by Dave Altimari and Ginny Monk, The Connecticut Mirror

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.

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.

D&L Auto Body & Towing (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

D&L first came into possession of the silver Wrangler in January 2018, when the Meriden Police Department called D&L to tow a Jeep that had been stolen from a car dealership in Pennsylvania and located during a traffic stop.

Hector Luis Gonzalez, who was driving the Jeep, said in an interview that he was shocked when officers told him it was stolen. His uncle had bought the Jeep from a car dealer in the Bronx, and he had a title. Gonzalez said he had put a lot of money into the Jeep, purchasing new tires and rims that cost nearly $5,000 and buying a light bar in the front that cost more than $500.

“I bought it from a dealer, so I didn’t expect that the car was stolen,” Gonzalez said.

Once a car is towed, the towing company is supposed to notify the car’s owner within 48 hours. As days pass, storage fees add up, making it expensive for drivers to retrieve their cars. After 15 days, the tower can ask the DMV for permission to sell a car if they deem it to be worth less than $1,500. This gives companies an incentive to place a lower value on vehicles, as they would otherwise have to wait 45 days to sell.

Gonzalez said he called D&L after the car was towed and staff told him that the dealer it had been stolen from had picked it up.

But when investigators reached the dealership, Koch 33 Automotive, two years later, its management said it had no idea the car had been recovered and told DMV officials that the dealer still had an interest in it.

“I have been under the assumption that the vehicle was still considered stolen,” a dealership employee told investigators. The company did not respond to calls seeking comment. The DMV is responsible for verifying the facts on the forms towers submit that state they tried to contact the owner. A vehicle search also should have shown the vehicle was stolen, which would have flagged the potential sale.

Twenty-five days after the tow, D&L submitted a form to the DMV saying that it wanted to sell the Jeep and that it was only worth $1,000.

In theory, the DMV had a way to catch tow truck companies that undervalued cars. Before approving a sale, DMV employees are supposed to check the book value and, if the declared value is lower, request more information as to why the tower believes the car is worth less. In this case, the National Automobile Dealers Association value for the Wrangler was $15,100, according to DMV records.

But D&L was able to get around that by providing photos of the car without doors or wheels. It then brought the Jeep on a flatbed to the DMV, where an inspector noted the missing parts and stamped a form declaring it not legal for road use.

The Jeep Wrangler was shown intact in a photo from a police stop in January 2018, first photo, and with the doors and wheels removed weeks later, second photo. (Obtained by CT Mirror and ProPublica)

Less than four months later, D&L sold the Jeep for $1,400 to JDM Investments, a company that Connecticut secretary of state business filings show was owned by Stefanski.

Under state law, the profits from sales of towed cars are supposed to belong to the vehicle owners. Towing companies have to hold onto the proceeds for a year and turn over any remaining money, after subtracting their fees, to the state.

But towing companies can get around that rule by selling cars for small amounts so there aren’t any profits left once towing and storage fees are deducted.

In the case of the Jeep sold to Stefanski, investigators calculated that there should have been $390 left over, but D&L never paid that to the owner or the state. If it had sold the vehicle for the book value, there would have been about $14,000 in profits.

Dominik Stefanski’s Facebook post advertising the Jeep Wrangler. (Obtained by CT Mirror and ProPublica. Redacted by the Connecticut DMV.)

After the sale, Stefanski, who has worked at the DMV since 1999 and earns $72,000 annually, applied for the vehicle’s title but said he wasn’t ready to register the car. That limited the paper trail: The DMV has no way to track unregistered cars.

Curiously, records uncovered by investigators showed that five days before purchasing the Jeep from D&L, Stefanski had already sold it to a used car dealer, Toria Truck Rental & Leasing of Hartford, which also does business as South Green Automotive, for $13,500.

After selling it to the dealer, Stefanski appeared to help Toria resell the vehicle by listing it on Facebook: “Selling my jeep 2010 only 73k miles clean title asking 23k$.” Two weeks later, the Jeep was sold at a public auto auction for $18,130 to a Groton dealership, which 10 days later sold it to a customer for $28,781, records show.

According to investigators, Toria then sent Stefanski a commission check for over $2,000 for the sales of two cars, including the Jeep.

Toria’s co-owner Edward Michaels said he and another employee, who no longer works for him, met with DMV investigators and they “were cleared.” The DMV did not pursue charges against Toria.

The Abandoned Cadillac

When cars are sold, towing companies have to submit a form called an H-110 that tells the DMV who the new owner of the vehicle is and how much it sold for. But the DMV says it doesn’t have an efficient way to track those. If it did, it might notice trends like a large number of towed vehicles being purchased by the same company.

Four months ago, CT Mirror and ProPublica requested six months’ worth of H-110s under the state public records law. The DMV said it could only search sales by specific vehicle identification numbers.

CT Mirror and ProPublica requested forms on 18 vehicles that tow companies sought to sell. The DMV said it only had that information on two of them: the 2010 Jeep and a 2010 Cadillac Escalade that Stefanski bought from D&L about a year later.

D&L towed the Cadillac from the Econo Lodge in Southington in November 2018. When the tower asked the DMV to sell the car, it wrote that the Cadillac was worth $750 because it had no key and had front end damage. According to the DMV report, the book value of the car was $17,500.

The company sold the Cadillac to JDM Investments five months later for $1,000. Stefanski flipped the car to Toria for $17,500, which sold it at a public auction for $18,300 to a Putnam auto dealer that then sold it to a customer in October 2019 for $23,250.

When it was initially towed, the Cadillac had belonged to Southington resident Daniel Rodriguez, who had left the car in the Econo Lodge parking lot after striking a guardrail on the highway. Rodriguez said in an interview that he had been battling an addiction at the time and “left it there.”

Stefanski posted on Facebook to advertise Daniel Rodriguez’s towed Cadillac. (Obtained by CT Mirror and ProPublica. Redacted by the Connecticut DMV.)

“I was not in the right state of mind, and I just never went back,” Rodriguez said.

Rodriguez said he never heard from any tow company or got any notice that his car was being sold until a DMV investigator contacted him in early 2020 after he’d moved to Texas. He wrote back “requesting any funds that may have been generated as a result of the sale of the vehicle.”

But Rodriguez said he was told by DMV officials it was too late: “Somebody got back to me stating that so much time went by, and I wasn’t allowed any compensation.”

That was incorrect. Because only eight months had passed since the sale, Rodriguez should have been able to claim any proceeds from the towing company. But in this case, there wasn’t any money to claim because of the way the transactions were handled.

Until CT Mirror and ProPublica contacted Rodriguez, he said, no one had told him that his car had been purchased by a DMV employee and that it eventually sold for more than $23,000.

“It’s like a thorn in the rear end,” Rodriguez said.

“They Can’t Do Nothing”

The DMV spent more than a year, starting in February 2020, investigating connections between Stefanski and D&L.

D&L eventually turned over records to investigators that showed it had sold JDM Investments 15 cars. The investigators’ report also showed they interviewed the owner of an auto body shop who admitted that a receipt for $1,071 worth of work on the Jeep was fabricated at Stefanski’s behest.

Stefanski said he didn’t understand the allegation because the DMV would have reviewed the receipt when it issued him the title to the Jeep.

During the investigation, one D&L employee described a conversation the employee had with Stefanski as investigators began to look into the case.

“You’re fucked,” the employee said he told Stefanski.

According to the employee, Stefanski replied that the investigators had questioned him about the Jeep.

“Like an hour after I sold you the Jeep you had it for sale on Facebook,” the D&L employee responded. “You told me you needed all the vehicles for your family but that was bullshit.”

Stefanski just told him not to worry. “I got receipts for everything,” he told the employee, according to the investigators’ records. “Don’t say anything to the officers. I got everything covered. I have representation in the union and they can’t do nothing.”

During Stefanski’s interview with investigators, he denied doing any favors for D&L and told them he needed the cars for a real estate business.

“I told you I don’t flip cars. I realized my business wasn’t working out so I sold it,” Stefanski said.

In an interview with CT Mirror and ProPublica, Stefanski said fixing up cars is his hobby.

The investigators questioned why Stefanski bought multiple vehicles, never registered them and then sold them. Did he realize his business wasn’t working out multiple times? “This makes absolutely no sense,” one investigator said, according to the DMV report.

In January 2021, DMV investigators applied for arrest warrants seeking to charge Stefanski and at least two D&L employees, including its then-manager, with larceny and title fraud.

But then-Assistant State Attorney Evelyn Rojas declined to file charges, citing “prosecutorial discretion” and “insufficient evidence to meet the burden of proof beyond a reasonable doubt.”

“The Department of Motor Vehicles is free to pursue whatever civil remedies it deems appropriate against the defendant and any other involved party,” Rojas wrote in a 2021 memo.

Rojas, who now works at the state attorney general’s office, did not respond to questions about her decision.

The DMV could have issued fines against D&L or even revoked the towing company’s license. The agency could have suspended or tried to fire Stefanski. But the agency did nothing to either of them.

In an interview with reporters, Stefanski maintained that he hadn’t done anything wrong in the transactions when shown a copy of the unsigned arrest warrant investigators had drafted.

“If it was something illegal, then why didn’t they sign it?” Stefanski asked.

CT Mirror and ProPublica obtained Stefanski’s personnel records from 2018-23, and he received glowing reviews from his bosses. No mention was made of the investigation or his role in it.

Stefanski still works as a document examiner, although he’s transferred to the DMV’s New Britain office.

Since the investigation, Stefanski has tried to sell several cars and auto parts on Facebook, including posting an engine from a 2014 Audi for $2,500 in November.

“I don’t understand why I can’t” make these sales, Stefanski said in an interview.

The engine, he said, he got from a buddy.

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