By David Carrigg-Staff writer

Michael Amlin's heart sank deep into his workman's boots when he saw what remained of his prized 1967 Ford Mustang.

The car had hit a tree-tearing its right fender off in the process-the side mirror was smashed and hanging limply down the scratched driver's side door, the horn was ripped from the steering wheel and all four tires were blown out.

"It was pretty beaten on," said Amlin, a Tsawwassen mechanic whose car was recovered by police six months after being stolen from his front yard last December.

"It was trashed and so was all my work. I did tons of work on that baby, a new motor, new transmission, new drivetrain, suspension, brakes. I did it all myself."

Amlin got a call from the provincial Auto Theft Task Force in July telling him the Mustang had been recovered from a backyard "chop shop" in Surrey, one of three vehicles that had yet to be stripped for parts. "It was being driven around by the guy that was running the chop shop. He must have really liked old Mustangs, but he sure abused it," said Amlin, who tried to buy his car from ICBC but was turned down because it was so wrecked.

If not for the task force's work, Amlin's Mustang would have been among the 2,000-odd stolen vehicles a year that are never recovered.

The vehicles are either dumped in lakes, rivers or gorges, given new vehicle identification numbers and resold-known as cloning-or put through sophisticated garages that chop the vehicles up and sell the parts at a fraction of the going price.

Sgt. Enzo Nadalin, a Vancouver Police Department cop on secondment to the Auto Theft Task Force, points at a provincial map on his office wall with this year's auto thefts highlighted by red dots. The City of Vancouver is solid red, with clusters in Surrey, Burnaby and Langley, the other hot spots for auto theft in the province.

According to Nadalin, most vehicle thieves are adults-about 70 per cent-and most steal to get from point A to B, to facilitate a crime or to sell to one of the unknown number of chop-shop and cloning operations in the Lower Mainland.

"We don't hear much about chop shops in the rest of Canada. It seems to be something that has flourished in B.C.," said Nadalin, a 30-year VPD veteran.

The Auto Theft Task Force formed in September 1998, two years after B.C. posted a record 35,000 vehicles stolen-the province has the dubious honour of having the highest auto-theft rate per capita in North America.

Auto theft in the province has since leveled off to about 30,000 units a year, and while 95 per cent of those stolen vehicles are eventually recovered, the arrest rate for car thieves has dropped from 14 per cent in 1990 to a paltry seven per cent in 2000.

The province's car insurer, ICBC, gives the task force $2 million a year to fund its 23-person operation, which recently moved to the Delta Fire and Police Building. The team comprises five people from the RCMP's Auto Theft Unit, three ICBC fraud investigators, a Crown prosecutor and 15 staff from various municipal police forces. The task force, the only one of its kind in western Canada, has recovered $10 million worth of stolen vehicles during its three-year existence, acting mostly on tips from informants. Task force members spend much of their time doing surveillance and trying to identify repeat auto thieves.

Last year, its most successful, the task force busted 15 chop shops in the Lower Mainland, including one in Vancouver at Main and Marine Drive. Since the task force formed, it has shut down 28 chop shops, recovered 599 vehicles valued at $8.8 million and made 279 arrests.

So far this year, the force has nailed seven chop shops-Nadalin attributes the lower number to the fact that the task force's Crown prosecutor, Peter Stabler, has managed to get jail time for some repeat chop shop operators and cloners.

"We are still trying to work out why the number of chop-shop busts has fallen, but if you put the right person in jail, auto theft will go down dramatically. I think we are popping the right people and putting them in jail. The task force itself has a very high conviction rate because most of the accused plead guilty. We have very direct evidence, namely the motor, transmission and chassis identification numbers of vehicles we find on site and we don't need civilian witnesses."

Stabler, who only prosecutes people linked to illegal money-making operations involving vehicles-mostly cloners or chop shop operators-said there are three types of professional vehicle thieves.

The first type-he labels them class one-are usually young people who buy a cheap wreck, take the VIN, and put it on a similar stolen model, which is then sold for up to $1,500.

"It's low-end and quick and the next level of thieves do the same thing, except they will also chop stolen vehicles and sell their motor and transmissions," said Stabler, adding the second class will also do a better job of making the false VIN plate appear original. "The low-end guys will simply glue the VIN on and you don't have to be a detective to see it's a phony. The middle guys will use rivets to put the new VIN on, though not always the right rivets." Each time a vehicle is stolen, its VIN is recorded by the task force. Putting on a new VIN, or one from a car not recorded as stolen, is the simplest way a crook can sell the car.

The high-end crooks get someone to manufacture VIN plates, based on records kept by car dealerships, then put the plates on expensive vehicles stolen by a contact. They operate nationally and will put the same manufactured VIN on vehicles sold in different provinces.

"They are often involved in stealing and sending to Asia, plus a number also defraud banks and insurance companies at the same time," said Stabler, adding it's only the third class of auto felon that makes decent money out of the crime. "[With] a lot of them, you wonder why they don't just get a job, they spend so much time taking the cars apart. It's more work than working."

Stabler's job as prosecutor is to get the maximum penalty imposed on thieves or chop-shop operators, who are usually charged with possession of stolen property over $5,000.

So far, the longest sentence was 18 months jail for a repeat auto thief who stripped the vehicles, sold the parts and dumped the car bodies. Another felon got a year's jail and was caught for car theft almost immediately after getting out.

The most common punishment is a conditional sentence, introduced federally three years ago, where the felon does community service in lieu of jail time.

Chop shoppers buy stolen vehicles from known auto thieves and pay them $500 and up, depending on the type of vehicle stolen. The vehicles are then stripped to their chassis and the parts sold by word-of-mouth or through auto trader magazines and newspaper classified advertising sections.

"I've said this a hundred times, time and time again: If you like the vehicle, put your mind into neutral for a second and focus on the seller,'' Nadalin said. "You must be able to identify the seller."

He advises buyers to get proper identification from the seller, check references, and make sure they know where the vendor lives and works.

"Don't accept a cell number, don't accept a pager number,'' he said. "Always pay the person that's identified on the registration paper. Don't give [the money] to the person who is selling the

vehicle. You pay the cheque out to that person on the registration, verify that that's the person that you've given the money to, so at least the police can follow it up and you have civil recourse later on.''

The most common chop shop vehicle is the Honda Civic, while the number one stolen vehicle is the Honda Accord, due to its popularity with youth and its reputed ease to steal. Nadalin said people with the smaller Honda Civics are buying the Accord VTEC motor, with 200 horse power, from chop shops and putting them in the Civic body, creating a street-racing car. A Honda Accord seat alone is worth $4,000 and can be bought for $200 from a chop shop.

The task force is now working with municipal traffic cops to track down the VINs and motor numbers on cars wrecked during street races. Nadalin suspects that the cars involved in the street racing have motors and other parts bought from chop shops.

Most chop shops are also linked to marijuana grow operations or chemical drug laboratories. "Chop shops and drug operations are synonymous," said Nadalin. "We find the person steals the vehicle, takes the vehicle to the drug operation and trades it for marijuana or whatever they are making. Then the person running the grow-operation strips it for parts and recoups their money. Almost every chop shop bust last year was linked to a grow-op."

The first chop-shop bust this year was in Maple Ridge and was linked to a crystal methamphetamine laboratory and cloning operation. The bust involved stakeouts by police in Nanaimo, Terrace, Kelowna and Kamloops, where the cars were registered to avoid the scrutiny of AirCare emissions testing, which is limited to the Lower Mainland.

The confirmed haul included five complete cars and three that had been through the chop shop, including the $47,000 chassis of a 1997 Chevy Tahoe sport utility vehicle.

Two men and two women were arrested in the auto-theft ring, all from the Maple Ridge and Mission areas. In addition to charges of auto theft and possession of stolen property, one of the men was charged with drug offenses in connection with the crystal methamphetamine drug lab found in his house, alongside the Maple Ridge chop shop.

The Auto Theft Task Force's latest chop-shop bust came on the afternoon of Tuesday, Oct. 16. Armed with a search warrant, acting off a tip, task force members entered a quiet residential rural Surrey home on 76th Avenue. Unfortunately, the two men suspected of running the operation were not home at the time the warrant was executed and are still at large.

The bounty included a $25,000 Ford Ranger an $8,000 Ford Mustang and two new Hondas worth $18,000.

In August, another chop shop was taken down after traffic cops in Langley pulled over two men driving what turned out to be a stolen truck, hauling a stolen trailer with a stolen car on the trailer.

A task force investigation of the two men led to a chop shop next to a house east of Mission. There, they found $73,000 worth of vehicles-most stolen from Abbotsford and Mission-in various stages of disassembly.

A month prior, the task force had its biggest coup so far this year, when it busted a well-resourced chop shop in a large concrete building on a Cloverdale farm.

Nadalin described the scene as a perfect set for a movie on chop shops. It had two vehicle hoists and eight stolen vehicles in various states of being stripped. Work on the case is ongoing-charges have not yet been laid, and investigators are still sifting through the parts found on site to find if they match any stolen vehicles. One of the big problems for the team is that panels, seats and similar parts do not carry identification numbers.

Nadalin said the Cloverdale bust stemmed from a tip from the RCMP's Organized Crime Agency. "They are mostly street-level operations. It's like dealing with the drug scene; it's the street-level people we're picking off," he said, adding weapons are often found during searches.

Nadalin said one troubling trend that's emerging is when cloners break into a vehicle and steal the registration papers, then transfer them to a similar stolen vehicle that's later sold.

Those whose vehicle's registration papers have been stolen only find out when ICBC fails to contact them to renew their registration.

"That person will ask the auto planner and they will say you sold your vehicle. Police get involved and find this other vehicle and knock on the person's door. The person that bought the stolen car then loses their money," Nadalin said, adding that more expensive clones-like Mercedes, BMWs and Porsches-are also now being transferred to the United States. "It's really escalated and we don't realize how serious it is because the felon will register a stolen car in every Canadian province and we aren't able to compare inter-province registries."

With the money he received from an ICBC insurance payout after his 1967 Mustang was stolen, Michael Amlin bought a 1970 Challenger, and he's not taking any chances with it. "I've got a wheel-lock club, an ignition shutoff and buttons under the seat that will stop anyone stealing it."

Such devices can play a role in preventing auto theft, says Nadalin. "Most cars are very easy to steal. I'm not here to educate the public about that, but it's amazing what you can do with a screw driver."

Still, Nadalin predicts the worst is yet to come as organized crime gangs take over the market. "When it comes to auto theft, it's entrenched back east and we are just a ripe tomato ready to be picked. I think we are next on the list because we are a lucrative market and a virgin territory when it comes to organized crime and vehicles."