It's the Brian Laird Show on WNYC.

Welcome back, everybody.

I'm Kusha Navadar filling in for Brian today.

So if you have a car that's ever been towed in the city,

odds are you've interacted with a little-known black market industry, illegal towing.

Unauthorized tow truck companies have been operating in the city for decades, and the scam basically looks like this.

Unlicensed tow truck drivers will rush to the scene of a crash, haul your car to their repair shop, inflate the cost of the damages, and defraud insurance companies to win big payouts.

And by big, I mean like tens of thousands of dollars per vehicle sometimes.

But insurance companies are by no means the only victims of these scams.

First off, there's a street safety issue.

Competing tow truckers essentially race each other to be the first on the scene of a crash,

recklessly speeding through residential neighborhoods on the way.

A man died a couple of years after being swiped by one of these trucks zipping through a quiet intersection in Queens.

There's also been a culture of violence within the industry. Last week, the owner of a South

Bronx auto body shop was sentenced to 19 years in prison for killing the owner of a rival shop

over a turf dispute. And yet, the city has dialed back enforcement in recent years,

allowing the number of unlicensed tow trucks to skyrocket. At this point, there are actually

now more illegal tow trucks operating in the city than legal ones. Liam Quigley is a reporter

at Gothamist, WNYC, and he recently published a huge investigation into the illegal towing industry and why the city has had so much trouble cracking down on it. Liam, welcome to the show. Hey, how are you? Good. So nice to have you here. I'm really excited to talk about this. You've been covering this solicit industry for years, and you just published this big story, giving a detailed

layout of the landscape and of this industry. And as I was reading it, I was wondering why now?

Like what information came out that makes this story so timely, given that it's been an issue for decades?

This was really something that I figured out in the past few months drilling into the data of all these speed and red light cameras that are all over the city and kind of saying, okay, is there a way we can see, you know, are they picking up tow trucks?

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