The Connecticut Department of Motor Vehicles has fired a longtime employee nearly five years after investigators found he used his position to garner steep discounts on cars he bought from a towing company, according to a termination letter obtained last week.
The Connecticut Mirror and ProPublica reported in March on the accusations against Dominik Stefanski and the DMV’s failure to take action against him or the towing company. The story was part of a larger series about how Connecticut’s towing laws have come to favor tow truck companies over vehicle owners and how the DMV’s lack of oversight has allowed abuses in the system. The DMV investigated Stefanski for over a year beginning in 2020 but didn’t fire him until early November, months after the news organizations’ story.
According to the 2020-21 DMV investigation, when employees of D&L Auto Body & Towing in Berlin, Connecticut, went to the main DMV office in nearby Wethersfield, they would make eye contact with Stefanski, who would then allow them to cut the slow-moving DMV lines. In exchange for this favor, the report said, D&L employees would allow Stefanski to select vehicles that had been towed by the company weeks or months before. D&L would then undervalue the cars on DMV forms, investigators said, allowing Stefanski to buy them cheaply and resell them for a profit.
In total, DMV investigators found that from 2015 to 2019, D&L sold 15 vehicles to an investment firm owned by Stefanski, who had worked for the agency since 1999 and was then a document examiner in the DMV’s main office. In one case, Stefanski bought a Cadillac for $1,000 and sold it for $17,500. The car was eventually sold by another company for $23,250.
In 2020, DMV investigators recommended that Stefanski be criminally charged for the scheme they alleged made him thousands of dollars, and they completed an arrest warrant. A prosecutor decided not to file charges, however, citing “prosecutorial discretion” and “insufficient evidence to meet the burden of proof beyond a reasonable doubt.” The prosecutor suggested the DMV could handle the matter internally.
But the DMV did not discipline Stefanski or issue fines against D&L in the years after the investigation. The agency declined to comment on the firing and declined to answer specific questions about the investigation.
Stefanski was placed on paid administrative leave in March, two business days after the story was published. He earned just over $72,000 annually. The Nov. 6 termination letter notes that he was fired for misconduct “when you used your position for financial gain.”
Stefanski said he has appealed and anticipates having a hearing next month. In an interview with reporters earlier this year, Stefanski maintained that he hadn’t done anything wrong.
Reached by phone last week, Stefanski said that after the news organizations published the article, he had a hearing in which he presented evidence, including a check he received as a loan to buy one of the vehicles. He said the check proves he paid more for the vehicle than the warrant indicated.
The state rejected Stefanski’s argument.
“The agency did not find that the information presented provided any basis to mitigate the contemplated penalty of dismissal,” the termination letter said.
A D&L official declined to comment on the firing but said previously in a statement that the manager working with Stefanski was fired and that the company is working with the DMV “to ensure that this type of situation doesn’t happen again.”
“The company’s manager at the time acted on his own and thought he was doing the right thing by selling in-operable cars,” the statement said. According to investigators, many of the cars were in good condition.
Stefanski said his union is helping him with the appeal, but he declined to give details until it is over.
Logan Williams, a representative of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees Council 4, which represents DMV workers, said the union can’t comment on the specifics of the case but that the rights of workers “derive their strength from the integrity of due process.”
“Every Union exists to defend this process and our members’ rights,” Williams said in a statement. “Whenever discipline is handed down in the workplace, our union has an obligation to ensure that the process is followed and that our members have access to due process.”
Stefanski said no one at the DMV indicated why he was being fired close to seven years after the incidents and five years after DMV investigators learned what was happening.
“They didn’t give me an explanation. They actually didn’t give me nothing,” Stefanski said.
