The Connecticut Department of Motor Vehicles has fired a longtime employee nearly five years after investigators found he used his position to garner steep discounts on cars he bought from a towing company, according to a termination letter obtained last week.
The Connecticut Mirror and ProPublica reported in March on the accusations against Dominik Stefanski and the DMV’s failure to take action against him or the towing company. The story was part of a larger series about how Connecticut’s towing laws have come to favor tow truck companies over vehicle owners and how the DMV’s lack of oversight has allowed abuses in the system. The DMV investigated Stefanski for over a year beginning in 2020 but didn’t fire him until early November, months after the news organizations’ story.
According to the 2020-21 DMV investigation, when employees of D&L Auto Body & Towing in Berlin, Connecticut, went to the main DMV office in nearby Wethersfield, they would make eye contact with Stefanski, who would then allow them to cut the slow-moving DMV lines. In exchange for this favor, the report said, D&L employees would allow Stefanski to select vehicles that had been towed by the company weeks or months before. D&L would then undervalue the cars on DMV forms, investigators said, allowing Stefanski to buy them cheaply and resell them for a profit.
In total, DMV investigators found that from 2015 to 2019, D&L sold 15 vehicles to an investment firm owned by Stefanski, who had worked for the agency since 1999 and was then a document examiner in the DMV’s main office. In one case, Stefanski bought a Cadillac for $1,000 and sold it for $17,500. The car was eventually sold by another company for $23,250.
In 2020, DMV investigators recommended that