Car Thief At Large

By RICHARD BEHAR/PHILADELPHIA

Mark Wills was obsessed with beautiful bodies -- flesh or metal or his own. By daylight, Wills, 28, worshipped his massive 6-ft. 1-in., 270-lb. frame in the mirrors of the weight-lifting center he owned in lower Bucks County, Pennsylvania. By night, he muscled his way off dance floors and into the beds of attractive women whose names, he bragged, he rarely remembered. But Wills' true talents lay elsewhere. Once each week he would get his hands on hard bodies that never played hard-to-get -- curvaceous Camaros, sleek Cadillacs, majestic Monte Carlos -- gleaming beauties that he could effortlessly pick up, strip naked and dispose of in a matter of hours. Mark Wills was one of Philadelphia's biggest car thieves.

"Wills boasted to me that he'd been stealing cars since the age of 14," says Lindsay Stott Jr., an undercover FBI agent who infiltrated the muscleman's operations. "He was proud of his expertise. He was very much in love with himself." Last year the feds and local police busted Wills' six- man, 14,000-sq.-ft. "chop shop" set in an industrial park in Bensalem, Pennsylvania. But, while all his cohorts were prosecuted, Wills fled after his arrest -- and remains at large. What has emerged of his saga illustrates how easy and lucrative it is to make a living abducting and dismembering automobiles in America.

"Car crime is hugely profitable and very difficult to detect," says Bucks County prosecutor Carolyn Oliver. "Wills' million-dollar ring is the biggest we've ever seen here, but it's just the tip of the iceberg." Salvage yards and body shops across the country will pay illegal suppliers like Wills $5,000 total for the front end, back clip, engine, radio, doors and bumpers of a typical late-model car. The parts are then resold to insurance companies, marked up 200% to 300% of their black-market cost. Last year 40,000 cars were stolen in the Philadelphia area alone. Very few of the thieves were caught.

By all accounts, Wills was a hands-on executive. He stole many of the cars himself in front of suburban row houses on the busy streets of North Philadelphia. Wills would pry a side window loose with a screwdriver, pull the glass back with his bare hands, unlock the door and slither inside. Next, he used the screwdriver to break the steering column and turn on the ignition. Popular antitheft devices like The Club, which locks a steering wheel in place, never deterred him. Most thieves spray The Club with Freon and crack it with a hammer. Wills would snip it in half with a ratchet-type tool. "He said he preferred GM cars," says agent Stott. "I think he was probably just more familiar with them."

While driving his quarry to the chop shop, Wills kept a red plaid scarf -- his trademark -- wrapped tightly around the steering column to hide the damage and avoid suspicion. He used the same red material to block the warehouse's windows and keep out prying eyes. A stern taskmaster, he forbade drug use by employees and demanded that they keep the garage immaculate. Oil spills were mopped instantly, while car parts were piled like groceries -- in perfect stacks. Ever wily, he split his operation into distinct divisions: thieves and choppers. No one but Wills knew the complete workings of the business. Still, the boss could not resist the occasional bit of brazen bravado. Detectives trailing him once saw Wills calmly lean out the window of a hot 1970 yellow Corvette to banter with a policeman.

After dismembering the cars, Wills and his cronies -- most of them fellow body builders -- would burn the identification plates and sell the scrap metal to a junkyard. The usable parts were then loaded into a rented 24-ft. Penske trailer and hauled to a salvage yard in West Hazleton, 70 miles northwest of Philadelphia. There, Wills' All-Brand Auto Parts received cash for the stolen goods. The FBI suspects, but cannot prove, that the salvage yard was placing orders to Wills to steal particular brands of cars.

Wills also offered his services to people who fell behind on their car payments -- not an unusual situation in the economically depressed steel towns of Bucks County. His customers included a computer-software manufacturer, hairdressers, truck drivers, restaurant workers, anybody. One Wills crony, Albert Falls, would hang out at a local diner, the Golden Dawn, spreading the word that customers could ditch their cars in the parking lots of shopping malls -- after first placing $200 under the floor mat. The car owners were asked to wait two weeks before reporting the car stolen and collecting the insurance. By then, all that was left of the vehicle was a bucket of bolts.

The product of a criminal subculture, Wills had a perfect pedigree in pilfering. Abandoned as a child, he was raised by a foster family that included two car-thieving brothers before becoming the Artful Dodger to the Fagin of Bucks County. After his arrest (and before fleeing), Wills told the FBI that he learned much of the craft as a teenager from John Palamarchuk, a 68-year-old former body-shop owner known to law enforcement as "One-Eyed." (His right eye socket, filled with a plastic orb, is barely open.) Wills, who did not own a driver's license, sometimes enlisted his mentor to rent the trucks that hauled his booty. Palamarchuk, who has never served time despite nine arrests, was happy to oblige. Even today, after his star student's fall, Palamarchuk makes no excuses about the milieu he inhabited. "What are you driving?" he asks, single-eyeballing a reporter's rented Chevy Corsica in a parking lot in his hometown of Bensalem. "Ahhh, that's easy to steal." Palamarchuk has raging gray hair, grungy clothes and the thick, menacing fingers of a man who's been plundering cars since the 1950s. During World War II, Palamarchuk claims he served on an underwater-demolition team in the Pacific, being paid, in effect, "$54 a month to kill people." As a result, he says, filching cars never posed an ethical dilemma for him. Over lunch, he insists he's "retired" after stealing more than 1,000 cars -- enough to help put two daughters through law and medical school. "Thank God, they didn't follow me," he says with a frenzied laugh. "Who the hell needs another car thief in the family?"

He is outraged by the popularity of the crude and cruel techniques of carjacking, which he insists is due to a national surplus of amateur burglars. "In the 45 seconds it would take me to push you out of your car, I could simply take it off a dark street," he explains. "If it's complicated, maybe I'll need 60 seconds."

Car snatchers such as Palamarchuk claim that the center of Philadelphia's black market is Passyunk Avenue, in the southwestern part of the city. Here lies a sprawling shantytown of 70 salvage yards, and journalists are about as welcome as the rusty mud after a heavy rain. "Is that your car?" barks the manager of one junkyard. "Leave it there a couple of hours, and see what ! happens to it." His sidekick, an unfriendly German shepherd, growls in agreement.

Nobody knows precisely how much of Passyunk Avenue's merchandise is hot. Palamarchuk believes it's more than 90%. Tony Kane, a special agent who covers Philadelphia for the National Insurance Crime Bureau, guesses 40%. "The general attitude on Passyunk is that if I don't buy it, the next yard will," says Kane. "You'll walk into a lot of yards and see nothing but a few doors and a lot of junk. That's because calls are made, orders are taken, and things get done through the back door."

The salvage yards communicate via an auto-parts telephone hot line. Some hot lines are statewide; others reach yards and body shops as far away as Florida or California. "I'm looking for a '91 Cadillac Seville left door," broadcasts one merchant. Before long, another responds, "I can fill that order." Fine, but does the seller have it in stock, wonders Kane, or will he arrange for a special-order theft? There's no way to tell, which makes the monitoring of hot lines by law enforcement virtually useless.

Car owners who want to dump their vehicles and collect from their insurance companies can sometimes go directly to a salvage yard for assistance. A Passyunk operator explains how it works: "Say you got a guy who can't keep up the payments on his car. You call me, the junkyard, and I'll tell you to leave it in a parking lot somewhere with the keys, as well as the title for my own protection. I give you a coupla hundred dollars, I sell the parts to a body shop, and they get resold to an insurance company. Meanwhile, the owner comes by to pick up his title and then report the car as stolen."

Some of the area's honest operators know where skeletons are buried, but they're not talking. "You snitch on people down here and no one will deal with you anymore," says Tom, a young, lanky employee with Patrick's Used Auto Parts, who refuses to divulge his surname. "I'd hate to come in next week and find our junkyard burned to the ground. Some of the people down here are pretty scary."

Among suppliers in Bucks County, few were as intimidating as Wills. "Mark could pick up 400 lbs. with one hand," says Palamarchuk, who was always fearful of Wills. Still, Wills mastered the one-eyed thief's cardinal rule: swipe, dismantle and dispose of one vehicle at a time. That ensures control -- and safety. "A good car thief can't be caught," Palamarchuk says. "He can only be informed on."

And that's how law enforcement cracked down. Wills quarreled with a partner, who ratted to the Bensalem police. Government agents then rented the chop-shop property to Wills as part of a sting operation. Over a four-month period last year, the FBI and police tracked 35 cars -- some from as far away as Washington and North Carolina -- into two of Wills' warehouses. Half the cars were stolen; many others were insurance "give-ups" by financially strapped car owners. Not long after, the FBI revealed itself, Wills escaped and law enforcement officers have been tracking him ever since -- with no luck. The case, however, has sparked spin-off investigations that may bag some more chop-shop merchants, including a few ostensibly legitimate auto dealers, as well as "replaters," who transfer identification numbers from junked cars to stolen autos, passing them off as repaired and refurbished.

Wills' cohorts pleaded guilty and most have already served their sentences. "We put more time into this case than those creeps spent in prison," snaps Charles Maddocks, a detective with the Bensalem police. "We slap their wrists and kick them back onto the streets." Meanwhile, somewhere in America, Mark Wills is probably pumping iron, and perhaps stealing cars.