Missouri will hand a repair shop or tow yard the title to someone else’s car if the business can show the owner asked for the work in writing, mailed the owner a certified notice and swore in an affidavit that the bill went unpaid. Dennis Arthur Cleveland, owner of Affordable Towing, filled in the first of those requirements with forged owner signatures on cars that had been reported stolen. On Oct. 6, a federal judge in Springfield sentenced him to 153 months in prison.
What Cleveland admitted
Cleveland, now 76, pleaded guilty in December 2025 to one count each of mail fraud, aggravated identity theft and money laundering. According to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Western District of Missouri, he directed employees he knew were submitting fraudulent paperwork to send it to the Missouri Department of Revenue to obtain substitute or replacement mechanic’s liens and titles.
Each filing claimed the vehicle’s owner had given permission. None had, and the owner signatures on the documents were confirmed to be forgeries. Every vehicle in the scheme had been reported stolen. When the paperwork produced a lien or title, the car was sold through a used-car dealership. When it didn’t, the car went to a local scrapyard. Prosecutors said Cleveland kept the proceeds either way, and put the total at several million dollars.
U.S. District Judge Stephen R. Bough gave Cleveland 120 months on the mail fraud and money laundering counts, to run concurrently, plus 24 months for aggravated identity theft, which runs consecutively. He added nine months for violating supervision from Cleveland’s 2023 federal conviction. After prison come three years of supervised release, $400,000 in fines, a $300 special assessment, $37,049 in restitution and a $37,049 forfeiture order.
Those last two numbers sit oddly next to “several million dollars.” The office’s release doesn’t say how many vehicles were involved, who the victims behind the restitution figure are, or why it covers so small a share of the money prosecutors say Cleveland took in.
“The defendant didn’t simply commit a harmless paperwork offense; he manipulated records for personal greed,” U.S. Attorney R. Matthew Price said in the sentencing announcement.
How a Missouri lien title is issued
The process lives in Section 430.082 of the Revised Statutes of Missouri. A shop that repairs a vehicle, or a business that tows or stores one, earns a lien when it does that work “at the written request of its owner, authorized agent of the owner, or person in lawful possession thereof,” or at the request of a peace officer. For towing and storage, the clock starts when storage charges begin. If the vehicle sits unclaimed for 45 days, the business must send certified mail to the owner and any lienholders of record. If 30 more days pass without payment or an arrangement, it can apply for title.
The application has to include “the original or a conformed or photostatic copy of the written request of the owner or the owner’s agent or of a peace officer,” along with an affidavit that notice went out and the debt is in default. The Department of Revenue’s Form 1062, the Affidavit for Mechanic Lien Title, must be notarized. If the director is “satisfied with the genuineness of the application,” and nobody has redeemed the vehicle or demanded a hearing, the state issues a new title in the applicant’s name, captioned “Lien Title.”
Every step after the first depends on that written request. It is the document that establishes the business had a right to the car in the first place, and it is supplied by the business seeking the title. The state reviews it as paper. A forged owner signature on that request turns a stolen car into a car with an unpaid storage bill, and the remaining steps (the mailing, the affidavit, the notary stamp) proceed on top of it.
The stolen-car check sits on a different form
Missouri does build theft checks into another way tow companies get title. When police order an abandoned or stolen vehicle towed, the officer fills out Form 4569, the Crime Inquiry and Inspection Report/Authorization to Tow, which has fields for whether the vehicle is stolen, when and where it was taken, and an NCIC inquiry. The Department of Revenue’s Abandoned Property Manual, revised in August 2025, says the authorizing agency must check the National Crime Information Center, and a tow company’s title file must include a dated law enforcement computer inquiry verification.
I read Section 430.082 end to end. It contains no reference to stolen vehicles, NCIC or a law enforcement inquiry. Whether the Department of Revenue runs theft checks on lien-title applications as an administrative practice isn’t stated in the statute, and the federal releases don’t explain how Cleveland’s filings on stolen cars got through. They also don’t say whether the owners received the certified-mail notices the law requires, or how the scheme came to investigators’ attention.
A tow yard is one of the few businesses whose daily work involves holding cars that their owners aren’t standing beside. That custody is what makes the lien law necessary. Shops and towers do get stiffed, and the lien title is how they get paid without a lawsuit over every abandoned car. It is also why the written-request requirement carries so much weight.
Cleveland’s second federal case in three years
Cleveland was already a federal defendant before the title case. In September 2023, Bough sentenced him to two years in prison and a $255,000 fine for conspiring to violate the Clean Air Act and tampering with a monitoring device. That release identified Affordable Towing as based in Kirbyville, Mo. Cleveland admitted that, starting in 2011, he had employees disable emissions controls on the company’s heavy-duty diesel tow trucks. According to court documents cited by prosecutors, each of the 12 altered trucks released the pollution equivalent of 1,140 legally operating tow trucks.
He kept running the modified fleet after law enforcement contacted him in September 2022, and kept running it after pleading guilty and being warned by the court. His bond was revoked on July 20, 2023. The agencies credited with investigating the title case include the EPA’s Criminal Investigation Division and the Missouri Department of Natural Resources, alongside the Department of Revenue’s Compliance and Investigation Bureau, the Postal Inspection Service and IRS Criminal Investigation. The releases don’t say when the title scheme ran.
One of his employees, Christie Engle, 49, of Springfield, pleaded guilty in January 2026 to the same three charges. I found no announcement of her sentence on the U.S. Attorney’s Office site.
Title paperwork has been the weak point in other cases we’ve covered this year, including a dealer accused of forging a dead woman’s signature to sell hail-damaged cars as clean and 31 felony charges in a Georgia tag-office fraud case.
What owners and used-car buyers can check
If your car is stolen in Missouri, keep your address current with the Department of Revenue. The lien-title statute requires the warning to go by certified mail to the owner’s last known address, and the shop’s notice, Form 5835, gives you 30 days to respond. A certified letter announcing a lien title on a car you reported stolen is a reason to call the police department that took your report, and the statute gives owners the right to demand a hearing.
If you are buying a used car with a Missouri title captioned “Lien Title” in its history, that alone isn’t a red flag. Lien titles are a routine way abandoned repair jobs get resolved. It does mean the prior owner never signed the car over, so ask the seller for the lien paperwork and run the VIN through the federal National Motor Vehicle Title Information System, which reports title brands and salvage records and, the Justice Department says, historical theft data in some cases.
Two things to watch next: Engle’s sentencing, and whether the Department of Revenue or the legislature adds the NCIC inquiry Missouri already requires on police-ordered tows to the lien-title process.
Should a tow yard get title on its own paperwork, or should every lien-title application wait on the same stolen-vehicle check Missouri already runs on police tows?