Customers were being towed left and right. If you visited an establishment and your car was towed, would you return?
The Fort Worth Weekly has the scoop. It ain't pretty. And it ain't the first time for parking troubles on West 7th. WHAT company was doing the towing? WHO initiated the "spotter" and the towing? How did the "spotter" know WHO was visiting WHAT establishment? Inquiring minds want to know.
On Friday and Saturday nights, sources say, more than 100 cars were towed from Montgomery Plaza’s parking lot for illegal parking.
Keely witnessed most of the action on Friday and nearly all of the action on Saturday. A “spotter,” Keely said, was patrolling the plaza’s parking lot, stealthily watching for violators and photographing their vehicles’ license plate numbers. A fleet of about a half-dozen tow-trucks, Keely estimated, was at the spotter’s call. The wreckers, said Eric Tschetter, owner of The Pour House on West 7th Street, “would pull [illegally parked] cars two wheels up, drive a block away, and then put them up on the truck. I mean, people had their parking breaks on. Cars were screeching all the way down the street. It was not a pretty sight.”
At one point, Keely confronted a wrecker. “I told him, ‘You’re raping people for three-hundred bucks,’ ” Keely said. “He said, ‘No, it’s actually $293.30.’ ”
Jimmy Moore, owner of the 7th Haven on West 7th Street, witnessed a tow-truck driver employing a “Slim Jim” to break into a car to release the parking break. “I called him out, and he said it was perfectly legal,” Moore recalled. “The car turned out to belong to the mom of Girl Scouts selling cookies on my back deck.”
Even Montgomery Plaza customers weren’t safe. Keely said that a couple of his customers who had visited establishments located in the plaza earlier in the evening were victimized by the tow-trucks later.
UPDATES : Thanks to THE PEOPLE, the Fort Worth Weekly now has pictures of the wrecker drivers on their site.
And Facebook now has a boycott Montgomery Plaza page.
