More than he bargained for

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: Today is Thursday, April 17th.

Thank you for listening to WORLD Radio!

Good morning. I’m Myrna Brown.

LINDSAY MAST, HOST: And I’m Lindsay Mast.

Coming next on The World and Everything in It: stealing cars.

Car thefts in the US have topped one million per year. That’s one car stolen every 37 seconds. Losses total around $8 billion annually, but most cases go unsolved.

BROWN: Why? Police departments often have neither the time nor resources to crack the sophisticated theft rings behind them.

MAST: But a determined officer in a sleepy southern town takes the case up and uncovers a criminal network stretching up the East Coast. WORLD Associate Correspondent Elizabeth Shenk has the story.

ELIZABETH SHENK: On a crisp December morning, Lillington, North Carolina woke up to squealing tires, burnt rubber, and empty parking spots where expensive cars and trucks sat minutes before.

It was big news on the local TV station, WRAL.

WRAL REPORTER CHELSEA DONAVAN: This is the exact brick that one brazen thief used to bust through this door around 4:45 this morning before running down the hall and prying open a key box. Around 4:15 a UHAUL pulls up to the Hiester Chrysler Dodge Ram Jeep and several people in hoodies run out.

A surveillance camera at the dealership recorded more than 15 shadows weaving between Chargers, Challengers, and TRX trucks.

They were listening for keyfob beeps. As soon as they found a match, the thieves slid behind the wheel.

DONOVAN: High end, high horsepower cars worth $631,000 taken in a matter of minutes.

The ring leaders pre-selected the vehicles online and scouted out the parking lot at least a week in advance.

STEPHEN GARDNER: They know what they're looking for when they get there.

That’s Detective Sergeant Stephen Gardner.

GARDNER: They even have inventory control numbers from CarGurus. They know what the stock or lot number is for the car.

Gardner specializes in everything from arson to car theft. But Lillington is home to only about 5,000 people. The town had never seen a case this big.

Gardner said the planning happened on underground, end-to-end encrypted chat sites like Telegram—sites that won’t cooperate with law enforcement. The thieves nabbed a total of 12 vehicles.

GARDNER: That was the biggest rip that they got in all of their days of thievery.

By 10 p.m. that night, Gardner and his lieutenant, Soonaoso Letuli, had tracked two of the cars to a suburb of Charlotte, about three hours away. They didn’t realize they had pulled on a thread of a far-reaching web—one that only God could help untangle.

GARDNER: We had no idea this stuff was going on … and that’s on us because we should be on the forefront of this stuff. We should be sharing the information.

Unlike police departments, thieves do share information. Their chat sites have links for YouTube tutorials on disabling tracking devices, cloning vehicle identification numbers, and using keyfob reprogrammers. They post videos of themselves driving away from the troopers who pull them over.

GARDNER: Some agencies have a “No Chase Policy,” so they literally just stand there and watch ‘em drive away.

But even stolen cars need fuel. That’s how Gardner had two thieves in custody just days after the heist. The morning of the robbery, a tip led Gardner to a gas station’s camera footage.

GARDNER: You could see he’s putting gas in multiple cars, just like a NASCAR pit crew.

The thief’s credit card was caught on camera. That’s all the financial investigators working with Gardner needed. Hours later, Gardner arrested and interviewed the thief. That first interview snowballed into an avalanche.

 GARDNER: I remember his exact words were… “Look, I'm not built for prison. I'll tell you whatever you wanna know.” Something we found out with these auto theft crews is there’s not a lot of loyalty among them.

They ratted each other out until 13 were apprehended, including the mastermind. Gardner networked with hundreds of police departments, Homeland Security, even the FBI. They uncovered a total of 7 crime rings that spanned from New York to Florida. They were masters in every kind of fraud.

The investigation started slowly. Bigger police departments were hesitant to work with the small-town cops. But Gardner and Letuli kept at it. They drove up to people on the street at all hours of the night and interviewed them. Once they almost got into a shootout.

GARDNER: We threw caution to the wind. And if it wouldn't have been for God's protection out there, who knows what could have happened.

It took 6 months to track down the thieves and retrieve 8 of the stolen cars. In that time, Gardner also identified 100 other cars stolen from up and down the East Coast.

GARDNER: We were able to uncover, just in our investigation, around four and a half million dollars in stolen cars.

Most car thefts never get solved. What made Lillington different?

GARDNER: God put this thing together from day one. It was quick, it was fast, it was super aggressive. And if it wouldn't have been for our chief, and without his guidance and without him saying, “Go forth and do the Lord's work,” if it wasn't for him, we would've never figured this thing out.

Although Gardner had worked a lot of different cases in his 21 years with the department, he’d never had one quite like this.

GARDNER: Before this case, I knew nothing about financial crimes.

That was more than three years ago. Now, he’s an expert.

GARDNER: I’m still getting phone calls…people are like … “We just had a few cars stolen the exact same way” … So the information has gotta be blasted out there so everybody knows it.

Gardner trains other law enforcement agencies, including the Secret Service and the FBI. And he’s been named one of the top three financial crimes investigators in the world.

Despite the accolades, Gardner doesn’t take credit for his success breaking up that first car theft ring.

GARDNER: If God wouldn’t have aligned all these pieces up, it would’ve never been solved. A hundred percent. A hundred percent. I believe God’s in every single thing we do.

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Elizabeth Shenk in Lillington, North Carolina.

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