This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with The Connecticut Mirror. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.
Reporting Highlights
- Cars for Cutting in Line: For years, a towing company got to cut the line at the DMV in exchange for selling towed cars at deep discounts, according to an internal DMV report.
- Range of Abuses: Investigators said the company drastically undervalued cars and avoided returning money to car owners or the state, showing the DMV’s lack of oversight.
- Few Consequences: Though the report said a DMV employee was reselling cars for profit, the agency took no action against the employee or the towing company. The employee still works there.
These highlights were written by the reporters and editors who worked on this story.
The silver Jeep Wrangler that showed up at the Connecticut Department of Motor Vehicles inspection station was missing all four of its wheels. Gone, too, were its doors.
“Vehicle is absolutely stripped,” the Connecticut towing company wrote to the state DMV. That was why it was only worth $1,000, the company said on an official form that took advantage of a state law allowing it to sell vehicles it had towed.
Photos submitted by the tow truck company showed the Jeep covered in fresh snow, but strangely, despite it having no doors, there was no snow inside the vehicle, suggesting the doors had recently been removed. The company also failed to mention that when it towed the stolen Jeep after a police stop three weeks earlier, it had stylish rims on its still-attached wheels and an LED light bar above the windshield, and the police wrote that the vehicle had “no visible damage.”
The DMV approved the request to sell the vehicle, and a few months later, the Jeep was posted for sale — not by the tow truck company but on the Facebook page of a longtime DMV employee. The Jeep now had rims, wheels and a light bar like it had when police stopped it.
The DMV employee sold the Jeep to a used car dealer for $13,500. After passing through several more hands, another dealership ultimately sold it to a customer for $28,781.44.
The Connecticut Mirror and ProPublica in January exposed how Connecticut’s laws favor towing companies at the expense of drivers. The state allows tow companies to seek the DMV’s permission to sell some vehicles after 15 days — one of the shortest such windows in the country. The system has resulted in a wide range of abuses with little oversight from the DMV.
The case of the Jeep with the missing wheels, laid out in internal DMV records, is an extreme example of how the DMV has failed to monitor a process that has had severe consequences for some car owners with low incomes. CT Mirror and ProPublica have spoken to dozens of people who had their cars towed and never saw them again. Many said they were never notified that their car would be sold.
Without strong oversight from the agency, someone who works for the DMV found a way to profit off that system without facing any consequences.
The towing company’s sales to the DMV employee went on for several years. It was finally discovered when a document the employee had submitted to obtain the title for one of the vehicles two years earlier came to the attention of the DMV’s investigations unit.
In total, DMV investigators found that from 2015 to at least 2019, the towing company, D&L Auto Body & Towing, in Berlin, Connecticut, sold 15 vehicles to an investment firm owned by a man named Dominik Stefanski, a document examiner then in the DMV’s main office in Wethersfield, outside Hartford.
According to the DMV case report, whenever D&L employees went to the DMV office, they would make eye contact with Stefanski, who would then allow them to cut the habitually long, slow-moving lines. In exchange for this favor, the report said, Stefanski would spend his days off walking the company’s lot selecting vehicles that had belonged to other people only weeks or months prior. D&L would then undervalue the cars on DMV forms, investigators said, allowing Stefanski to buy them cheaply and resell them for a profit.
Credit:
Shahrzad Rasekh/CT Mirror
DMV Commissioner Tony Guerrera declined to answer specific questions about the investigation. But Guerrera, who was deputy commissioner during the investigation and became commissioner in 2023, said after reporters raised questions about the incident, “This issue has been escalated to the Office of Labor Relations for further review and to ensure a thorough assessment.”
In an interview in the doorway of his home, Stefanski denied the investigators’ findings. He said he never let D&L cut the line, and when he was informed that D&L employees told investigators he purchased at least 15 cars from them, he scoffed, “Jesus Christ, probably not.”
The investigators “tried, but nothing came up because they knew they had nothing,” Stefanski said.
D&L issued a statement saying owner Kevin Harrison wasn’t aware of the scheme until DMV investigators asked about it. “The company’s manager at the time acted on his own and thought he was doing the right thing by selling in-operable cars,” the statement said. According to investigators, many of the cars were in good condition. The manager was fired, D&L said.
“D & L Auto Body & Towing, LLC works with the Department of Motor Vehicle to ensure that this type of situation doesn’t happen again,” the statement said.
Ultimately, the DMV didn’t take any action against D&L or Stefanski, and Stefanski still works at the DMV.
The Jeep With the Missing Wheels
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Sharon Lerner
I cover health and the environment and the agencies that govern them, including the Environmental Protection Agency.
