In a move that took prosecutors by surprise, a tow truck
operator who has spent three years in jail awaiting trial pleaded
no contest to 99 felonies and one misdemeanor.
In a move that took prosecutors by surprise, a tow truck operator who has spent three years in jail awaiting trial pleaded no contest to 99 felonies and one misdemeanor.
Vincent Cardinalli, a 67-year-old San Benito resident, pleaded no contest to a litany of embezzlement, perjury, forgery and other charges the Santa Clara County District Attorney’s Office brought against him after uncovering a tow and sue scam.
Cardinalli, his two children and a son-in-law used to parlay their towing and collections businesses into a gold mine, according to court documents. He will likely serve 14 years in prison, said prosecutor Victor Chen, who just took over the massive case this week. Chen credited former prosecutor Dale Lohman and Greg Adler – an attorney for an auto-salvage company, Copart, Inc., that was a target of the tow operators’ scam – with the work leading up to the plea.
Without Lohman and Adler, “(Cardinalli) would clearly still be victimizing people,” Chen said. “Had Cardinalli not messed with Copart, he could have gone on forever. This would never have come to light.”
According to prosecutors, the tow truck operators took advantage of a wide range of vehicle owners, from individual victims who spoke little English to large companies such as Copart. Targeting Copart is where they slipped up, Chen said.
“It was obvious to me that I had happened upon a long-running scam of the court system and thousands of innocent people, but nobody was doing anything about it,” Adler said in an e-mail. “It would have been easy to look the other way and let it be someone else’s problem, but I knew Greer and Cardinalli would have kept going and more people would have been hurt. What they were doing was wrong, so I felt obligated to speak up. Fortunately, Dale Lohman listened.”
Chen met with Cardinalli’s defense attorney Friday morning for a readiness hearing prior to his trial, which was scheduled to take place Aug. 16 and expected to last several months. At previous hearings, “every offer he floated to us was ridiculous,” Chen said Friday. “We certainly didn’t expect him to plead today.”
Tammy Miller-Holmgren, an attorney assigned to be Cardinalli’s lawyer through the county’s Independent Defender’s Office, was not immediately available for comment.
According to prosecutors, the family’s scam involved hundreds of fraudulent lawsuits and spanned almost a decade, targeting unwitting motorists in San Benito and Santa Clara counties. Cardinalli and his son, Paul Greer, brought an avalanche of lawsuits against unwitting motorists for towing, storage and lien sale fees on vehicles the motorists never owned, or sold years before the cars were towed, according to court documents. When defendants tried to fight back, father and son often zeroed in on technicalities and advanced frivolous arguments in small claims court, according to witnesses testimony at the preliminary hearing. In addition, the defendants often never knew they were being sued. With the help of process server Jeffrey Horan, who falsified proofs of service for use by the tow truck operators in court, the family misled judges into thinking the people they sued had been notified of the lawsuits against them when they had not, Lohman said. Horan pleaded no contest in June 2008 to conspiracy and six counts of perjury for his role in the scheme.
The Dispatch first reported on the family’s unorthodox business dealings in April 2006. Cardinalli and Greer were arrested in June 2007.
Given his charges, Cardinalli faced a maximum prison sentence of 186 years, prosecutors said. But even if convicted on all counts, “that’s just a number on a piece of paper and he would not have served that,” Chen explained.
Though Cardinalli will have to pay restitution, “I haven’t even started to look at that number because I know there are a lot of victims I still have to reach out to,” Chen said.
From victims who had been sued by Cardinalli but had not yet forked over any money, to “those who woke up on Christmas morning and basically had their whole bank account wiped out,” Chen said he would contact as many victims as possible.
“It was wrong on so many different levels,” he said. “I think for most of these people, just knowing that they’ve been vindicated will be satisfaction in itself.”
Cardinalli’s no contest plea is basically the same as a guilty plea in the context of the criminal courts, Chen said.
Cardinalli will next appear in court Aug. 16 in Department 32 of the Hall of Justice in San Jose, at which time attorneys will receive a report and sentencing recommendation from the county’s probation department. Chen said he expects a sentencing hearing to be scheduled later this year.
In May, Greer, 33, pleaded no contest to 59 felony counts, according to prosecutors. His charges included 26 counts of attempted grand theft, 14 counts of perjury, 13 counts of subornation of perjury, three counts of embezzlement and one count each of conspiracy to obstruct justice, presentation of false evidence and burglary. Greer will receive eight years in prison, Lohman said earlier this year.
Cardinalli’s daughter, Rosemary Ball, 35, also pleaded no contest to one count of conspiracy to obstruct justice, one count of attempted grand theft and one count of perjury, according to the District Attorney’s office. Her husband, Michael Ball, 39, pleaded no contest to one felony count of attempted grand theft. They will be sentenced to between four and six months of county jail and 150 days of electronic monitoring.
Though it’s likely Cardinalli will get out of prison while in his mid-70s, Chen said the tow-truck operator will be “under a microscope,” making it “next to impossible for Cardinalli to pull off this kind of scheme again.” Cardinalli also appeared to be in poor health and was confined to a wheelchair when attending his lengthy preliminary hearing last year.
“Cardinalli got away with ripping people off for this long because he was operating in the shadows,” Chen said. “Now that he and his family have been outed, their schemes aren’t going to work anymore.”
