New federal indictments lay out a slew of insurance fraud charges against the co-owner of the Bayview’s notorious Specialty Towing, among them a charge that he loaded a tow truck full of four clunkers, faked an accident, and tried to collect full insurance.

It’s been one hell of a year for the Bayview District towing company Specialty Towing. In February, SF City Attorney Davd Chiu banned Specialty Towing getting city contracts for illegally towing cars and forcing the owners to pay cash under the table to get them back.  Mission Local also reported co-owner Jose Badillo bought a $300,000 Lamborghini while collecting welfare.

But the company probably got most of its notoriety for the April viral video seen below, where the company tried to tow a moving vehicle that had passengers in it.

The company’s biggest legal problem to date is surely how they were raided by the FBI earlier this month, with Badilla being arrested for allegedly faking a car accident with an already-undriveable car, and fraudulently collecting $34,000 in insurance money for it. That would have seemed to answer the question of why Specialty Towing was raided.

But lordy, a new set of federal indictments released Wednesday shows there is much more to this story. Badillo and three other alleged co-conspirators are accused of faking yet more car accidents to collect insurance money. The alleged schemes involved two other SF towing companies that Badillo owns: Jose’s Towing, and Auto Towing.

The most brazen (and hilarious!) of these alleged schemes was Badillo and co-defendants Kirill Afanasyev and Jason Naraja, from SF and Hayward respectively, loading a tow truck with four cars that were “inoperable or had pre-existing damage” according to the feds. Badillo then allegedly staged a completely fake accident with the loaded truck in San Mateo, and tried to collect the full value of all four of the vehicles in an insurance claim. The other co-defendants are accused of knowingly making false statements to support the scheme.

They only got $5,210 from the insurance company. But in the eyes of the law, insurance fraud is still insurance fraud, regardless of the degree to which it was successful.  

In another more successful scheme, Badillo, Afanasyev, and Jaime Respicio of Pleasant Hill allegedly staged another fake accident with an inoperable vehicle in 2019. That accident netted them $47,856 from the insurance company.

All four defendants have been arrested and released on bail of $50,000. Naraja was scheduled to appear in federal court this morning at 10:30 am. Badillo is scheduled to appear Friday morning, Respicio on September 5, and Afanasyev on September 9.

Related: FBI Raids Notorious Bayview Towing Company, the One That Tried to Tow a Moving Car [SFist]

Image: CherryRyu via Reddit