THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Saturday, August 12, 1995 TAG: 9508120108
SECTION: BUSINESS PAGE: D1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY HELEN MACLEOD
JOURNAL OF COMMERCE
DATELINE: NEW YORK LENGTH: Medium: 94 lines
If vehicle theft were a legitimate business, it would rank No. 56 on the Fortune 500 list.
But business is getting tighter on the domestic market, so, like executives in any competitive industry, car thieves are looking for markets abroad.
Last year, the National Insurance Crime Bureau said up to 20 percent of the 1.5 million cars stolen in the United States found their way overseas.
From the mobster in Moscow to the white-collar criminal in Kowloon, Hong Kong, there's a lot of money to be made selling cars stolen in the United States. For reasons ranging from tax to cachet, a car can be worth twice as much in a foreign country as in the United States. That means it's to a criminal's advantage to spend a few thousand dollars shipping it to Europe, the Eastern bloc, or to the Far East or South America.
Just ask Dave.
He charges only $2,000 to guarantee that a stolen car, concealed in a container or driven straight onto a roll-on, roll-off ship, will reach the other side. Add perhaps $1,800 for freight and other expenses and you've still got a high-profit margin on a car that will sell for $50,000 in Germany or Hong Kong or the Dominican Republic.
``They pay some punk a hundred bucks to steal the car, then they bring it to me,'' Dave says.
Only Dave isn't really a bad guy.
He's just been to bad-guy school. He works undercover for the stolen-vehicle task force at the Port of Newark's U.S. Customs division and his real name, of course, isn't Dave.
No reliable export figures are available, but the insurance crime bureau, an industry association, said in a recent report that last year nearly two-thirds of the vehicles stolen in this $7.5 billion industry were recovered by the police, insurers or the bureau itself. Some of the remaining third went to what is known as the ``chop shop,'' where cars are broken down for parts.
The rest were almost certainly sold abroad.
The NICB said hundreds of thousands of stolen vehicles are shipped or driven out of the United States every year.
In 1994, customs at Newark intercepted about 250 vehicles worth $5 million, leading to more than a dozen arrests. In Los Angeles, Operation Stop Export Auto Theft between U.S. Customs and the NICB seized 123 vehicles worth $3.8 million.
Dave, and his boss at Newark, special supervisory agent Jim Sullivan, refuse to guess at how many stolen cars are being shipped out of the country. All they know is that it's more than they will ever catch.
``Things have become a little more sophisticated,'' he said.
Sophistication includes changing all the Vehicle Identification Numbers on the chassis and engine, forging documents and listing industrial scrap on the list of container contents to avoid attracting suspicion, when a container weighs more than normal because of a concealed car.
Forged papers and changed VINs are essential for smuggling a car out ``loose'' - that is, driven straight onto a roll-on, roll-off ship - because each one of those is checked, however cursorily, by customs. But a 40-foot container can hide three cars and there is little need to conceal those identities.
Dave admitted that catching a car randomly is rare. Mostly, customs agents work from tips. Once caught, a car thief often can lead officials to an export ring.
The biggest problem for U.S. customs officers, like Dave, is the difficulty in getting people behind bars. For instance, if a car is being illegally exported for insurance fraud, the owner will send the car abroad and won't report it stolen until he is sure it has reached the other side.
So, if customs discovers a car hidden in a container and removes it before it leaves the country, the only thing the owner can be charged with is ``failure to declare'' goods in export, which carries a measly $500 fine. ILLUSTRATION: TOP 10 CARS STOLEN
1. Honda Accord
2. Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme
3. Ford Mustang
4. Toyota Camry
5. Olsmobile Royale
6. Honda Civic
7. Chevrolet Camaro
8. Cadillac DeVille
9. Chevrolet Caprice
10. Toyota Corolla
GRAPHIC
WHAT HAPPENS TO STOLEN CARS?
[For a copy of the graphic, see microfilm for this date.]
JOHN EARLE/Staff
by CNB