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Life & Times Transcript

07/21/05

Val Zavala>> Tonight on Life and Times --

What they're doing is illegal, so how are these tow companies getting away with it?

Tamar Galatzan>> They've just started going willy-nilly throughout the community picking up cars, towing them and charging whatever prices they wanted and you had to pay that to get your car back.

Val>> And then, our FilmWeek critics mull over a musician's last days, the hustle and flow of Memphis street life and an island that's far from paradise.

It's all straight ahead on tonight's Life and Times.

Life and Times is made possible through the generous support of the L.K. Whittier Foundation dedicated to improving the quality of life by supporting innovative endeavors in the fields of medicine, health, science and education.

And by a generous grant from Jim and Anne Rothenberg.

Val>> It's a rip-off that's costing car owners tens of thousands of dollars. Some tow truck companies are towing cars illegally, extorting money and then charging exorbitant fees to release the cars. There are so many complaints that now the police have launched an undercover operation to nab these unscrupulous tow truck companies. Is it working? Sam Louie has the story.

Sam Louie>> Getting your car towed can leave you stranded, frustrated and vulnerable. While most tow truck companies operate within the law in Los Angeles, experts estimate that close to twenty percent used questionable tactics.

Tamar Galatzan>> We're probably talking about hundreds if not thousands of victims citywide of these tows.

Sam Louie>> Tamar Galatzan is a Los Angeles Deputy City Attorney.

Tamar Galatzan>> "How long were you parked there?"

Sam Louie>> Each week, she's inundated with calls from people complaining about tow truck companies.

Tamar Galatzan>> They find so many ways around the law, so many ways to victimize people.

Sam Louie>> Among the most common complaint, people are towed illegally or overcharged to get their car back.

Tamar Galatzan>> The problem with the tow truck companies is something that is not only in Los Angeles, it's actually statewide. It's actually across the country.

Sam Louie>> Galatzan says, in 1994, the federal government deregulated towing. As a result, cities and states lost the ability to regulate certain areas of the towing business.

Tamar Galatzan>> What that created was a bunch of tow companies, some that had just popped up, that didn't have to follow any rules. There was no one there to regulate them. There was nothing really there that they had to follow, so they just started going willy-nilly throughout the community picking up cars, towing them and charging whatever prices they wanted and you had to pay that to get your car back.

Sam Louie>> With some companies making as much as ten thousand dollars a day, towing is seen as a cash cow. In Los Angeles alone, there are four hundred licensed tow truck companies, twice the number before deregulation. Galatzan says the growth has led to hundreds of complaints with similar stories of deception and extortion. Her office is aggressively filing criminal charges against several tow truck companies.

Tamar Galatzan>> These are often multiple counts, twenty, thirty, forty, fifty counts of unlawfully taking a vehicle, attempted extortion, vehicle tampering, receiving stolen property. Those are the types of criminal charges that we've been filing against the owners of these tow companies.

Sam Louie>> Some of the companies being investigated included 5A Roadside Towing, Top Notch Towing and Act Towing, all based in Van Nuys. The companies did not want to be interviewed, but 5A Towing acknowledges that they towed away this Hummer from a McDonalds parking lot in Van Nuys. The vehicle's owner, Sheila Harry, says she was parked legally when her car was towed in late May. She agreed to talk on camera, but did not want to show her face.

Sheila Harry>> When I asked the guy what he was doing, he said, well, he had been called to tow my car, that I'd been here for over thirty minutes and I left the premises. I said, no, I didn't go anywhere. You shouldn't tow my car.

Sam Louie>> Sheila, then eight months pregnant, begged them not to tow her car.

Sheila Harry>> I was very uncomfortable. I tried to plead with him to let me go. He wouldn't listen. I had to go to the hospital. When I got to the hospital, I was having contractions. I was having headaches and dehydration.

Sam Louie>> The company released her Hummer after charging her $322. Sheila says she's filed a civil lawsuit against the company.

Sheila Harry>> I think it's ridiculous and something needs to be done about it to stop it or else they'll keep doing it to a lot of people.

Sam Louie>> Because of numerous complaints, the LAPD is actively conducting undercover sting operations to catch illegal tow truck operators. We were with the undercover officers as they went after Quick Lift Towing, a company with numerous complaints. On this day, we found the company's tow trucks busy at a parking lot in Hollywood.

Captain Ann Young>> We actually see them watching and waiting and checking out the vehicles from time to time and looking at where the person is going and to what particular store and maybe making notes on a clipboard as to what time and how long. It's an operation. It's organized and well-planned.

Sam Louie>> But the tow truck employees were the ones being watched today as they tried to tow away an undercover officer's car illegally.

[Film Clip]

Sam Louie>> In this case, the man in the white t-shirt claims he works with the shopping property and has the right to authorize the tow.

[Film Clip]

Sam Louie>> The man offers to release the car on the spot if she gives him $180 cash.

[Film Clip]

Sam Louie>> The car ends up being towed, but police follow close behind. Several minutes later, they pull the truck over. The tow truck driver is handcuffed and arrested. When we tried to ask him a few questions, he had little to say.

>> "I was just doing my job, sir. That's about it."

Sam Louie>> Can you explain the job or what your managers tell you to do?

>> "I don't remember. They tell me to pick up a car and that's about it. I ain't got no further comments."

Sam Louie>> Police also arrested the accomplice in the white t-shirt. Both have been charged with taking a vehicle without the owner's consent.

Captain Ann Young>> The person that was arrested today does not work in conjunction with the property owner. In fact, our information tells us that he was with the tow company.

Sam Louie>> Police say not only do some companies illegally take your car, they also overcharge you. In Los Angeles, a tow and one day's storage should be around $120, but many companies try to tack on extra fees especially during nights and on weekends.

Tamar Galatzan>> A lot of these predatory tow companies have added all these additional, you know, storage fees, key fees, after-hours fees, opening the gate fee, all sorts of things which they claim they're allowed to because that's not mentioned in the state law.

Sam Louie>> But as of this year, Galatzan says there is new legislation tow truck companies must follow. By law, tow companies can tow your car from a private lot only after you've parked there for more than one hour. They must also have written permission from a property owner or manager who must be present at the time of the tow. Galatzan believes that this will cut down on the majority of the illegal tows and, for those who defy the law, they'll face prosecution as several have in previous cases.

Tamar Galatzan>> In both cases, there was a lengthy amount of jail time or Caltrans picking up garbage at the side of the freeway. The owners were put on probation. They had to pay restitution, in one case, fifteen thousand dollars to the victims that we had just identified of these predatory tows.

Sam Louie>> And if you are a victim of an illegal tow, it's not too late to get your money back by taking the tow truck company to small claims court. I'm Sam Louie for Life and Times.

Kcet.org is the place to look for the very latest on Life and Times. You'll find previews of upcoming stories, transcripts and audio of past episodes and links to some of our most interesting features. Just go to kcet.org and click on "Life and Times".

Val>> So what do you think humankind's greatest achievement has been? Going to the moon? Curing disease? Or great works of art, music or architecture? Well, according to one thinker in Southern California, none of these. It is the city, and he says Los Angeles is a model for the future. Saul Gonzalez spoke with Joel Kotkin, author of the new book, "The City: A Global History".

Saul Gonzalez>> Joel, whether it's the cities of ancient Samaria a millennia ago or twenty-first century Los Angeles, what has been the importance of urban areas to the larger tale of humankind?

Joel Kotkin>> Well, cities have really been the place where virtually all of culture, science, technology, art, have all come from cities. It's been a unique category of things that only cities have been able to do. Now we may be entering a different era with the internet. With new technology, the rural areas, smaller towns, suburbs may be able to do many of those things. But if you look over five millennia, it's been the city where all this has happened.

Saul Gonzalez>> They've been kind of the engines of civilization, right?

Joel Kotkin>> Yeah, they've been the incubators of ideas, the incubators of great concepts, that have really emerged almost completely form the interactions that have taken place within the cities.

Saul Gonzalez>> What makes a working city work well? What do you need?

Joel Kotkin>> Cities really need to have three things. This is something that I stress in the book. One, they have to be sacred. People have to care. People have to feel that this is my city. This is Los Angeles. This is where I live and I'm willing to sacrifice some conveniences in order to be here. So that sense of sacredness, originally religious, now perhaps more a matter of civic or neighborhood involvements as well.

Saul Gonzalez>> A sense of common participation in the life of the city?

Joel Kotkin>> Right. I mean, this notion that this place matters to me. This neighborhood matters to me is very, very, very critical. Second is safety. Safety is absolutely critical. Anybody who went through the 1992 riots can see what happens to a city when order falls apart. First, you've got to be busy. You have to have commerce, you have to have business, you have to have jobs and you have to have a middle class. Those are the things that really have made cities work and be viable. This is the model of the twenty-first century in every place where there is enough money to afford. You go to London today or Paris and you go to the outskirts of those cities and they look at lot like --

Saul Gonzalez>> -- they look like Los Angeles.

Joel Kotkin>> They look like Los Angeles. Los Angeles is really about the possibilities of urbanism when there's been enough affluence, enough land and the technology allows for people to live in a way which allows them greater private space.

Saul Gonzalez>> And to those who say that the Los Angeles model for a city, this isn't sustainable on this planet. It chews up too many resources, too much land. It's something that shouldn't be exported for the rest of the world. How do you respond?

Joel Kotkin>> Well, I mean, if everyone in India lived like everyone in the San Fernando Valley, it probably would be a problem. I don't think we have to worry about that for a while. But fundamentally, I think the key issue is how do we evolve this way of life in a way that is more environmentally friendly? My ideal is that you build villages and that the metropolitan area is a series of villages that connect together, but are fundamentally more or less self-sufficient, as opposed to the historical model which is you have this center city and everything builds up outside of it. I don't think that makes sense in the twenty-first century, given what we can now do.

Saul Gonzalez>> Because of technology, because through our keyboards and through the internet, we can all in a sense have an urban experience, go to places that at one time you could have only found in cities. Does that change the nature of cities in the future?

Joel Kotkin>> I think it changes them profoundly. I think one of the things that you're going to see over time, for instance, is that you now can conduct very sophisticated business from almost anywhere. For instance, my home office. I'm online to China, to Great Britain, to New York, every day and it's not anything visible.

Saul Gonzalez>> And a kid in Kansas can visit the Louvre online, you know? So how does that change what it means to have an urban experience? Does it make us all cosmopolitans?

Joel Kotkin>> Well, it makes us more cosmopolitan. The urban space, in a funny way, is becoming universal so that I can be, and I have been, in small towns in North Dakota where they have high-speed internet and you've got kids getting online. They are just as well informed in many ways as a broker on Wall Street or as a scientist at JPL is because they've got access to this tremendous amount of information. Now some people say, well, that's the end of cities. I think, you know, what's happening is, in rural America in small towns and suburbs, they are becoming more urban. The world itself, which now has a majority of people living in cities, is actually more urban. It is the triumph of urbanity, not its defeat. It's just a new form of urbanity.

Saul Gonzalez>> Looking ahead to the rest of the twenty-first century, are you generally optimistic about the future of our cities both in this country and around the world?

Joel Kotkin>> I'm optimistic, I think, in many ways about the evolutionary development of the cities in this country. I think I am optimistic about Canada. I'm optimistic about Australia. Europe, I think, has some very serious problems along with Japan because of the very low birth rate, so they lack children. Societies without children are doomed to extinction. I think that's pretty obvious. We certainly would say that about a species in the wild. Then I think that the real question and the great issue of the twenty-first century is what happens to the cities of the developing world? What happens to Mexico City? What happens to Baghdad? What happens to Cairo? That is the great urban issue of the twenty-first century?

Saul Gonzalez>> Where hundreds of millions of people try to survive in squalor, in misery, right?

Joel Kotkin>> And where technology is making it harder and harder for them to, first of all, survive in the countryside and to have any real role in the world's economy. I would say that's the place where I have lots of concerns and I think it's where the world is going to have to address much of its resources in the twenty-first century or we will see, on a global basis, something akin to what happened during the industrial revolution where you had tremendous disruptions. You cannot go on over the long term with millions and millions of people living in cities who have no sense of upheaval.

Saul Gonzalez>> Joel Kotkin, I want to thank you for joining us on Life and Times and thank you very much for writing "The City".

Joel Kotkin>> Thank you.

To send a comment or a question to our program, you can reach us by mail at this address:

Life and Times
4401 Sunset Blvd.
Los Angeles, California 90027

You can also call our viewer comment line (323) 953-5555) or contact us the fast way by e-mail at kcet.org.

Larry Mantle>> Welcome to FilmWeek on Life and Times. I'm Larry Mantle of 89.3 KPCC. Our first film this week is the science fiction movie, "The Island", starring Ewan McGregor, Scarlett Johansson and directed by Michael Bay.

[Film Clip]

Larry Mantle>> I'm joined this week by critics Henry Sheehan of henrysheehan.com and Jean Oppenheimer of New Times. Jean, tell us about "The Island".

Jean Oppenheimer>> Well, "The Island" has a sleek look and some of the shallowness of a TV commercial. Having said that, however, I think it's actually extremely entertaining for the first two-thirds and it's very subdued for a Michael Bay film for the first two-thirds. It's the last third that they get into problem. It is so over the top for the last thirty to thirty-five minutes that, I mean, it loses everything.

I mean, you start out with this story that it's a science fiction story and not real, but to go over the top to this extent. I think a big part of the film, the best actually, is Ewan McGregor who is very likable here. I think he always invests his characters with a lot more than is probably on the written page. Scarlett Johansson, I thought, was fine. I don't like her in period pieces at all and I think she should just stick to contemporary pieces.

Larry Mantle>> Henry, what did you think?

Henry Sheehan>> Well, I think this is probably Michael Bay's best movie to date, although we are talking about the director of "Pearl Harbor" and "Armageddon" (laughter), so it's a fairly low level of achievement. The problem with this movie is you can sit back and enjoy it, but on reflection, the more you start thinking about it, the less it holds together. It opens with this incredibly kitschy vision of a woman on a speedboat that looks like a parody of a perfume commercial.

It does go into a nice area with the clones who are being raised for their organ parts. I'm not giving anything away. This is all in the trailer. But it's not original material. It goes back to "Coma" years ago, but it's handled well enough. The problem is that they can't stick to the level of reality that he himself establishes. Once the action starts piling up, the thing becomes crazily unbelievable by his own criteria and the movie falls apart in front of you.

Larry Mantle>> Our second film is an independent that was a real hit at the Sundance Film Festival. It tells the story of a pimp who wants to make it big in the music business. The film is "Hustle & Flow".

[Film Clip]

Larry Mantle>> Well, Henry, this film was a darling at the Sundance Film Festival. Did it make any magic for you?

Henry Sheehan>> Well, I have to say that I thought Terrence Howard as the lead character of the pimp, DJay, who has ambitions to become a rap singer, was excellent. I mean, Terrence Howard has been around for some years now, usually with featured parts in bad movies, and this is his big opportunity to take a fairly interesting character and run with it and that's what he does.

I don't think DJay is very interesting as written. He's a character who goes way back in film history. John Garfield used to play him all the time of someone deprived or even a somewhat criminal background who wants to make it in music or some other field. I have to say that the movie really puts him through the wringer, but it doesn't cheat you on the ending. I mean, it doesn't fool you into going along with this guy and then, you know, rapping you in the stomach or slapping you in the face at the end. It's a richer film than that.

The problem is that it's a very shallow movie. The women are treated just horribly. I mean, all the women are essentially prostitutes. The good ones are devoted to Terrence Howard's character and the bad ones are not and that's basically how you define the value of the women in this film. It's not particularly believable. It's just a genre piece, but Howard is really, really good.

Larry Mantle>> Jean, do you disagree at all?

Jean Oppenheimer>> No, not really. I think if you can get past the premise -- and that's going to be a pretty big "if" for a lot of people -- there is some very pretty impressive work. Terrence Howard is wonderful in this. I'd also like to point out the cinematography. Amy Vincent actually won the award for cinematography at Sundance, deservedly so.

Basically, this is about a pimp having a midlife crisis and we're supposed to feel sorry for this guy who basically lives off of the whores that he lives with, so right there are some problems. But it's also more of a fairy tale and it's done in that way. If you can accept it as that, I think that it would be easier going. I think that the other actresses were actually quite good, but the parts are very degrading for women.

Larry Mantle>> And we close this week on a new film from director Gus Van Sant. In "Last Days", he tells the story of the final days of a rocker modeled closely on Nirvana's Kurt Cobain. Michael Pitt stars.

[Film Clip]

Larry Mantle>> Well, "Last Days", Nirvana for you or no?

Jean Oppenheimer>> Well, you know, what's really surprising about this film, I think, is that it should be a total bore and it's not. I mean, we're talking about a story that basically has no plot, very little dialog, no action to speak of, and yet it does sort of hold your interest. The film is actually more of an observation in a character study and it's an interesting way to approach the film. We are not asked to identify with Blake. All he does is sort of walk around the grounds, cook macaroni and cheese, avoid his friends, not answer the telephone and we're never asked to get inside of him. His inner turmoil and the reasons for it can only be pretty much presumed. Michael Pitt, an actor I don't tend to care for, I think does a really outstanding job.

Larry Mantle>> What did you think, Henry?

Henry Sheehan>> Well, a lot of respect for the concept behind the movie which is to follow around this fellow in a semi-disassociative state for the final hours before he ends his life and not try to understand him in a conventional sense, but to understand the world he's in which includes hangers-on and a great deal of isolation. I think even Van Sant realized, though, that there was going to be a lack of interest in such a kind of dry undertaking, so he introduces all these supporting characters that have kind of comic playoffs with the rock star Blake. A salesman comes in. Ricky Jay plays the detective and Lukas Haas plays this kind of number one hanger-on. All these characters come in at key moments to kind of lift the movie up, so it kind of doesn't live up to its concept.

Larry Mantle>> And no Courtney Love character in the film?

Henry Sheehan>> No Courtney Love. Not that she's litigious or anything, but no Courtney Love (laughter).

Larry Mantle>> Well, thanks for joining us for another edition of FilmWeek on Life and Times. I'm Larry Mantle of 89.3 KPCC joined by critics Jean Oppenheimer of New Times and Henry Sheehan of henrysheehan.com. Please join us again next week this same time for another edition of FilmWeek on Life and Times.

Val>> And remember KPCC broadcasts a full hour of FilmWeek every Friday morning at 11:00 a.m. And that's our program. I'm Val Zavala. For everyone at Life and Times, thanks for watching. We'll see you next time.

Life and Times was made possible through the generous support of the L.K. Whittier Foundation dedicated to improving the quality of life by supporting innovative endeavors in the fields of medicine, health, science and education.

And by a generous grant from Jim and Anne Rothenberg.

Val>> Next time on Life and Times --

Should Long Beach welcome the west coast's first liquefied natural gas terminal?

>> The area, if we were to have an explosion, would set us back to the Flintstone era.

>> It's not a very good target because it's not very easy to damage. These tanks and these ships are not easy to damage at all.

Val>> That's next time on Life and Times.

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