Hell On Wheels

When Mike Dowdall needed a truckin April 1999, he went to Shawnee Mission Ford. The glitzy Kansas dealership on Shawnee Mission Parkway in Johnson County seemed a reputable place to buy a sturdy pickup to haul plumbing, heating and air-conditioning equipment for his company, Dowdall Engineering.

"I was looking for a good, high-quality used truck that I could use to transport men and materials," Dowdall says.

The smiling saleswoman who greeted Dowdall pointed out a nice, white 1995 Ford F-250. The odometer showed only 45,825 miles -- not bad for a four-year-old vehicle. The price was a little more that $12,000. Dowdall, like any smart car buyer, asked where the vehicle had come from.

"It was a trade-in," Dowdall says the saleswoman told him, from a "frequent Shawnee Mission Ford customer." Dowdall signed the papers, confident he'd made a wise purchase. He invested $6,000 to install a utility bed on the chassis.

Soon the truck started to give him trouble, and a repair shop gave him bad news. The truck had been wrecked -- something Shawnee Mission Ford's saleswoman had failed to disclose, violating state law. And whoever had fixed the damage had done a shoddy job.

Dowdall spent more than $3,000 on the first round of repairs. Mechanics worked on the ignition, an oxygen sensor, the water pump and the steering. Then it needed a valve job -- a costly engine repair. After that, Dowdall's mechanic told him he would need to put at least $2,000 more into the truck. The brake rotors had to be replaced, the cylinder heads had to be rebuilt, the exhaust manifolds had to be replaced, the radiator fan was worn out and the truck needed a new clutch.

A year after the purchase, in October 2000, a letter from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration informed Dowdall that a federal odometer-fraud investigation had found evidence that his truck had more miles on it than the odometer indicated. In fact, Dowdall later learned his truck had racked up twice the mileage shown on the odometer at the time he purchased it. Although Shawnee Mission Ford employees had certified the mileage to be correct, the real figure was at least 92,002 miles, judging from the paperwork of a previous sale of the truck. He also learned that his vehicle had been a rental -- another fact Shawnee Mission Ford hadn't disclosed, thus violating state law.

"I didn't know anything about it," the saleswoman, Bea Wells, later said of the truck she sold Dowdall. "We disclose anything we know about the car." The fifteen-year employee of Shawnee Mission Ford testified in a deposition that she is not trained to examine a vehicle for wreck damage or indications of odometer fraud.

Dowdall was mad.

"I was under the impression I was buying a reliable vehicle and would get many years of relatively trouble-free service from it," Dowdall says. "Instead, I got a high-mileage piece of junk that's constantly in the shop, gets poor gas mileage and is worthless in my business."

After more than a year of hassles with the truck, Dowdall got a call from the Brown Law Firm. The firm told him his truck was one of at least eleven vehicles with rolled-back odometers -- and in some cases, wreck damage -- that Shawnee Mission Ford had bought from a wholesale outfit that operated out of an ex-con's driveway in Leawood, Kansas. While it was in business between August 1997 and April 2000, Interstate Exchange sold more than 400 cars to dealers, individuals and wholesale auctions throughout the metro area, according to the company's sales records. About 75 percent of the cars went to dealers.

A federal investigation had exposed Interstate Exchange's activities and locked up two criminals involved. When investigators sent letters to victims of the fraud, some tried to return their vehicles, and a few found lawyers.

The Brown Law Firm, one of a handful in the country that specializes in auto fraud, sued Shawnee Mission Ford in Kansas U.S. District Court on behalf of an Ottawa couple and a college student from Wyandotte County who had bought rolled-back Interstate Exchange cars from Shawnee Mission Ford. Terresa and Scott Roberts and Jourdan Penn sued the dealership for violations of federal odometer law, civil conspiracy, fraud and violations of the Kansas Consumer Protection Act. In June, Shawnee Mission Ford paid a judgment of $250,000 in actual and punitive damages in the two cases.

"With all of my experience, it was obvious from the beginning there was some really bad misconduct going on," says attorney Bernard Brown, who once appeared on a 60 Minutes segment called "Totaled" and has handled car-fraud cases for eighteen years. "I can see the signs of odometer fraud just like a car dealer can spot a rebuilt wreck. It's painfully obvious. The bestthing you could say for [Shawnee Mission Ford] was, they were handling vehicles that they definitely should have known better."

After the judgment, Dowdall also decided to talk to the Brown Law Firm about suing Shawnee Mission Ford. The firm expects to file a suit on his behalf within a month. Looking for a pattern beyond the Roberts and Penn cases, the firm has investigated Dowdall's vehicle and discovered that its previous owner was far from a satisfied customer.