Tom Feddor has the lowest vehicle license plate number in Illinois on his Range Rover.

If you're thinking "1," think lower.

The plate number, which has been in Feddor's family for almost 40 years, is simply "0," as in zero, zilch, nada.

But there's a problem. The City of Chicago has his number. It zeroed in by mailing him dozens of ticket notices for parking-related violations dating to 2007. About 170 ticket notices issued to Feddor's 0 plates are listed on a city Web site, including 77 this year.

The violations are for such things as parking at expired meters; parking with the motor running in the Wrigley Field bus-permit zone; parking during street-cleaning hours; running stop signs or traffic signals; operating a hazardous or dilapidated vehicle; failing to display a residential parking permit; blocking access to an alley, driveway or fire lane; and parking a truck, recreational vehicle, bus or taxi on a residential street.

Bad guy with clout, this Feddor, huh?

Well, no. None of the tickets was placed on his vehicle, which was nowhere near the scenes of the alleged infractions.

A glitch occurred at the Chicago Department of Revenue involving Feddor's 0 plates being used during tests of ticketing equipment. The error prompted the cascade of ticket notices to land in his mailbox, city officials determined after launching an internal investigation based on calls from the Tribune.

Feddor was unsuccessful in earlier efforts to get help from the Revenue Department and the Department of Administrative Hearings, he said.

One hearing officer, Zipporah Lewis, made several calls on Feddor's behalf. But "the people she encountered at the other end of the phone seemed to be annoyed and bothered by her. Most tried to quickly end the call," Feddor said.

It turned out that some city parking-enforcement aides punched in 0 when testing their electronic ticket-issuing devices, Revenue Department spokesman Ed Walsh said. Officials weren't aware there was a 0 plate or that Feddor was receiving tickets, Walsh said in response to the Tribune inquiry.

"The test violations should have been dismissed in the database. The majority of the cases [Feddor] contested successfully. But we are taking steps to rectify the situation so in the future an actual registered plate number will not be used to do the testing," Walsh said.

Feddor will be refunded money if he made payments on tickets erroneously issued, he added.

An undetermined number of the ticket notices were repeat warnings, city officials said.

The situation got to the point where Feddor was "afraid of getting the boot," he said, referring to the city's new policy of locking Denver boots on vehicles that have two or more outstanding tickets.

He said he filed challenges to most of the tickets and trekked to the city's administrative courthouse on Superior Street about every three weeks with notices in hand. The hearing officers dismissed almost all of them, but it wasn't how Feddor preferred to spend his life.

"Almost every judge's answer to the problem was to get rid of the plates," Feddor said. But that suggestion had zero value to him.

Feddor, 39, a Realtor who lives in Chicago, thoroughly enjoys the distinction of having a license plate number lower than the governor's. And he's careful about obeying the rules of the road to avoid casting an impression that he's above the law.

The highly prized 0 license plate was assigned in 1971 to Feddor's grandfather, Robert Lamkin, a dairy farmer magnate and businessman from Watson, Ill., near Effingham.

In a 1999 letter to the editor published in the Tribune, Lamkin's daughter, Nancy Lamkin Olson, wrote, "Whenever someone would comment on his plate and say, 'You must be someone important,' my dad would reply, 'No, I'm just nothin'.'"

Until then, the lowest license plate in the state, 1, was assigned to the wife of then-Gov. Richard Ogilvie. The governor himself held the 1 plate in a series reserved for official state vehicles.

Dorothy Ogilive's 1 plate previously was held by Illinois Secretary of State Paul Powell, who died in 1970 with about $800,000 in license plate registration payments stuffed in shoe boxes. The 1 plate number also was held by Catholic archbishops, including John Cardinal Cody, and Sidney Gorham, a lawyer for the Chicago Automobile Club who wrote the law in 1907 requiring the licensing and registration of vehicles in Illinois.

Lamkin, who also was president of a company that manufactured electric motors and generators, likely received the special 0 plate because of his service as an unpaid adviser to Secretary of State John Lewis while Lewis was director of the state Department of Agriculture. Ogilvie also appointed Lamkin to chair the St. Louis Metropolitan Area Airport Authority.

Lamkin's grandson sure could have used his help today.

Adding to Feddor's headaches, the letter "O" Illinois license plates registered to convicted felon Lawrence Warner, a co-defendant in the corruption trial of former Gov. George Ryan, sometimes resulted in Feddor receiving ticket notices from the city that belonged to Warner, he said.

"Mr. Warner was always very nice about helping to straighten out the problem," Feddor said.

Warner is serving a prison sentence for his role in sweetheart deals when Ryan was secretary of state.

Warner received 15 ticket notices from October 2007 through early May, according to a city Revenue Department Web site that lets drivers search for tickets issued on their vehicles. Twelve of the tickets were dismissed.

"I understand that people who read my story in the newspaper won't care about this guy with the low-numbered plate," Feddor said. "But I don't have any influence."

Until the Tribune intervened, he said he suspected that some power broker or mover and shaker coveted his 0 plate and was causing the problems. In addition to the ticket notices, Feddor has never received license registration renewal forms or city sticker applications in the mail, he said.

"My gut feeling had been that someone important wanted the plate and had started a campaign of harassment against us," he said. "I'm very glad to learn that it was just a clerical error that hopefully will soon be corrected."

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Contact Getting Around at jhilkevitch@tribune.com or c/o the Chicago Tribune, 435 N. Michigan Ave., Chicago, IL 60611.

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