According to the complaint, investigators found one of the cars, a 2001 Chevrolet Impala, at Mr. Bennette's home in Bayside, Queens, and two others, a 2001 Ford Taurus and a 1998 Mercury Sable, at the home of his mother in Manson, N.C. Two others, a 1994 Plymouth Acclaim and a 1994 Ford Taurus, were found at an auto repair shop in Queens.

The thefts came to light last month during a Secret Service inventory of its cars. When agents called Larry's Auto Collision in Whitestone, Queens, a repair shop it uses, an employee said that Mr. Bennette had told him a few weeks before that two Secret Service cars were his for the taking, the complaint says. The employee picked up the cars at Floyd Bennett Field in Brooklyn, he told investigators.

The agency found a memo that Mr. Bennette had helped prepare that listed one of the cars found at the auto repair shop and three of the others as having been recovered at ground zero and crushed at the Fresh Kills landfill on Staten Island. The discovery prompted a search of Mr. Bennette's desk at the Secret Service's current New York field office in downtown Brooklyn. There, the complaint said, agents found a receipt dated June 4, 2003, showing the sale of three of the cars -- the two 2001 models and the 1998 model -- to a Danielle Bennette of Larry's Auto Collision.

Danielle Bennette is the name of one of Mr. Bennette's daughters. A man who answered the phone at Larry's yesterday said he did not know the name. The Secret Service administrators never authorized any of the transactions, the agency said. Federal prosecutors declined to say yesterday if anyone at the auto collision shop would be charged in the scheme.

When called in to the Brooklyn field office for questioning on April 2, Mr. Bennette, who joined the Secret Service in 1999 after retiring from the New York Police Department, said he had forged signatures of agency managers to transfer the titles of the cars, the complaint says.