A Case of a Missing File, and a Car Buyer’s Battle

It’s a case of a Los Angeles schoolteacher versus a Montebello car dealer, whom she hired to act as her intermediary in purchasing a used car at a dealer’s auction.

And now, for the first time in the 13-year experience of the assistant court administrator in Burbank, a court file--the one in this case--is missing.

Gerie Rhosen already has won a judgment of $1,235 in Burbank Small Claims Court, where, on Nov. 2, Judge Rand Rubin chose to believe her rather than the dealer, Mark Bordman, and his employee, attorney Richard Angelini.

Rhosen testified that after the dealers assured her they would take only a $250 profit on the transaction, Angelini told her they had paid $5,400 to buy her a 1991 Nissan Stanza at the L.A. Dealers Auto Auction in Rosemead. She paid that bill, plus license and fees, in cash.

However, as Rhosen also testified, the auction’s officials later told her the actual price her intermediaries paid was only $4,250 plus the auction buyer’s fee of $90. She said they had also stung her on a few other small items.

Bordman and Angelini insisted they had never misinformed Rhosen, but the judge found otherwise.

The day of the verdict, Bordman appealed it to Glendale Superior Court, and a few days ago he informed me during an interview that the court file was missing, so he had no idea when the appeal would be heard.

This is a case that points up, once again, how important it can be to have your wits about you when buying a car. But the missing file intrigued me.

In visits to the Burbank and Glendale courts, clerks confirmed that, yes, the file had vanished. Burbank court administrator Nancy Graczyk said this was the first such disappearance in her 13 years of experience.

But Judge Rubin pointed out that all small claims cases in Burbank are tape-recorded.

“The file can be reconstructed if the recording exists,” he said.

Graczyk reassured me that there indeed is a tape recording, and Eric Cohen, assistant administrative supervisor of the Burbank, Glendale and Pasadena courts, soon after disclosed that he had just issued this terse order to court employees:

“Recreate the file forthwith and get the thing on calendar.”

Cohen said the Burbank courts reported sending the file to Glendale, but Glendale said it never arrived.

When Bordman’s appeal is heard in Superior Court, Cohen added, it will be a brand new trial. “It will be as if the small claims case never took place. Normally, the parties in such an appeal are heard without attorneys, and the Superior Court decision is final. There can be no further appeals.”

Since Bordman had been the first person to tell me of the missing file, I asked when he had learned of its disappearance and what, if anything, further he knew about it.

He said he first heard of the missing file “right before Christmas,” when he called for a court appearance date. He also said he would discuss the matter no more.

Up to then, Bordman had been quite cooperative. He drove downtown to The Times an hour after I first phoned him for an interview.

Bordman said it was ridiculous for anyone to think that he and his employee would do all the work of buying the car for Rhosen for only $250. Actually, he said they had made about $1,100 on the deal, but about $400 in overhead should be subtracted from that.

Although Bordman said neither he nor Angelini had ever told Rhosen they would only be earning $250, Rhosen insisted he was “lying,” and a friend who had accompanied her to the dealer, Susan Glick, backed her up.

Glick said Bordman and Angelini “told us we couldn’t even go to look at the cars without them, and we were not able to view the actual purchase transaction. . . . But their deal was, they would bid on the car we wanted and charge only $250 plus the fee to the auction house. And they said the fee was $175, when it was actually only $90.”

I’ve found in writing occasionally about buying cars in recent months that it pays to give careful attention to the numbers.

This proved to be the case with Bordman, who first told me that he had paid “between $4,600 and $4,700” for Rhosen’s car, including a $400 auctioneer’s fee.

I took the precaution of checking with John Geiger, assistant general manager of the auction firm.

Geiger said the fee figure was bunk. “We only charged a nominal fee, nothing like $400,” he said.

Bordman later acknowledged paying only a $90 fee, and Geiger confirmed this amount. But Bordman added that his purchase price had been increased by borrowing at 3% interest per month to pay it, despite the fact that Rhosen had paid him in cash. He said the loan payments were costing him close to $150 a month.

Bordman accused Rhosen of obtaining the $4,250 base purchase price--normally a figure the auto auction does not reveal to outsiders--by “calling up the auction and pretending she worked for me.”

Rhosen asserted that it wasn’t what she said, but what auction personnel presumed, that led to release of the key figure.

She had become suspicious, she said, when she checked the Kelley Blue Book at the library and found the dealer had given her an inflated Blue Book price.

W. James Bragg, a Long Beach author of a book on how to buy cars, remarked to me of Rhosen:

“She has to be the first person in L.A. who found out what her intermediary had actually paid for her car. Anybody else doesn’t have a clue.”

But Rhosen is persistent. When the court file is reconstructed, I would think she would represent herself well at the next trial.

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Ken Reich can be contacted with your accounts of true consumer adventure at (213) 237-7060, or by e-mail at ken.reich@latimes.com.