Buying a car - is this legal?

The scrap yard that I worked at we did get some hot cars, that's why we had to start writein' down the vin # and make a copy of the sellers driver license. Even me working there I had to go through the same process if I sold my boss a car... But, if I totally cut the car up and hauled it in as "scrap metal" and not as a "scrap car", I didn't have any paper work at all.. Almost none of the cars that I sold for scrap did I have any paper work on, I knew who I bought the car from, so It was never an issue...