DUMONT — Detective Patrick McDermott had been looking for Quintin Lewis for two long years.

Lewis was a suspect in a 2017 crime that victimized a Dumont business owner. Checks were forged in the businessman's name, then passed off to other people, in a crime called "uttering."

But identifying a suspect was one thing; finding him was another, as McDermott discovered.

"The driver's licenses, the addresses, nothing was coming back legit, and he just turned into a ghost," McDermott said. "Every time I thought I was getting closer, I either just missed him or it was a bad address, or he had lived there a month ago."

Lewis used addresses that were really UPS stores and aliases that were varied spellings of his first name with an additional initial, McDermott said.

Schools:Five Bergen County districts are pilot sites for school security app

Police:Paterson police welcome first all-female class and first hijabi officer

Outbreak:Five cases of mumps reported in Bergen County Jail outbreak

He finally got his man on June 4, when Lewis was apprehended in Maywood in front of Metro Ambulance on West Central Avenue, where McDermott says he worked. McDermott, his Dumont Police Department colleague Detective Sgt. John DiGirolamo, and Maywood police took part in the arrest.

An employee at Metro Ambulance would not confirm that Lewis worked there, citing company policy.

The breakthrough came a few weeks ago, when McDermott got the tip that Lewis worked at Metro Ambulance. He also had information that Lewis had charges against him in several other towns in Bergen and Essex counties for allegedly receiving stolen property, forging checks and using fake IDs.

That led to Dumont and Maywood police spending two days staking out the ambulance company before catching Lewis. McDermott said the suspect was driving a stolen vehicle from Lyndhurst before he was nabbed.

The detective said one of Lewis' scams was purchasing cars sold by individuals on Craigslist with forged checks.

Lewis, 39, who had lived in Newark recently, had dozens of charges out of Dumont alone connected to the 2017 case, McDermott said.

There are nine charges listed against Lewis in the inmate database for the Bergen County Sheriff's Office for offenses occurring between July 2018 and June of this year, including theft by deception and receiving stolen property with knowledge that it was stolen.

In Essex County, 16 charges are listed, including resisting arrest and forgery. He is being held at the Essex County Correctional Facility in Newark.

Lewis previously served a four-year prison sentence for theft after purchasing a Saddle Brook resident's car with a bogus check.

McDermott said finally tracking down Lewis was satisfying. "It went on longer than I wanted, but it was fun, because more and more information came up, and we said: We have to catch this guy."

Email: kaulessar@northjersey.com