Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. announced the arrest on Tuesday of more than 30 suspects in a ring that prosecutors allege counterfeited and sold fraudulent City government parking placards, which were used chiefly in Lower Manhattan.
According to a summary from the City’s Department of Investigation (DOI), the case begin in March of this year, “after DOI investigators began observing what appeared to be an increase in the use of fraudulent parking placards in and around Lower Manhattan.” Several of these instances appear to have taken place directly outside of DOI’s headquarters, on Maiden Lane.
The inquiry soon documented that, “the selling of parking placards is a very profitable business with the price for the placards on the black market ranging from $500 to $2600.” The investigation began to yield results last Friday, when one suspect was arrested after selling an undercover agent, “a single fraudulent parking placard for $1200.”
The case also amassed evidence of galling abuses that strain credulity, including the use of placards to identify as belonging to government employees vehicles that included multiple BMWs and Range Rovers, as well as one Mercedes Benz and one Rolls Royce.
But no scam is perfect, and the DOI’s probe found that some of the suspects were ticketed by Police Department traffic agents, despite displaying in their windshields seemingly authentic credentials allowing them to park in spaces that would otherwise be illegal.
In a move that appears brazen even by the standards of New York criminality, three of these suspects are alleged to have sent copies of their counterfeit placards to the City’s Department of Finance (which adjudicates parking tickets), along with written explanations that the violations were issued in error, and that the fines should thus be waived.
A 2008 study by the City’s Department of Transportation (DOT), which examined placard use in Lower Manhattan, found that one in ten of these credentials was either expired, in some way misappropriated or outright forged. The same study documented that more than 3,000 vehicles displaying law enforcement placards park at Lower Manhattan curbs each day, absorbing approximately one-fourth of all street-parking capacity.
But while parking in Lower Manhattan is generally difficult, within Battery Park City, it borders on the impossible. The neighborhood is, in statistical terms, the most parking-deprived community in the five boroughs of New York City. With a residential population of more than 13,000 (and another 10,000 reporting here for work each day), it has just 201 parking spaces available to the public, of which 58 are metered and 143 are unregulated, except by alternate-side parking rules. (These figures come from the same DOT, issued in 2008, the last year for which detailed numbers are available.) While there is ample curb space within the community’s 92 acres (enough for more than 1,600 parking spaces), 59 percent of it falls within zones that are signed “no standing” (785 spaces) and “no parking” (581 spaces). Much of the rest is set aside for commercial vehicles, buses, and vehicles displaying government placards.
Making matters worse, as many as half of these spaces that remain are commandeered each day by police officers and other government officials displaying credentials that effectively make them immune from parking tickets. This problem became worse in 2014 when the New York Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Strike Force (an arm of the federal Drug Enforcement Administration) rented 56,000 square feet of office space at Brookfield Place. This unit brings more than 250 law enforcement personnel from a dozen-plus agencies (including the NYPD, the FBI, the DEA, Customs, United States Secret Service, the New York State Police, the New York City Department of Correction, and the New York State Division of Parole) to Battery Park City each day. Because the cars they use for undercover work need to be concealed, these are stored in 130 garage spaces within 250 Vesey Street. That means, however, that the personal vehicles these officers and agents take to and from work are almost invariably parked on the streets nearby.
This subject came up at the September meeting of the Battery Park City Committee of Community Board 1, where Luis Sanchez, the DOT’s borough commissioner for Lower Manhattan, was asked about the vast stretch of River Terrace (between Chambers and Vesey Streets), where there is no legal parking whatsoever on the west side of the street, which adjoins Rockefeller Park.
“In terms of River Terrace, the principal regulation is along the west side, where there’s no standing any time,” explained Mr. Sanchez. “That is there because it’s a tight roadway, and River Terrace cannot safely accommodate two way traffic and still have two parking lanes. So it’s there for safety reasons.”
Several members of the Battery Park City Committee pointed out that the curb on the west side of River Terrace is always blocked with cars (albeit, those that parked illegally, but with impunity, because of placards) regardless of this regulation. They also noted that such a policy effectively creates a free parking lot law enforcement personnel with placards. Mr. Sanchez answered, “I know placards illegally park there. But because they illegally park there doesn’t mean I’m going to change the regulation, because then I’d be putting in a substandard design.”
Mr. Sanchez added, “the ‘no standing’ regulation is the strictest one we have. Whether you have a placard or not, you should not be there. Placards are allowed in no parking zones, in commercial zones, but not in no standing zones. They should not be there. And if they are, they should be ticketed by somebody.”
When Battery Park City Committee chair Tammy Meltzer pointedly asked, “so you’re asking us to have the police police the police?” Mr. Sanchez shrugged and said nothing further.