A Bronx man who has been accused of stealing 30 cars in a 75-day period has been indicted in 26 of those cases. Reynaldo Nazario, 35, allegedly went on a car-stealing binge between August 2nd and October 23rd this year. Nazario's brother tells the Times that he has been obsessed with cars since he was a little kid: “My brother’s drug is cars,” he said. “He can’t stay away from them.”
Nazario's brother Frank said the obsession with keys and cars started when he'd grab a chair and pretend to drive the washing machine: “Nobody could sit in that chair,” Frank Nazario said. “He’d be in that chair for hours. He’d say, ‘You can’t drive my car.’” He described his brother's method to the Times: "He would pry the lock mechanism from the door of a car he wanted, take it home, file a blank key to fit the lock, and go help himself to the car, Frank said."
Lately, Frank has tried to reason with his little brother—who sounds a little like transit superfan/thief Darius McCollum—to stop, to no avail: “I’d tell him, ‘It’s not the ’80s anymore,’” Frank said. “‘Cops are on to you.’” He offered up another anecdote about when Nazario was helping a neighbor fix her car and he messed something up: “He said to the woman, ‘Don’t worry, I’ll get you another car.’” Nazario stole one in front of the building and gave it to the woman.
Nazario was caught after police figured out that he was taking many of the stolen vehicles and selling them to a scrap yard. He faces 26 counts of possessing stolen property, falsifying business records and felony grand larceny (the other four cases are still before a grand jury), which means he could face more than 100 years in prison from all the accumulated charges. Nazario, who has only been out of prison since May, has already served five stretches in state prison for various car-related crimes over the last decade, including over two years for an assault that involved him hitting several police officers with a stolen car.
