John F. Rivers, 44, of East Greenbush, New York, held towing contracts with a Walmart, a Hannaford, and a Home Depot in the Albany area — the exact kind of agreement that gives a tow operator legal access to a retail parking lot to remove abandoned or improperly parked vehicles. Between October 2022 and August 2024, he used that access to steal 17 vehicles worth a combined $230,000, according to the New York Attorney General’s office. On February 24, 2026, a Rensselaer County court sentenced him to 2 to 6 years in state prison. His buyer, 58-year-old Broadalbin used car dealer Robert A. Pitcher, who created fraudulent ownership paperwork to resell the stolen cars, received 5 years probation.
The case is a clean illustration of a specific vulnerability in how towing actually works: the contract that authorizes a tow company to police a parking lot is the same contract that hands it physical custody of someone else’s car, with almost no real-time check on what happens to that vehicle next.
How The Scheme Actually Ran
New York law requires a mandatory 30-day hold period before a towed vehicle can be sold, giving an owner time to reclaim it and giving law enforcement time to catch fraud in progress. Rivers’ operation blew past that window routinely. According to the Attorney General’s announcement, vehicles were sold within days of being towed — not weeks — and owners were never notified their cars had even been taken, let alone sold.
One case detailed by investigators involved a Hyundai Sonata towed in March 2024. Within two months, it had been transported out of state to a chop shop in Massachusetts. The owner learned none of this from Rivers’ company — there was no notification process to skip, because the entire point of the scheme was to move vehicles before anyone came looking. Attorney General Letitia James summarized the operation directly: “John Rivers turned his towing business into a criminal operation, stealing cars throughout the Capital Region and selling them to dealers like Robert Pitcher.”
The Dealer’s Role Was The Laundering Step
A stolen car is worthless the moment someone checks a title. Pitcher’s role in the scheme was manufacturing the paperwork that made stolen vehicles look like legitimately acquired used inventory — the same forged-ownership-document problem that shows up again and again in vehicle theft rings, because a clean-looking title is what lets a stolen car re-enter the legal market instead of staying hidden. Combined, the two defendants faced more than 30 felony charges before sentencing, per the AG’s office…