Today’s proof that there is sometimes justice in the world comes from Santa Clara, California where a judge sentenced a scamming jerk of a tow truck driver to 14 years in prison after he pleaded no contest to 99 counts of fraud related to a towing scam. The 67 year old man or a family member would tow random cars to his lot, let them sit, and then sue the owners of the cars whose cars were towed for no good reason for massive storage fees. 

The only reason this scam worked was because of a small claims court official who found on the side of the towing jerk in virtually all cases. This was no small time deal, the man had taken more than $1-million dollars from innocent people who often could not afford a lawyer to represent them in the court hearing against the mastermind of this thing, Vincent Cardinalli. The judge who sentenced Cardinalli called him, “worse than Bernie Madoff” for running the scam that stayed below the radar for many years. 

How did he get busted, you ask? Simply put, he poked the wrong bees nest with a stick, trying to sue State Farm insurance for fees owed on cars that State Farm didn’t own anymore. In an awesome plot twist, a kid just out of law school, working for State Farm investigated, saw a weird pattern and then realized what this dude was up to. The newbie attorney started contacting victims and eventually amassed thousands of documents showing how the scam worked and how many people had been violated.

Once the court saw all that, the jig was up and Vince Cardinalli started practicing how not to drop the soap.

His incarceration does not give people their collective million bucks back, but we have to assume there are lots of smiles floating around in the pool of people victimized by this guy. Thanks for a young kid who wanted to do right, the bad guy is headed to the grey bar motel, just like in the movies.

Source — SFGate.com