Serving legal papers wasn’t his strong suit, the city says.
The city’s worst process server claimed to be hand-delivering court summonses all over the city, but GPS records revealed he was often miles from his mark or totally off the grid, according to the Department of Consumer Affairs.
Robert Winckelmann, 41, lost his city-issued license after a sweeping DCA investigation discovered he was not actually serving legal papers to defendants, the city says.
http://liarcatchers.com/process_service.html
In one case from November 2011, Winckelmann, a Jericho, LI, resident, drove to The Bronx and swore on an affidavit that he served a summons on Fox Street to a relative of a woman being sued by creditors for $6,098, according to court records.
But at the time of alleged service, he was three miles away at the Cross Bronx Expressway and Newbold Avenue, GPS records indicated.
Later that day, he claimed to serve three more summonses in The Bronx, on East 149th Street, the Grand Concourse or Bronx Park South, but electronic records again proved that he was miles away, DCA said.
Those three debt-collection cases resulted in default judgements for his client, a debt-collector which purchased bad accounts from Chase and the New York Credit Acceptance Corp., according to court records.
When a debtor isn’t served properly, they don’t know when to go to court, it could result in a default judgment or an automatic ruling against them.
“We are referring all evidence of defaults by him and others back to the courts,” Department of Consumer Affairs Commissioner Jonathan Mintz told The Post.
Probers found that Winckelmann was involved in 31 cases that ended in default judgments.
The city issued Winckelmann 46 GPS-record violations and slapped him with 35 counts of failure to maintain records. But Winckelmann denied any wrongdoing, and said some of the GPS violations were due to technical glitches in the new citywide system, and that 36 violations were for cases in Westchester, outside the city’s jurisdiction.
“They just took his livelihood away without a hearing,” said his attorney Myra Sencer. “He is really being treated unfairly.”
During a yearlong DCA crackdown, investigators issued violations to one in three of the city’s 943 process servers for having written logs that didn’t match their GPS-tracked whereabouts. Since November 2011, process servers have been required to maintain a GPS record.
“Our findings were so disappointingly negative,” Mintz said.
DCA randomly checked 102 licensed process servers; 10 lost their licenses, three surrendered them, and 43 entered into settlement agreements with the DCA, the agency said.
The agency issued $36,000 in fines.
“For way too long process servers have been like the Wild West of the legal system,” Mintz said.
