stolen car from 1969 recovered

[IH2LOSE]

Well allthought this may not seam like the correct forum for this post I think it may be very informative and enlighten anybody with a collector car.

There is an active post over on the NCRS board
http://www.ncrs.org/forum/tech.cgi/noframes/read/211848

with a link to the news story . I really have to find out the entire story of this stolen car. I may be an alarmist but as I shaired my thoughts there

"Well my first thought is GREAT a stolen car re-united with its owner,and the theif is left with nothing and hopefully arrested.

But after thinking about it,I am now thinking I would love to here the entire story.Like is the car completely restored with a current registration or a california title, In new york we did not have titles untill 1970 or 1971. So my question is
What if the car was stolen,insurance company paid for it,then the car got resold legally with the sticker for a recovered auto. Some body pulls the sticker off and applies for a registraion or title from the vin still on the car and gets it. Now he re-sells it to an honest guy who now pays he correct value for a used vette ,car passes thru hand over the next 36 years or so and ends up in this container with the owner thinking its a legit car? I mean this could be a story on any one of our cars with the exception of the guys who purchased there cars brand new and have kept them all this time.
Or what if some one had a legit car with a rusted frame and purchased this frame used from a junk yard,or there picking up the vin from the motor he may have purchased used thru a dealer and stuck it under or in the the car and this is what there picking up as a stolen car.
I have to say I do not tthink theft is OK in anyway, I would just like to better under stand the entire story and hope someone post the follow up to this guy getting his car back."


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My thoughts are this could be any one of our cars being seazed as very few of use know the true history back to day one.
My hope are that it looks the same way it did when it was stolen some 36 years ago because some one stashed it away in a barn with the intent to defraud some one.But if it has a current registration or title,this is a scary revelation for the collector car owners
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[motorman]

when you look a used car that you do not know the background have the police run a vin # check before you buy to see if it was stolen and if the insurance paid for the car is owned by the insurance company

 

[IH2LOSE]

when you look a used car that you do not know the background have the police run a vin # check before you buy to see if it was stolen and if the insurance paid for the car is owned by the insurance company

I have done that on all of my purchases on older collector cars,But as far as I know the data base a normal police man has axcess to only dates back 7 or 15 years Certainly not 36 years,

 

[henny496]

stolen car

Hello Larry
I hope all is well.
I too wonder about this story and why would it not of shown up when license renewal came or even insurance payments.
The car may of been scrapped by now, so someone is getting hosed. Perhaps the newly found owner would pay for resto fees, if any
Like to know more
Tom

 

[00fxd]

This is something I think about too. Checking with the Police is not fool proof. Their records are not national or international, only reigonal. I did hear of a situation where a Corvette and it's past were re-united after many years [decades?]. The owner had been paid out many years before and then the car was found. Apparantly the insurance had a right to reclaim the car. The current owner had owned the car for several years and had spent a substantial amount of money refurbishing it. He of course spent several days sh!##ing himself. To their credit, when the dust settled, the insurance co agreed to let it go due the time involved.

 

[WayneC]

I expect that such cars may get caught when an unsuspecting owner goes to a new state (or changes insurance companies) and they inspect the car thoroughly and find the engine number doesn't jive with the frame number and/or the body number, and the probable correct number turns up stolen. The current owner will lose the car, which as 00fxd said, probably now belongs to the insurance company that paid off the owner's claim back when it was stolen. If the current owner is really lucky, and if he can reasonably claim ignorance of having purchased stolen property, the insurance company may allow him to take title in return for repaying that claim money, assuming he thinks the car is worth the money.

 

[paul67]

US Customs did a search on my 1967 when I brought it into Canada from PA. So there must be some kind of database out there for older cars.

 

[IH2LOSE]

So today is the day the car is supposed to be re-united with its owner,

Has anybody heard an update?

This is all I have found
http://www.heraldsun.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5478,17848875%255E1702,00.html

I am trying to find out if the car was legally registered in any state since it was stolen

 

[Viet Nam Vett]

So today is the day the car is supposed to be re-united with its owner,

Has anybody heard an update?

This is all I have found
http://www.heraldsun.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5478,17848875%255E1702,00.html

I am trying to find out if the car was legally registered in any state since it was stolen

CNN just had a blip about the car 20 min ago. They said the owner will get to see it today..........

 

[jreeves]

A Stolen Love Is Found, 37 Years Down the Road

January 17, 2006
A Stolen Love Is Found, 37 Years Down the Road
By MICHAEL WILSON
Alan Poster had been going through a rough time that winter. A Brooklyn native and a 26-year-old guitar salesman, he had just divorced and moved from Queens to a 21st Street studio in Chelsea. He bought himself a flashy treat that he could barely afford but could not resist: a blue Corvette.

He had owned it for only two or three months when it was stolen from a parking garage on 23rd Street. It was Jan. 22, 1969.

Years passed, and there were other cars, but he never forgot that 1968 Corvette. "Probably the only car I've ever really loved," Mr. Poster, now 63, said in an interview last week. "That car and my new life started together."

The new life took him to California.

Turns out, the car followed.

Almost 37 years after the Corvette was stolen, Mr. Poster got a call last month that it had been recovered, just days before it was supposed to be shipped to a buyer in Sweden. It was flagged during a routine Customs Service check of the vehicle identification number, sending two New York City detectives on a long-shot search through thousands of crime reports to connect the car to its first owner.

"We can call this a miracle," Mr. Poster said. "I stand in the shower going, 'Why me?' Has anything like this ever happened to you?"

The car is to be returned to Mr. Poster today, at a news conference in Carson, Calif. It is silver now, with a red interior, and the engine was replaced at some point. Inexplicably, it has no transmission. "Up until this moment, I thought it was chopped up and shipped away," Mr. Poster said. "It's in great shape, I understand." He said he does not plan to drive it much. "I am going to be a collector of a Corvette."

The 1968 Corvette represented a breakthrough for Chevrolet, created in the so-called Mako Shark design and ushering in the third generation of Corvettes. There were 18,630 Corvette convertibles made that year.

One of those convertibles, painted International Blue, rolled out of the factory and to a dealer in Great Neck on Long Island on July 16, 1968. Mr. Poster paid $6,000 for the car a few months later, he said.

"I didn't have a lot of money," he said. "I went out on a limb to get this thing. It was an egocentric muscle car that just came out. Back then, Corvette was hot as heck. That was an absolute fantasy of mine."

A 1968 Corvette in mint condition would be worth anywhere from $20,000 to $60,000 now, depending on the type of engine, according to Classic Corvettes and Convertibles in Tarpon Springs, Fla. Most of the 32 1968 Corvettes listed for sale yesterday on the Hemmings Motor News Web site were in that range, with some priced at more than $100,000.

He liked, in no particular order, to drive fast with the top down and impress girls. "I was dating back then," he said. "I used to drive up the West Side Highway to Jersey. Trips like that. For the little time I had it, it was fun."

On the night before the Corvette was stolen, Mr. Poster foiled an attempt to steal it from a curbside parking spot on the Upper West Side, he said. He was picking up a date and saw the car pulling away, but managed to pull the man out. "I let him go," he said, and he did not report the incident. The next night, a garage attendant went to get the Corvette, but returned and said it was gone. Mr. Poster did not have insurance against theft because he could not afford it, he said. He went years without owning another car.

"It was a wake-up call," he said. "It made me believe you can't fall in love with things. It was kind of an interesting awakening."

The police report, dated Jan. 22, 1969, offered little hope that Mr. Poster was ever going to see his Corvette again.

It stated, in full: "Comp reports that at the t/p/o his car below was taken from the above premises in some unknown manner."

If it seemed - full as it was with police abbreviation - that the officer was in a hurry, there was good reason: With 1969 just 22 days old, Mr. Poster's was the 6,620th car reported stolen in New York City so far that year, and one of more than 78,000 by year's end. On average, about 215 vehicles were stolen in the city every day - more than four times the current rate.

He eventually left New York for California, founding the Ace Products Group, a company that makes cases for cameras and guitars, drums and other musical instruments. He settled in Petaluma, north of San Francisco. He is a single father with a 17-year-old daughter. He drives a Mercedes.

The National Insurance Crime Bureau keeps a database of stolen vehicles, a database that is routinely checked before a vehicle is exported. On Dec. 7 last year, Customs checked three cars being sold by a collector in Long Beach, Calif. One of them had been reported stolen in New York City on Jan. 22, 1969. No further information was available. No name of the owner, no address, not even a police precinct or borough.

The case was given to two detectives in the auto crimes division in Queens, Cliff Bieder, 44, and William Heiser, 41. They went to police headquarters in Lower Manhattan, and to Room 300, the daunting records room, to search on microfilm. If they had not found the report by Jan. 1, the car would have been shipped to Sweden, they said.

"It was the equivalent of finding a needle in a haystack, that report," Detective Heiser said. "One of the guys bet us a steak dinner we wouldn't find it."

With 44 years' experience between them, the detectives spent four days in Room 300, squinting at fine print - "Our eyes were hurting," Detective Bieder said - when Detective Heiser found the report on Dec. 23. He told his partner. "I thought he was going to pass out," he said.

Finding Mr. Poster was easier. The detectives tracked him through the buyer of his last house in the New York metropolitan region, who said he lived in California. Mr. Poster said Detective Bieder called him at his office.

"He said, 'You had a car stolen in '69? A Corvette? What color was it?'" Mr. Poster recalled. "I said, 'Blue.' He said, 'We have your car.' "

Less is known about what happened to the Corvette over the past 36 years than what did not happen to it: apparently no one ever tried to register or insure it, the detectives said, or the same flag from the database would have surfaced.

"It's almost like it was just put somewhere and then pulled out a year ago and put up for sale," he said. The man who was selling the car to the buyer in Sweden is not suspected of any wrongdoing, the detectives said. The detectives are trying to trace the car's history backward. "It could have been through so many hands already," Detective Bieder said. "It's hard to find who's culpable."

Auto thefts in New York have dropped sharply, to 17,875 last year, the police said. The detectives have been gloating over their success since the day they found the report. "We came back and said after the new year, we'd be eating steak dinner," Detective Heiser said. "Somewhere nice. Not Sizzler."

The whole affair put Mr. Poster in a reflective mood.

"Things don't happen by accident," he said. "Things come back to me. I have no idea why. Maybe it all comes back to you at some point."

 

[JohnZ]

Since it wasn't insured at the time and there was no payoff when it was stolen originally in New York, it still belongs to him; the seller who was shipping the car is SOL. The NICB has records of any car that has been reported stolen, whether it was insured or not; that's where U.S. Customs does their routine checks.

 

[Vanity Plate Bob]

NBC nightly news just aired the story. Looks like new. Silver.
Owner was in it.

 

[JohnZ]

Big-block automatic, with missing trans, gas tank, and muffler on one side.

 

[JOE BYRNE]

Was blue with different color interior when purchased in 68. A few days before it was stolen he caught someone attemting to steal it and scared them off. He paid $6,000 for it and did not have enough money to insure it according to CNN

 

[65-to-00]

ya' gotta love noo-yawk .... NOT

In 1980, I was driving a truck making late night runs into NYC from Noo-Joy-Z. I would take "The 440" across Staten Island and over to "The City" (as if it was the only city?).

Ahead of me coming down an on ramp was a Vette followed by a large van, so I slowed and stopped to watch as they pulled over (about 3 am).

Out of the van came a swarm of people with jacks, blocks and wrenches and started to take the thing apart. These guys made the Woods Brothers look like slackers. In moments the doors were coming off, glass was out and then they started on the engine ... a total "frame off" thief-storation.

NYPD was about a half a mile down the road so I stopped and told them that the lights they could see back there was a gang stripping a Vette.

...... "Ok, thank you" ...... I pulled down the road a bit and watched. They never moved a muscle.

My guess is the the Vette recovered had "good" upper numbers but some savy inspector looked at the frame or some lower numbers.

That's why some insurance "recovered/damaged" vehicles cost so much, the bad guys bid them up so they can get a clear title and do a switch on the numbers and still sell the parts.

 

[IH2LOSE]

Since it wasn't insured at the time and there was no payoff when it was stolen originally in New York, it still belongs to him; the seller who was shipping the car is SOL. The NICB has records of any car that has been reported stolen, whether it was insured or not; that's where U.S. Customs does their routine checks.

John do you if when we register our collector cars if motor vechicle runs the cars thru the NICB or are they only run haphazardly when crossing a border or being sold out of the country

 

[JohnZ]

John do you if when we register our collector cars if motor vechicle runs the cars thru the NICB or are they only run haphazardly when crossing a border or being sold out of the country

I think only law enforcement and Customs use NICB regularly; when I imported my '69 Z/28 from Canada six years ago, U.S. Customs ran it through NICB while I was at the counter before they generated the "Informal Entry Certificate" that's required in order to register/title an imported car in the U.S. and cleared me to proceed home with it.