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Car dealer faces two felonies charges of forgery and tampering with records
By ROBERT CONNELLY
CANFIELD
A city car dealer is charged with two felonies alleging forgery and tampering with records.
Joseph J. Reinthaler Jr., 49, of Montgomery Court, was arrested Friday and arraigned Tuesday in Mahoning County Area Court here. He is charged with forgery, a fifth-degree felony, and tampering with records, a third-degree felony.
The investigation into Reinthaler, and Reinthaler’s Auto Village Inc., began when Farmers National Bank contacted someone in July who had been paying off a car debt.
A police report said Reinthaler requested a duplicate title to that car in 2012, then sold the vehicle in 2013 with that duplicate title, but before the debt to Farmers was paid off by the dealership.
The previous owner made check payments to Farmers, the lien holder, then after the car was traded in to Reinthaler’s, the bank started to receive monthly cash payments.
The loan still is in the name of the previous owner, who had traded in the vehicle in 2012, and has a balance of more than $8,000.
But documents from the auto dealership said the car was free of liens and the previous car owner’s lien had been paid off in 2012.
That person had “traded in that car at Reinthaler’s Auto Village and the dealership never paid off [that] car, but continued to pay off the loans [in cash] so the bank had no reason to think that anything was wrong until recently when they started to get some late payments,” said Canfield Sgt. Cris Ruiz. “So basically, Reinthaler was keeping [that person’s] line of credit open in [their] name since 2012.”
The previous car owner told police he did not recognize some of the documents that carried his signature. Ruiz emphasized that “people [should] take the few minutes to read what documents they are signing in an effort to reduce these” instances.
He also said this was not the first time Reinthaler has been investigated by police – in fact, there’s an open case in Canfield court against Reinthaler for not giving a title to someone who bought a car from his dealership.
Online court records said a criminal complaint was filed March 10 against Reinthaler on a second-degree misdemeanor of failure to provide certificate of title to accompany transfer. Ruiz explained that the person who bought that car had waited 30 days, then 60 days, but did not get the title.
That case has had a pretrial date reset over the past several months and has one scheduled for 10:30 a.m. Sept. 25 here.