Used-car dealers’ sketchy ways met with a yawn

Law enforcement takes some forms of fraud very seriously. Writers of bad checks, for instance, can expect to practice their cursive in jail.

But when a car dealer sells a rebuilt wreck and conceals the damage, authorities tend to want to pretend that no laws were broken.

This week’s Martin column describes a recent civil trial that ended with a jury hammering Blue Springs Ford for selling a pickup truck that had undisclosed structural damage. “The whole front end was cock-eyed,” Bernard Brown, the attorney for the couple who bought the Ranger, says.

The jury awarded the couple, Kimberly and Michael von David, $171,520 in actual damages and assessed eye-popping punitive damages of $1.75 million.

Brown has taken Blue Springs Ford to court on multiple

occasions. He’s astonished by the brazenness with which the

dealership seems to operate. “There are other Ford dealers we never a

peep about,” he says.