UK Police Bust Chop Shop Mechanic

He was a busy, busy man.

Everyone knows about chop shops in part thanks to Hollywood and its glamorous portrayals of such operations. The reality is most chop shops are small operations that move around for obvious reasons. But police in the UK busted one that had almost £500,000 of parts and cars present at the time, so it was a big operation.

Watch a fleeing Dodge Ram get wrecked by police here.

The chop shop mechanic in question, Ali Teli, was found guilty of his crimes by a jury, as reported by Oxford Mail. This after the man tried blaming the whole operation on a mysterious subletter of his shop space, with Teli going so far as to craft fake invoices to make his contrived explanation look legitimate.

Thames Valley Police took photos of the operation when they made the bust. Unsurprisingly, a Range Rover was in the process of being stripped of parts when the shop was raided. Considering they’re stolen so often in the London that some insurance providers won’t cover them anymore, we fully expected those to be at the backbone of such an ambitious operation.

Also, Range Rovers need plenty of parts since they’re always breaking. It’s a sad yet true reality anyone who’s owned one for a significant portion of time knows all too well.

Funny enough the report says a GPS tracker was what brought Teli’s operation down. Most thieves these days will park a stolen vehicle in a public spot away from where they originally stole it for a few days just to see if anyone shows up to take it back. After all, with small tracking devices like AirTags that can be dropped literally anywhere in a car, even thieves can’t be too cautious these days. It would appear Teli got sloppy, probably because he had chopped up so many stolen cars and not been caught. Ego is oftentimes the worst enemy of a criminal mastermind.

Teli has been sentenced to six years imprisonment after the judge called his operation “almost industrial.” Surely the sheer scope of his ambitious chop shop was what earned him such a heavy sentence. That is likely why most chop shops are temporary and small.

Unfortunately, Teli has four kids he leaves behind and his wife is pregnant with their fifth. Hopefully those children don’t grow up to follow in their father’s footsteps.

Images via Thames Valley Police