That must be an anomaly.”
Lussenhop: Right around the same time he got this tip, another reporter in his newsroom …
Monk: So I’m Ginny Monk. I cover housing and children’s issues at The Connecticut Mirror.
Lussenhop: 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 source’s tip about the law.
Altimari: Serendipity, literally serendipity. It was just kind of like a perfect storm to join forces.
Lussenhop: When Ginny, Dave and their editors had a hunch they were on to 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, Ginny and Dave’s first move was to look up the law.
Lussenhop: When you were looking into the history of the law, like what, what was sort of the, like, how did this happen?
Monk: 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. So clearly it was something that municipalities had to deal with, and to do that they kind of introduced these regulations around a new industry. And that new industry was the towing industry.
Lussenhop: 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.
Monk: But fast-forward a century. And the results of that law look very different.
Lussenhop: 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.
But Ginny and Dave weren’t hearing about old, useless broken down cars being taken off the streets.
Altimari: So, so clearly the law was either being abused or wasn’t being followed. Uh, this is not, you know, my car broke down on Interstate 95 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.
Lussenhop: 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.
Altimari: There were other people who had multiple cars towed and never got them back. A 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.
Monk: 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.
Lussenhop: Just for the tow truck.
Monk: Just for the tow truck.
Lussenhop: Did you think at that point that perhaps you were just dealing with maybe one bad actor?
Altimari: 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.
Lussenhop: 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?
To find out how many cars they were working with, Dave went to his deep bench of sources and called someone he knew on the inside of the agency that managed all of this — the Department of Motor Vehicles.
Altimari: Actually, that’s where my source within the DMV came in very handy. It’s a person I had known for 15, 20 years. They could have gotten in troublefor helping me. So, that’s why we kept them anonymous.
Lussenhop: 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.
Monk: When towers want to sell a vehicle that they’ve towed, they fill out a form.
Altimari: A very specific document that’s called an H-100 that the tower has to submit.
Monk: 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.
Lussenhop: So these DMV forms, the H-100s, they were the key to understanding how big this problem really was.
Monk: So we requested all of those forms.
Altimari: Like, three years’ worth of these H-100s to try to get some idea of how many cars a year were they trying to sell, what towers were doing it the most and all that kind of thing.
Lussenhop: That sounds like a fairly simple record to request.
Altimari: So I put in a Freedom of Information request to the DMV.
Lussenhop: 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.
Altimari: They got back to me relatively quickly and told me it was gonna cost us $47,000 to get the records.
Lussenhop: Oh my God.
Altimari: So …
Lussenhop: Even getting an estimate in, like, you know, $1,000 is kind of like, oh boy, but $47,000.
Monk: Right.
Lussenhop: Is astronomical!
Altimari: I’ve never seen a number like that, quite honestly. It kind of floored me. Um.
Monk: That was more than we were able to pay.
Lussenhop: I mean, I can see a world where you get that response. This will be $47,000, and it’s just, like, story over.
Altimari: Well, uh, not story over. Um, that made me wanna pursue it even more, quite frankly.
Lussenhop: The Connecticut Mirror got a lawyer involved who negotiated the price down significantly.
Altimari: Maybe eight months after I submitted it, they started giving us documents.
Monk: We started getting Friday afternoon document dumps. A couple hundred documents at a time.
Lussenhop: What do they look like? What are they?
Altimari: A mess. Literally a mess.
Monk: Some of which were handwritten.
Altimari: Some of them were completely redacted.
Monk: Just black squares for hundreds of pages.
Altimari: Completely useless. There was no rhyme or reason to what they redacted. So it was very frustrating.
Monk: This really big piece of the story is out of our grasp.
Lussenhop: 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?
Monk: We made flyers.
Altimari: Describing what we were looking for.
Monk: I believe it said, Have you been towed, in really big letters? And we made a Spanish version as well.
Altimari: Had a QR code that 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.
Monk: Just knocking on doors.
Altimari: Literally shoe-leather reporting.
Lussenhop: Did you have any memorable moments from those trips?
Monk: 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.
Altimari: Um, and we ended up — I think it was over a hundred responses back from that.
Lussenhop: 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.
Altimari: Traumatic, you know, I mean. You lose your car, you could lose your job.
Lussenhop: But the next question was, sure, this all appeared to be legal under this 100-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?
Altimari: 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 them called D&L Towing in Meriden. My source said, you should also really look at this guy named Stefanski, who is a DMV employee and his relationship with D&L.
Monk: Saying, this guy still works at the DMV and he’s still selling an awful lot of cars on Facebook Marketplace.
Altimari: That was the first time I heard the name Stefanski, and that turned out to become quite a story.
Lussenhop: A story involving allegations of larceny and fraud. It was all laid out in Stefanski’s personnel file, which Dave’s source told them to request. The DMV had been investigating Stefanski.
Lussenhop: What did you learn about him?
Altimari: His name is Dominik Stefanski, and he was what they call a document examiner for the DMV and had been for over 20 years.
Monk: 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?
Lussenhop: No kidding.
Monk: But he would move this particular towing company to the front of the line.
Lussenhop: I love that part of the scheme is just cutting the line.
Altimari: Yes. And you think that’s a little benefit, but I don’t know. I mean, people go to the DMV right? They know how long you have to wait in line sometimes.
Lussenhop: Turns out standing in an hourslong 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 Stefanski made that headache go away
Altimari: And in exchange for, you know, letting them cut the line, he would literally go to their towing lot in Meriden, walk through the lot and, like, pick out cars that he wanted that they had towed.
Monk: And then resell them for thousands of dollars in profit.
Altimari: He just turned around and flipped them just like you’d flip a house — and made a lot of money. So this was literally all laid out on a record that we could use.
Lussenhop: In this record they could see a list of cars that were towed and then sold to Dominik Stefanski. Now the owners of those cars were presumably victims of this car-flipping scheme. And Dave and Ginny wondered if the owners were aware of that, if they knew what had happened to them.
Altimari: Did they realize, you know, the, the journey that their car ended up taking.
Lussenhop: But the names of the owners were not in the document. All they had were vehicle identification numbers, or VINs.
Monk: A VIN is not terribly helpful without the name of the person.
Lussenhop: This was a true needle-in-a-haystack situation. There is 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 owners’ last names. One by one, starting with the As, Ginny started going down the line looking for her VIN.
She did this all day long for three days. On the fourth day …
Monk: I think I was only on the letter D.
Lussenhop: Someone who worked at city hall finally came over and said, hey:
Monk: What’s the VIN you’re looking for again? 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.
Lussenhop: Somehow this person looked up the VIN and found the owner’s name.
Monk: 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 Dominik Stefanski.
Lussenhop: That’s crazy.
Monk: I must have looked really pathetic.
Lussenhop: The doggedness of Ginny Monk, ladies and gentlemen.
Monk: I believe it was — began with an R.
Lussenhop: 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?
Monk: Absolutely, but it could have been weeks.
Lussenhop: Good for you, man.
Lussenhop: 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.
REPORTING CALL, Altimari: Um, so let me go back, let me, let me, if you got a couple minutes, I’m just trying to, so I have a merit. I, I have a Meriden police report.
Lussenhop: Meanwhile, Dave went looking for the owner of another one of the cars sold by Stefanski. This guy had no idea what happened to his car.
Altimari: It was a 2010 Jeep Wrangler. I was able to track down the owner, Hector Gonzalez, by a police report cause they were, we, we got a police report that had his name in it.
REPORTING CALL, Altimari: You got stopped by the state police or something, and they said the car was stolen?
REPORTING CALL, Hector Gonzalez: Yep.
Altimari: The driver had been stopped by the police cause they thought it was a stolen car.
Lussenhop: Turns out it was stolen previously — not stolen by Hector or by his uncle.
REPORTING CALL, Gonzalez: It was literally my Jeep. My uncle bought it
Altimari: It belonged to his uncle, and his uncle had given it to him.
REPORTING CALL, Gonzalez: I put hella fucking Jeep. I put big rims. Everything.
Altimari: He told me he had spent a lot of money putting custom wheels on there.
REPORTING CALL, Altimari: Yep. Some kind of a bar. What’s the bar on top? What does that mean? The light bar?
REPORTING CALL, Gonzalez: It got a light bar on top.
REPORTING CALL, Altimari: You put that? Did you put that there?
REPORTING CALL, Gonzalez: Yeah, 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 rims.
REPORTING CALL, Altimari: OK.
REPORTING CALL, Gonzalez: They almost $5,000 rims. I had train horns; I had music on it.
REPORTING CALL, Altimari: So you put a lot of money into it.
REPORTING CALL, Gonzalez: I put more money on it.
Altimari: So the car was clearly worth a significant amount of money.
REPORTING CALL, Altimari: So here’s, here’s what happened to that Jeep. OK. At least from what I’ve been able to piece together. D&L towed it.
REPORTING CALL, Gonzalez: Yeah.
Altimari: As it turned out, D&L put in the H-100 form that they needed to put in, and they claimed that the Jeep was worth less than $1,500.
Lussenhop: Less than $1,500. That’s the cutoff in the law. If the tow company wants to sell a car in 15 days, they have to claim that the value of the car is less than $1,500.
REPORTING CALL, Altimari: And there’s no way that Jeep was worth less than $1,500.
REPORTING CALL, Gonzalez: Oh, that truck —
Altimari: 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.
REPORTING CALL, Altimari: Do you have a photo of the Jeep?
REPORTING CALL, Gonzalez: Nah, that’s, that’s a long time ago.
REPORTING CALL, Altimari: Yeah, I know.
REPORTING CALL, Gonzalez: How the Jeep looks. I …
REPORTING CALL, Altimari: I, I, I, I’m gonna text you a photo that they gave me.
Lussenhop: 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 the 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.
REPORTING CALL, Altimari: No doors, no light bar and snow all over the place.
REPORTING CALL, Gonzalez: No. The car had doors. It had all the doors.
Altimari: 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.
REPORTING CALL, Altimari: 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 DMV and in exchange, they let him walk around their lot and pick out towed vehicles that he wanted to buy. So he bought that Jeep for $1,000 from D&L.
REPORTING CALL, Gonzalez: Wow.
REPORTING CALL, Altimari: Under, under an LLC.
Altimari: Then he turned around and he sold the Jeep for $13,500.
Lussenhop: And when Stefanski sold the supposedly stripped Jeep? In the photos he posted on his Facebook Marketplace account, the Jeep miraculously had all its doors and tires back.
Altimari: So he made, uh, quite a profit.
REPORTING CALL, Gonzalez: Wow. That’s crazy.
Lussenhop: That is crazy to have a reporter show up and just be like, Hey, do you have any idea what happened to your, to your Jeep?
REPORTING CALL, Altimari: You never know what you’re gonna get a phone call about. Right, man?
REPORTING CALL, Gonzalez: Tell me about it.
REPORTING CALL, Altimari: I bet you hadn’t thought about that car in a long time.
REPORTING CALL, Gonzalez: And the DMV guy’s from Connecticut?
REPORTING CALL, Altimari: Oh yeah. He still works there. Nothing happened to him, believe it or not. Yeah, they did a whole investigation. And then DMV never did anything about the guy.
Altimari: During the time of this investigation, Stefanski got glowing reviews from his supervisors and never was suspended. Nothing happened.
REPORTING CALL, Altimari: He makes 78 grand a year working at DMV.
Lussenhop: 72 grand a year, it turned out.
REPORTING CALL, Gonzalez: Shit.
Lussenhop: So what did you and Ginny, once you, once you had this story in your hands, what did you do next?
Altimari: We had to, we had to go talk to Stefanski.
REPORTING CALL, Gonzalez: What’s his name?
REPORTING CALL, Altimari: All right, man. Hey, thanks.
REPORTING CALL, Gonzalez: Later.
Lussenhop: That’s after the break.
IN-PERSON INTERVIEW, Altimari: Hi, Stefanski?
IN-PERSON INTERVIEW, Dominik Stefanski: Yeah.
IN-PERSON INTERVIEW, Altimari: My name’s Dave Altimari.
IN-PERSON INTERVIEW, Stefanski: Mm-hmm.
IN-PERSON INTERVIEW, Altimari: I’m a reporter from The Connecticut Mirror.
IN-PERSON INTERVIEW, Stefanski: Mm-hmm.
IN-PERSON INTERVIEW, Altimari: This is my colleague, Ginny.
IN-PERSON INTERVIEW, Monk: Hi, nice to meet you.
Altimari: So Ginny and I, uh, one night went and knocked on his door, and he came and didn’t let us in.
IN-PERSON INTERVIEW, Altimari: Can we sit at the table for a second or …?
IN-PERSON INTERVIEW, Stefanski: Not really, but …
IN-PERSON INTERVIEW, Altimari: OK.
Altimari: I was surprised he talked to us, but he didn’t seem to have a care in the world about it.
IN-PERSON INTERVIEW, Stefanski: I didn’t do nothing wrong.
Altimari: He didn’t think he had done anything wrong. He said I was investigated and, you know, I, um, it’s this little side-business I had.
IN-PERSON INTERVIEW, Altimari: How about the Jeep? Do you remember …
IN-PERSON INTERVIEW, Stefanski: What, it was five years ago? You know, missing doors. So we have to still put ’em on even if they’re, you know, whatever the D&L did it is between D&L, you know, I’m saying I bought it as, as it was, you know what I’m saying? So …
Altimari: I didn’t do anything wrong. It’s not that big a deal.
IN-PERSON INTERVIEW, Stefanski: It was five years ago.
(“ODE TO JOY” BLASTS IN THE BACKGROUND)
IN-PERSON INTERVIEW, Altimari: You can keep it. Oh, you can? Oh, OK. Yeah, it’s a copy. I mean, it’s, it’s a copy of the document.
Lussenhop: “Ode to Joy” is just blasting in the background for some reason.
Altimari: Yeah. Yeah. I don’t know what, no idea what was going on in the background, to be honest with you.
IN-PERSON INTERVIEW, Stefanski: Like I said, I, I can’t tell you what you’re gonna write about me, you know what I’m saying? Because journalists never good stuff writing about people.
Lussenhop: Stefanski 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 Ginny and Dave were on his doorstep.
Monk: Sure. Well, so we’re here cause we, we wanna be sure to give you an opportunity to kinda tell your side, and I know you gotta read this, but I just want to be sure.
Lussenhop: 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, to respond to what we’ve discovered.
IN-PERSON INTERVIEW, Monk: You know, like, you can call.
IN-PERSON INTERVIEW, Stefanski: Yeah, yeah.
IN-PERSON INTERVIEW, Monk: Email, text, whatever is fine. I …
IN-PERSON INTERVIEW, Altimari: Your attorney call, that’s fine.
IN-PERSON INTERVIEW, Monk: Yeah, that’s fine, too.
Lussenhop: 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.
IN-PERSON INTERVIEW, Altimari: Thank you very much. No …
IN-PERSON INTERVIEW, Monk: … problem. Nice to meet you. Yeah.
IN-PERSON INTERVIEW, Stefanski: All right, guys. Thank you.
IN-PERSON INTERVIEW, Monk: All right. Thanks.
Lussenhop: The DMV’s internal investigation of Stefanski 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 Stefanski internally or fine the towing company, D&L. But none of that happened back then.
The towing company, D&L, said in a statement that a manager involved was fired and that he’d “acted on his own” and thought he was “doing the right thing by selling inoperable cars.” They said they are working with the Connecticut DMV to “ensure that this type of situation doesn’t happen again.”
But Stefanski’s scheme was just a symptom of a much bigger problem, a bad law creating bad incentives that people like Stefanski could take advantage of at the expense of vulnerable people just trying to get by.
And the people who were responsible for this system and for making sure the law was applied as intended were Stefanski’s bosses, the leadership of the Department of Motor Vehicles. That’s where Dave and Ginny went next.
IN-PERSON INTERVIEW, Tony Guerrera: Thanks for coming in.
IN-PERSON INTERVIEW, Monk: Thanks for having us.
Altimari: So we, we had to reach out to the commissioner of the DMV because the DMV is the agency that was in charge of this whole thing. So we had to do a sit-down interview with the DMV commissioner, Tony Guerrera.
IN-PERSON INTERVIEW, Altimari: Stefanski is still doing the same job. And as a matter of fact, is advertising on Facebook Marketplace.
IN-PERSON INTERVIEW, Guerrera: So, I’m sorry. I don’t mean to sound. What is he doing?
Altimari: Even though we had given them questions ahead of time, he didn’t seem to really know what we were talking about.
IN-PERSON INTERVIEW, Altimari: So in exchange for allowing D&L to cut the line every time they come in …
Altimari: I think he eventually realized that this was gonna be a big deal.
IN-PERSON INTERVIEW, Altimari: And as far as I know, he’s still working there, um, getting a nice raise last year. Uh, how does that happen?
IN-PERSON INTERVIEW, Guerrera: I can’t comment on it right now, but …
Monk: He was very quickly put on administrative leave, just a couple days after the story.
Lussenhop: Wow.
Altimari: And he was fired like eight months later.
Lussenhop: When reporters called him back after the firing, Stefanski 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.
REPORTING CALL, Altimari: So we have been collecting for over two years now, um, the forms that they’re supposed to submit, which are called H-100s, and …
Lussenhop: 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 that 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.
Altimari: 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.
IN-PERSON INTERVIEW, Altimari: 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.
Altimari: They were supposed to hold it for a year, 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.
Lussenhop: So under, under this law, which, you know, obviously it seems like a flawed law, but under the law, the owners of these cars should have gotten some of the money.
Altimari: Yes, under the law, if that doesn’t happen, the extra money is supposed to be turned over to the state of Connecticut.
Monk: 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.
Lussenhop: No money, like not one cent
Monk: Not one cent.
Lussenhop: Never.
Altimari: Never.
IN-PERSON INTERVIEW, Altimari: We’ve talked to the treasurer.
IN-PERSON INTERVIEW, Guerrera: Yeah.
IN-PERSON INTERVIEW, Altimari: Um, they have no records of any money ever going to the state from any tow truck company.
IN-PERSON INTERVIEW, Guerrera: Help me out here, guys, cause I’m a little confused.
Altimari: DMV had no idea that they were supposed to be doing this and certainly wasn’t making sure they were doing it.
Lussenhop: 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.
Monk: 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.
Lussenhop: That is a wild conversation to have with a public servant.
Altimari: With a commissioner, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yup.
THE CONNECTICUT NETWORK, “Connecticut House of Representatives May 22nd Session”: Will the Senate please come to order and members and guests if you would please rise …
Lussenhop: After you started publishing stories about this, what was the response?
Monk: So kind of immediately after our story first published, we were talking with lawmakers who were calling for change.
THE CONNECTICUT NETWORK, “Connecticut House of Representatives May 22nd Session”: We’ve learned over the years and particularly over the last, uh, years due to some investigative reporting of some particularly egregious circumstances.
Monk: I spend most days at the state Capitol. This was the quickest legislative response I’ve ever seen to a story.
THE CONNECTICUT NETWORK, “Connecticut House of Representatives May 22nd Session”: The media roll call vote. … We’re voting on the bill. This is 7162. An act reforming the towing motor vehicle statute.
Monk: And they followed through on it. They passed a really broad overhaul of the towing laws.
THE CONNECTICUT NETWORK, “Connecticut House of Representatives May 22nd Session”: Legislation passes!
Lussenhop: So what’s the state of towing in Connecticut today? Is it still possible for a towing company to sell your car in 15 days?
Altimari: No. The 15-day thing is gone from now on in Connecticut, any car that gets towed that a tower wants to sell, they have to wait 30 days to seek permission from the DMV. 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 onto the DMV website, look it up and find my car and find which tower has it.
Lussenhop: No more cars just, like, vaporizing.
Altimari: Right.
Lussenhop: How does that make you feel?
Altimari: Oh, it was very, uh, you don’t, you don’t get many stories where the legislature literally blows up a 100-year-old law.
Monk: 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 I want to make things better for people and through so many points in this reporting, the experience of being nonconsensually towed felt unfair.
IN-PERSON INTERVIEW, Anderson: He lost his job, like right after the new year.
IN-PERSON INTERVIEW, Anderson’s husband: They look at Connecticut like it’s this big rich state. Yeah. Everybody’s got money. Yeah. You know how much money we got? She’s got $11 plus the five she just gave me. Here’s my life savings.
Lussenhop: What, what happened to the couple, Melissa Anderson and her husband, the chef? Did they know what had happened to the car?
Altimari: 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 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, you know, something, certainly a lot more to them, and they just junked it. So I think that was kind of like rubbing salt in the wound for her.
IN-PERSON INTERVIEW, Anderson’s husband: We have not recovered from that since it happened two years ago.
Altimari: You think towing, you know, what’s the, what’s the big deal? Right? But, um, when, you know, a lot of people are, lives are being impacted by it. Um, I think that was an important reason to pursue this as long as we did.
IN-PERSON INTERVIEW, Anderson: Even if I don’t get my, like, anything, I’m, I’m …
IN-PERSON INTERVIEW, Anderson’s husband: … really happy. I’m really happy you knocked. I’m really, really happy you knocked on the door.
Julia Longoria: This episode was produced by me, Julia Longoria, with production help from Gabrielle Berbey. Editing by Katherine 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 from the Connecticut Network. Our team also includes Sabby 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 ya next time.
