[music]

Janae Pierre: I'm willing to make a really big statement here about you, Liam. May I?

Liam Quigley: Please.

Janae Pierre: You have an amazingly detailed knowledge of a very niche subject that not a lot of people know about, and that is New York City's tow truck industry.

Liam Quigley: Nothing brings me more joy.

Janae Pierre: Seriously. [chuckles] Tell me why.

Liam Quigley: Tow trucks are one of those things you probably only think about until you need one,-

Janae Pierre: Right.

Liam Quigley: -like you're stranded, you're on the Belt Parkway, Atlantic Avenue, wherever that may be. It's not something you might expect a reporter to spend years covering. What I found out in doing that is that the city's towing industry has undergone this really dramatic change over the past five or six years, and that's that the number of unlicensed tow trucks, trucks not authorized to tow in New York City, has grown really rapidly. It puts consumers at risk, but there's also a public safety risk. There's one woman I spoke to who really distilled how this public safety issue can affect people.

Suzy Delgado: Come on in.

Liam Quigley: Thank you. Her name is Suzy Delgado. I met her at her apartment, Ozone Park, Queens, [crosstalk] a few years ago. Do you mind if I record while we talk?

Suzy Delgado: Yes, [unintelligible 00:01:17].

Liam Quigley: This is a nice place. Reminds me of my apartment growing up, but smaller. It's cramped, cozy, photos of her kids.

Suzy Delgado: Those are my husband's grandkids. Those are my step-grandkids.

Liam Quigley: Oh, step grandkids. Cute. We sit down at her small kitchen table, and I just asked her, "Tell me about this traumatic experience." What I've been doing is I've been following the tow truck industry for a long time.

Suzy Delgado: Right.

Liam Quigley: I was hoping that you would just-- I don't want to make you go through it all again.

Suzy Delgado: No. Trust me, when I go through it, I can never forget it. Something that's not going to go away. Never. [music]

Liam Quigley: This is back in November 2021. It's November 6th. It's a Saturday. It's 4:30 in the morning.

Suzy Delgado: 4:30 in the afternoon.

Liam Quigley: 4:30 in the afternoon. Sorry. Suzy's off from work, where she works at JetBlue cleaning airplanes. It's a day off. She hears teenagers racing a Range Rover through the neighborhood.

Suzy Delgado: They love racing.

Liam Quigley: Then she hears a crash right into her brand new 2018 Nissan Pathfinder. [crosstalk] Her car is really badly damaged. It's pushed up into the curb. The wheel, looks like it's split from the axle.

Janae Pierre: It's not drivable.

Liam Quigley: It's going to need major bodywork. She calls the cops.

Suzy Delgado: I called 911.

Liam Quigley: Police are saying, "Look, there's a lot going on right now."

Suzy Delgado: "Ma'am, sorry. There's nobody who got hurt. We got to wait."

Liam Quigley: There's nobody coming, and she starts getting frustrated.

Suzy Delgado: I called 911 three times that night. I even called the precinct.

Liam Quigley: What does happen is that within two to three hours of Suzy putting in this 911 call, there's people outside arguing from different towing companies over who's going to take her Pathfinder.

Janae Pierre: Wait, fighting in the middle of the street?

Liam Quigley: To the point that somebody took out a gun, shooting.

Janae Pierre: Oh my gosh.

Suzy Delgado: When the first shot came, I turned around.

Liam Quigley: She's outside taking this all in.

Suzy Delgado: When I turned around, that's when the second bullet, the second shot landed on me.

[music]

Liam Quigley: Suzy says she got shot through her thigh.

Suzy Delgado: I felt my leg. It was numb. I'm like, to my husband, "I just got shot, and I felt my pants wet." I touched, there was all blood all over my fingers. Thank God they hit me here. They didn't hit me in my chest or my head because I probably still would not be here for who's going to take my car.

[music]

Liam Quigley: Of course, Suzy was wondering why. Why did this happen? Why did this hit-and-run turn into a gunfight over who's going to tow her car, and why didn't the police respond when her car was hit?

Suzy Delgado: One of the cops went to go see me in the hospital. I go, "Why did I have to wait to get shot to see your faces?"

Liam Quigley: Why did I have to get shot to see your faces?

[music]

Janae Pierre: This is NYC Now. Liam Quigley has gone deep into the city's towing industry. What he's found is that the number of unlicensed tow trucks has skyrocketed in recent years. We're going to talk about the decisions city officials have made that have driven that growth, who's responsible for fixing it, and why it matters to you. All right, Liam, let's start with a user-friendly question here. If I'm in a car crash in New York City, I need my car towed, right? What's supposed to happen here?

Liam Quigley: If your car needs to be towed, a police officer should respond to that scene when you call 911. Then they're supposed to use a list of approved tow truck companies that are licensed, whose drivers have gone through background checks. The tow trucks have a blue medallion that they get from the city to tow anywhere legally in the five boroughs. There's some tow truck companies that have contracts for specific highways.

Janae Pierre: Why is it designed that way?

Liam Quigley: This is a system that goes back three decades.

Sal Albanese: We did this years ago. I would have to drill down on my memory bank to remember all the details.

Liam Quigley: I called up this guy, Sal Albanese. He's been around a long time in New York City politics. Back in the late '80s, early '90s, he's a city council member, and there had been several really high-profile wrecks involving licensed and unlicensed tow truck drivers racing to the scenes of crashes. In the industry, these people are known as chasers.

Sal Albanese: We were seeing those chases on a regular basis back in the day. These guys were racing through the streets.

Liam Quigley: This was so they could be the first to get to the towing job, because towing a car, you can really tap into a lucrative market. Insurance payouts, junk fees, and the more valuable the wrecked car, the higher the potential return.

Janae Pierre: I hate to sound like Lloyd Banks here, but if an accident involves a beamer, Benz, or Bentley--

Liam Quigley: That's music to a chaser's ears. At that time, there had been several really high-profile incidents involving licensed and unlicensed tow trucks getting into serious, deadly crashes and killing people.

Sal Albanese: It was pretty dangerous.

Liam Quigley: That brings in a big effort to regulate things. Stop chasing, stop the territorial disputes erupting from who's first, because it could be violent.

Sal Albanese: They were not nice guys to deal with. When we did this, I was a little bit on edge because I realized that there's a lot of potentially nefarious characters involved in this business.

Liam Quigley: Did you ever get threatened?

Sal Albanese: I got some nasty calls to my office when we were doing this. I don't remember the exact nature of the threat, but yes, definitely.

[music]

Liam Quigley: The real genesis of towing regulation as we know it in New York City that's supposed to be followed, it comes from Albanese in the late '80s, early '90s, creating this system requiring the police, when they're pulling up to a crash scene, to call tow trucks from a specific list.

Janae Pierre: What made you start paying attention to tow trucks in the first place?

Liam Quigley: A lot of this is just being outside in the city, I started noticing there were more unlicensed trucks on the street, or at least I was getting a strong hunch that that was the case. Things were feeling like there was going to be a return to the days when chasing was a much bigger problem, but the question that I had was, how am I going to prove something like that?

Janae Pierre: Let me guess, you figured out a way.

Liam Quigley: Yes. This was a big moment for me. There's an unknown number of trucks that are not authorized to operate in New York City, but they do have tow truck plates issued by the Department of Motor Vehicles. Those license plates, those trucks, they're getting caught all the time by the city's speed and red light cameras. That data is public. What I also had was this list of authorized tow trucks in New York City, because I've been asking the Department of Consumer Protection for that data for every year for almost nine years.

Janae Pierre: Oh, y'all are buddies.

Liam Quigley: They love me. Anyway, when you're comparing those two data sets, you get some really stark numbers. In 2021, those cameras grabbed the plates of 54 distinct tow trucks that were not licensed to tow in New York City, but by the end of last year, that number was just over 700.

Janae Pierre: Damn. That's crazy.

Liam Quigley: Now there's about the same number of licensed as unlicensed trucks on the roads. It's probably an undercount because not all of these trucks are getting caught by cameras. At the same time, the number of licensed tow trucks in the industry, they're vanishing. They've dropped by hundreds over the same time period.

Janae Pierre: Wow.

Liam Quigley: Really, we should say many of these unlicensed trucks, they're not what you think of when you think of a typical tow truck.

Janae Pierre: What do you mean?

Liam Quigley: There's these hidden rig systems. You can convert a lot of regular pickup trucks into a tow truck. It can go totally in the bed of the truck. Others are tucked under the bed of the truck. Unless you really know what you're looking for, you're not going to see it. It's a big shift in the industry over the past 5, 10 years or so, where you're seeing a lot more chase trucks that were born in a factory as just a regular big pickup truck.

Janae Pierre: How do these unlicensed tow truck drivers know where the crashes are?

Liam Quigley: A big thing for years in the industry has been police radios tuned to emergency frequencies to find out where the crashes are. That's been illegal for years for both licensed and unlicensed tow truck drivers. They'll also cruise areas where there are crashes. Linden Boulevard in Brooklyn, for example. The data is showing that a lot of these unlicensed trucks are speeding, they're running red lights, and they're getting in serious crashes.

There have been 15 people killed in crashes with both licensed and unlicensed trucks since 2010. A Queens man who was killed in 2023 by an unlicensed truck that had a hidden towing setup we talked about. Police said a similar tow truck was involved in the death of a woman in the Bronx the next year, and the data showing the problem has grown dramatically over the past five or six years.

[music]

Janae Pierre: What do we know about why this happened?

Liam Quigley: There's two things that are happening here. The first, there was a big change during the height of the pandemic in 2020. Cops wanted to reduce their contact with the public and conserve police resources to speed up response times. They stopped responding to many minor crashes, really thousands, in the city where there's no injuries. You may have seen these signs on the LIE on the BQE that say, "Look, if it's a minor accident, minor crash, move off the highway, exchange info." Really, if there's no property damage, you're not required to report the crash to the police.

Janae Pierre: Why does that matter that the police don't show up?

Liam Quigley: The front lines of enforcement were police officers on the scenes of crashes who were looking out for a tow truck driver pulling up that they didn't ask for them to be there. That's a violation that could get unlicensed tow truck drivers in hot water. The police even had the power to seize unlicensed tow trucks whenever they saw them, but that's the second thing that changed in 2022 when the patrol guide gets updated. It's like the handbook for how to police New York City. It tells officers to stop seizing unlicensed tow trucks when they see them.

Janae Pierre: Why?

Liam Quigley: The NYPD told us that this was in response to city council legislation that was meant to reduce harsh penalties for local businesses.

Janae Pierre: Where does that leave drivers like me?

Liam Quigley: Whichever tow truck driver is there first is usually going to set the terms. Once your car's hooked up, you still have rights, but it can feel a lot harder to exercise them. Look, we're talking about where your car's going to go, who's going to work on it, how long it's going to stay there, what they're going to charge you if you don't pick it up right away. I've talked to people. They've had their car towed, and then it's just gone for months, that they've gone on this ordeal to get their car back, including from a body shop that was just recently shut down by the NYPD for these types of practices.

[music]

Janae Pierre: We heard from Suzy Delgado earlier. She was shot when people from two rival truck groups showed up to tow her car. How common is it for violence to erupt like that over a wrecked car?

Liam Quigley: Look, not every car crash in New York City equals shootout in the street, but there's real violence that we tracked here. Last year, in a federal case, the owner of a Bronx tow truck company pled guilty to ordering the shooting of a rival tow truck company owner. Look, when I met Suzy a few years back, she was still dealing with the implications of this shooting.

Suzy Delgado: Sometimes when I'm at work, the pain kills me.

Liam Quigley: It's financially destabilizing for her. She had to go back to work cleaning airplanes at JFK.

Suzy Delgado: We got the car payments, we got rent to pay, we got other things to pay.

Liam Quigley: Meanwhile, the police never found the people who shot her.

Suzy Delgado: It's a shame that tow companies have to hire people that carry guns. They shouldn't be carrying guns at the first place.

[music]

Janae Pierre: Coming up, what are the signs a tow truck is illegal, and how can you spot one at a crash scene? Liam and I hit the road to find that answer.

Liam Quigley: The truck had no license plate, no medallion, no USDOT number, no company name.

Janae Pierre: We'll meet the man who has made it his mission to take on unlicensed tow trucks.

[00:14:33] Bob Holden: If I was just one second early, I would have been dead. I just wouldn't have been here.

[music]

Janae Pierre: Up to this point, we've explained how unlicensed tow trucks operate, how they show up at a crash scene, how they pressure people into handing over their cars, and why it's been so damn difficult for the city to stop them, but there's still a basic question. If you found yourself in an accident and you're standing on the side of the road, would you actually know an unlicensed tow truck when you saw it? To find out, Liam and I went for a ride on the Belt Parkway in Brooklyn to walk through what to look for.

Liam Quigley: We're going to be looking out for a blue medallion. You need to have that on your truck if you want to tow cars in New York City, with extremely rare exceptions.

Janae Pierre: Moments after Liam explained that, we went zooming past a flatbed parked on the side of the road.

Liam Quigley: Here's a tow truck on our left. This tow truck, you'll see it has the blue medallion. That company is Ben & Nino. They have the contract for this portion of the highway.

Janae Pierre: Wow. We passed by so quickly. I totally missed the blue medallion. Where am I looking for the blue medallion?

Liam Quigley: Oh, it was on the utility box underneath the flatbed on the left side of the vehicle. They're typically on the left side.

Janae Pierre: Oh, wow. [laughs] You know exactly what you're looking for. That was a legit licensed tow truck. Now, in addition to the blue medallion, Liam says you should look for a couple of other things, too.

Liam Quigley: Yes. There should be a number issued by the Department of Transportation on the truck, there should be decals on the truck with the name of the towing company, and there should be, I know it sounds crazy, a license plate on the truck.

Janae Pierre: Now, how about an unlicensed tow truck? We got out of the car and stood on the side of the Belt. God damn it, smell like urine.

Liam Quigley: Ew. [chuckles]

Janae Pierre: Not the nicest place in New York City. What about this truck? Oh, no, this is an SUV. Traffic was flying by, and then-- Oh, what is this?

Liam Quigley: No.

Janae Pierre: No.

Liam Quigley: Oh. [crosstalk]

Janae Pierre: Oh, it is. A classic style straight up tow truck with that thing that looks like a cross on the back that Liam talked about goes whizzing right past us.

Liam Quigley: That's a perfect example. Tell me what you saw.

Janae Pierre: I didn't see a blue medallion, but they were driving at least 65 miles per hour. I don't have your eye, Liam.

Liam Quigley: Did you see a license plate?

Janae Pierre: I didn't see a license plate. So much to look for so quickly. [chuckles]

Liam Quigley: Did you see any lettering for the company?

Janae Pierre: No, I don't recall. Damn.

Liam Quigley: The truck had no license plate, no medallion, no USDOT number, no company name. Really, no identifying information other than that's a tow truck, and it's driving here and out in the middle of the day on the highway in New York City. That's one of hundreds of unlicensed tow trucks that are getting caught on speed cameras. That one probably not, because it didn't even appear to have a license.

Janae Pierre: Yes.

[music]

Janae Pierre: Before we went home, I wanted to see one of those tow trucks Liam mentioned earlier, the regular pickups that have been modified for towing. Now, we are literally in the middle of the street. We are standing on the median on Atlantic Avenue, and I think I have spotted an unlicensed tow truck. It was a GMC Denali, so a pretty big pickup truck, but in the back--

Liam Quigley: It's got this big T-shaped metal black apparatus sticking out of the bed of the truck. These are the exact type of hidden rig systems that are common where you have a regular pickup truck that can now move quickly to a crash scene, the driver can hook up a wrecked car and get out of there pretty quickly. All credit to you. You spotted this one.

Janae Pierre: Yes, getting better.

Liam Quigley: You trained up really quickly.

Janae Pierre: Good teacher.

Liam Quigley: Yes. Atlantic Avenue, for sure.

Janae Pierre: If the number of these unlicensed, illegal tow trucks has grown so dramatically, is there anyone doing something about it?

Liam Quigley: Not on a really fundamental level. I spoke to a legal expert who said tow trucks are not exactly something that someone running for mayor or another elected official is going to go out and campaign on. It's usually like a reactive thing where something pops up, consumers get violated, and then big response from NYPD, wait a couple of years, you'll see it pop up again. It takes a series of high-profile crashes, or violence, or big consumer fraud to get a big reaction. It's like what happened in the '80s and '90s. Things are spiraling out of control, and then boom, you get some reforms. There is one person who's made this a little bit of a mission.

Daniel Kurzyna: Gothamist, WNYC, right?

Liam Quigley: Hey, how are you?

Bob Holden: How is it going?

Liam Quigley: Nice to meet you, Tom.

Bob Holden: My pleasure.

Janae Pierre: Who's that?

Liam Quigley: Bob Holden.

Janae Pierre: The Bob Holden?

Liam Quigley: The Bob Holden, former council member until just a couple of months ago. He represented parts of Glendale, Middle Village, Woodside, other parts of Queens. He's had run-ins with tow trucks.

Bob Holden: I was almost wiped out by a company that was based in Glendale. I had a little Mini Cooper. Before I became a council member, I was a college professor.

Janae Pierre: Didn't take him for a Mini Cooper guy.

Liam Quigley: He tells me it's the worst move he ever made because you can get wiped out easily by bigger SUVs. What happens is he's around the corner from his house--

Bob Holden: I hit a stop sign. I was about to go on the gas, and you couldn't see because it was going up a hill, and this blur in front of me-

Liam Quigley: It's a tow truck.

Bob Holden: -was going 60 miles an hour down a narrow one-way street the wrong way. If I was just one second early, I would have been dead. I just wouldn't have been here.

Liam Quigley: Later on in the neighborhood, he sees the same truck.

Bob Holden: I photographed it.

Liam Quigley: He reports this to the cops. Holden is not a guy who hesitates when he sees something like this. He's going to the cops.

Janae Pierre: Sure.

Liam Quigley: He starts photographing lots of other unlicensed tow trucks running red lights all over the place, tow truck companies and body shops breaking other laws, parking wrecked cars in the roadway while they're waiting to be repaired.

Bob Holden: It's been like a mission for me. These tow trucks are endangering everyone. It was bad enough we got lawlessness on our streets with people passing red lights, and motorcycles and mopeds, and e-bikes on sidewalks, but then, when you add these rogue companies, this should be a major story, except it's not.

Liam Quigley: I went out with Holden. I just see this guy in action. He's passionate about this stuff. We go for a drive. With us at the time, you'll hear his voice, is his chief of staff, Daniel Kurzyna. We're out there looking for unlicensed tow trucks.

Janae Pierre: I thought you only did that with me.

Liam Quigley: I'm sorry.

Bob Holden: Now go down the right there.

Liam Quigley: We're out there. We start circling around these body shops that Holden has dealt with a bunch when we start to see a lot of unlicensed tow trucks. We're seeing these wrecked cars stored on the street, which is also, by the way, illegal.

Bob Holden: No, they're all over the street. Look, see this? See, I'm call the police and get these towed.

Daniel Kurzyna: Those are probably-- [crosstalk]

Liam Quigley: Then, within minutes, we see a tow truck running a red light, another going the wrong way down a one-way street.

Bob Holden: Did you get a picture of him going down the one-way?

Daniel Kurzyna: No.

Bob Holden: No, I want to give it to the CO.

Liam Quigley: CO, meaning he's the commanding officer at the local precincts.

Bob Holden: This is what they do to the neighborhood, they bring down the quality of life.

Liam Quigley: He called the traffic cop live while we were in the car walking around with the neighborhood, like, "You got to come deal with this guy," urging him to write some tickets, put some pressure on this tow truck company that has these wrecked cars parked in parking spots.

[music]

Bob Holden: Got to bang these guys out because they're using public streets as storage. Again, it's the quality of life. We don't need all this on this.

Liam Quigley: This traffic officer, he didn't know I was recording, so I won't play his tape, but he did not really seem like he wanted to be writing those tickets. Holden, he's documented cases where towing companies, body shops have come outside while he's photographing their trucks and just questioning like, "What are you doing?"

Bob Holden: Look at this one, [chuckles] look at that one. We got to get this towed. I can't believe it.

Janae Pierre: What's the solution here? Do we all need to be Bob Holden?

Liam Quigley: I can say that if that was the case, 311 would be jam-packed constantly.

Janae Pierre: [laughs] No. Seriously, though, what does Bob Holden say should be done?

Liam Quigley: Holden, he bangs on these city agencies that he says they're responsible for overseeing the towing industry. They're not forceful enough, and he says it's really difficult to get enforcement that's sustained.

Bob Holden: Again, the weak link in this is the cops. Many times, they look the other way, the cops. I want the letter of the law.

Liam Quigley: Remember that policy change we talked about NYPD stopping showing up at a lot of crashes, and then a couple of years later, stopping the seizure of unlicensed tow trucks?

Janae Pierre: Yes.

Liam Quigley: Holden says, "Look, that just shows in the numbers that the unlicensed industry has been fueled by that change."

[music]

Janae Pierre: What do the NYPD have to say about all of that?

Liam Quigley: The NYPD told us, "Look, we have lost a big enforcement tool in terms of being able to see an unlicensed tow truck and seize it." They said, at the same time, they can still issue summonses to tow trucks, they're doing that on highways in the city, that they can still issue fines for tow truck drivers doing things that they're not supposed to do, and that they still respond to crashes if there's a dispute, where there's injuries, or where the car needs to be towed. There's another agency in here. Remember this agency, the Department of Consumer and Worker Protection?

Janae Pierre: Yes, DCWP.

Liam Quigley: They're responsible for licensing tow trucks in New York City. It's been that way for years. Many of the people I spoke with for the story, Holden, Albanese, that other council member, they said the agency has been ineffective in regulating the tow truck industry. Look, if you look at the job that DCWP has to do, their portfolio is growing. You may have seen them in the news for dealing with DoorDash, e-bike sales, the construction trades, the quality of gasoline at gas stations, the scale at your supermarket. The list goes on. They have about 62 inspectors to do all of this.

Janae Pierre: That's ridiculous.

Liam Quigley: It's very few. Officials with this agency, they say they're doing their best. They've acknowledged before that the tow truck industry is constantly evolving the ways that it tries to get around their regulatory schemes, but they say, "Look, if the NYPD tells us about an unlicensed operator and they're really the ones supposed to be doing that, we'll issue fines, we'll check out licenses, we do background checks," but industry experts that I talk to, they say you can't really get results with such an overburdened agency.

[music]

Janae Pierre: Liam, thanks so much for breaking down the tow truck industry for us. I know. Unfortunately, I have a new hobby as well. I'll be out here looking for unlicensed tow trucks now. Thank you.

Liam Quigley: Thank you. Please send me those license plates.

Janae Pierre: [chuckles] Sure. That's WNYC's Liam Quigley.

[music]

[00:26:29] [END OF AUDIO]

 

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