Mark Wills was obsessed with beautiful bodies -- flesh or metal or his own. By daylight, Wills, 28, worshipped his massive 6-ft. 1-in., 270-lb. frame in the mirrors of the weight-lifting center he owned in lower Bucks County, Pennsylvania. By night, he muscled his way off dance floors and into the beds of attractive women whose names, he bragged, he rarely remembered. But Wills' true talents lay elsewhere. Once each week he would get his hands on hard bodies that never played hard-to-get -- curvaceous Camaros, sleek Cadillacs, majestic Monte Carlos -- gleaming beauties that he could effortlessly pick up, strip naked and dispose of in a matter of hours. Mark Wills was one of Philadelphia's biggest car thieves.
"Wills boasted to me that he'd been stealing cars since the age of 14," says Lindsay Stott Jr., an undercover FBI agent who infiltrated the muscleman's operations. "He was proud of his expertise. He was very much in love with himself." Last year the feds and local police busted Wills' six- man, 14,000-sq.-ft. "chop shop" set in an industrial park in Bensalem, Pennsylvania. But, while all his cohorts were prosecuted, Wills fled after his arrest -- and remains at large. What has emerged of his saga illustrates how easy and lucrative it is to make a living abducting and dismembering automobiles in America.
"Car crime is hugely profitable and very difficult to detect," says Bucks County prosecutor Carolyn Oliver. "Wills' million-dollar ring is the biggest we've ever seen here, but it's just the tip of the iceberg." Salvage yards and body shops across the country will pay illegal suppliers like Wills $5,000 total for the front end, back clip, engine, radio, doors and bumpers of a typical late-model car. The parts are then resold to insurance companies, marked up 200% to 300% of their black-market cost. Last year 40,000 cars were stolen in the Philadelphia area alone. Very few of the thieves were caught.
By all accounts, Wills was a hands-on executive. He stole many of the cars himself in front of suburban row houses on the busy streets of North Philadelphia. Wills would pry a side window loose with a screwdriver, pull the glass back with his bare hands, unlock the door and slither inside. Next, he used the screwdriver to break the steering column and turn on the ignition. Popular antitheft devices like The Club, which locks a steering wheel in place, never deterred him. Most thieves spray The Club with Freon and crack it with a hammer. Wills would snip it in half with a ratchet-type tool. "He said he preferred GM cars," says agent Stott. "I think he was probably just more familiar with them."