American Dream

Aug. 19–25, 2005
Driver’s Education
by Dave Jamieson

Quotes:

How seriously did Richard Lafontant take local law when it came to stealing cars? He once walked out of a court hearing for auto-theft charges and hopped into a stolen minivan.

The Maryland couple thought they’d found a steal. The Honda Odyssey minivan they’d seen advertised in the Baltimore Sun classifieds was in fantastic shape. It was just 3 years old, fully loaded by soccer-mom standards, with relatively low mileage and hardly a scratch on it. The Blue Book would have valued the family ride at around $20,000, but the guy was asking only $12,500. And the price was negotiable, to boot.

The deal seemed so good that the couple probably would have been more suspicious if the seller hadn’t been so charming. He called himself Peter James, and he did them the courtesy of bringing the van out for a test drive near the Fort McHenry Tunnel in Baltimore. “He was chitchatting for a half-hour while we looked at it,” recalls the husband, who asked that he and his wife not be named. “He was very nice, very professional.” James seemed harmless enough, an affable, graying businessman in his 60s. He wore a nice suit. He said he’d just come from a game at Camden Yards, where his wife worked with the Orioles’ corporate office as a consultant. For any question the couple asked about the van, he had a quick answer.

The van performed perfectly well on the test drive, but James tried to sweeten the deal anyway: If the couple would pay him in cash, as his accountant recommended, James would be willing to knock the price down to $10,500.

They said they’d take it.

The wife worked in a bank, and she knew to be careful when handing over a pile of cash to a stranger. She had asked to see James’ license, which he produced for her, and she even had him sign his name on a piece of paper so she could make sure it was a match.

On May 9, 2004, her husband took a few thousand dollars out of his account and pooled the remainder of the 10 grand from his brother and father. At his Baltimore County home, he handed James the money in exchange for a District of Columbia auto title, a notarized bill of sale, and a fresh set of keys to the van. Both parties satisfied, the husband offered to give James a lift to the nearby Bennigan’s, where James said he was meeting his family.

But once her husband and James were on the road, the wife noticed something amiss with the title. When she held it up to the light, she saw that a name appeared to be whited out. On top of the white patch was the name Peter James.

She called her husband on his cell phone to tell him it was a scam, to tell him not to let James out of his sight. But her husband had left his phone at home and never got the message. Within minutes, Peter James was gone, and so was their $10,500. When they called the police, the cops told them what they had suspected: that the van had been stolen. It had been reported missing a week earlier, in Northwest Washington.

Peter James wasn’t who he claimed to be. In reality, he was Manuel Lopez, a then-64-year-old legitimate-businessman-turned-con-man from the District, who had probably met up with the Baltimore County couple only because they sounded Indian. Lopez had been reselling stolen cars to non-natives for months.

But as good a salesman as he was, Lopez merely served as someone else’s lackey. He was one of several pawns used in a sophisticated car-theft scheme allegedly orchestrated by Richard Lafontant, a 36-year-old D.C. native who’s now being held in jail in Maryland.

Through a scam that was part larceny, part document fraud, and part play-acting, Lafontant allegedly managed to lift roughly $300,000 worth of late-model sedans, SUVs, and minivans off Washington-area streets and resell them to unsuspecting auto shoppers. The scam bore many touches of criminal innovation, perhaps the most impressive of which was Lafontant’s apparent ability to pluck vehicles off the street without marring their windows or doors. The cars he allegedly stole showed none of the typical signs of auto theft, and they were in perfectly good condition for resale.

Lafontant was arrested at least three times on auto-theft-related charges over the course of two years, and each time, either the charges were dropped or he was given a suspended jail sentence and set free. The D.C.-area courts treated Lafontant’s transgressions as if they were isolated thefts rather than part of a widespread and lucrative scheme that stretched from western Virginia to Baltimore. In the end, he allegedly bilkedmostly working-class families—almost all of them born outside the United States—out of over $120,000 in cash.

“There were three or four levels of fiction to go through,” says Sean Bryson, a former Arlington County detective who worked the case. And yet for all its technical savvy and con artistry, Lafontant’s scheme ultimately relied on a basic fact of life in ethnically diverse Washington: that many immigrants are willing to pay for their necessities—even those as expensive as cars—with cash.

Around D.C. these days, car theft is handled a lot like public drunkenness. Cops haul the perp in, book him, and then have no choice but to set him loose. Because of the sheer volume of cases, charges are more likely dropped or reduced than pursued with zeal.

Lafontant had spread his scam across such a wide swath that no single county felt particularly stung. Arlington and Maryland’s Montgomery County each saw a handful of cases, nothing that amounted to an epidemic or warranted any serious resources. Still, it was the kind of phenomenon that would excite any engaged cop who was detailed to the often-mundane world of auto theft.

By November 2003, cops in auto units around the region had started working together in an informal Lafontant task force. The group included officers from D.C., Arlington, Montgomery County, the Virginia DMV, and the FBI. They got together whenever they could to brainstorm.

To see if Lafontant had dropped out of the car-theft game, members of the task force decided to tail him. Bryson and his partner, Detective Wayne Vincent, started following him on May 28, 2004, outside the Prince George’s County Courthouse in Upper Marlboro, Md., according to court documents. Lafontant had shown up for sentencing on grand-theft charges. He had received what by now was something of a trademark sentence—10 years, all suspended, as in Virginia—and walked out of the courthouse a free man. He was now on probation in three different jurisdictions, each with its own life-altering prison term hanging over his head if he slipped up. But Lafontant had no plans to go straight. When Bryson and Vincent followed him out of Upper Marlboro, he was driving a stolen gold Mazda minivan with stolen D.C. tags.

The following morning, the surveillance team followed Lafontant as he drove the stolen minivan from his Oxon Hill, Md., apartment into the District. Just before 10 a.m., he picked someone up at a boarding house in Northwest and headed north toward Maryland. It was the guy from the sketch—Lopez. He hopped into the van with some papers and a legal pad. The pair then took the van through a car wash.

Of 22 victims allegedly defrauded by Lafontant and his cohorts, 21 of them appear to have been born outside the United States.

When he appeared in federal court in Alexandria last September, Lopez made it clear to the gallery that he’d already begun his penance. His hands trembled when he rose to speak to the judge on his own behalf, and the white Styrofoam cup of water he raised to his lips shook as if it were going to spill over onto the podium. He said that he was taking nitroglycerin for a heart condition, in addition to other medications, and that he’d been attacked by other inmates twice since he’d been jailed. Clearly out of his element, he seemed vaguely to hope that a judge might have mercy on an old man. When it came to mitigating his crimes, he merely offered the fact the he possessed a bachelor’s degree. “I’m sorry,” he said weakly, “because I don’t want to be here.”

Currently held in jail in Prince George’s County, Lafontant has bided his time and watched as prosecutors with Anne Arundel, Prince George’s, and the federal government have wrangled over his custody for the last year. When he’s through with Maryland, Lafontant will have to finish his business with the feds in Alexandria, where he was charged with conspiracy last year.

As for the compensation of his alleged victims, they’ve received either a small percentage of what they originally paid or nothing at all. And with the alleged fraudsters behind bars and penniless, the victims aren’t expecting to see any money soon. “I haven’t gotten anything back yet,” says Tavafi of her $4,000. “It’s been almost two years. And that was big money to me.” CP

Copyright © 2005 Washington Free Weekly Inc.