How to Lose a Car in 15 Days

Summary

Paper Trail – “How to Lose a Car in 15 Days”

Podcast: Paper Trail (ProPublica)
Host: Jessica Lussenhop
Guests: Ginny Monk and Dave Altomare (Connecticut Mirror)
Date: May 21, 2026

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Episode Overview

This episode explores how a century-old Connecticut law allowed towing companies to seize and sell cars for minor parking violations after just 15 days – often devastating low-income car owners. Investigative reporter Jessica Lussenhop rides along with Connecticut Mirror reporters Ginny Monk and Dave Altomare, documenting their two-year journey to expose abuses in the system, bureaucratic indifference, and an insider scheme that led to legislative reform.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

Everyday Misfortune Becomes Life-Altering

• Common hardship amplified: The familiar aggravation of a towed car becomes an existential crisis for residents in parts of Connecticut, where tow companies could seize and sell cars in just 15 days for infractions as small as a missing parking permit.
  • Jessica Lussenhop: “That feeling of walking out to your car and it's just gone... in Connecticut, this annoying but common thing becomes a life-altering experience.” (00:18)

Case Study: Melissa Anderson

• Personal loss: Melissa, after saving for a year to buy a used car, loses it almost immediately due to an expired parking pass (01:16-02:09)
• Financial devastation: The bail was $1,000+ (nearly the car's value); her chef husband lost his job after losing his only means of transport.
  • Ginny Monk: “I just want my car.” (02:18)
  • Jessica Lussenhop: “Her husband's 22 minute commute turned into two hours on buses and trains.” (02:44)
  • Ginny Monk: “And he lost his job.” (02:52)

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From Local Outrage to Investigative Breakthrough

• Systemic pattern: Multiple residents at Melissa’s complex experienced similar rapid car losses. The Connecticut Mirror’s Monk and Altomare sensed the problem was much bigger.
  • Jessica Lussenhop: “Not only were these towers selling the cars... they did it, in some cases, in just 15 days after they towed it.” (03:23)
• Authorities repeatedly said the practice was legal (03:50).
• Investigative drive: Instead of accepting the stonewalling, Ginny and Dave dig deeper with ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network support.

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The Law: Its Origins and Unintended Consequences

• Historical context:
  • The 1920s law aimed to solve the problem of abandoned cars, empowering a then-new towing industry (08:23-09:11)
• How it works:
  • If a towed vehicle is valued under $1,500, it can legally be sold in 15 days (09:22).
  • Towers required to:
    • Notify owner
    • Allow owner to collect excess sale proceeds after fees
• Abuse: Towers undervalued vehicles, sometimes stripping parts for photos to claim low value, then selling them for a profit (24:32-26:24).

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“This Can't Be Legal — Can It?”

• Predation vs. public interest:
  • What was meant to address abandoned junkers now destroys the livelihoods of apartment dwellers for minor offenses (09:59-10:59).
  • Neighborhoods develop informal “tow-watch” patrols (11:09).
• Scope unknown: Was it one bad actor, or a statewide crisis? Dave taps sources within the Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) for data (12:00).

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Obstacles to Accountability

Data Stonewall

• DMVs keep records via the 'H100' form for each roped car, but obtaining them is costly — $47,000 for three years’ data (13:52).
  • Dave Altomare: “I've never seen a number like that. Quite honestly, it kind of floored me.” (14:10)
• After negotiations, they receive redacted, messy records, many useless (14:49-15:08).

“Shoe Leather” Reporting

• The team canvasses apartment complexes with flyers and QR codes, bringing in 100+ stories (15:28-16:15).
• Cascading hardship: Car loss frequently leads to job and housing loss.
  • Dave Altomare: “You lose your car, you could lose your job.” (16:32)

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Following the Money: The Stefanski Scheme

DMV Insider Abuse

• Dominic Stefanski, a DMV document examiner, allowed D&L Towing to “cut the line” for processing, then personally bought undervalued cars from the company and flipped them for profit (17:25-19:15).
  • Dave Altomare: “He would literally go to their towing lot in Meriden, walk through... pick out cars... resell them for thousands of dollars.” (18:57)
• Documentation & obstruction: Ginny Monk faces challenges matching VINs to owners, sometimes relying on sympathetic city clerks and off-the-record help (20:53-21:14).

Manipulating Evidence

• D&L claimed tricked-out Jeeps were worth under $1,500, submitting misleading photos (24:19-25:24).
  • Jessica Lussenhop (re: snow in the Jeep without doors): “That’s not how snow works.” (25:01)
  • Stefanski flips the Jeep for $13,500 (26:24).
• DMV fails to discipline Stefanski despite investigation; he’s only fired years later after the reporters bring the findings to light (27:21-34:41).

Telling Quotes

• Jessica Lussenhop: “DMV never did anything about the guy... got glowing reviews from supervisors.” (26:54)
• Ginny Monk, regarding stubborn reporting: “On the fourth day, I think I was only on the letter D…” (20:53)
• Dave Altomare: “You don’t get many stories where the legislature literally blows up 100-year-old law.” (39:41)

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Culmination: Systemic Change

Legislative Response

• Lawmakers react immediately to publication, leading to swift reform:
  • Old: 15 days to sale
  • New: 30 days, plus public DMV database and transparency (39:01-39:35)
• Ginny Monk: “This was the quickest legislative response I have ever seen to a story in the media.” (38:33)
• No more “vanishing” cars: Owners and the public can now look up towed cars online for transparency.

The Human Toll

• For car owners like Melissa Anderson: Her car was irreversibly junked; her family never fully recovered (40:47-41:52).
• Ginny Monk (with emotion from a source): "'I'm really happy you knocked on the door. Because, like if somebody honestly—'" (41:55)

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Notable Quotes & Timestamps

• Jessica Lussenhop: “It's kind of a, 'wait, what?' kind of story.” (04:36)
• Dave Altomare, on first hearing about the law: “I don’t believe that. That can’t be true, that they can potentially sell you a car in two weeks.” (05:45)
• Ginny Monk, on gathering data: “We made flyers describing what we were looking for... just knocking on doors.” (15:28-15:51)
• Ginny Monk, on the law’s intent vs. impact: "It seemed logical at the beginning... but fast forward a century, and the results... look very different." (08:23-09:11)
• Ginny Monk, on what the state got from all the car sales: “No money. Like not one cent.” (36:51-37:02)

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Timestamps for Key Segments

| Segment | Topic | Timestamp | |---------|-------|-----------| | Opening & Melissa's story | The human cost | 00:01-03:03 | | The law and its evolution | History & mechanics | 08:23-09:22 | | Systemic ambiguity | Sizing the problem | 11:12-12:00 | | Data roadblocks | FOI request for H100s | 13:14-15:08 | | Community outreach | Flyers & responses | 15:28-16:15 | | Stefanski scandal | DMV insider profiting | 17:25-19:29; 26:24 | | Confronting Stefanski | Accountability | 29:55-32:09 | | Sitting down with DMV | Bureaucratic response | 33:33-34:48 | | Legislative change | Reform passes | 38:33-39:35 | | Aftermath for residents | Long-term impact | 40:47-41:55 |

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Tone and Language

The episode combines clear-eyed investigative rigor with empathy and moral urgency. The host and guests are candid, persistent, and often incredulous at the blatant systemic abuse. Dialogue features colloquial, conversational language ("holy shit, that's—I don't believe that" (04:40)), making the technical and bureaucratic elements accessible and humanizing.

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Memorable Moments

• Ginny’s marathon through city hall vehicle books, saved only by a sympathetic clerk (20:53-21:14).
• The Owed to Joy soundtrack during the doorstep confrontation with Stefanski (30:53).
• Legislative change moving at lightning speed after decades of inertia — a rare “blow up the law” success (39:41).

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Episode Impact

• Pulitzer Prize-winning journalism: This investigation sparked rapid and meaningful change, directly improving protections for vulnerable car owners in Connecticut.
• The story ultimately reveals how unexamined bureaucratic systems can enable exploitation – but also how relentless local reporting can drive reform.

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For further information or to support investigative journalism, visit ProPublica.org/donate.

Transcript

[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 can completely ruin your day. That feeling of walking out to your car and it's just gone. 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. But I want to take you to a place where for years people have been having a fun house mirror version of this experience, where this annoying but pretty common thing becomes a life altering experience. And this place is called Connecticut.

[Dave Altomare]

Go through your case for me. So was your car a Dodge? Was it a Dodge Neon?

[Jessica Lussenhop]

Yes.

[Dave Altomare]

Okay.

[Jessica Lussenhop]

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

[Dave Altomare]

You just bought the car?

[Ginny Monk]

Yeah.

[Jessica Lussenhop]

Reporters at the Connecticut Mirror interviewed her.

[Ginny Monk]

I literally just got.

[Jessica Lussenhop]

Melissa had just bought a used 1998 Dodge Neon.

[Ginny Monk]

We were speeding up. Took us almost a year to speed up.

[Jessica Lussenhop]

She said it had taken her about a year to save up the $1,200 to buy.

[Dave Altomare]

So you go out there and they're hooking your car.

[Jessica Lussenhop]

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.

[Ginny Monk]

So I parked the car real quick. I come upstairs, we're putting a coat on the baby.

[Jessica Lussenhop]

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

[Ginny Monk]

As we're going down the stairs, my neighbors are screaming.

[Jessica Lussenhop]

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

[Ginny Monk]

He said, oh, too late. Already hooked. And she said, you didn't even tie it down. You can drop it right away.

[Jessica 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.

[Ginny Monk]

I just want my car.

[Dave Altomare]

It's an old car.

[Ginny Monk]

If you want with it a piece of crap.

[Dave Altomare]

Yeah, but it's mine, right? Right. No, I mean literally, you had just bought it. Yeah, and we had.

[Jessica Lussenhop]

Just to make matters worse, her husband's a chef, and he said he left his supplies in the car.

[Dave Altomare]

All my knives in the back of the car. And you never got any of it back.

[Jessica Lussenhop]

Chef Coates without their only car. She says her husband's 22 minute commute turned into two hours on buses and trains.

[Ginny Monk]

And he lost his job.

[Jessica Lussenhop]

She says he eventually lost his job.

[Ginny Monk]

It was a lot. Taken the bus to downtown and another bus to the train station.

[Jessica Lussenhop]

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

[Dave Altomare]

What kind of.

[Ginny Monk]

What kind of vehicle was it again?

[Dave Altomare]

It was a Chevy Trailblazer.

[Ginny Monk]

Okay.

[Jessica Lussenhop]

They discovered something kind of wild happened to these cars.

[Dave Altomare]

Ultimately, the car was sold.

[Jessica 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.

[Dave Altomare]

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.

[Jessica 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 Altomare, they did not walk away. They got ProPublica involved and started asking questions.

[Ginny Monk]

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

[Jessica Lussenhop]

It's kind of a like, wait, what kind of story?

[Dave Altomare]

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 going to be a pretty good story if we could figure out how to do it

[Jessica 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.

[Dave Altomare]

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

[Jessica Lussenhop]

I'm Jessica Lussenhop. This is Paper Trail.

[Dave Altomare]

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

[Jessica Lussenhop]

This towing story crossed the desk of this journalist.

[Dave Altomare]

My name's Dave Altomare. I'm an investigative reporter at the Connecticut Mirror. Been a journalist for almost 40 years now.

[Jessica 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. I've heard that you're possibly the best source reporter in Connecticut. Would you agree with that?

[Dave Altomare]

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

[Jessica 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 this crazy law that lets towers sell your car in 15 days?

[Dave Altomare]

That can't happen.

[Ginny Monk]

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

[Jessica Lussenhop]

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

[Ginny Monk]

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

[Jessica 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 sources. Tip about the law.

[Dave Altomare]

Serendipity. Literally serendipity. It was just kind of like a perfect storm to join forces.

[Jessica Lussenhop]

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, Ginny and Dave's first move was to look up the law. When you were looking into the history of the law, like, what was sort of the. Like, how did this happen?

[Ginny 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.

[Jessica 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.

[Ginny Monk]

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

[Jessica 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.

[Dave Altomare]

So clearly, the law was either being abused or wasn't being followed. This is not, you know, my car broke 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.

[Jessica 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.

[Dave Altomare]

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 wit's end, struggling to get by and just couldn't afford to get the cars back.

[Ginny 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.

[Jessica Lussenhop]

Just for the tow truck.

[Ginny Monk]

Just for the tow truck.

[Jessica Lussenhop]

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

[Dave Altomare]

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.

[Jessica 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.

[Dave Altomare]

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 trouble for helping me, so that's why we kept them anonymous.

[Jessica 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.

[Ginny Monk]

When towers want to sell a vehicle that they've towed, they fill out a form.

[Dave Altomare]

There's a very specific document that's called an H100 that the tower has to

[Ginny Monk]

submit, 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.

[Jessica Lussenhop]

So these DMV forms, the H1 hundreds, they were the key to understanding how big this problem really was.

[Ginny Monk]

So we requested all of those forms,

[Dave Altomare]

like three years worth of these H1 hundreds 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.

[Jessica Lussenhop]

That sounds like a fairly simple record to request.

[Dave Altomare]

So I put in a Freedom of Information request to the DMV.

[Jessica 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.

[Dave Altomare]

They got back to me relatively quickly and told me it was gonna cost us $47,000 to get the records.

[Jessica Lussenhop]

Oh, my God. So even getting an estimate in, like, you know, $1,000 is kind of like, oh, boy. But $47,000, right, is astronomical.

[Dave Altomare]

I've never seen a number like that. Quite honestly, it kind of floored me.

[Ginny Monk]

That was more able to pay.

[Jessica 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.

[Dave Altomare]

Well, not story over. That made me want to pursue it even more, quite frankly.

[Jessica Lussenhop]

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

[Dave Altomare]

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

[Ginny Monk]

We started getting Friday afternoon docum, a couple hundred documents at a Time.

[Jessica Lussenhop]

What do they look like? What are they? What? Information.

[Dave Altomare]

A mess. A mess, Literally a mess.

[Ginny Monk]

Some of which were handwritten.

[Dave Altomare]

Some of them were completely redacted.

[Ginny Monk]

Just black squares for hundreds of pages.

[Dave Altomare]

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

[Ginny Monk]

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

[Jessica 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?

[Dave Altomare]

We made flyers describing what we were looking for.

[Ginny Monk]

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

[Dave Altomare]

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.

[Ginny Monk]

Just knocking on doors, literally.

[Dave Altomare]

Shoe leather reporting.

[Jessica Lussenhop]

Did you have any memorable moments from those trips?

[Ginny Monk]

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

[Dave Altomare]

And we ended up getting, I think it was over 100 responses back from that.

[Jessica 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.

[Dave Altomare]

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

[Jessica Lussenhop]

But the next question was, sure, 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

[Dave Altomare]

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. One of them 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

[Ginny Monk]

relationship with dnl, saying, this guy still works at the DMV and he's still selling an awful lot of cars on Facebook Marketplace.

[Dave Altomare]

That was the first time I heard the name Stefanski. And that turned out to become quite a story.

[Jessica 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. What did you learn about him?

[Dave Altomare]

His name is Dominic Stefanski and he was what they call a document examiner for the DMV and had been for over 20 years.

[Ginny 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?

[Jessica Lussenhop]

No kidding.

[Ginny Monk]

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

[Jessica Lussenhop]

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

[Dave Altomare]

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.

[Jessica Lussenhop]

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 Stefanski made that headache go away.

[Dave Altomare]

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

[Ginny Monk]

had towed and then resell them for thousands of dollars in profit.

[Dave Altomare]

He just turned around and flipped them. It's like he'd flip a house and made a lot of money. So this was literally all laid out on a record that we could use.

[Jessica Lussenhop]

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

[Dave Altomare]

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

[Jessica Lussenhop]

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

[Ginny Monk]

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

[Jessica Lussenhop]

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 owners last names one by one, starting with the A's. Ginny started going down the line looking for her vin. She did this all day long for three days. On the fourth day, I think I

[Ginny Monk]

was only on the letter D. Someone

[Jessica Lussenhop]

who worked at City hall finally came over and said, hey, what's the VIN

[Ginny Monk]

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.

[Jessica Lussenhop]

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

[Ginny 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 Dominic Stefanski.

[Jessica Lussenhop]

That's crazy.

[Ginny Monk]

I must have looked really pathetic.

[Jessica Lussenhop]

The doggedness of Ginny Monk, ladies and gentlemen.

[Ginny Monk]

I believe it began with an R.

[Jessica 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?

[Ginny Monk]

Absolutely. But it could have been weeks.

[Jessica Lussenhop]

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.

[Dave Altomare]

So let me go back. Let me. Let me. If you got a couple minutes. I'm just trying to. So I have a Meriden police report.

[Jessica Lussenhop]

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

[Dave Altomare]

It was a 2010 Jeep Wrangler. I was able to track down the owner, Hector Gonzalez, by a police report, because we got a police report that had his name in it. He got stopped by the state police or something. And they said the car was stolen. Yep. The driver had been stopped by the police because they thought it was a stolen car.

[Jessica Lussenhop]

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

[Dave Altomare]

It was literally my Jeep. It would belong to his uncle, and his uncle had given it to him. I left up the Jeep. I put big rams, everything. 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. I got a light bar on top. You put that. Did you put that there? Yeah, I put everything. I lift up the char or big rims. Rockstar rims. I don't know if you've heard about the Rockstar. Okay? Hey, Almost five thousand dollar rims. I had train horns. I had music on it. So you put a lot of money into it. So the car was clearly worth a significant amount of money. So here's, here's what happened to that Jeep. Okay. At least from what I've been able to piece together. DNL towed it. Yeah. As it turned out, DNL put in the H100 form that they needed to put in, and they claimed that the Jeep was worth Less than $1,500.

[Jessica 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.

[Dave Altomare]

And there's no way that Jeep was worth less than $1,500. And to buttress there 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 long time ago. Yeah, I know. I'm going to text you a photo that they gave me.

[Jessica 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 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.

[Dave Altomare]

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 dm and in exchange, they let him walk around there a lot and pick out towed vehicles that he wanted to buy. So he bought that Jeep for $1,000 from D&L under. Under an LLC. And then he turned around and he sold the Jeep for $13,500.

[Jessica 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.

[Dave Altomare]

So he made quite a profit. Wow, that's crazy that.

[Jessica Lussenhop]

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 Jeep?

[Dave Altomare]

You never know what you're gonna get a phone call about, right?

[Jessica Lussenhop]

Man,

[Dave Altomare]

I bet you hadn't thought about that car in a long time. The DMV guys from Connecticut? Oh, yeah, he still works there. Nothing happened to him. Believe it or not, they did a whole investigation and then DMV never did anything about the guy. During the time of this investigation, Stefanski got glowing reviews from his supervisors and never was suspended. Nothing happened. Wow, you make 78 grand a year working at DMV?

[Jessica Lussenhop]

72 grand a year it turned out.

[Dave Altomare]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Jessica Lussenhop]

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

[Dave Altomare]

We had to go talk to Stefanski. Good guy. What's his name? All right, man. Hey, thanks. Yep.

[Jessica Lussenhop]

That's after the break. Hi, I'm Megan. I work in membership at ProPublica. I want to tell you a bit about the newsroom that makes this podcast. The first thing you should know is that we're a nonprofit, which means we have no owner, no corporate interests or government funding, and we have no paywall. So everything we publish, including this podcast, is free. Our business model protects our independence. We're not beholden to benefactors. Funders have no say in what we cover. Our reporters have the freedom to investigate the most powerful people and institutions in this country and follow the facts wherever they lead. Right now, a lot of the news industry is being reshaped by political influence, profit motive and financial pressure. But ProPublica is different. It's investigative journalism for the people, not for profit. Find out [e-mail] info

[Dave Altomare]

hey there. My name is Jody Avergan. Have you noticed, the present day, it feels pretty rocky. Well, I think history can help. What's more, this little country of ours, the United states, it's turning 250 soon. So how did we get here? On this day, historians Nicole Hemmer and Kelly Carter Jackson and I sit down to look at stories from the past, silly, surprising, deeply relevant, that feel like they have something to teach us about today, this day. Three times a week. You can find it wherever you're listening right now. Hi. Yeah, my name is Dave Altomare. I'm a recorder from the Connecticut Mill. This is my colleague Jimmy.

[Ginny Monk]

Hi, nice to meet you.

[Dave Altomare]

So Ginny and I one night went and knocked on his door and he came and didn't let us in. Sit at the table for a second, or shall we?

[Ginny Monk]

Okay.

[Dave Altomare]

I was surprised he talked to us, but he didn't seem to have a care in the world about it. Right, right. I didn't do nothing wrong. He didn't deny, didn't think he had done anything wrong. He said it was investigated. You know, it's just a little side business I had. How about the Jeep? Do you remember five years ago, you know, missing doors, so we have to still put them on, even if they're, you know, whatever the DNL did, it's between dnl, you know, I'm saying I bought it as it was, you know what I'm saying? So I didn't do anything wrong. It's not that big a deal.

[Jessica Lussenhop]

Owed to Joy is just blasting in the background for some reason.

[Dave Altomare]

2020. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know. No idea what was going on in the background, to be honest with you. Well, like I said, I can't tell you what you're going to write about me, you know what I'm saying? Because journalism is never good stuff, writing about people.

[Jessica Lussenhop]

So 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. Sure.

[Ginny Monk]

Well, so we're here because we want to be sure to give you an opportunity to kind of sell your side. And I know you got to read this, but I just want to be

[Jessica Lussenhop]

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, to respond to what we've discovered.

[Ginny Monk]

Like, you can call, email, text, whatever is fine. Yeah, that's fine.

[Jessica Lussenhop]

Like I said, 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.

[Dave Altomare]

No problem.

[Jessica Lussenhop]

Nice to meet you.

[Dave Altomare]

Yeah. All right, guys. Thank you.

[Ginny Monk]

All right, thanks.

[Dave Altomare]

Bye. Bye.

[Jessica 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 and L. But none of that happened back then. The towing company D and L, said in a statement that a manager involved was fired and that he, quote, acted on his own and thought he was doing the right thing by selling inoperable cars. They said they're working with the Connecticut DMV to, quote, ensure 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 are responsible for the 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.

[Dave Altomare]

Go on way, Brad. Well, thanks for coming in.

[Ginny Monk]

Thanks for having us.

[Dave Altomare]

No problem. So 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. Stefanski is still doing the same job and as a matter of fact, is advertising on Facebook Marketplace. So I'm sorry, I don't mean to sum. What is he doing? Even though we had given them questions ahead of time, he didn't seem to really know what we were talking about. So in exchange for allowing DNL to cut the line every time, I think he eventually realized that this was going to be a big deal. And as far as I still working, got a nice raise last year. How does that happen? I can't comment on it right now.

[Ginny Monk]

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

[Dave Altomare]

Wow. And he was fired like eight months later.

[Jessica Lussenhop]

When the 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.

[Dave Altomare]

So we have been collecting for over two years now the forms that they are supposed to submit, which are called H1 hundreds.

[Jessica Lussenhop]

After years of manually reviewing redacted and handwritten H1 hundreds, 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.

[Dave Altomare]

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 is 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 to 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.

[Jessica Lussenhop]

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

[Dave Altomare]

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

[Ginny 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.

[Jessica Lussenhop]

No money. Like not one cent.

[Ginny Monk]

Not one cent.

[Jessica Lussenhop]

Never?

[Dave Altomare]

Never. We've talked to the treasurer. Yeah. They have no records of any money ever going to the state from any tow truck company. So help me out here, guys, because I'm a little confused. Yep. DMV had no idea that they were supposed to be doing this and certainly wasn't making sure they were doing it.

[Jessica Lussenhop]

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

[Ginny 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.

[Jessica Lussenhop]

In that is a wild conversation to have with a public servant, with a commissioner.

[Dave Altomare]

Right? Yeah. Yeah. Yep.

[Jessica Lussenhop]

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

[Ginny Monk]

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 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 have ever seen to a story in the media.

[Dave Altomare]

Roll call vote. We're voting on the bill. This is bill number 7162, an act reforming the motor vehicle towing statutes.

[Ginny Monk]

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

[Jessica Lussenhop]

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 15 days?

[Dave Altomare]

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 want to 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.

[Jessica Lussenhop]

No more cars just like vaporizing.

[Dave Altomare]

Right.

[Jessica Lussenhop]

How does that make you feel?

[Dave Altomare]

Oh, it was very. You don't get many stories where the legislature literally blows up 100-year-old law.

[Ginny 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 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, like right after the new year.

[Dave Altomare]

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. There's my life savings.

[Jessica Lussenhop]

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

[Ginny Monk]

happened to the car?

[Dave Altomare]

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 because, 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. And they just jumped it. So I think that was kind of like rubbing salt in the wound for her. Yeah. We have not recovered from that since it happened two years ago. When you think towing, you know, what's the big deal? Right. But when, you know, a lot of people are. Lives are being impacted by it, I think that was an important reason to pursue this as long as we did.

[Ginny Monk]

Even if I don't get like any.

[Dave Altomare]

I'm really happy. I'm really happy you knocked. I'm really, really happy you knocked on the door. Like, because, like if somebody honestly.

[Jessica Lussenhop]

This episode was produced by me, Julia Longoria, with production help from Gabrielle Burbe. Editing by Kathryn Wells Sound design and mixing by David Herrman Music by Julian Sartorius. Filippo Ansaldi, Simone Sims Longo and Epidemic sound the Connecticut House of Representatives. Audio comes from the Connecticut network. Our team also includes Savvy 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.