Service Request #5: Dude, Where's My Car?

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0:41With Thumbtack, you don't have to be a home pro. You just have to hire one. You can hire top rated pros, see price estimates and read reviews all on the app. Download today. Well, I thought my car had been stolen, which I was like, does that even happen? I guess it does, but, you know, my car is really old. It's like 2011 Mazda 6, so I really didn't know why anyone would want to take that car. This is Kelly Prime. We work together at 99PI, and she lives in Brooklyn. And not too long ago, she had an experience that shook her. She and her friends had been out for the day in Coney Island, and they were stopping to get some takeout on the way home.

1:23They were looking for a place to park, not too far from the restaurant. And, you know, this is Brooklyn, so there's not a lot of parking available. And all the street parking looked like it was filled up. But on the right-hand side, we come upon this brightly lit, beautiful, empty parking lot in front of a 7-Eleven. Perfect. Like irresistible, it sounds like. Irresistible. An oasis. Allure, some might say. So we parked in the parking lot, pulled up, only car there. What a miracle. And just ran out into the supermarket and spent probably like, you know, 15 minutes grabbing our stuff. They came back out, went to the 7-Eleven parking lot, and the car wasn't there.

2:15Disappeared. The car was gone. And I was sort of in denial for a second. I was like, well, surely. like I just I'm not that great at remembering where I parked anyway but it's not a big lot and it's super brightly lit and there's no cars there. So she and her friends went into the 7-Eleven to ask if anyone had seen anything. We go to the register and we're like I think our car just got stolen. Did you see anyone steal a car? And the guy was like no it didn't get stolen got towed. And this guy is just acting like he's never heard something more boring in his life. And he was like, yeah, 20 cars get towed a day.

2:56There's a sign out there. Call the number. Back out in the parking lot, they did find signs warning that unauthorized cars would be towed. One was in Cyrillic, one was covered in graffiti, and another was tucked away in a far corner of the lot. Kelly had the idea to pull up the Google reviews for the 7-Eleven. And they found dozens of people telling pretty much the same story.

3:50I'm Delaney Hall, and this is Service Request from 99 % Invisible and Campside Media. We take your burning questions about infrastructure, and we investigate. Kelly eventually got her car back that night, and we will get into that. But the whole experience left her with a question that she could not shake. Or really, a whole bunch of questions. How is it that you can just park your car 15 minutes later, it's gone? I don't know who's in charge of regulating this. I don't know who empowers these tow truck guys. Under whose authority are they working? It just feels like this black box of mystery that's affecting clearly a lot of people, if the Google reviews are to be believed.

4:36Today, the black box of mystery of towing and impoundment. Who decides when your car gets taken? Who decides where it goes? And when things go wrong, which it turns out they do a lot, why is it so hard to fix?

4:55When we started trying to find the answer to Kelly's question, I learned the term that describes this kind of practice. It's called predatory towing. And it describes towers who actively hunt for cars to pick up and then demand inflated fees when owners try to get them back. Predatory towing happens everywhere. But in some places, it happens a lot. Detroit, Michigan has a well-documented and long-running predatory towing problem, and so that makes it a good case study for us. I mean, it's a big business. It's a multi-million dollar business, and they make a lot of money doing this. Yeah. So that's why they do it.

5:33This is Tom Berry. He spent 35 years as a police officer in Detroit, and he retired as a lieutenant about a decade ago. Since then, he's worked as a fraud investigator for insurance companies, and he has seen the towing industry from basically every angle. He's been a cop who called tow trucks, and he's been an investigator who's uncovered how corrupt towing companies actually operate. I'm curious, can you help us understand, in an ideal world, how is towing supposed to be a public good? What kind of service do towers provide when they're working well? If it's working good, which we all like to see, you live on Elm Avenue and you come out one day and you can't get out of your driveway because somebody's parked there.

6:25So, of course, call the police because you've got to go to work. And the police call the tow truck and the tow truck comes out and moves that car out of your way so you can go about your business. That's a good deal. Also, we have accidents. You know, once they take care of the injured, we need to remove those cars from the road. The tow companies take them to a tow yard. So they can be good. In many cities, when there's a crash that needs to be cleared or a vehicle that's been abandoned on the street, police will call a private towing company to haul it away. That's how it works in Detroit, too.

7:02Tom says that when he was a police officer, the department gave him a list of the tow companies that he was allowed to call. These were companies that had a contract with the police to cover a certain area of the city. And most officers would go down the approved list, calling companies until one was available to send a tow truck. But years later, as a lieutenant, Tom discovered that not all police officers were doing it that way. They were using a certain tower. They weren't calling the scheduled toers, the toers on the list. They were calling their friend. Some cops were calling tow companies they had a relationship with.

7:45And many of those companies were inflating their fees way beyond what a typical tow would cost. Then they'd pay kickbacks to the police officers who sent the business their way. And the corruption kind of swelled. It just keeps surmounting, and eventually, you know, it comes crashing down. That's what happened here in Detroit. Eventually, there was a federal investigation into the corruption that Tom is talking about, and some cops went to jail. But that wasn't the end of towing problems in the city. In fact, Tom says some of the most problematic towing doesn't even involve the police. It involves situations like Kelly's, where people get towed for parking in a private lot.

8:30I'm curious if, kind of zooming out, you can walk me through how a predatory towing operation works. Like, what does a typical day look like? What are the most common schemes that you see? Well, I think that most towers are basically honest. First, I want to give them a little accolade. So what happens, like your friend there at the 7-Eleven. So it's illegal to park in private property and go to the doctor's office, let's say, or go do your shopping. So if you own a business in your city, you know, McDonald's or Burger King or whatever, and you have private citizens that aren't patronizing your business, tying up your lot, and they keep coming in there and you're losing customers because your lot's full of people going to shop at Macy's, then you're mad.

9:30So you, the business owner, can contact Joe's Towing and say, hey, I got a red Chevy out in my lot. Can you come and get it? It's been here for a half hour. This practice makes sense. A business needs to keep its lot clear for actual customers. And that's what happened to Kelly. She parked at a 7-Eleven, walked to a neighboring restaurant, and then came back to find her car gone. She technically broke the rules, and the tow company had the right to take her car. But there are sketchier tactics that some towers use to maximize the number of cars they can grab. For instance, spotters. Spotters are paid citizens that live in that area.

10:14I approach them and say, hey, I'm the owner of Joe's Towing. And I know that your apartment overlooks, you know, the Burger King lot over here. So we meet. It's okay. Here's what I want you to do. I want you to watch this lot. And if you see somebody go into that lot and not use the business, you call me. And so I'll be right there. And if I get the tow job, you get 50 or 100 bucks. So tow truck makes cash. People make 50 bucks, no taxes. Everybody's happy except the person that parked there. Except the person who parked there. So this is interesting. Some tow companies, they basically recruit a neighborhood network of eyes on the ground, of spies.

11:00That's a good way to put it, a neighborhood network. Excellent. People who are just keeping an eye on these various parking lots. And when they see someone park there and not use the business, they just give the tow truck driver a call and they get a kickback. Exactly. In some cities, it's illegal for tow companies to use spotters, but not in New York City or in Detroit. One tow company there became so notorious for using spotters, they felt the need to put out this little explainer video on their Facebook page. A lot of people think a spotter is illegal, but it's not. There's nothing illegal about it.

11:35They're just maintaining parking spaces for the property owner. After the break, we'll talk with a driver who used to work for that notorious Detroit tow company.

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14:01My name is Shane Nation. I'm in Detroit, Michigan, and I currently tow, and I've been in the industry for about five years. When I spoke with Shane, he was in his tow truck between calls on his lunch break. As far as I can tell, there aren't a lot of tow truck drivers who are willing to talk with a journalist about the realities of the job, but Shane is one of them. He started in the industry when he was just 16 years old. Once I started working in the industry, it's like a bug. It's very hard to go do something where you're not as free, like go sit in an office or inside all day long. And honestly, it's not boring.

14:46There's people that have been towing for 25 years and they'll tell you that they learn new stuff every day because it's just genuinely that type of job. So for people who are not familiar with towing, what is a typical day like in the life of a tow truck driver? You normally sit in the truck, you play on your phone, do whatever to like let time pass. And then you just wait for police calls to come in. Those could look like impounds, like somebody got arrested and we would tow their car to impound lot. It could look like a car crash and we have to be out there cleaning the scene on the highway or something.

15:19and it could be as simple as your mom broke down and she just needs to tow to the mechanic shop to get her car fixed. Have you towed your mom? Yeah, not my mother. Luckily, she buys newer vehicles and gets warranties and stuff, but family members, yes. So they're like, oh, I know exactly who to call, Shane. Yeah, unfortunately, that is what seems to be what they do. Shane's first real towing job was with a company in Detroit that had a reputation for predatory towing. Shane doesn't actually have a problem naming this company. He's spoken on TV in Detroit about them. But we don't want to name them in this episode.

16:02We don't want Shane to get in trouble. So since day one there, they would say, hey, look, we're on the news all the time. It is what it is. People don't like their car getting towed. So that's pretty much how I was told there, like, hey, you're going to see that we're this, this and that. And just don't believe it because, you know, we're just doing the public a service and some people don't appreciate that. At first, Shane thought maybe that's just how the world works. People just complain to the media a lot. Plus, he liked his job. He liked the trucks and getting greasy and how every day was interesting and new.

16:39A lot of the jobs he was doing were private property impounds, or PPIs. That's when a tow company has a contract with a property owner, like an apartment complex or a 7-Eleven, to tow cars that shouldn't be there. And this company that Shane worked for was aggressive about it. They would work with spotters, like the ones Tom told us about. They had people sitting in the parking lot, watching and waiting for someone to park illegally. We had two different spotters. They would sit in tenant-out cars and just wait for somebody to pull up. We would sit around the corner. We wouldn't be no further than five minutes away.

17:18One of the lots Shane worked was across the street from the Med Center, which is a cluster of major hospitals in downtown Detroit. People would park in the apartment complex lot and then walk across the street to visit someone in the hospital. And Shane's job was to tow their cars the moment they walked away. We'd pull up right away, grab their car and drive off with it. Now, these people, sometimes they would come out and, you know, they'd be screaming, yelling, I don't have another car. How am I supposed to get to work? How am I supposed to take my kids to school? And when I was 17, I'm not going to lie, I had no remorse for them.

17:53I didn't feel bad for them at all. But once I started getting older and having bills to pay and understanding that it's genuinely hard out here in the world to survive, especially on a low income. And then somebody's come in and taking your car when you're just trying to visit, you know, your mom or your dad that's in the hospital. I can understand now that's like just a really crappy thing to do to somebody. Shane says he would sometimes spend whole shifts sitting in his truck near that one parking lot waiting for spotters to call in tows. Because that single lot was sort of a goldmine. It's 100 % returns other than the fuel you used on profits.

18:41So, I mean, they're making a killing just towing 15 to 20 cars a day off that one lot. And they have all of downtown Detroit. So, I mean, it's a big operation. Given the company's reputation, sometimes the Detroit police would show up to see what was going on. or they'd respond to complaints from people who were getting their cars towed. But the company was ready for that. Shane says they trained their employees on what to say when the police arrived, which laws to mention in their arguments for towing a certain car. Shane's interactions with the public weren't any better. It was all so confrontational.

19:19They would always beg and plead, and that's understandable, especially if you don't have the money. It was standard. I was constantly, for lack of a better word, I was constantly the a-hole in every predicament I've ever, like every interaction I had, I was the aggressor. And I just, it wasn't a good feeling. If you think about it, it is kind of wild that these non-law enforcement private companies are allowed to just take people's unattended vehicles. Shane says that bad practices are common in the world of private property impounds because there are basically no checks in the system. Definitely.

20:00It's the least regulated. You're not pulling up on a police scene with police there and you're not pulling up on a broken down vehicle with the car's owner there. You're pulling up on an unattended vehicle that you have full access to. and I mean you just hook up this car and you call the police nearby and you go hey I'm towing this car because it's parked incorrectly on this lot there's no verification of this whatsoever you just you call the police and you tell them you're doing it and they put the system they put the car in lien so it can't be reported stolen that's all it is to ppis and there's just no verification in the system so everybody exploits it so you're doing this at this apartment complex lot But you've gotten a little older.

20:46You're like, this doesn't feel good because you understand kind of the implications of having your car towed. It's expensive. It's like a huge headache. So what happened from there? So it was never that, like, I wanted to continue doing it. It was kind of the fact that I had bills to pay and my own family to feed is why I stayed there for so much longer after that time period. Right. But yeah, like, I hated it every day after that. Like, it made me lose my love for towing, and I genuinely just wanted out in any way, shape, or form by the end of it. Shane was having a full-blown crisis of conscience.

21:27He dreaded going to work and spending all day towing people who he believed didn't really deserve it. Eventually, he left the predatory tow company. He thought he might go back to working in fast food. But instead, he started with a different company, where he was doing different kinds of tows. I just didn't want to do PPIs. That was my biggest thing, was private property impounds feel like they're just not necessary. Like, at least in the way they did it. Like, it was just unnecessary, and I just, I did them so much 24-7 that I just didn't want to do them ever again. and that was my main thing.

22:06Where I'm at now, all I do is services. I'm not towing anybody's car because I want to. It's simply they call or the police call and I'm going there to either clean up the wreck or I'm going there to get those people home. Especially where I'm at now, it's never the case that I'm going there for any other reason other than to service them.

22:33These conversations with Tom and Shane helped me understand so much better what might have happened with Kelly's car. She was involved in a private property impound situation. She parked at that 7-Eleven illegally. There may have been a spotter that saw her do it. And the company probably had a relationship with a tower who was contacted as soon as she walked away. So after standing in the parking lot trying to figure out what to do, she and her friends decided to call the tow company. So we called the number, and we actually had to call, like, multiple times to get the information we needed, because, like, we'd call, and then they would hang up, or we'd call and sort of knock at the right information.

23:21At one point, Kelly asked the tow company to confirm that they had her car by reading back the license plate number. And they're like, we can't give you the license plate. And at one point they were like, yeah, we have your car, but come back tomorrow. It was all extremely confusing. But eventually Kelly took a cab home to let her dog out for a walk and her friends decided to go get the car themselves. The impound lot was about a mile from the 7-Eleven and they had to walk there. They eventually found the place and through the holes in the front gate, they could see Kelly's car. They got there and there was a building that was brightly lit up inside indicating that perhaps the office was not actually closed.

24:04But they were brought into this building and the guy was like, it's going to be$350 to get your car back because the office is closed right now. Wow. That's a lot of money. Yeah, especially I'm pretty sure the sign said 125 like the sign had a pay scale on there and he was immediately like that's going to be 350. So there's sort of this there's this negotiation going on it's like oh yeah yeah totally there's totally a negotiation and it included like at first they said oh because I'm not physically there that's an extra fee and then they said oh the business is closed it's after hours so that's another fee.

24:51But there wasn't actually a fee structure. It was just like a negotiation, like a bartering. They were just making it up. Yeah. They kidnapped my car and then like ransomed it for an uncertain amount of money based on how much cash my friends had on hand. Like it's crazy they can do that. But according to Tom, the retired cop, tow companies do this all the time. They pretend they're closed so that people have to come back the next day. And that allows them to inflate the storage fees they charge. They demand to see registration and insurance, which is often in the car that's been impounded. And so people have to run around gathering new documents.

25:33Might take them a day, might take them two days to go get that information and bring it back to satisfy the tow company. Meanwhile, another 50 bucks a day, another 50 bucks a day for keeping your car. Often, these businesses don't disclose their fee structures. And even when they do, the fees can be manipulated. So, well, it came in on the 2nd at 11 o 'clock at night, and here it is the 3rd, and it's 1 o 'clock in the morning. Well, that's two-day storage. That's$110. Well, wait a minute. My car's only been here for two hours. Yeah, but that's the way it is. Because it's technically touched two days, even if it was just a few hours in the middle of the night.

26:16I see. Kelly's friends were lucky. if you can call it that, because they showed up that same night. They eventually paid$200 to get the car back. It's really, really sketchy. Like, none of this feels legal. You can just take someone's car, ransom it, figure out an amount of money between you, and then they said no receipt. So they just had to pay their$200. How else are you going to get your car back? Like, these five guys have it. What else are you going to do? It almost seems like the towers don't want you to get your car back. Or at the very least, they might not mind if you don't retrieve your car.

26:54Well, what some of these tow companies do, they know good cars and bad cars. You know what I mean by that? Like, hey, that's an older car, but it's got good treads on it, good struts. You know, it looks pretty okay. I could probably get some money for that. So they kind of pull that to the side of the auction that they have every 30 days. Cars are valuable. So this is another way they're making money. Exactly. They hold a person's car until the fees are so high the person can't afford to retrieve it. Yeah. And then they sell that car at auction, scrap it for parts, make money on the car itself.