Contracted Company Uses ‘Lookouts’ to Spot Parking Violators

By David Whitney

At the Central Square Plaza on the corner of Stanley Street and Paul Manafort Drive, 11 different retail residents that call the plaza home see students and other locals park their cars illegally in their lot.

Recently, the vigilant patrol of the plaza has been leading to towing mistakes, as both customers and employees of the plaza’s store have seen their cars inexplicably towed away from the lot.

“It’s ridiculous,” said John Lumani, owner of Central Cuts.  “I’ve been towed twice and my customers have been towed before too. One of them thought her car had been stolen but I knew where it was.”

Lumani mentioned how there are 11 businesses and only around 30 parking spots between them.

At the center of the discussion is Empire Motors, the contracted towing company that patrols the lot daily for violators.

“There’s not one, not two, but nine signs in that parking lot that say two-hour parking and no student parking,” says John Curren, president of Empire Motors. “These people that park here are robbing these businesses from customers.”

“The reason why so many people park in the plaza is easy,” says John Gorman, a co-owner of Another Bookstore, who’s also been mistakenly towed.

Gorman said that it’s close to the DiLoretto and Willard academic buildings and that there’s relatively little open parking nearby that section of the campus for students to take advantage of.

What’s making parking their even trickier for both those trying to get away with parking illegally and those that get their cars towed away by accident is the group of plain-clothed workers patrol the area at random times. Once these workers see a student or anybody park their car and cross the street, they call it up to get towed.

It’s unsure how many of these “lookouts” there are but there’s more than just one taking action at the plaza.

Acting like a loss prevention employer at a retail store, they mark every license plate on a car once it parks in the lot. That way they know what time a car was parked in the lot and if they’re an actual customer or not.

“On good days, we can get up to seven, on others zero,” said a lookout who wished to have his name left unknown. “Actually, a lot of the cars we tow are repeat offenders.”

The lookout said he was an employee of the towing company and not the plaza, something Curren would later confirm.

As far as towing innocent drivers, Curren says that they release those cars free of charge and don’t hold them to the same $88 fee that actual violators are responsible for.

“We have a program where we have the license plate numbers for each employee’s car,” said Curren.

Still, many at the plaza said that it’s not an easy task to regain possession of their car when they’re mistaken for being parked their illegally.

“I had to beg and scream to get my car back,” said Nicole Hail, an employee to the Underground Deli that sits on the lower level of the plaza.

Hail isn’t the only one to experience frustration in getting towed while being at work. The Recorder stopped by five other businesses in the plaza and in each one of the employees said they’d been towed at least once by the company.

Rebecca Zibell, an employee of Tony’s Central Pizza, has been towed twice since she started her job in September. She stated that Empire wouldn’t give her car back right away and instead, she needed to bring her boss down so that they could verify she was an actual employee.

Curren said that he considers his towing company to be generally nicer than others.

“I could be a real jerk but I feel that we’re nicer than other companies,” said Curren.

Curren said he realizes that most cars are actually owned by parents and not students themselves and that he could technically hold them until the parents showed up. Instead, Curren said he often releases the car to the student after confirming with the parent through a telephone call.