By Dan Morse and Matt Zapotosky
Washington Post Staff Writers
Monday, October 13, 2008; A01

Burdened by debt and driving home from a night of gambling in West Virginia, Sergio Lopez launched a scheme that at the time must have seemed like a good idea.

He pulled his Volkswagen Jetta up to a random corner in Silver Spring, doused the interior with gasoline, set it on fire and walked away. He later made a claim to Nationwide Insurance. The car was missing, he said -- someone must have stolen it.

Add Lopez, who pleaded guilty in the case this year, to the band of Washington area residents who have torched their cars hoping for a quick insurance check. A Baltimore police officer did it. So did a Baltimore firefighter. A Prince William County resident burned a minivan for a friend.

Investigators estimate that hundreds of such crimes occurred in the Washington area in the past two years, although the exact number is unclear, and experts predict the number will increase because of the worsening economy. Many offenders have fallen behind on payments to car dealerships. This year, more people are behind on such loans than in nearly two decades.

"With what's just happened to the economy in the last week," said Donald Galbreath, a longtime fraud investigator for the insurance industry, "I see the trend will get worse."

A federal judge yesterday rejected the claim by a coalition of historians and nonprofit groups that Vice President Cheney intended to illegally discard some of his official records, and instead accepted the pledge of a senior White House aide that key Cheney documents and other materials will be transferred as required to the National Archives.

The decision, announced on the eve of the Bush administration's handover of power, capped a long legal battle over how much discretion Cheney had to decide which documents he must preserve for history. On virtually every important legal issue in the case, including whether courts even have jurisdiction to review the matter, the Justice Department -- representing Cheney -- lost.

But the groups, including the American Historical Association, the Organization of American Historians and the Society of American Archivists, were unable to convince the court that Cheney intended to destroy or keep much of his records under what they called a strained interpretation of the governing law.

The Justice Department provided what U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly called "constantly shifting arguments" in the case, but, she said, "That confusion is not evidence" that would undermine the sworn deposition of Claire M. O'Donnell, a Cheney aide who handles record-keeping and other administrative tasks.

"The Court expects," she said, that White House officials "will, in good faith, comply with the representations that their officials have made, by way of testimony, in this case." As a result, she granted summary judgment on the White House's behalf and lifted a five-month-old injunction mandating the preservation of Cheney's records.

One of the plaintiffs, Stanley I. Kutler, an emeritus professor of history and law at the University of Wisconsin Law School, said he remains worried that "when the Archives goes to open Cheney's papers, they are going to find empty boxes."

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