Posted on 05/13/2002 8:47:05 AM PDT by gubamyster
Sunday, May 12, 2002
By JEAN RIMBACH AND MONSEY ALVARADO Staff Writers
The money was coming in fast. The 18-year-old clerk made $150 for every learner's permit she smuggled out of a Union County motor vehicle agency. She typed as many as 10 a day for a man who procured New Jersey driver's licenses for illegal immigrants.
In barely nine months, before she got caught, the $7.25-an-hour clerk earned an extra $50,000.
"At 4:30 p.m., I was gone. I took my permits, I walked out and I didn't care," she says.
The Record reported, last September and December, a lucrative black market in driver's licenses, bolstered by a ready supply of counterfeit and stolen birth certificates.
Now, after scores of additional interviews, reviews of hundreds of pages of documents, and months observing activities at agencies around the state, it is clear that corrupt workers within the New Jersey Division of Motor Vehicle Services assist the scam at every turn.
In the last 16 months, at least 13 employees from eight DMV offices - East Orange, Rahway, Newark, North Bergen, Wayne Route 46, Camden, Trenton, and Lodi - have been arrested for alleged crimes involving driver's license fraud. Many of the cases, details of which were released by state police only under threat of legal action from attorneys for The Record, are before a state grand jury.
And there may be more arrests to come. Employees in at least five DMV sites around New Jersey remain under suspicion, the state says.
DMV workers on the take earn at least $50 for a duplicate license, $100 for a permit, or $150 tucked inside a pack of gum for a passing grade on a fictitious road test. The ring of a cellphone, the tip of a hat, or a red paper clip on a counterfeit birth certificate are among the signals that pass between employees and shady dealers in illicit licenses.
"There has always been corruption inside," one dealer says while sitting in an SUV in the parking lot of a long-closed restaurant in Newark. "Without corruption, this wouldn't work."
These criminals often justify their thriving business as a useful service for poor, illegal immigrants. But in fact, the license scam helps put dangerous drivers on New Jersey roads and, since Sept. 11, has raised disturbing questions about safety and security.
The arrested workers influenced every step of the licensing process: a state employee in Rahway who administered the written test, two men in Newark who conducted road tests, and a clerk on Route 46 in Wayne who issued learner's permits. Brokers hail the Wayne agency as an especially accommodating place to do illegal business.
The DMV is in such disarray that the governor has appointed a commission to address security and document control. Even efforts by diligent DMV workers to ferret out possible title and license fraud seem to have fallen into a black hole, with the state police scrambling to account for 1,000 cases referred to them since 2000.
The state's new transportation commissioner, Jamie Fox, says even in the short time since his appointment, "very serious questions" have been raised about a number of employees.
The administration is pursuing these accusations, he says.
"A cancer grew because it wasn't addressed," the commissioner says.
Behind the counter
It started slowly, $20 or $50 paid by a fellow clerk for help processing fraudulent permits. That was small change compared to another worker at this North Jersey DMV, who bragged about earning $200,000 selling DMV documents.
One day the clerk, a single mother now in her 20s, arrived home to find on her doorstep one of the men who frequented the DMV. He had a proposition.
"I was like, 'What the hell is going on?' And then he told me, 'This is how much money you can make,'" she recalls. "The way he put it to me then was it's not illegal, they're about to get their green cards, but they have families they want to support."
Two former DMV clerks - both arrested and accused of official misconduct - agreed to tell The Record about their experiences on condition their names and the precise locations of their North Jersey agencies not be used.
They worked in different counties at different times but told remarkably similar stories.
From the day she was hired, says the young mother, she was surprised at how lax things were. She was not asked for references or about previous jobs. Instead of an application, she was told to put her name and Social Security number on a piece of paper. She was hired on the spot.
Training was nearly non-existent. She wasn't shown how to spot counterfeit documents. After a week at the collating desk - where completed paperwork is sent - and another taking photographs of customers for licenses and identification cards, she was assigned to the front counter.
She slowly noticed something was amiss.
"I would see a lot of little things," she says. "Like at the collating desk, people putting stuff in their purses."
One day she rejected a man seeking a license who had a U.S. passport but spoke no English.
"He told me he knew who I was and he knew what I did," she says. "I mentioned it to one of the girls there. ... At that point I was laughing about it - it was funny to me - and I saw everybody get nervous."
Eventually she realized workers were providing learner's permits and other DMV documents for illegal immigrants, who under New Jersey law are forbidden to drive. Some were taking up to $300 to issue licenses to people who lacked proof they had passed the road test, something she says happened at least 200 times.
But even after she was drawn into the illegal trade, the clerk drew the line at some activities. She passed up the big payoffs offered for duplicating licenses, in which a photograph of a broker's client is attached to a license already issued to a New Jersey driver.
"It's the worst thing anybody can do because of the fact you're ruining someone else's record," she explains. "You don't know who you're giving that license. He could be a criminal for all you know. Obviously you're not just helping somebody get a license, you're destroying somebody else's life."
Some fellow clerks used their colleagues' initials when processing bad paperwork so it wouldn't be traced to them. One worker, she recalls, issued state ID cards to friends, free of charge, so they could appear to be at least 21 years old.
"There's so much going on," she says of the agency. "It's so corrupt."
Her arrangement with the dealer was simple: He would come to her home at night and give her completed paperwork. She would type up the permits at the DMV, and he would return to her house to pick them up. He always paid her at home - $100 per permit - but some clerks did their business at the DMV.
She estimates she created about a dozen permits in the names he provided.
At the time she was earning about $8 an hour, $532 every two weeks. The money the brokers were offering the workers often dwarfed their salaries.
"In my case, I have a baby - that's diapers and clothes, so unfortunately that's the way I looked at it at the time," she says.
"It's impossible any manager, any agent couldn't see it - it was right in front of their eyes. You're talking about girls coming in with 2001 cars, and they're 18 years old," she said. "There's just so many things, the new clothes, things you would notice."
It was a similar scene at the Union County DMV where the 18-year-old clerk estimated she earned at least $50,000 selling documents, mostly permits and photo driver's licenses, to a Colombian man who sold them to illegal immigrants. Of the 15 people she worked with, she suspected 10 were on the take.
"It's so easy to get stuff done over there," says the Union County woman.
The Colombian first paid her $150 for each permit she typed for him, then upped it to $200. And she got a friend a job at the DMV and began paying her $50 to help get the permits through.
"The money kept coming in," she says. She paid cash for clothes and a new Volkswagen. "I didn't have to finance it, I didn't have to lease it. It was mine."
She also took DMV photos for clients who were getting state ID cards or driver's licenses.
"He would call me and tell me the person is here, and I would look for them and take their picture after they paid," she says.
Most of the paperwork she processed was for undocumented Hispanic immigrants, although another man did pay her to issue several fraudulent car titles. She covered her tracks by putting documents through under other employees' initials but took a risk by never paying the DMV fees for the fraudulent transactions.
The Colombian dealer paid top dollar to the state workers at a driver testing center, offering $500 for fraudulent proof of a successful written exam or road test.
"They got paid way more than I did," she says.
From DMV to DMV
To the average New Jerseyan, a trip to the DMV is at best a nuisance.
To those in the document black market, it's a job.
"It's a close-knit family," Sam Giovia, a Bergen County police detective, says of a group of Peruvians in the license fraud business. "There is a trust and a bond between them. All of them are making money because of one sale. It's hard to infiltrate because not too many people are on the inside with those organizations."
The brokers, middlemen, and fraud crews who get licenses illegally in New Jersey are primarily Latin American but are also known to come from Asia and Eastern Europe. They travel from one DMV office to another, working their way around the state doing transactions for clients and typically charging anywhere from $1,200 to $3,000 for their services.
Some move in packs, post lookouts in parking lots, and make arrangements with somebody inside. They keep clients' paperwork in business envelopes. Springfield Detective Judd Levenson says he's seen up to 30 envelopes containing separate identities in cars used by fraud crews.
Not every fraud crew works with DMV employees.
"It's not like every DMV has a bad person," Giovia says.
And not every person seeking a fraudulent license is an illegal immigrant. Some are Americans trying to evade suspended driving privileges, and some are identity thieves.
Many middlemen pride themselves on their ability to fool clerks with an array of phony documents, including counterfeit passports, green cards, birth certificates, Social Security cards, and out-of-state driver's licenses. For example, at the Newark DMV one recent afternoon, a reporter watched as a dealer easily got a learner's permit using a counterfeit South Jersey birth certificate.
The crews move the licenses forward one step at a time: Get a permit at one of the 45 DMV agencies - which are run by private contractors with state funds; pass a written test, then the road test, at a state-run testing center. The road test validation can be taken to any DMV agency to be turned into a license. At that point, the middleman brings in the client for the photo.
Beepers, ever-changing cellphone numbers, and arranged signals with DMV workers help smooth the way. A Paterson dealer is known to tip his hat to alert a worker when one of his cronies is headed for the counter. A Union County dealer draws a circle on his documents or fastens them with distinctively colored paper clips.
One North Jersey broker described a state DMV employee who not only helps people on the written test, but also confiscates counterfeit paperwork from those who don't pay her - and sells it back to them later.
"Unbelievable, right?" he says.
The bribe can be tucked in amid documents, concealed in a car's glove compartment with other permits that need approval, or folded inside a tiny pack of gum.
"Here, I have gum for you," another broker, who works out of Newark and Paterson, tells a reporter as he pantomimes placing a pack of gum into a worker's hand.
Undocumented immigrants are well aware DMV workers are part of the fraud. A young Ecuadorean woman, for example, recalls how when she approached a corrupt worker at the North Bergen DMV, he told her, "I can't do it right now because a manager is here."
More recently, in the parking lot of the Wayne DMV on Route 46, a reporter approached an employee she'd been told could help immigrants through the written exam. "It's too risky now,'' he warned her, saying identification was being checked more closely since Sept. 11.
He mentioned it was easier to pass people through the written exam in North Bergen because it is on paper, not a computer.
And he was curious about who had sent her and the people she wanted him to help.
"Who do you got?" he asked from the window of his car.
He continued the conversation, but without agreeing to a thing, he drove off.
Making the connection
License brokers and DMV workers forge their alliances in parking lots and at pay phones, near hot dog carts and coffee trucks. The approach often takes place at workers' homes; some brazenly connect right at the DMV counter.
"It's happening all over," says a former Hudson County DMV worker. "Just watch in the parking lot, that's where all the business is done."
"It's easy to cultivate someone," says the North Jersey broker. He says he enticed one worker by paying him $50 at a public phone.
References are typically required, a dealer from Essex County explains: Give the worker a name they recognize, someone they have done business with. Guys on top will insulate themselves from the crime, paying others to make connections - and take chances.
"I don't go to the DMV," he says. "I pay them, and they pay people inside."
Paperwork and money are exchanged at workers' homes, he says. "They meet at night, away from the DMV."
Sometimes the traffic is reversed, says Giovia, the detective. The DMV worker will go to the dealer's home to pick up documents and money. Workers even deliver permits on their lunch hour, he says.
The allegiances are often threatened by fierce rivalries.
A Paterson dealer is known to lure corrupt DMV employees away from his competition on their lunch breaks.
"He talks them into a bigger game, you know, like 'Are you dealing with him? Don't worry about him no more. How much is he paying you? $100 per job? Don't worry, I'll give you $1,500 a week,'" says a man called Chato, who worked for the dealer for two years.
At first, the dealer asked little for his investment, maybe help with two or three licenses a week, "like corn, like feed for the chickens," Chato says.
"But once you take two payments, he hits you with like 10 a week,'' Chato says. "Next thing you know, they are like boom, doing 15 or 20, and everybody starts getting suspicious about them. He don't care because he wants to like burn you and make all the money he can."
This dealer pays less than others, Chato says, but there's less danger.
"It was money for little risk," he explains. "Somewhere else I'm making $500, but he's only going to pay $200 because he's already paid inside. But this money is butter. ... I won't go to jail, nothing. There is no risk because the person inside Motor Vehicles already knows I'm not legit, and I know he's not legit, and everybody is happy."
A different man describes how he corrupted a clerk in the East Orange DMV. He claimed to be in a hurry and offered $50 to produce a duplicate license for a friend - without the right identification.
"She was scared, she didn't want to do it," he says, talking late one night in the parking lot of a Newark bar. But he persuaded her.
The next time, he offered her $100 to get him a learner's permit. She agreed. Before they parted, she processed some 40 fraudulent permits.
"She worked with me for two months," the dealer says. "They got suspicious; she was fired."
The consequences
The crimes clerks and testers commit sometimes get them fired but rarely prosecuted.
Russell Stellato, who's been in charge of the Newark DMV for seven years, says he's fired four workers suspected of license fraud. He turned over only one case to state investigators - an employee who had typed up a permit under another worker's initials. Stellato doesn't think there was an arrest.
James Van Sickle, who runs the DMV's Regional Service Center on Route 23 in Wayne, recalls three years ago firing a worker "who was issuing permits to people who shouldn't have gotten them." The case went to DMV investigators, but Van Sickle doesn't know what became of the investigation.
And Robert Shuey, the private agent who ran the Eatontown DMV until resigning in December, says even after he told DMV headquarters he had fired a worker for making 23 questionable transactions - at up to $1,500 each - no legal action was taken.
"She just went away," says Shuey, who last heard she was working in the court system.
State DMV officials can't say exactly how many workers have been terminated or arrested for suspected document fraud in recent years. And they acknowledge that lack of oversight - from in-house audits right up to the state police - makes it impossible to define the scope of the problem.
"We don't know, we just don't know," says Fox, the transportation commissioner. "In the short period of time that we have been here, there have been very serious questions raised about a number of people."
Diane Legreide, the new DMV director, recognizes the corruption "is spread throughout the state'' but says relatively few workers are involved.
"You are talking a small percentage of employees," she says. "Overall I believe the majority of people in those agencies are honest; I would hate to think otherwise. But you do an awful lot of damage with 5 or 10 percent of employees.'' The current DMV roster has approximately 2,200 state and private workers.
The state's failure to weed out corrupt employees is part of the problem, she adds.
"Someone who is making $7 an hour ... sees someone else who they believe is making a lot of money and nothing is happening to them - I'm not sure that doesn't corrupt more of your workforce,'' she says.
Corruption has flourished in an atmosphere soured by the lack of training and employee standards, a decrepit computer system, and the shrinking numbers of supervisors, investigators, and auditors.
Sometimes, it hits close to the top.
In March, James Lyons, who ran the Springfield DMV, was charged with official misconduct for allegedly putting through fraudulent paperwork, some of which purportedly cheated lien holders and rolled back odometers. Sources say authorities were alerted because Lyons was staying late to process licenses and titles, a task agents rarely do themselves.
In February, Jenessa Bonnette, the daughter of the Camden DMV chief, pleaded guilty to unlawful possession of materials to alter or falsify licenses. The teenage clerk had stolen 100 clear plastic laminate covers whose pale, silvery hologram can make counterfeit licenses appear legitimate. (Three teenagers who had worked at the Lodi DMV were arrested in February for allegedly stealing an estimated 100 hologram laminates.)
Last August, Marie Thebaud, the former head clerk of the East Orange DMV, was charged with official misconduct for allegedly issuing a license to an applicant she knew was unqualified.
But the corruption is hardly limited to the upper echelon.
Two Trenton employees were charged with official misconduct - Merle Washington last May for allegedly soliciting money to remove a surcharge from a driving record, and Assunta Cuadra in October for helping a suspended driver get another license.
Maria Vijande, a longtime clerk at the North Bergen DMV, was arrested last August and accused of official misconduct and conspiracy; she allegedly issued a duplicate license to someone she knew was not the license-holder.
Sally Alexander, a state employee at the Rahway driver testing unit, was arrested in August and charged with official corruption. Police allege she knowingly passed unqualified applicants on the written driver's test. That same day, six other people were arrested in Rahway for allegedly conspiring with DMV workers to obtain licenses, permits, or other documents.
Julio Paredes and Marcus Harvey, both driving examiners in Newark, were suspended by the DMV after their December arrests. State police would not provide information about the arrests, but a source close to the investigation says Paredes and Harvey were fraudulently passing permits through the DMV road test, and Harvey allegedly received payment for his actions.
Corrupt workers are often caught after tips from fellow employees, say DMV officials.
"I think we're getting all the ones doing it blatantly," says Charles Rehberger, a Transportation Department investigator. "The ones under the radar, only doing a few at a time, need to make a mistake. ... I'm sure there's a lot going on that we don't know about."
Go down south
"Todos los Martes," says the Essex County dealer. "Every Tuesday."
He's steering reporters to a DMV 80 miles away in South Jersey, where one of his rivals regularly shows up on Tuesdays and deals with a particular worker behind the counter.
The day starts off slowly. But by 2 p.m., when the lines grow longer and the clerks get busy, a fraud crew is obviously at work. Out front, two men in their 20s shuffle papers while a third man, who is perhaps 50, watches. When they walk inside, the older man nods toward a fourth man wearing a wool hat, who sits near the bathroom. "Wool hat'' nods in response.
The first three sit down, but separately, as if they do not know each other.
But then there are gestures. And more nods. And hurried cellphone conversations.
After a few minutes, one young man, dressed in a black track suit, gets on Line 5. A couple minutes later, with a few other customers behind his colleague, "wool hat'' takes his place on Line 5.
Another member of the group then comes forward, a man wearing khaki pants and a brown sweater. As he joins Line 5, "track suit'' finishes at the counter and walks past "khaki pants.'' He whispers a couple of words in Spanish, "La morena'' - "the black woman.'' He is describing the worker behind the counter for Line 5.
The older man heads for Line 5 only when the others are back in their seats.
The DMV clerk has helped each of the men - even though only two of them have responded to names broadcast over a loud speaker, the way all other DMV customers are summoned.
What happens next makes it certain they are a team.
"Wool hat'' walks to the department store next door and sits on the bench outside.
The others join him, one by one.
"Track suit'' and "wool hat'' leave in a purple car. The others are joined by a man who has been waiting in a Toyota, and all walk into the department store.
Weeks later, when the Toyota's owner is found in Elizabeth and asked about getting an illegitimate license, he doesn't complain or protest. His first words in response are, "Who told you about me?"
A troubled agency
The Wayne DMV agency on Route 46 is a case study in corruption.
Two workers and seven customers were arrested last year and accused of being in on the fraud. Multiple sources say the fraud was much more widespread - and is still going on.
"Wayne was the bomb," a dealer says in explaining it was the place to go to get fraudulent paperwork done.
Disorder ruled the Wayne agency, according to repeated audits.
Eight consecutive audits, including the most recent, said clerks were careless in how they checked customer paperwork. One day last September, auditors found at least 116 instances in which clerks did not note what identification was presented for driver's licenses or duplicates.
They found 21 driver's license applications missing answers to required questions, or where employees had failed to follow up on "yes" answers to such questions as "Do you suffer from any mental, physical, or convulsive disorder?''
The confusion extended to the computer and stock rooms, where items with control numbers were stored haphazardly. Monthly stock reports were unfinished, which signaled auditors that they had only inaccurate tallies of stock items. Similar problems were noted in six prior audits.
Such conditions opened avenues for lawbreakers.
A man who worked for the Union County dealer says the Wayne DMV was one of his favorites. His crew bounced among various agencies, taking tests for clients or bringing them in for photos, but when one was too crowded, his boss would call ahead to another.
"When it was too busy in Rahway, we would go to Wayne," the man says.
A 24-year-old undocumented Ecuadorean who needed a license to drive from her home in Paterson to a job in Ringwood says she paid a broker $1,200. Her first step was getting a state ID card. She was told to go to a specific female employee on Route 46 in Wayne and signal her.
The code phrase was: "Hi, I was outside and I think you may have called my name."
Next, an employee took her name and photo, and provided the identification card. A few weeks later, her broker told her to go back to the same DMV at 4 p.m. that day. Her name was called and she went to the counter for another picture - this time for her driver's license.
The woman has never taken a written exam or road test.
'Victimless' crime
Driver's license fraud was long regarded as a relatively minor crime by citizens as well as most public officials, the purview of teens who wanted to drink a few years early. Such complacency ended Sept. 11.
But long before the Twin Towers fell, Rehberger, the Transportation Department investigator, realized the potential for license fraud to turn deadly.
Try to tell him about the broker who says he's only helping immigrants who want to work, or the DMV employee who says, hey, it's not murder, and Rehberger tells the story of Manuel Cruz.
Cruz had received his commercial driving license with the help of a Jersey City DMV worker who made phony computer entries.
Cruz spoke only Portuguese. "But Mr. Cruz," Rehberger explains, "passed a 40-question English test in three minutes. If you sat down, you couldn't read the questions that fast."
In 1993, the Jersey City worker was arrested in a police sweep that also nabbed 20 other DMV employees.
A year later, Cruz got into his truck after drinking and, driving too fast, caused an accident that killed two teenagers in Somerset County.
"I look at it, two kids are dead because of this, two kids paid with their lives," Rehberger says. "I look at it, too, as I'm somebody that would wait in line to get his car inspected, that would wait in line to renew his driver's license. These people are just cutting the line and in some cases [taking] no tests or anything. They're thumbing their nose at the whole system.
"I look at it as a major problem, some people don't realize it," he says. "Suppose it's the next person to fly a plane into another government building, you know? You don't know what these people are going to do with these licenses."
Staff Writers Benjamin Lesser and Clint Riley contributed to this report.
Staff Writer Jean Rimbach's e-mail address is rimbach @ northjersey .com. Staff Writer Monsy Alvarado's e-mail address is alvarado@northjersey.com
While reading this article, my thoughts crossed over to the Arthur Andersen/Enron debacle. Sad to say, but I couldn't find much difference in their actions, except for the fact that David Duncan was said to have been earning close to $1 million per year as lead Andersen auditor. Of course, that means a large number of Andersen partners and staffers were 'wetting their beaks' while Andersen was giving Enron a clean bill of health on their financial statements. The silence from other Andersen employees/CPAs in this debacle is thunderous. And Duncan showed great 'leadership' in being the first to cut a deal for himself with the Feds. Good thing he wasn't a platoon leader in Nam, his sorry a$$ would've been fragged.
Then I read an article about the upcoming litigation, with Duncan's lawyer whining that his client's career as an accountant is over. Obviously, this esteemed member of the bar got his degree from the University of Duhhhhh!
I am a firm believer of the separation between church and state. However, I fear for this country's future if we do not return to our Judeo-Christian values. Thanks to Bill Clinton, Newt Gingrich, and many others, we no longer ask if something is right/wrong, we only care about if something is legal/illegal.
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