Dan's Papers - August 7, 2009

During the month of July, a total of five people were arrested in the Town of East Hampton for creating forged beach parking stickers for their cars. Beach parking stickers cost only $25 a year if you are a resident of the Town and $15 if you are a resident who is a senior citizen. The stickers being forged were not these, though. They were the out-of-town version. People not from this place who want to go to East Hampton beaches have to fork over $350 to get a sticker every year. It is placed on the inside back window of the car. Today, as you know, many new cars have tinted windows in the back, so the sticker is sort of hard to see. Traffic control officers would have to look closely to tell a forgery from the real McCoy. It has apparently given people ideas.

On the other hand, I can tell you this is a long way from an organized forgery ring. It's just beach parking, after all. So three of the forgers just placed a regular legal sticker on a color copier, set it for high resolution laser and what came out they stuck it onto the inside back windows of their cars. That the sticker has a number that could be looked up didn't occur to them. And that the license plate number on the sticker didn't match the license plate number of that car didn't seem to phase them either. Another forger used white out on the part of the sticker where the license plate was written, then copied it, whited it out and later magic markered their new license plate number. The fifth perpetrator tried not only whiting out the plate number, but he also changed the actual sticker number by changing a one to a seven. That didn't work either.

The first two forgers were caught on July 6 and July 9. The third forger, Lisa F. Didyk, 52, of Westbury, was arrested on July 10. She and a friend, who is going through chemotherapy, were visiting her mother, who has a sticker for her car. Rather than get their own for such a short stay, Didyk made a color copy of her mother's sticker and put it on her car.

If Didyk didn't think this was such a big deal, forging a public document, she soon learned otherwise. She was arrested on her beach blanket and taken downtown in her bathing suit to face Judge Lisa R. Rana with a charge of Second Degree Felony D, a crime that could lead to six years in prison.

"What you have here are public documents," said Police Chief Todd Sarris. "Whether it's a deed to a house or a parking sticker document does not matter. If you are in possession of an illegal copy of a forged instrument, it is a serious crime."

Didyk told the judge she had made the copy because she didn't want to have her friend have to walk too far. But she had also made other copies of the sticker for other vehicles owned by the household. She was released on her own recognizance.

The fourth person arrested was Nancy J. Caspar, 42, of Chappaqua, N.Y.

(Westbury, Chappaqua - these are upscale communities. Is $350 such a big deal to wealthy people in a post-Madoff era? Apparently so.)

Caspar had parked her 2008 Jeep Grand Cherokee in the lot at Gin Beach in Montauk. It came to the attention of the traffic control officer there because he thought the color of the sticker was slightly off. Also, although the handwriting on the sticker indicating the plate number matched the plate number on the car, the officer noticed it had not been written in the special black marking pen that the clerks use. Upon investigation, he found that the sticker not only had the original plate number whited out - it was for a 2005 Toyota as it turned out - but the new plate number was written in a different kind of ink.

The officer noted the discrepancy and called the real police who, now on the lookout for this vehicle, found it the next day parked in a driveway on Stuyvesant Drive in Montauk. Caspar, when arrested, said she and her husband had been visiting their father who lived in that house, and yes, she had made copies of it for their car. She was also charged with being in possession of fraudulent documents and second degree forgery.

The latest arrest took place at the South Lake Drive Beach in Montauk on July 19, where a forged instrument was found on the rear window of a Dodge Durango by a traffic control officer. Not only was the license plate number whited out and rewritten, but also the number of the sticker itself was changed, crudely, by changing a one to a seven.

Police arrived on the scene, but the Durango was gone. They soon found it elsewhere in Town, however, and Sean McKay, 44, of Darien, Conn., who was here with his wife, was arrested and charged with the same sort of crime as the others, then released on his own recognizance.

After her arrest, Didyk called a local attorney named John Courtney of Amagansett, and though she didn't hire him to represent her, Courtney, as a result of the call, did make some phone calls about the matter. He thought it ridiculous what they had put her through, and he said it was a long way from a felony charge to an indictment and he predicted that no indictment would be forthcoming on any of these matters. The grand jury would not want this case.

"A violation of a Town ordinance, yes. A felony with a possible jail sentence - it's hard to imagine," he said.

I was curious to see if some of our other Towns are having trouble with forged beach stickers, but apparently it is not a problem anywhere except in the Town of East Hampton.

I'd suggest a plea bargain. Perhaps, to avoid a felony, the perps could agree to buy an annual sticker for $350 and keep it pinned it to their clothing day and night for the six years they might otherwise have had to spend in jail. It would be a small price to pay, $350 times six, although waiting in line to get it renewed every year would be something of an inconvenience.

And of course, if they forget to renew, or if they commit another forgery by copying the sticker so as to avoid having to stand in line, well, the Town can haul them in and proceed with the case as if the plea bargain had never taken place.