| Issue #33, November 10, 2006 |
Predators Booted
Aggressive Car Towing and Tire Booting is Made Illegal Here
By Dan Rattiner
It is now illegal for “predatory towing” to take place in Suffolk County. Members of the county legislature, after parking their cars and carefully looking to see if there might be some tiny sign somewhere — behind a tree or a bush — that might in some tiny way inform them that if they leave their cars there they will get towed, then went into the meeting room and quickly passed this measure on Tuesday afternoon. The vote was 17-0.
“Predatory” is defined as allowing parking on an empty lot for the purpose of almost immediately towing the car away after the owner locks it up. After you leave your car and go off, a tow truck appears and picks the front end of your car up on a hook. When you come back out, the car is gone. The owner of the property is usually in a building nearby looking out a window chuckling malevolently, and you can indeed approach him to weepily tell him your tale of woe only to find that the property owner says there is nothing he can do really, there is this sign — perhaps it is in the window of the building alongside the property — that says PARKING 5 MINUTE MAX ONLY. VIOLATORS WILL BE TOWED. PAY $500 FINE. So it’s a scam.
The predators are actually the property owner and the towing company owner. They make a deal, you pay the fine to the towing company, and the towing company kicks back some of the fine to the property owner. So the business here is the more cars towed per day the more money they make.
And so, it is now illegal for a property owner and a towing company owner to conspire for “the purpose of collecting excessive towing and storage fees.”
I don’t know of anything like this here on the East End at this time, but a friend told me of something that could be this. There is a real estate company that shares a building and parking lot with the Quogue Post Office. Parking is free for people going to the post office on one side of the lot, but you can’t park for the post office on the other side of the lot — that is for the real estate company. There’s no sign in the lot saying that, but there is a little sign, maybe two little signs, in the windows of the real estate firm that say NO PARKING. So your guess is as good as mine.
I also don’t know if this would be covered by this law, but for about three years in downtown East Hampton beginning in 2000, there were half a dozen deals done by private parking lot owners to have a particular company called C.E.T arrange to separate motorists from their money.
C.E.T was run by a former East Hampton Police Lieutenant and several other men, and they hired teenagers either on foot or in cars to patrol these lots aggressively. There were big signs in these lots, which said that if you parked there more than an hour, or perhaps two hours, you would be given a ticket and have to pay a fine of $375. There was no mention of towing. And there was no mention of the Jesse James situation you would soon find yourself in if you dared.
The young men in these lots would note the hour of any car parked in the lot and then, as soon as the time was up, they’d walk over and clamp a steel boot on one of the back tires. The owner was going nowhere.
After that, there came the hold-up. The motorist would show up — there was one case where somebody had to take their mother to the hospital — and this boot would be on the car and the motorist would dither and fret about what could be done about that and the young man would swagger over and say he had a key to unlock the thing, but for you to get him to do that you had to pay the fine of $375. He accepted cash. And he accepted credit cards. He had one of those portable credit card swiper machines. Perhaps he’d hold it up and show it to you.
There are few things worse than suddenly having your day turn from sunshiny and happy to deeply miserable and humiliating. The kid would not bill, he would not negotiate. The key stayed on the ring until the loot was forked over. And no, you could not get him to unlock you so you could drive away home to get the required funds. No exceptions.
I think the kid was told he’d get fired if he relented. Although I don’t know if he also was automatically fired if somebody wrestled him to the ground and stole the key. Certainly, working for C.E.T was a tough job fraught with danger, but what the heck, there are young men who like that sort of thing. And they did pay you. It was a job.
I recall that George Plimpton called me up one day to say that he had got caught up with this. He still hadn’t paid the fine.
“I told them KEEP the car. I took a cab,” he said.
“Where’s your car now?”
“I have no idea. That’s their problem.”
There were others, however, who took this situation much more to heart. Andrew Baker, who owns the Harbor Music Store in Sag Harbor, was one. Having his car booted made him so upset and angry he gave the boot a series of big kicks. When that didn’t work, he used his superhuman strength to kick it even harder, and when he did, the boot actually broke in two and clattered onto the pavement. Baker didn’t know it at the time — I think it was the adrenalin rush — but that super kick broke his foot. Because that had not registered with his brain just yet, Baker simply glared at the kid with the credit card swiper machine — who was standing there with his mouth hanging open — and then triumphantly climbed into his car and drove it off.
Baker, the next day, was in the hospital having a cast put on his foot, and when 30 days after that, the C.E.T. company sent Baker a bill for their “broken” tire boot, I thought, well, that’s just about enough and wrote about it in this newspaper. I honestly think that caused an end to this particular problem. Maybe there were visits from Marina Van, the President of the East Hampton Chamber of Commerce. And so this dreadful situation came to an end.
At the end of that third summer, the Police Officer resigned from the company and sold his interest and the owners of the lots either turned them over to the Town for a dollar so the Town could regulate the parking lots by giving windshield tickets to offenders, or some new arrangement was made. Today, there still are some lots in town where the sign says there’s a $250 fine if you overstay the time, and I do suppose it is enforced, but I think it is being done in a way that is more acceptable to Marina and to the rest of us.
In any case, the new County legislation is done, and from a reading of it, it seems that there might be ways of getting around the law in some instances. But I think it certainly would make predatory towing more difficult. A parking lot owner could buy his own wrecker, for example. Or there could be some secret thing where the towing guys leave cash in a suitcase or something. I don’t know.
Remember the good old days when we all got around on horseback? Just gallop up to the store, dismount and throw the reins over the hitching post. None of this predator crap back then, let me tell you.
We haven’t heard the last of this yet.
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