New York neighborhood sees fewer Iowa license plates

A Brooklyn, New York, neighborhood is no longer swamped by cars with Iowa license plates.

That's likely because the Iowa Department of Transportation in September canceled more than 450 vehicle titles and registrations obtained with false or fictitious information. These cars - many with Linn County and Polk County plates - had been clogging up the Ditmas Park West neighborhood since 2012.

'Iowa stood out blatantly in New York City,” said Maxine Plotkin, who has lived in Ditmas Park West for 40 years. 'There are fewer now. I think what they did was transfer a lot of them to New Jersey (plates).”

Joel Siegel, Ditmas Park West Neighborhood Association president and a Manhattan lawyer, thinks the cars creating the problem are linked to a car rental business using names including 25 Dollar Car Rental, Elite Car & Truck Rental, Rent 4 Less, 123 Go Rent A Car and Econo Rentals.

When a New York-based CBS affiliate took an undercover camera to the business in August 2013, an employee showed the reporter, posing as a rental customer, several cars with Iowa license plates parked in the neighborhood.

'They're doing this for insurance purposes,” Siegel said Thursday.

New York is the third most expensive state for car insurance, with the average policy costing $1,152 in 2012, compared to $561 in Iowa, the Insurance Information Institute reported.

A woman who answered the phone at 25 Dollar Car Rental Friday declined to comment.

Paul Steier, director of the Iowa DOT's Bureau of Investigation & Identity Protection, said the false information provided to get the 450-plus Iowa plates did not include any of the names linked to the Brooklyn car rental business or use the business's Brooklyn address. However, investigators do believe the cars were being used as rentals, he said.

Because the information was bogus, investigators haven't been able to determine who's behind the false registrations.

'I do not know the extent at which NYPD has worked to track these vehicles and owners,” Steier said. 'The NY DMV fraud unit is aware of this as well.”

Using false information to register a car in Iowa is most often an aggravated misdemeanor, punishable by up to two years in prison and a maximum $6,250 fine.

Living in one state, but registering your car in another, is also illegal. Those charges typically come from the state where the vehicle is being operated because that's the state losing out on taxes and fees.

The Iowa DOT will run the vehicle registration records nationally to determine if the fraudsters used the canceled titles to register in another state, Steier said. But if those registrations were transferred before the Iowa cancellations, the new state would have to determine if the applications were valid.

Ditmas Park, a historic district, and its neighbor, Ditmas Park West, were created in the early 1900s within the Flatbush neighborhood of Brooklyn. The area is known for century-old Victorians with wide front yards and the longest row of bungalows in Brooklyn.

Residents told The Gazette in 2013 the Iowa cars were hogging scarce street parking. New York cars that get too many parking tickets get booted or towed, one resident said, but police told residents they could only offer repeated tickets for the Iowa cars.

The NYPD's 70th Precinct, which patrols Ditmas Park West, did not return two calls this week from The Gazette.