He got everyone in town out of their tickets for FREE!

i actually saw a police car pull up and do a burn up in michigan there's an event called the woodward dream cruise woodward avenue is one of the most famous cruising sections of asphalt in north america and in fact a lot of the car companies advertise and take photographs of their cars out on woodward avenue back in the day it's a famous photograph of a gto on a turnaround on woodward avenue that was featured in some ads back then and they actually got in trouble for encouraging people to street race and that's the meaning of woodward is that people actually equated it with street racing hot rods cruising so when i was in high school for instance in the late 70s i had a cool car and i go out cruising on woodward friday night saturday night any night you could i was out there cruising around in the early 1990s a guy started as a fundraiser a cruise where he said hey you got a cool car come on down on saturday and we're gonna drive around a woodward and we're raising money for my kids soccer team and so many people showed up it turns out there's a lot of guys out there and gals out there with cool cars and they don't need much of an excuse to come out and so many people came out that they decided to make it an annual event and it quickly mushroomed to the point where it's almost out of control they estimate that over a million people show up every year they've estimated anywhere from 40 to 50 000 cars are brought there i'm not talking about regular people driving out to watch people who bring their cars i've been going to the dream cruise on and off now almost since the very beginning i've been almost every one of them i often park at the north end and just watch traffic go by but you'll see people who cruise the whole time other people park their cars and there's so many cars there that you will see anything you name it i saw a row of 11 or 12 deloreans go by one day there's a whole section where all the guys with the old mustangs will park together car clubs everything and some people just set up lawn chairs and it's like a big parade but it's free huge huge event first couple years of the dream cruise though were very very organic and less controlled and it was not uncommon that people would you know occasionally stop in front of group people and and light them up a little bit you know and a lot of people were goofing off and having fun and burnouts and there's actually a restaurant bar just north of uh northwood shopping center where there's guys with buckets of water and if you indicated them you wanna do a burnout they dump the water for you so you could do a big old smokey burnout and i actually saw a police car pull up and do a burnout that's how like i said everyone's having a good time after a couple years of that went by one year somebody said you know something you got so many people so many cars we can't let people goof off too much so they authorize the police to start writing tickets writing tickets at the dream cruise is like an apocalypse now and he goes you know handing out speeding tickets to the indy 500 and it didn't seem right but people were smoking her tires were getting tickets so one day i'm going into my office on the monday following the dream cruise i'm listening to local radio station and a guy calls and he goes i can't believe this is the dream cruise i got a ticket for spinning my tires cop wrote me up for that and i went into my office and i called the hotline to the radio station guys i'm an attorney i'll represent that man for free i went to dream cruise at a fun time i think it's bogus too and they said well will you represent everyone else i said sure why not so like many of the decisions in my life that are so well thought out uh i i did that on the whim and i said here's the deal i'm going to give you my fax number tell people if they fax the ticket to my office by friday i will represent them for free my fax machine blew up i mean these guys were promoting it wcsx in detroit 94.7 classic rock and they were giving my fax number out every morning all week long if you got a ticket at the dream chris steve later is your guy here's his fax number fax on the ticket i told my secretary so just start stacking them up and we'll start filing appearances now the dream cruise goes through several communities it goes through uh from royal oak to birmingham and so on all the way up a bunch of different municipalities but a lot of them were written in royal oak which is like ground zero for the dream cruise and so we started filing appearances on all these tickets and i was you know putting together files for all these and i think i had 30 40 50 tickets that first year and i would file appearances on all these tickets and then the cool thing was i discovered that because many of the tickets were written by the same cops on the same day all the appearances were being done in the same day so i would get a notice from the court saying steve be here on wednesday you got 14 tickets this morning or that afternoon 12 more and so i was going into court handling these tickets and the good news is that i would walk you into a prosecutor office and i'd say hi i'm steve glades i'm here in 14 cases i drop them all on the desk and the guy goes okay and he cut me deals on all 14 of these cases because it was easier for him we were doing justice in bulk so we're going through these files and if somebody spins their tires they'd write them up for um careless driving well careless driving is a serious thing three or four points plus a big old fines and costs and we've knocked it down to an unsafe start that kind of stuff so this is typical if you hire an attorney on a typical day for an unsafe start you know whatever they knock the stuff around so that is not that uncommon but it was cool because we're doing these in big chunks and i go in the hallway and i call off 12 names but guys i just got you all deals you know go up the windows and pay your tickets the very next year somebody from the newspaper called me and said are you still gonna be doing that well i know if i say yes they're gonna do an article about me so i said yes so detroit news sends a reporter over to my office they sit and interview me we have a long nice discussion about woodward dream cruise how much i love this but the focus of this of course is that i'm gonna be representing people for free now this is being announced before the dream cruise and that's a little bit of a problem so i go to the dream cruise i have a good time next morning my phone fax machine is blowing up all kinds of tickets are coming i got stacking like this the number of tickets i got was so out of control that my secretary called me up one day steve did you notice this and she shows me a list of all the ticket numbers and at one point in time i had six consecutive tickets written by the same cop all six of them had called me and and the ticket numbers were sequential which the odds that happened are pretty slim so i filed all these appearances at one point in time i had 50 tickets in one courthouse on the same day 24 in the morning 26 in the afternoon that kind of thing so i go to the courthouse i'm out in the hallway calling off names and every single person's got almost the exact same thing unsafe start careless driving whatever it is and and they tend to overwrite tickets in the hopes that either are stupid and you pay it or if you do hire an attorney they've got room to negotiate on it and sure enough went in and got all these resolved the next year's year three i think it was another newspaper called me maybe a radio station i don't know at this point i actually was on channel seven in detroit television detroit news detroit free press oakland press one of the newspapers actually sent a reporter to the courthouse and interviewed me there and got a picture of me looking all smug in front of the courthouse that kind of thing and i was having a blast going all these different courthouses the next year again make the announcement before the dream cruise all the tickets start blowing up i follow all my appearances i go into court on the very first day and the prosecutor goes dude i got bad news and i got set and he goes we've been told to stop cutting new deals like what do you mean and he goes we're concerned that people are getting tickets because they know you're going to get them off i go dude i'm not getting anybody off if you write somebody for careless driving because they spun their tires and we not get to unsafe start that's what should happen and he goes yeah but my boss thinks that some of these people are spinning their tires because of you it's not my fault you know and he goes well you can kind of see this so can't you i go a little i i guess i don't know and he goes well here's the deal he goes we've got some that we're not gonna cut any deals on at all zero and i go which ones and he goes three of your people written for reckless driving now here's the thing they were accused of spinning their tires but a cop at the end of a long day who's been standing out in the hot sun all day long and wants to go home gets angry when you see some guy fishtail under woodward spin his tires and he's gotta chase the guy down and give him a ticket he's not gonna give him a ticket for an unsafe starter spinning stairs he's in a rider for reckless driving well reckless driving is serious six point offense it's a misdemeanor you can go to jail for it and it's a heavy fine and it's an automatic hard suspension on your license you lose your license for 30 days right off the bat so i go i would never advise a client to plead to that and he goes we'll have trials done we actually had three trials jury trials where we actually had to go in front of a jury pick a jury and the beginning of one of the trials the judge actually called us up to bench and i've been in front of this judge not million times including half a million times on woodward cruz tickets and the judge goes why are we trying this case he looks at me because your guy won't take a deal i go no they won't offer a deal and he looks the prosecutors no deals why and he goes yeah that's a policy of the prosecutor's office but we can't cut deals on misdemeanors because we think that his offer of free representation and the judge is like fine so we actually had a trial and so the sad news is i had one guy who got convicted and he actually got got dinged for you know points and his license and everything and the sad part is you know the guy probably had done what he was accused of doing that is spun his tires in the back end probably got squirly i wasn't there but is that reckless driving is that careless driving or is that simply you know some kind of driving without due care and the problem is the statute in michigan in most states says that reckless driving is the kind of driving where you do something that has the high likelihood of hurting somebody or property damaging property and the argument is that someone could have gotten hurt and the argument of course is that no one did get hurt and i can tell you that i had one guy got convicted i felt bad about that you know an attorney hates to lose a trial right but the thing about it is is that i mean we we fought a good fight you know we did what we could on the other hand i had another case which was a jury trial woodward dream cruise ticket and a guy got a a reckless driving ticket because he had driven around a police barricade and he lived down the street and he had his wife and his kids in the car and a cop had his hand up like this and my guy thought well i just live right there and he cut around and there was a barricade there and the cop was talking to somebody and when he realized that he chased after the guy stopped the car hauled him out of the car in front of his kids slammed him face down in the hood of the car and handcuffed him and then wrote him for reckless driving and so during that trial the case is in front of a jury and my guy testifies which you don't normally like to do in a criminal case but my guy's a very good witness we talked very briefly about the cop with his hand up and we spent his entire testimony talking about him being hauled out in front of his kids and wife face down on the car handcuffed and being treated like that all because he drove around a barricade to get to his house which you can see right there and the cop had his hand up like this talking to somebody else and he got written for reckless driving for that jury came back not guilty almost instantly and so the weird thing is i had to stop doing the free woodward cruise tickets just you know what can i tell you i got shut down by you know by the man i guess but i had so much fun and i met so many people and the funny part was people hire me for tickets from time to time and i'll read the ticket and they'll say like you know somebody's driving a 2018 ford explorer and gets a speeding ticket i'm reading these tickets since like you know 69 chevrolet unsafe start you know and i go what you know tell me what is it that's a big block camaro with a line lock you know and and you know i actually had a guy tell me that he goes he goes yeah because i did i had to burn out you know the end all burnouts he goes but i had a line lock on you because that car is not going anyplace you know but he's you know a burnout you can see from space you know but it was so much fun to talk about cars these guys because these guys you know look in the car do you have what and you know these guys meeting each other like friendships and so on and what's funny is i was i was talking to different people one day in court after i resolved a bunch of cases and i had a guy that was from way far away he was from some place up in northern michigan like five or six hours from the dream cruise so i know that he couldn't have heard about me on the radio and i don't think he'd read about me in the paper and so i look at the guy and i go i'm curious how did you find out about me because he faxed my office and he goes i was driving home from the dream cruise and i picked up a hitchhiker and i was complaining that i had just gotten a ticket and the guy reached his wallet goes here call steve lato so i wound up representing i never counted but it was several hundred people from the dream cruise and there was a point in time where if you're in the detroit area during dream cruise weekend you might see an article where it says this attorney will represent you for free if you get a ticket at the dream cruise it was a lot of fun while it lasted but it got shut down premier financial services has been a sponsor of been wiki for the last four years we can't thank them enough for their support and we love them for that but also because their simple lease truly is a tremendous product in the world of exotic car financing they allow you to minimize your payment minimize your down payment 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Channel: VINwiki

Views: 309,697

Rating: 4.9643331 out of 5

Keywords: Steve Lehto, Lehto's Law, VINwiki, Car Stories, speeding ticket, reckless, start, driving, infraction, trial, jury, prosecutor, police, woodward dream cruise, woodward ave, avenue, woodward, muscle cars

Id: RXGKE2pJEP4

Length: 14min 15sec (855 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 19 2021