Ford Agency Has New Name but Fraud Inquiry Goes On

The name has been changed from Wilson Ford to Friendly Ford and pitchman Ralph Williams has been replaced by a man named Tony in the television ads.

But Friendly Ford in Huntington Beach is the same business that was raided in March by the state Department of Motor Vehicles and other law enforcement agencies as part of an investigation into its sales practices.

Richard Wilson still is president and principal shareholder of the dealership, Williams is still general manager, and senior DMV investigator Claire Paige says her agency is still in the midst of a complicated investigation into allegations of sales fraud by the dealership that date back to 1986.

DMV investigators won’t discuss what they have found in their investigation so far, but do say they continue receiving complaints about inflated prices from current Friendly customers.

Testimony in Texas

And in Texas, testimony in a disciplinary hearing against a dealer there alleges that Wilson Ford at one time taught sales personnel how to use a computer program to falsify interest rates and reap inflated profits.

Wilson could not be reached for comment Friday, and Friendly Ford’s deputy general manager, Gerry Schroff, declined comment on the investigation. Schroff said only that the DMV investigation had nothing to do with the dealership’s name change or Williams’ disappearance from the television ads.

But Marshall G. Mintz, the Century City attorney representing Friendly Ford, said the dealership decided to change its name and ads in part to remove the onus of bad publicity caused by the DMV raid and allegations against Wilson Ford.

Williams, in a telephone interview from his home in Dallas, said he stopped doing the television ads “because I don’t need (the exposure) and I am tired of being a target while running the most honest and legitimate dealership, in my opinion, in Orange County.”

Critical of DMV

Williams lashed out at the DMV and complained that some of the law enforcement officers who conducted the March 12 raid had entered the dealership with guns drawn. He compared their conduct to “what happened in Nazi Germany. This is not America, that this can happen.”

He said the DMV has not filed any charges in the case nearly six months after the raid because “they haven’t got anything.”

In a 100-page affidavit filed in Orange County Superior Court to support the DMV’s request for a warrant to search Wilson Ford and seize various documents and computer programs, the agency’s investigators contended that Wilson Ford trained its sales personnel to deceive customers and inflate the purchase price of autos. The dealership was also accused of conspiring to defraud consumers through misleading television ads, featuring Williams, that promised cars at rock-bottom prices.

A fixture of late-night television in Southern California for decades, Williams started as pitchman for his own dealership in the early 1960s.

As a car dealer, however, Williams ran afoul of the DMV--which regulates California auto retailers--on several occasions. He had his dealer’s license revoked on two separate occasions.

After joining Wilson Ford he was refused a salesman’s license in 1983 on the grounds that he had made sales at the Beach Boulevard car lot without being licensed. That action was later overturned and Williams now has a valid car salesman’s license in California.

Williams also ran afoul of regulators in the state of Washington, where he once owned a dealership. He still owes consumers in that state millions of dollars awarded in a 1972 consumer fraud judgment against him and his company, Washington authorities said Friday. The charges against Williams, according to Washington Assistant Atty. Gen. Jay Uchida, included false and misleading advertising in television ads in which Williams was the star.

While Williams lives in Dallas and once owned a dealership in Texas, an official of the Texas Motor Vehicle Commission said Friday that Williams is not now active in the auto business in that state.

Still, Williams and Wilson Ford figured prominently in a recent administrative hearing into alleged misconduct by a Tyler, Tex., car dealership whose former owner also was a major investor in Wilson Ford until June.

In the Texas case, according to Henri ten Brink, assistant director of enforcement for the state Motor Vehicle Commission, the commission alleged that the dealership “engaged in various activities involving misleading sales techniques” and inflated pricing.

One employee of the dealership, ten Brink said, “testified that they had one particular computer program, called ‘Back to the Future,’ that he learned to use when he was taken to California to the Wilson Ford lot. He testified that he was introduced to a Mr. Williams, who introduced him to someone else who showed him how the program was being done” at Wilson Ford.

Ten Brink said the program involved citing a highly inflated finance charge by programming a computer to start compiling interest as much as a year earlier than the actual effective date of the loan. The price would be adjusted so that the monthly payments were agreeable to the customer, but the amount included for finance charges would be hundreds, even thousands of dollars higher than would really be paid to the bank. The dealer would be able to pocket that extra money and would hide it in the final paper work by disguising it as fees for dealer protection plans and other add-ons.

Mintz, the Wilson/Friendly Ford attorney, said Friday that he was aware of the Texas testimony but has been told by Friendly officials that the computer program the agency uses is not the one described.