On Monday, Gary Lamar Smith, Jr., former owner of SOS Towing, went before the court to argue that he did not owe any restitution to insurance companies.

“I was able to justify every towing ticket,” Smith testified Monday.

Smith and his father, Gary Lamar Smith, Sr., had been charged, along with the owners of four other towing companies, with criminal insurance fraud in 2020. Last month, the Mobile County District Attorney’s Office agreed to drop the criminal charges against Smith in exchange for paying restitution. Mobile County Circuit Court Judge Michael Windom signed a restitution order for $8,946, which was the maximum amount of restitution that Smith could be ordered to pay.

But Smith argues that he shouldn’t have to pay restitution at all. In a surprise address to the court at the start of the hearing, Smith said that he never agreed to restitution, all he agreed to was to audit the company’s towing records. Further, he argued, he only became owner of SOS Towing in 2019, and shouldn’t be held accountable for overcharges that happened before he officially became owner.

The latter argument was the crux of what Smith’s attorney, Chase Dearman, argued in court. Smith signed an application to the Mobile Police Department to be added to the city’s towing service rotation in Feb. 2019, and paperwork to change ownership of the company from his father to him was not processed by the Alabama Secretary of State’s office until June 2019. Therefore, Dearman argued, Smith was not liable for any overcharges from before that time.