The Wees returned to find a crew from Robert’s Towing hauling away their silver Toyota Solara, even after Lydia, 28, sat down in the passenger seat and said she wouldn’t move until police arrived.
“The men then stepped into their truck and began driving off with my wife still halfway in the car and the door still wide [open]!’’ Daniel Wee, 31, wrote in a complaint to the state.
The Wees unwittingly picked perhaps the worst place to park in a city where street spots are painfully limited and snagging one in a private lot sometimes seems like the only solution. It is an inherently risky move - trespassing in fact - but also a risk that varies enormously from lot to lot, a Globe review of city towing records shows.
Some lots are virtual snares, and none more so than the one the Wees wandered into: More than twice as many cars have been towed for illegally using the 63-spot lot shared by a Rite Aid and a Dunkin’ Donuts than at any other address in Boston, according to the Globe review. The second-leading location was the South Bay mall in Dorchester, a vast lot with more than 2,000 parking spots.
Also on the top 10 list of towing hot spots are three other pharmacy parking lots in Allston, South Boston, and the South End; Commercial Wharf West, a block-long private street near the North End; the Whole Foods near the Boston-Brookline border; Blanchard’s liquor store in Allston, a Stop & Shop in Brigham Circle, and a strip mall lot in Fields Corner.
But the extraordinary number of tows from the one small Allston strip mall - roughly 3,550 vehicles over 31 months, generating an estimated $465,000 in cash for Robert’s if they collected $131 per tow - does more than illustrate the tactics of one company.
It casts a light on an industry that in Boston legally impounds roughly 90,000 vehicles a year. Tow companies, nearly all of them privately owned, have almost no government oversight, even though they use heavy equipment to seize private property, carry tools for prying open cars, and often demand cash on the street.
