Stacey's Mazda RX-7, The Untold Story of Theft and Deception
This document created January 16, 2013.
The last time that I wrote anything in the series about this car was nearly ten years ago. In that then-final page, I alluded to "something more" in the story, which had yet to be told. No, I'm not going to tell you all of the juicy details of my relationship with Stacey. I'm a gentleman, and I don't "kiss and tell." Well, there, I guess I just did. But that's all your going to get about that.
No, this installment is about the insurance fraud that was going on in and around Langley, British Columbia. At the time of Stacey's car theft, there was an active police investigation going on about a series of car theft and vandalism incidents, and Stacey's car was pivotal in solving the case. In fact, Stacey was a key player in putting it all together.
Now, to follow this, you're going to need to go back to that second page
in this series, the one with the pictures of the car pained black. When Stacey finally got the car back, and prior to beginning this restoration, Stacey started looking into what it would take to remove the black paint without harming the red finish that was underneath. She tried a variety of chemical cleaners, and eventually found one that worked pretty well. Remarkably well, in fact.
Regular automotive paint, properly applied, shouldn't come off so easily. Stacey and her local paint experts eventually determined that this wasn't exterior automotive paint at all - it was most likely underbody coating, sprayed onto the whole car in a deliberate attempt to make the car look terrible.
And Stacey's mom also had a hand in the discovery. She found that the blue "paint" that was smeared all over the interior surfaces could be washed off with soap and hot water. The local experts determined this to most likely be powdercoating paint. Powdercoating is a process that uses a special paint on an electrified metal surface to make the paint bond to the surface. Without a metal surface and the juice required to make it stick, powdercoating paint won't stick to anything.
Why would anyone do such a thing to a car? This was a question that bothered Stacey for weeks, while she awaited the final disposition of her insurance claim with the car.
But as I mentioned previously, Stacey had some unusual luck in how this insurance claim was processed. As Stacey explained it to me, when a car is deemed to be a total loss, the law in British Columbia (or perhaps Canadian law, country-wide - I don't recall what she explained to me) requires that the insurance company takes posession of the car and it goes up for auction. The law states that only licensed or certified body shops and restoration shops can bid on these cars, as they have the expertise to assure that a damaged car can be repaired for safe operation again. The general public is not permitted to bid on these safety-compromised cars.
But the insurance company never took posession of Stacey's car. And they never took the title from her. (I think they may have issued her a salvage title, as she was able to succesfully re-register the car after the repairs were made.) Stacey knew this was highly unusual, because Stacey was actually in the insurance business, at the front end of the policy-writing process. Stacey owned the family's insurance agency where she had worked since she was a teenager.
And she didn't pull any strings to make this happen. She didn't have any connection to the adjuster that handled her claim. In fact, things were kind of tense between her and the adjuster when her claim was handled, so no favors were likely to be doled out. Her best guess is that there was a processing error that left her with a seemingly worthless car that would cost more to restore than it would fetch at auction.
So there she was, with a vandalised car that could be WIPED CLEAN to restore it's prior finish. Well, that would have been possible if the thieves hadn't badly scratched up one portion of the finish so badly that the whole panel and every painted surface nearby would need to be repainted anyway.
But still, why?
And then it dawned on her: the auction process! These thieves stole her car, painted it with wipe-off materials, and left it to be recovered. The insurance company would come by, total it out, write a check to the owner, and the car would go up for auction. An auction where the thieves's associates from a restoration shop would be waiting, looking for black-undercoating painted cars to bid on. Nobody would want them. They'd practically steal them - again!
Stacey brought this story to the insurance company and to the police that were investigating the matter. Jaws dropped. "Dick Stacey" solved the case!
But it wasn't over with this realization. The authorities asked Stacey to keep this under wraps until they could build a case to convict the thieves and all of their associates. I was the only person that she fully spelled it out for. And I can keep secrets. That's the kind of work that I do. I'd tell you more, but I'd have to kill you.
It was probably about five or six years after the initial theft of Stacey's car that she called me one day to tell me about the arrest and conviction of a number of people associated with the car theft ring that was responsible for the initial theft of her car. That was actually a few years ago, but I never got around to publishing an update to the whole story.
But now, here in early 2013, I had to add this one more chapter. It was just one more really cool thing that I was a part of in her life.