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On the ladder of international organized crime, drug trafficking ranks number one. In second place, and sneaking up fast, is auto theft. In the US alone, it is estimated that $6 billion is lost each year to vehicle theft. A substantial percentage of the stolen automobiles last touch American soil as they are loaded onto massive seagoing vessels and shipped to foreign ports.
High priced vehicles that are stolen off of the streets are often buried deep within shipping containers, carefully concealed under layers of other goods that disguise the true nature of the shipment. Five hundred cases of tomato soup can deeply bury a Lexus and boxes and boxes of household goods can conceal the true booty of the shipment, a costly Harley Davidson.
When the $50,000 Lexus arrives in China, the vehicle will fetch $180,000. When the $20,000 Harley Davidson arrives in Denmark, it will triple in value, bringing the seller $60,000.
The more extensive the problem of organized crime in a foreign country, the easier it is to bring in stolen vehicles. The routes established for drugs and arms trade can easily be adapted to handle other commodities. When it comes to money and profit, organized crime knows no boundaries. Heroin, weapons, cars…they’re all easily adaptable to the same operations.
While an estimated 300,000 vehicles are stolen annually in the US, car theft is a global dilemma. In Germany, for instance, insurance company executives estimate that 75 percent of all reported auto thefts are fraudulent, often occurring when the vehicle owner finds himself in over his head on the payments. The saddled owner will cut a deal with a band of thieves, and shortly thereafter, the car will come up missing. The report is made to the insurance company, they pay off and everyone walks away happy, except, of course, the insurer.
Poland, too, enjoys an influx of stolen vehicles, especially the 4-wheel drive models. In a recent case, two Chicago police officers saw a Jeep being driven into a 40foot shipping container parked on a city street. Further investigation revealed an organized criminal network responsible for shipping 84 stolen automobiles with a value of $3 million to Eastern Europe. The ring included Polish customs agents, stationed in Poland, who were bribed to let the cars into the country. Fake bills of sale would significantly lower the import taxes and the profits were high. At least 17 arrests were made and one criminal ring has been destroyed but it hardly made a dent in the massive overall problem.
Many losses are suffered by auto rental and leasing companies because they are considered an easy target by criminals. With a wallet full of fake identification and a credit card, one can walk into an airport rental car location and drive out with a new $50,000 automobile within a few short minutes. And while the preliminary paper work is a little bit more extensive for a lease, the results are the same. The high priced automobile is then driven straight into a shipping container and the profit journey begins. Cars stolen on the East coast flow into Europe, cars from the west coast reach destinations in the Far East or Mexico. Vehicles shipped from southern ports head to Central or South American countries.
Only three countries currently have cooperative treaties with the US that allow our representatives to reclaim the stolen vehicles once they have reached foreign soil. Those three countries are Mexico, Belize and the Dominican Republic. A treaty with Poland is in the final stages of negotiation and many other countries are in the very early stages of negotiation. The entire process of negotiating a treaty between two nations and then implementing it will usually take at least five years, sometimes much longer.
Because the problem of global auto theft has reached such a magnitude, the US has requested assistance from the United Nations. An initial meeting late last year in Warsaw resulted innumerous recommendations aimed at controlling the problem. These included using Interpol’s stolen vehicle database for the exchange of information, the development of standardized VINs and the movement toward international databases that are compatible with one another. Additionally, the UN has begun to develop training programs to assist the Eastern Europeans who lack the training and the resources to tackle organized crime.
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