Wheels Up, Cars to Go
Thieves target cars parked at Montreal airport
When his plane touched down at Montreal's Dorval international airport, David LaRoche collected his luggage and headed for the airport parking garage, where he'd left his brand-new Audi sedan 3 1/2 weeks earlier. But the car wasn't there. LaRoche, 56, found a police officer, who gave him the bad news: His Audi A6 most likely had been absorbed into a vast stolen-car black market somewhere in Eastern Europe or Africa. "In a heartbeat," LaRoche recalls, "the officer told me, `You're never going to see that car again.' "
LaRoche, who flies out of Montreal because it is the closest major airport to his northern Vermont home, is not alone. Countless U.S. travelers use Montreal's airport because of its convenient location and competitive prices, which it touts in radio ads in New England and upstate New York. Not surprisingly, the ads don't mention that more than 200 cars--primarily expensive new ones--are heisted every year from the airport's parking lots.
Professional thieves search the airport's long-term parking garages for cars that are relatively free of dust and have U.S. license plates--a lack of dust means that a car was parked recently, and Americans often travel for weeks on end. Says Andre Beauchamp, a car-theft investigator for the Insurance Bureau of Canada: "That gives the bad guys a lot of time to do whatever they want with the car."
What they do, typically, is take the stolen cars to Montreal's harbor, where they are concealed inside huge metal shipping containers to be taken overseas. In little more than a week, the cars are on the street in Russia or countries in Africa or Asia. Police allege that Canada's most powerful car-theft rings are controlled by Russian crime organizations. "Russians come to Montreal to place orders for x amount of vehicles," says Doug Hurley, the head of the Montreal Police property-crimes division.
Airport officials downplay the problem. "You have to put things in perspective . . . when you have [so many] cars parked at your airport every year," says Pierre-Paul Pharand, Montreal's director of airport protection. "It's not a major problem." But the Montreal airport's car-theft problem--police recorded 220 stolen cars last year--is far worse than other international airports in North America. Last year, for example, only 65 cars were stolen from parking lots at Los Angeles's sprawling airport; Boston's Logan airport had only four reported thefts. So now David LaRoche will head to Logan, his next-closest major airport. It's a longer drive, but that's OK if it saves his new car.
This story appears in the July 30, 2001 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.