Fake License Ring Busted in New York

For criminals, it was like a get-out-of-rap-sheet free card. Until the authorities played their own hand.

Two dozen people, including two New York State DMV workers, have been accused in a scheme to sell fake driver’s licenses to criminals seeking new identities, the Daily News reported this week. The going price for licenses? Around $7,000 to $10,000 each, according to the Daily News. The ring allegedly sold more than 200 of them.

The IDs were “keys that could liberate criminals from their rap sheets,” Preet Bharara, U.S. Attorney for the Southern District is quoted. Bharara added that high-tech security is useless if employees who work in sensitive positions are dishonest.

“We hope to send a message to every employee of every government agency that you cannot sell your integrity,” Bharara said, according to WNYC radio. “If you do, you put everyone else in your community at risk, and your country at risk.”


The driver’s licenses looked real because they were real, with all the hallmarks and other design elements of every other New York State driver’s license. Among the criminals who bought the licenses: a fugitive drug dealer featured on “America’s Most Wanted”; a convicted sex offender; and a man who couldn’t get a regular license because of a drunken-driving conviction.

The sting operation was a joint effort between the New York Police Department and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly said the ringleader, Wilch Dewalt, 52, also known as “the License Man,” sold a license to an undercover officer posing as an illegal alien who was on the U.S. “no-fly” list.

Authorities said Dewalt bought stolen Social Security numbers from other sources, then checked with a Harlem DMV employee, Glenda Hinton, 54, to see if any IDs were already issued under that name. If not, Dewalt would create an entire identification package for the client, including birth certificate and W-2 forms. Dewalt would then direct the client to the Yonkers DMV office, where an accomplice, a supervisor named Robin Jones-Woodson, 42, allegedly would steer the application through the system, The News reported.

If the charges are true, they’re yet another reminder that the illicit uses of Social Security numbers extend beyond simply opening new credit accounts.