‘Botched from the word go’: How W5 uncovered a ‘serious error’ and authorities dropped charges against car salesmen

Car salesman wrongly accused of selling stolen cars considering suing Toronto Police.

A “serious error” by police that was uncovered in a W5 investigation is among the reasons that Crown prosecutors dropped dozens of the nearly 200 charges against a pair of car salesmen accused of selling stolen cars, according to one of the lawyers for the two men.

Now, the two men, Fadi Zeto and Harris Bocknek, are speaking out as they try to restore their reputations after almost a year of fighting to prove they are innocent.

“You cannot do anything. You cannot work. Anywhere you go, people look at you in a bad way. They think you’re a criminal,” said Zeto, 33, in an interview Tuesday.

“One hundred and seventy-six charges. Wow. In my whole life, I’ve never been arrested, I never had a problem,” he said.

Speaking with CTV Barrie last week, Bocknek said it was tremendously relieving to read a letter from the crown prosecutor that there was no reasonable chance of conviction in the case.

“It was botched from the word go,” Bocknek said.

“Obviously, this has been a long time coming. I definitely feel great about it. There were 176 charges withdrawn. There was no evidence of it. And I submit from the first day on, myself, the co-accused, nobody had any part in this. Everything that we did was above board,” he said.

The Toronto Police Association (TPA) disputed the pair’s account, saying police were told the remaining charges were dropped because of concern about the reliability of one of the witnesses in the case, and said the W5 investigation’s results were not communicated to them by crown prosecutors as a reason for the charges being dropped.

“While we understand it is the prerogative of the Crown to not proceed with this case, the decision is disappointing nonetheless. Our members stand by their work, and their decision to lay charges in the first place. In turn, we will stand by them as they continue with their work, undeterred by the outcome of this particular case,” said TPA president Clayton Campbell in a statement.

The TPA said in an e-mail its officers would be pursuing an explanation through its channels.

In November 2024, Det. Dan Kraehling of the Toronto Police’s 53 Division Major Crime unveiled the results of Project Warden, claiming Zeto and Bocknek were selling stolen cars through the Rouge Valley Mitsubishi car dealership in Scarborough.

The officers had been alerted by the dealership’s owner, Chris Olschewski, who showed them folders with records of nearly two dozen cars sold over the course of a year that he believed were stolen – vehicles whose value added up to about $2.2 million.

The police alleged the salesmen had disguised the stolen cars by faking their unique vehicle identification numbers, and covered up the whole process by forging Carfax vehicle history reports.

The news conference came at the height of a vehicle theft crime wave, with some $1.5 billion worth of vehicles taken off the street annually, nationwide, according to Equite Association.

When W5 started looking into the case, Olschewski shared the documents in those folders with us as well. We built a database of the cars referred to in the criminal charges and also the related set of charges from OMVIC, Ontario’s car dealer regulator.

We discovered irregularities in the vehicles themselves, including 12 cars whose vehicle identification numbers were listed as being exported out of Canada before they were sold in Toronto – a sign of VIN fraud.

Then, we asked Carfax to pull from their records copies of the reports that they had issued at the time to better understand the alleged fraud. Instead, Carfax confirmed that the documents we had were genuine.

That was exactly the opposite of the allegation in nearly a quarter of the charges: that Zeto and Bocknek did, “with intent to defraud, alter a document, namely a Carfax report.”

• More W5 investigations

Zeto’s lawyer, Danny Kayfetz, said police claimed the Carfax report at the time of the sale didn’t match the one they pulled during their investigation.

The reason, he said, is because they pulled one months or even years after the sale. That report would naturally be different, because there would have been years worth of extra data on the report.

“The Carfax report that was obtained by the police through a serious error on their part was for a different day than the day that was sold,” Kayfetz said.

By comparison, Zeto had ownership documents that showed one of the cars, a 2019 Porsche Cayenne, in a clear line of ownership all the way back to the manufacturer, he said.

“There was nothing wrong with any of our documentation,” he said. “There was no evidence ever produced in the disclosure that involved any wrongdoing by them.”

As for the issue with the VINs apparently being exported before being sold – that may not refer to anything connected to Bocknek or Zeto.

Carfax estimates that there are some 140,000 vehicles on Ontario roads that are successfully disguised stolen cars from years of VIN fraud by other people.

Some of those cars may have gone through that dealership just by chance — or the cars with the correct VINs may have gone through the dealership, with cars with disguised VINs being exported.

But without further investigation, it can be difficult to tell which is the car with the original, true VIN, and which is the stolen car whose VIN has been altered. Some of the two dozen cars were not available to be inspected, such as the 2019 Porsche Cayenne – it had been stolen after the sale.

The Toronto Police Service said in a statement to CTV News, “The Toronto Police Service investigates offences and pursues charges where appropriate and where the grounds exist. The Crown’s role is to assess cases and determine if there is a reasonable prospect of conviction and if it is in the public interest to proceed. The Crown’s decision does not negate the reasonable grounds upon which charges were laid or the validity of the charges related to Project Warden.”

The TPS didn’t return an e-mail asking if the accusations against the pair would remain on their website, but Kayfetz said he had been assured they would come down. He said he isn’t ruling out a lawsuit against the TPS.

Zeto said he became a car salesman because of a love of cars that started for him as a boy. And he said he just wanted to return to that job.

“The main thing to me, it’s just to clear my reputation at the moment. It’s not about going after anybody,” he said.