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entering a lot, a customer would take a ticket from a
machine. The date and time would be printed on the
ticket and encoded in the magnetic strip on the back.
To leave the lot, the customer would drive to a
tollbooth and the ticket would be put into another
machine. This machine would read the date and time of
issuance, calculate the length of time that the
customer had parked in the lot, and display the parking
fee owed. The customer would then pay the cashier in
the tollbooth. At the end of a shift, each cashier
would bundle together the tickets and cash received and
put them in a brown bag labeled with the cashier’s name
and the number of the tollbooth. Each cashier would
also place in the bag a tape from the ticket-reading
machine that provided a record of the tickets that the
machine had processed. The supervisors then would
forward the bags to Gricco’s assistants.
In early 1990, Gricco, McCardell, and others made
a plan to steal money by substituting customers’ real
tickets with replacement tickets showing false dates
and times of entry. A customer who had parked in the
lot for a long period of time would have a real ticket
reflecting a high parking fee. On leaving the lot, the
customer would pay this fee to the cashier. However,
instead of inserting the real ticket into the ticket-
reading machine, a cashier participating in the scheme
would insert a replacement ticket, and the machine
would calculate the parking fee based on the false date
and time stamped on the replacement ticket. This
replacement ticket would indicate that the customer had
parked for only a short period of time, and thus the
parking fee would be much lower. The thieves would
pocket the difference between the amount paid by the
customer and the amount of the fee shown on the
replacement tickets.
Michael Flannery, a technician for the company
responsible for maintaining the ticket machines,
provided the replacement tickets. Flannery also
disabled the fare displays on the ticket-reading
machines so that customers could not see that the
parking fees that they were paying were higher than the
fees recorded by the machines.
Flannery initially supplied Gricco with
replacement tickets by removing tickets from the
ticket-issuing machines and then resetting the counters
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Last modified: March 27, 2008