South Suburban Driver with Vanity Plate Hit with Undeserved Citations

David Latko drives his white Nissan GTR at high speeds on the pavement at the Joliet Autobahn. Otherwise, he keeps the sports car in a garage. But will you find it on a Florida tollway? Or a Chicago street? Never.

“It’s like a race car. It doesn’t go downtown,” Latko said.

Then why is the Mokena man getting toll violation tickets from the Sunshine State and parking tickets from the Windy City? Well, the owner of Latko Wealth Management, a financial consulting firm in Frankfort, isn’t the only person in Illinois with a vanity plate that reads FINANCE, reports Lisa Parker for NBC 5 Investigates, even though he’s had that plate for 30 years.

Turns out, the state of Illinois issues duplicate vanity plates for any one of the dozens of specialty license plates now available in Illinois: Bears, Blackhawks, Cubs, Sox, Bulls, Police Memorial, Organ Donor, Rotary, Route 66 ... and so one and so on. And state officials say complaints about faulty citations are on the rise because of these specialty plates.

A Cadillac Escalade owner in Sherman, IL, has his own specialty FINANCE vanity plate. And he’s the one who should have received the Florida tickets. Latko was able to persuade Florida officials to drop the violations after presenting the clear-cut evidence that he didn’t deserve those citations.

But when he called on the City of Chicago, guess what happened?

“Basically they hang up on you saying just pay the ticket,” according to Latko.

» find out what happens next via this NBC 5 Investigates report

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