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

"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”

of the car. This is Kelly Prime. We worked together at 99 P.I. 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.

They 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 7/11, so like irresistible, it sounds like irresistible, in Oasis, a lure, 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 7/11 parking lot, and the car wasn't there. Disappeared, the car was gone, and I was sort of in denial for a second. I was like, well, surely, like, 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 7/11 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, didn't get stolen, got towed.

And this guy is just acting like, like, he's never heard something more boring in his life,

and he was like, yeah, the 20 cars get towed a day. There's a sign out there called the number. Back out in the parking lot, they did find signs warning that unauthorized cars would be towed. One was in Surrillic, 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 7/11,

and they found dozens of people telling pretty much the same story. Says, I was their customer for many years, gave a great business for all those years, till my car was towed less than six minutes absence. If you read the other one-star review, you'll understand what's going on. This door is running a scam, we bought drinks in the store, and someone called the towing,

never buy anything from this story, call 311, terrible and unauthorized cars hostage,

and get $150 from you. I'm Delaney Hall, and this is service request, from 99% invisible and campsite 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 who's 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. Today, the black box of mystery of towing and empowerment, 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? When 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 toers 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. It's a big business. It's a multi-million dollar business, and they make a lot of money

“doing this. Yeah. That's why they do it. This is Tom Barry. 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

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. So, 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. Once they take care of the injured, we need to remove those cars from the wrong. 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. Tom 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 towers, the towers on the list. They were calling their friend. Some cops were calling tow companies they had a relationship with. And 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 swell. It just keeps

“your mounting and eventually 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. I'm curious if kind of zooming out, you can walk me through how a predatory towing operation works. 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. But so what happens like you're your friend there at the 7/11? So it's illegal to park and private property and go to the doctor's office. Let's say you're go, you know, 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 are patronizing your business, tying up your lot, and they keep coming in there and your customers, because your

lot's full of people going to shop at Macy's, then you're your man. So you the business owner can contact, you know, Joe's towing and say, hey, I got a red Chevy out 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 it to 7/11, walked to a neighboring”

restaurant and then came back to find her card gone. She technically broke the rules and the toe 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 at live in that area. I approached them and say, hey, I'm the owner of Joe's towing and I know that

your apartment overlooks the Burger King a 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 going to 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.

spies. That's a good way to put a neighborhood network. Excellent. People who are just keeping an eye

“on these various parking lots. And when they see someone parked 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 that spotters illegal, but it's not. There's nothing illegal about it. It's 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.

Well, I guess to start, could you just introduce yourself like your name and where you are and

what you're doing? My 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. There'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 plan your phone, do whatever to 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 law. It could look

like a car crash and we have to be out there cleaning the scene on the highway or something. And it could be as simple as your mom broke down and she's needs to tow to the mechanic shop and to get her car fixed. Have you towed your mom? Yeah, not my mother, luckily she buys new vehicles and gets warranties and stuff. But family members, yes. So they're like, oh, I know exactly

“who could have called Shane. Yeah. Unfortunately, that is what seems to be what they do.”

Shane's first real towing job was with a company and Detroit that had a reputation for

predatory towing. Shane doesn't actually have a problem naming this company. He's spoken on TV and Detroit about them. But we don't want to name them in this episode. We 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 where this this and that and uh, just don't believe

it because, you know, we're just doing the public 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. A lot of the jobs he was doing were private property impounds or PPI's. That's when a tow company has a contract with a property owner, like an apartment complex or a 7/11,

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 say intended 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. One of the lot 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 they'd be screaming yelling, "I don't have another car,

I suppose to get to work, I suppose to take my kids to school." And when I was 17, I'm not going to lie. I had no remorse for them. I didn't feel bad for them at all.

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 your mom or your dad that's in the hospital.”

I can understand now. That's 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 toes. Because that single lot was sort of a gold mine. It's a hundred percent returns, other than the fuel you used on profits. So, I mean, they're making a killing just telling 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 are 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 telling a certain car.”

Shane's interactions with the public weren't any better. It was all so confrontational.

They would always back and plead and that's understandable, especially if you don't have the money.

It was standard. I was constantly, for lack of a word. I was constantly the a-hole and every predicament I've ever, like every interaction I had, I was the aggressor. And I just say 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, it'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 unintended vehicle that you have full access to. You just hook up this car and you call the police nearby and you go,

"Hey, I'm tone 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 car in lean so it can't be reported stolen. That's all it is to PPEs and there's just no verification in the system. So everybody exploits it. So you're doing this at this apartment complex lot. You've gotten a little older. You're like,

this doesn't feel good because you understand 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 I wanted to continue doing it. It was kind of the fact that I had bills to

pay in my own family to feed is why I stayed there for so much longer after that time period. But yeah, I hated it every day after that. 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. He 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, or he was doing different kinds of tows. I just didn't want to do PPI. That was my biggest thing. Was cyber 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. What I'm at now, all I do is services. Like, 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 what I'm at now. It's

never the case that I'm going there for any other reason other than to service them.

These 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 it that 7/11 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.

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 call”

and sort of knock at the right information. At 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 7/11

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 but 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 this negotiation going on. It's like, oh yeah, yeah, totally. There was totally

a negotiation and it included like, if 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, but 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. Mike, take them a day. Mike, take them two days to go get that information and bring up back to satisfy the tow company. Meanwhile, now the 50 bucks a day, now the 50 bucks a day

for 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 second and 11 o'clock at

night and here it is the third and it's one o'clock in the morning. Well, that's two days stories. That's $110. But 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, I'd say. Exactly. 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 a 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 you're going to get your car back? Like these five guys have it. What else are you going to do? It almost seems like the toers 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. Well, what some of these tow companies do?

They know good cars and bad cars. You want to mean by that? Like hey, that's a, that's an older car. But you've got good threads 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. This is another way they're making money. They hold a person's car until the fees are so high the person can't afford to get it out. Retrieve it. Yeah. And then

“they sell that car at auction, scrap it for parts, make money on the car itself. That's why it's a”

multi million dollar business, towiness. And people don't realize that.

For that reason, Tom says bad towers might target cars that look a little bit junky or old. Like Kelly's 2011 Mazda cars that look like they might be underinsured. Or their owners might not have hundreds of dollars on hand to get them back. Because they're easy targets. And generally those those owners of those cars don't squeak. They don't make complaints. I don't

high hanging fruit. towers can get away with this in part because there's very little oversight.

The towing industry is regulated by a patchwork of laws across the country. They vary state by state. According to research done by a consumer watchdog group, only about half of states set a cap on towing or impoundment fees. More than 30 states don't require rates to be displayed or disclosed. 13 states don't even require the towing company to notify you that your car has been towed. And in 34 states, kickbacks are legal. All of which creates a massive gray area.

Some of what they do just sounds like aggressive business practices. You know, like towing

companies working hard, working proactively to tow a legally parked cars and to make money.

And I guess I'm wondering when do you think it crosses the line from, you know, going hard for business to something more like fraud? No, I don't know where the line is, but there's certainly a wavy line there that nobody knows about. It's interesting what you're saying because it strikes me as part of the problem, which is that you hear about these tactics that bad towers use, and they just seem unfair. And yet it's not totally clear they're breaking some law here.

“So the only way to stop it is get a law, make a law or an ordinance in the city you can make it”

and prosecute them and don't take your foot off the gas. And unfortunately, many cities don't fight it until it's so out of control that now they can't get it all back at the box. You know, the box has been open and that grabs flying all around. How are you going to get that box close again? You know, it's difficult. And that's what happens when you let little things like the little toe. Hey, you charged your forties, don't you only had it one. When you do that,

if you don't stop it, it's just going to be six days seven days because that's what happens. It's just human nature. It's just going to keep growing. So the only way to stop it in my opinion is sort of nip it in the bud, you know, stop it when it's small so we can control it. Tom's advice is to pass regulations and then crack down. But some cities have tried a different approach. They've just cut private towers out entirely. And they've set up their own public

towing operations. But getting that going can be a heavy lift. It requires a city to acquire land for the empowerment lot and trucks to do the towing and people to staff the operation. How common is it for a city to have their own trucks their own lot? I don't think it's common. I think it's a rarity. And why isn't it more common? It's a lot. You got who's going to oversee it. You're going to have policemen oversee it. There's so many cost considerations I think

for that that they just don't want to do it. They want somebody else to do it. Which I would

“too I think that's what happens with the cities is they don't want to deal with it.”

What's one piece of advice you have for someone whose car has just been towed? Of course it's a situation. If it's it was legitimate you had an accident and the police come out in a normal city and they're going to tow it to their yard. That's the way it should go. If you got insurance on your car, let it run its course. Make your claim, call your company, make an insurance claim. But be aware of especially imparking private property toes. It's extremely

lucrative. When you pull into a lot, if you see a sign you know this area controlled by Tom's towing you know violators will be towed pay attention to those signs because a lot of those places they got somebody who watch it and they're going to tow you. Be careful with your

park. What I hear you saying when I say you know what what's your piece of advice it's basically

don't get towed. I do not get yourself caught up in this situation. If you come out and they got the car on the hook, pay the drop fee, pay it. Just pay it right down. You're saving yourself time, aggravation, trouble, problems, just pay it. Try to negotiate it down. So you know what and

“this is what I would tell people. Let's say it's 400. Say oh my god would you take 250?”

Barter. Barter. Barter. But get your car back. Yeah get your car back. Don't leave it. Don't wait. Don't wait.

it's gone and you have to negotiate a ransom with some guy in a dark parking lot and that is an actual

“business. And we have a pretty good answer. The reality is that towing regulation varies state by state,”

but in many places towing companies have contracts with private businesses to monitor and tow

illegally parked cars in their lots. Some towers use spotters. Those are people who keep an eye on

parking lots and call the tow company as soon as they see someone park their illegally. Some tow

“companies don't post their fees and then bargain with people once they show up to try and reclaim”

their car. And in many states there are a few regulations governing how tow companies operate. With that Kelly, consider your service request resolved. Today on the show you heard Kelly Prime, an editor with 99% invisible. You also heard Tom Barry, a retired police officer who's now an investigator for the insurance industry and Shane Nation, a tow truck driver in Detroit. What infrastructure mystery keeps you up at night is there's

something in your life that you use every day but you don't actually understand how it works. Submit your service request by recording a voice memo with your question and email in it to

“[email protected]. And remember, if your car gets towed, try to negotiate the price down or”

better yet don't get towed in the first place. I'm Delaney Hall. Infrastructure is everywhere and we're

here to help you decode it. Service request is a production of 99% invisible and campsite media. The show is produced and fact checked by Julia Case Levine and edited by Choshi Schmulibitz. Mixed by Ewan Lie Trimun. Theme song and music by Swan Rail. Additional editing by Emmett Fitzgerald and Vivian Leigh. Show art by Erin Nester. Roman Mars is our boss at 99PI. Kathy 2 is our executive producer. Matt share is the executive producer at campsite. We are a part of the Siria 6M podcast

family. You can find us on all the usual social media sites as well as our Discord server. There's a link to that as well as every past episode of 99PI at 99PI.org.