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The product of a criminal subculture, Wills had a perfect pedigree in pilfering. Abandoned as a child, he was raised by a foster family that included two car-thieving brothers before becoming the Artful Dodger to the Fagin of Bucks County. After his arrest (and before fleeing), Wills told the FBI that he learned much of the craft as a teenager from John Palamarchuk, a 68-year-old former body-shop owner known to law enforcement as "One-Eyed." (His right eye socket, filled with a plastic orb, is barely open.) Wills, who did not own a driver's license, sometimes enlisted his mentor to rent the trucks that hauled his booty. Palamarchuk, who has never served time despite nine arrests, was happy to oblige. Even today, after his star student's fall, Palamarchuk makes no excuses about the milieu he inhabited. "What are you driving?" he asks, single-eyeballing a reporter's rented Chevy Corsica in a parking lot in his hometown of Bensalem. "Ahhh, that's easy to steal." Palamarchuk has raging gray hair, grungy clothes and the thick, menacing fingers of a man who's been plundering cars since the 1950s. During World War II, Palamarchuk claims he served on an underwater-demolition team in the Pacific, being paid, in effect, "$54 a month to kill people." As a result, he says, filching cars never posed an ethical dilemma for him. Over lunch, he insists he's "retired" after stealing more than 1,000 cars -- enough to help put two daughters through law and medical school. "Thank God, they didn't follow me," he says with a frenzied laugh. "Who the hell needs another car thief in the family?"
He is outraged by the popularity of the crude and cruel techniques of carjacking, which he insists is due to a national surplus of amateur burglars. "In the 45 seconds it would take me to push you out of your car, I could simply take it off a dark street," he explains. "If it's complicated, maybe I'll need 60 seconds."
Car snatchers such as Palamarchuk claim that the center of Philadelphia's black market is Passyunk Avenue, in the southwestern part of the city. Here lies a sprawling shantytown of 70 salvage yards, and journalists are about as welcome as the rusty mud after a heavy rain. "Is that your car?" barks the manager of one junkyard. "Leave it there a couple of hours, and see what ! happens to it." His sidekick, an unfriendly German shepherd, growls in agreement.
Nobody knows precisely how much of Passyunk Avenue's merchandise is hot. Palamarchuk believes it's more than 90%. Tony Kane, a special agent who covers Philadelphia for the National Insurance Crime Bureau, guesses 40%. "The general attitude on Passyunk is that if I don't buy it, the next yard will," says Kane. "You'll walk into a lot of yards and see nothing but a few doors and a lot of junk. That's because calls are made, orders are taken, and things get done through the back door."
The salvage yards communicate via an auto-parts telephone hot line. Some hot lines are statewide; others reach yards and body shops as far away as Florida or California. "I'm looking for a '91 Cadillac Seville left door," broadcasts one merchant. Before long, another responds, "I can fill that order." Fine, but does the seller have it in stock, wonders Kane, or will he arrange for a special-order theft? There's no way to tell, which makes the monitoring of hot lines by law enforcement virtually useless.