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Forgery alleged in probe of towing service
By Elise Franco
Austintown
Police from Austintown and the Ohio State Highway Patrol spent hours Friday looking through documents at Jeswald Auto-Truck Service after serving a search warrant.
Austintown Police Chief Bob Gavalier said the warrant came on the heels of a monthlong investigation into why towed vehicles at Jeswald, 6528 Mahoning Ave., seemed to go to the junkyard without proper authorization.
Gavalier said the proper procedure for junking towed vehicles includes first sending a certified letter to the vehicle owner and then sending an affidavit for the unclaimed vehicle to be signed off by the department.
“It looks like they were forging the names of the former police chief and [a lieutenant]” he said. “They somehow took an old affidavit form and copied it so they could forge the name and make it look like we had signed off.”
Gavalier said the company gets money for each car junked, depending on the weight of the vehicle and price of scrap metal at the time.
Calls for Jeswald to comment weren’t returned Friday afternoon.
Carl Jordan, owner of Carl’s Towing, 6704 Mahoning Ave., said he’s been impounding cars for Austintown police since 1974.
Jordan said the only reasons a towing company would want to bypass the process is to avoid the cost of sending certified letters, which are about $10 each, and to make money.
“The only benefit is if you’re processing a bunch of [certified] letters,” he said. “There’s a substantial amount of money to be made on those cars as well.”
Jordan said processing the paperwork for each car through the police department is time-consuming — car owners and lien holders have 10 days to respond to the certified letter before the process can continue.
He said the car owner ignores the letter about half of the time.
The forms are then sent to the police department, and then to the state, to cancel out the car and its title, Jordan said.
“It’s then sent back to the police to sign and then back to me,” he said. “Then I can junk [the car.]”
Going through the tedious process is the only way to legally get rid of the impounded cars, Jordan said. “You can’t bypass the police department.”
Jordan said that until 2009, Austintown police processed all impounded vehicles.
Gavalier said police don’t yet know how many vehicles were involved or how long the alleged activity had been going on, but said officers conducting the search warrant were looking for business records, bank-account statements and third-party vehicle records to make a determination.
“It could have been anywhere from several months to several years,” he said.
Police haven’t filed charges, but Gavalier said those involved could face charges of shamming legal procedures, a third-degree felony, as well as grand theft and grand-theft auto, both fourth-degree felonies.
In mid-December, an officer conducted a random check on impounded vehicles listed in the department’s LEADS system. More than 100 vehicles listed at Jeswald showed up in the file, according to a police report.
Jordan said if the proper paperwork isn’t filed, an impounded car will remain active in the LEADS system, which likely helped lead police to begin investigating.
“This was an unusually high number of vehicles to have in the LEADS towed-vehicle file,” the report said.
Gavalier said the officer called Jeswald to find out what was going on.
“He thought they were probably having a problem with the paperwork but found out that some of the vehicles had been disposed of,” he said.