A black 2013 Ford Edge SUV parked on Mulberry Street just two blocks from the Manhattan District Attorney's office and the county courthouse was found on August 12 with its rear license plate folded horizontally in two places, obscuring the first three letters. The vehicle displayed an official district attorney parking placard. City records show its driver racked up 23 tickets over about two years, including eight speeding violations, five bus-lane citations, and 10 parking tickets, before the citations abruptly stopped after December 2025.
The discovery, first reported by Streetsblog New York City, prompted the Manhattan District Attorney's office to open an internal investigation into the employee's conduct and revoke the placard, which carries the identification number 31078. The vehicle's New York plate reads LBR2580. The office has refused to identify the employee's name or title, and Streetsblog has filed a formal records request seeking the driver's identity.
Office spokesperson Douglas Cohen said the office revoked access to both the vehicle and the placard and is conducting a full investigation, adding that the office plans to take appropriate disciplinary action. It remains unclear from available records exactly why the ticket flow stopped after December 2025 or whether the bent plate is connected to that pattern.
A DA Who Built His Brand Fighting Ghost Cars
The irony is hard to miss. Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg has publicly said that ghost cars — vehicles with fake or obscured plates — pose a danger to Manhattan pedestrians, bikers, and drivers, and in 2024 he compared them to ghost guns. New York City drivers frequently deface or deform license plates specifically to evade automated speeding-ticket and toll cameras, a practice regulators at every level of government have spent the past two years trying to stamp out.
The New York City Department of Transportation and NYPD finalized rules in March 2025, effective that April, prohibiting any form of license plate obstruction — dirt, rust, or plastic covers included — and setting a $50 fine for parking with a plate that cannot be read. State lawmakers moved even further: effective September 2024, the New York State Department of Motor Vehicles banned the sale of plate covers outright and raised the maximum fine for intentionally obscuring a plate to $500, with repeat offenders — three violations within five years — facing a mandatory 90-day registration suspension. Fabricating a fake plate altogether, or possessing equipment to make one, is a Class E felony under state law punishable by up to four years in prison, according to Tilem & Associates, PC.
A Pattern of Under-Enforcement Near Government Buildings
This is not the first time scrutiny has landed on how New York's own government employees park near their workplaces. The NYC Department of Investigation found in April 2024 that placard misuse was widespread and that the three agencies issuing them — the DOT, the Department of Education, and the NYPD — kept no unified tracking system. A separate DOI review of five months of 2022 data, reported by Patch, found that the NYPD issued just 76 illegal-parking tickets to officers in precinct self-enforcement zones out of 876 total summonses issued there, roughly 0.3 percent of the total.
The Department of Investigation recommended that the NYPD end its self-enforcement practice, but the department has continued it. In July 2025, the NYPD Legal Bureau formally rejected the recommendation to eliminate the self-enforcement zones, which let precinct commanders rather than civilian traffic agents oversee parking near their own stationhouses. Streetsblog's November 2025 reporting also cited Metropolitan Transportation Authority data showing government employees commute into Manhattan's central business district by personal car at more than twice the rate of other workers, a pattern that helps explain why placard density runs so high around Lower Manhattan's civic center.
A Prior Consultant's Disciplinary History
The DA's office has faced personnel trouble before. A former NYPD hostage negotiator who worked as an hourly consultant for the office faced a disciplinary investigation in 2023 and resigned from the consultant job that same year. The office has not said whether that earlier episode is connected to the current placard case.
City Council members have pushed to raise the stakes for plate defacement well beyond the current civil fines. A 2024 proposal, Int. 0766-2024, would make operating or parking a vehicle with an obscured or defaced plate a misdemeanor carrying fines up to $1,000 and up to 20 days in jail, elevating what is now typically treated as a minor infraction into a criminal offense. Whether that measure advances may hinge on how visibly City Hall and agencies like the DA's office enforce the rules against their own staff.
The episode also lands amid a broader crackdown on unreadable plates across the region. In May, a multi-agency sweep on the RFK Bridge pulled over more than a dozen vehicles within minutes to scan for fraudulent or concealed plates, part of a wider state and city push to get untraceable cars off the road. For now, the Manhattan DA's office says its investigation into the employee and the bent-plate Ford Edge is ongoing.
