To Catch a Thief- So Sweet : Incident Leads to New Type of Traffic Ticket

Revenge is not always swift. But it’s always sweet.

Kenneth Dine continues to taste it five years after a car thief grabbed his classic ’71 Chevy from a Van Nuys street and stripped it bare.

First, the 41-year-old contractor recovered the remains of his stolen car. Then he tracked down the thief and sued him to cover the cost of a new engine, tires and other parts.

When the thief refused to pay the judgment, Dine snatched his car.

And when a mix-up over the re-registration of his recovered Chevrolet led to a traffic citation that almost led to Dine’s arrest, he prompted the Judicial Council of California to order the printing of millions of traffic tickets to make them easier for motorists to understand.

The new tickets began to be phased into use last month.

Dine had no idea that he would turn into a do-it-yourself policeman, prosecutor and judicial administrator when his 13-year-old automobile was stolen on Aug. 8, 1984.

The car’s shell was found two weeks later in the hills at the western edge of the San Fernando Valley. Gone were its engine and most of its parts. Old, bald tires replaced the expensive radials that had been on the car.

“I knew from the junk tires that it had been towed, not hauled up there,” said Dine, of North Hollywood. “Without an engine, its front end was riding high in the air. So I knew it hadn’t been towed far.”

Dine decided to help police find the thief.

He took his car back to the unincorporated Calabasas neighborhood where it had been abandoned and left it at the side of a busy street. A sign on its roof offered a reward to anyone who had seen it being stripped.

Calls quickly poured in. Nearby residents who had noticed the auto at a house near the intersection of Old Topanga Canyon Boulevard and Mulholland Highway provided a description of a man seen dismantling it.

Dine visited the neighborhood the night before trash day to search for clues in garbage cans put out at the stripping location. The trash yielded a discarded photograph of the suspect--who turned out to be a Pacoima man who was a friend of the house’s occupants--as well as his name.

By tracing the name through the Department of Motor Vehicles, Dine learned where the suspect lived.

The amateur sleuthing turned out to be of little help to police, however. When Dine turned up his clues, the detective assigned to his case was on vacation. By the time the officer took up the investigation, the stolen car parts could not be found.

Although authorities had no criminal case against the suspect, Dine figured he had a good civil one. He decided to sue the suspected car stripper in small claims court to recover at least part of the cost of his missing engine and the other car parts.

The alleged thief did not contest the suit. In mid-1985, Dine won a $1,500 judgment against the 31-year-old Pacoima man, who signed over the pink slip of his 1963 Impala convertible as payment.

But when Dine went to his house to claim the car, the thief reneged on the deal.

So Dine hired a tow truck driver to seize the Impala. Angry over what was happening, the thief hit the tow operator over the head with a bottle. Police were called and the thief was arrested.

“I’d never heard of anybody taking a thief to small claims court before,” said Los Angeles Police Detective Mike Coffey, who was involved in the arrest.

Although police appreciate citizen involvement, they are often leery of people playing detective, Coffey said. “The thief attacking the tow driver is an example of what can happen when you do things on your own.”

The Pacoima man ended up in jail on the assault charge. Dine eventually sold the Impala and used the profits to pay for a new engine for his own car. Because the registration had lapsed on his motorless Chevrolet, Dine obtained a temporary registration for it.

But the saga was far from over.

In early 1987, as Dine was breaking in his rebuilt car’s new engine, he was ticketed by a California Highway Patrol officer who noticed that the car’s temporary registration had expired.

Although instructions on the back of the ticket indicated that Dine could mail the court proof of the car’s re-registration, the officer had failed to indicate on the front of the citation that the violation could be corrected by mail. So a warrant was issued for Dine’s arrest on a failure-to-appear-in-court charge.

That warrant eventually was canceled. But Dine complained bitterly about the incident to officials of the Judicial Council of California, who help oversee administration of courts.

When the council decided last year to look into revising traffic ticket forms, officials asked Dine to serve on an advisory committee.

“I was getting complaint letters from him, so I thought to myself who better to get the public’s input from,” said Rick Neal, traffic courts coordinator for the Council’s Administrative Office of the Courts.

The council approved Dine’s suggestion that future traffic tickets include special “yes” and “no” check-off boxes that specifically state whether violations can be cleared up by mail. Neal said police agencies began using the new tickets Jan. 1, although the old tickets are usable through the end of 1990.

Dine said he is pleased that his experience helped change the traffic ticket system. Next, he said, he wants to take on the parking ticket system.

He charged that mix-ups and confusion involving a private company that collects traffic fines for Los Angeles has ensnarled him in a legal fight over five parking tickets that were earned by the thief years ago on the Impala. Dine apparently inherited the tickets when the thief signed over the car’s pink slip.

But that’s another story.