\n\tJoe Ford looked at the moray eel and ordered another Bloody Mary.<\/p>\n
This was the Breakers Seafood Bar, a glass-walled room with floor-to-ceiling views of the Atlantic. It was nestled in the Breakers resort, a sweeping spread of fairways, fountains, and castle-like accommodations in Palm Beach, Florida, four square miles comprising the fourth-wealthiest zip code in the U.S. Beneath Joe\u2019s cocktail napkin, orange fish and black eels swam in a glass aquarium bar. Surrounding him, old men in blazers with floral pocket squares drank 55-dollar Beluga caviar-infused martinis and chatted up young women in cocktail dresses. But Joe, a private detective who specializes in finding rare stolen vehicles, was here for something else\u2014the alleged thief of a 1938 Talbot-Lago T150C-SS Teardrop coupe, chassis number 90108, current value $7.6 million.\u201c<\/p>\n
\n\tThe FBI may arrive with undercover agents,\u201d he said, stirring his Bloody Mary with a celery stick the size of a paddle. \u201cI\u2019m supposed to call if I see our suspect\u2014we\u2019re hoping he shows.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\tJoe took a sip of his Bloody Mary. Sixty-two, he was more\u00a0Magnum, P.I.\u00a0than Sam Spade\u2014tall, trim, tan, usually dressed in a fitted polo or a Hawaiian shirt. He drank sweet tea by the gallon and spoke like the New Orleans native he was. (\u201cI grew up in east New Orleans, near the Ninth\u00a0Wah-ard.\u201d) He liked to swim and dive for lobster and drive boats. Recently, he\u2019d cruised on a 65-footer down to Utila, \u201cthis coral-reef island off the coast of Honduras,\u201d he said. \u201cIt was incredible, diving with whale sharks and drinking with outlaws.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\tJoe may mingle with the billionaires of the world, but he lived a few miles west of the $15 million mansions lining the shore, on the workaday side of the Intracoastal Waterway. For years, he\u2019d crashed in a condo owned by his girlfriend, Shari, a knockout who waitressed at a pricey restaurant in a nearby resort, and helped care for her teacup poodle. Outside their place sat a tarp-covered sports car, a 1976 MGB two-door convertible Joe hadn\u2019t driven in months. \u201cThe battery\u2019s dead,\u201d he once told me. \u201cI bought the car to drive on Sundays and then never got to it. But, you know, you still need a convertible in Florida.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\tJoe had dabbled in architecture and law school before stumbling into buying and selling rare cars and, eventually, being hired to find stolen ones. When tracking each vehicle, he offered the same deal to the victim of the theft. Joe would take majority ownership of the car, working for free until it was recovered. Then he and his partner would sell it on the open market and split the reward. Joe had made money along the way, but lost more, and was no stranger to filing bankruptcy. Still, through it all, he loved the chase. \u201cJoe\u2019s a bounty hunter,\u201d said John Draneas, an attorney in Portland, Oregon, who specializes in rare cars. \u201cIt\u2019s an incredibly risky thing\u2014but it works for him.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\tFor Joe, the $7 million Talbot Lago case was a big one, the kind that could set him up for a long time. Maybe help him get his own boat, his own rare sports car. Help his daughter, Julia, be more comfortable as she coped with retinitis pigmentosa, a disease that was slowly making her go blind. \u201cWe first noticed she had vision problems when she was seven,\u201d Joe said. \u201cBut she wasn\u2019t formally diagnosed until high school. Once, she was performing as a flag waver during halftime at a football game when the stadium went black. My [former] wife, Tessie, rushed to the field because she knew Julia couldn\u2019t see anything.\u201d Joe paused, collecting himself. \u201cThe night vision goes first.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\tJoe was proud of Julia, amazed by her resilience and her ability to lead a pretty normal life despite her disease. Still, he wanted a better future for his daughter as her vision went, her world shrinking to blackness. He hoped the payday from a job like this, potentially millions, would give her a better life, set her up with what she needed\u2014ensure she\u2019d be taken care of forever. \u201cAs a dad, you want to do everything you can,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Joe glanced around the room. It was a gray, drizzly day at the Cavallino Classic Palm Beach<\/a>, one of dozens of rare-car competitions held annually around the world where top collectors come to mingle and pit their restored multi-million cars against each other. Known as\u00a0concours d\u2019elegance, French for \u201ccompetition of elegance,\u201d these events are held in locations ranging from Pebble Beach\u2014the Super Bowl of car competitions taking place every August\u2014to the shores of Lake Como, Italy, and are multiday parties for the .01 percent. They include high-end auctions, vintage-car races, and black-tie cocktail parties, culminating in best-in-show contests where white-gloved judges peek under hoods, rev engines, and inspect seat linings for historical accuracy. Winning vehicles receive renown and high valuations\u2014the car-world equivalent of a prize racehorse. Their owners get respectability. And it is\u00a0this\u00a0goal, adulation by one\u2019s peers, that might drive ambitious owners to take risks acquiring spectacular cars\u2014a factor Joe believed figured into the mystery of the Talbot-Lago.<\/p>\n \n\t\u201cConcours are prestige events,\u201d he said. \u201cThis is where high-end owners come to win and get recognition. And sometimes they get snookered.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tJoe learned about stolen cars in all manner of ways. Sometimes victims found him through the grapevine. Other times he came across cold cases in decades-old car magazines or in the files of investigations abandoned by law enforcement, picking up the trail on his own. At the moment, Joe had a range of cases in various stages of progress. In one, he was trying to find the heir to a series of stolen cars, including a rare Bugatti, involving a father who may have disinherited his son. In another, he was researching a missing car in the former Soviet Bloc, \u201cwhere they\u2019ll kill you for a million-dollar vehicle\u2014not sure I want to touch that one yet.\u201d In yet another, he was tracking down a wealthy collector in the Midwest who, decades ago, angrily bulldozed a barn full of rare cars after a fire had destroyed a few of them. \u201cI read a story about the incident in an old\u00a0Road & Track\u00a0magazine,\u201d Joe said. \u201cA forgotten news piece.\u201d Joe was convinced he could rescue the remaining chassis from their gravesite and have them restored. \u201cBack then the cars weren\u2019t worth what they are today,\u201d he said. \u201cThe former landowner is dead, but I\u2019m using Google Maps to search the area. The barn might be under a highway.\u201d Yet another case involved a collector in Oxnard, California, a wealthy Ferrari owner whose vintage $5 million racer had gone missing in Asia. \u201cWhen he said Asia, I said, \u2018Oh fuck, good luck with that,\u2019\u201d Joe said, noting how difficult the vehicle would be to recover from there. \u201cBut then I called back: \u2018Tell me more.\u2019\u201d None, however, compared with the Talbot-Lago. \u201cIt\u2019s a poker tournament,\u201d Joe said, finishing his beer. \u201cAnd now my big pot\u2019s come in.\u201d<\/p>\n \t\t\t\t\t\t \t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tBlackstone Publishing<\/p>\n \n\t In 1939, Teardrop 90108 was imported into the U.S. by Luigi Chinetti, an Italian race car driver who won Le Mans three times before retiring to Greenwich, Connecticut, to start America\u2019s first Ferrari dealership. That year, Chinetti sold the Teardrop to Tommy Lee, the son of a wealthy owner of Cadillac dealerships in Los Angeles. (Mount Lee, home to the Hollywood sign, was a property of the family.) Receiving a cut of every Cadillac sold in California, Tommy lived a playboy life, speeding cars, dating starlets, and competing in drag races along the dry desert lake beds of the Mojave Desert, hurtling across the sand in goggles at over 100 miles per hour. In 1950, following an accident with a truck that left him with chronic pain, Lee leapt to his death from a twelfth-story window, leaving behind a fortune and a world-class collection of cars, which were subsequently sold off, among them the T150.<\/p>\n In 1967, Roy Leiske, a self-made millionaire and the founder of Monarch Plastic Products, an injection-molding company in Milwaukee, bought the Teardrop for 100 dollars. He took the ravaged T150 to a cluttered garage near his home and began tinkering with it. Leiske\u2019s wife had died from cancer in 1962. After his son, a pilot, died in an airplane crash in 1996, Leiske withdrew from anything that resembled the life he had been living\u2014everything except the Talbot-Lago.<\/p>\n \n\tHe shut down Monarch Plastic and became obsessed with the T150. He didn\u2019t go outside, didn\u2019t see many people, and spent his days working on the car amid piles of machine parts in his former factory. Collectors traveled to see the vehicle, including the former\u00a0Tonight Show\u00a0host Jay Leno. \u201cI arrived at this warehouse-type building in the wintertime,\u201d Leno recalled. \u201cThe guy was old and unshaven. The car looked damaged, was in pieces, and the wood was rotten. He wanted like seven hundred thousand dollars for it, rushing me about the sale, and I knew I was looking at another million just to restore it. It just didn\u2019t feel right.\u201d<\/p>\n Leiske never sold.<\/p>\n One day in 2001, the Talbot-Lago disappeared. In the middle of the night, men in white overalls cut the phone lines at Leiske\u2019s home. Then they drove about two miles to his former factory. They parked an unmarked white box truck in front and drilled out the cylinders of the lock to a garage door. \u201cIt was a very sophisticated way to steal it,\u201d said Jeff Thiele, a Milwaukee policeman who worked the case. \u201cLike some shit out of the movies.\u201d<\/p>\n \t\t\t\t\t\t \t\t\t\t\tA 1938 Talbot-Lago T150-C SS Teardrop Coupe on display at Sotheby\u2019s in New York in 2022.<\/p>\n \t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tJohn Lamparski\/Getty Images<\/p>\n \n\tFor years, the Teardrop had remained partially disassembled at the back of the facility, its parts in various places, the paperwork scattered among office drawers. Somehow the thieves knew exactly where to look for all of it. They used an overhead crane already in the building to move the Teardrop\u2019s parts into the box truck, which they backed up to the main door. According to eyewitnesses, only one thief was seen well enough to be described: a white male about 35, \u201cthin build, with sandy-brown shoulder-length hair.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tAt 10 a.m., Leiske arrived to drink his coffee and begin working on the car, as he did every morning. Only the Teardrop wasn\u2019t there. The parts and nearly all the paperwork\u2014even some receipts dating back to the 1960s\u2014were gone. No sign of a forced entry, even though the doors had been dead-bolted when he left. Nothing else was taken. \u201cIf Roy had arrived a half hour earlier, they probably would\u2019ve killed him,\u201d said Richard Mueller, his second cousin. \u201cAfterward, he called me every day asking about that car. It broke his heart.\u201d<\/p>\n Four years later, Leiske died. He bequeathed the car\u2014which technically he still owned\u2014to Mueller, who figured he\u2019d never see it again.<\/p>\n \n\tUntil Joe entered the picture.<\/p>\n \n\t\u201cAH, THE CAVALLINO,\u201d JOE SAID, rattling the ice in his drink. \u201cA real ball-swinging event.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tStanding at the bar, Joe sniffed for clues. He had been hired by Leiske\u2019s heirs to find the Teardrop, his investigation eventually dovetailing with the FBI\u2019s own hunt for the vehicle\u2019s alleged thief. Now, they were working together. Sort of. \u201cJoe Ford has been instrumental in helping with this case,\u201d said Thiele. \u201cA lot of the leads we got on this vehicle came from Joe, and we followed up on them.\u201d He paused. \u201cSometimes, though, Joe has to remember that he\u2019s not law enforcement.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tJoe believed he knew who had stolen the Talbot Lago and then sold it to a millionaire collector, and both men could be here today. So Joe was chatting up contacts, looking for information, and also acting as a lookout for the FBI. The feds needed Joe\u2019s help identifying the suspect. Joe knew him on sight. They used to be friends and even once worked together in the world of rare cars before having a spectacular fallout. Now Joe was working with the FBI to help track him down.<\/p>\n \n\t\u201cThe FBI gave me a number to call if I see him,\u201d Joe said. \u201cThey have information he may show up, so something may happen here.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tJoe was wearing a navy blazer, turquoise shirt, and white pants, like he\u2019d just stepped off a yacht. He was here with Shari. Whenever Joe visited concours, she took time off from work to go along. The cars? Whatever. The resorts, though?\u00a0These\u00a0she could get excited about. \u201cI keep telling him to get rid of that old car outside our home, it\u2019s annoying,\u201d she said. \u201cBut he\u2019s very independent.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tFor Joe, this type of high-end soiree was the everyday world of his detective work. In the realm of concours, it was an open secret that among the multimillion-dollar cars on display could be fake or stolen goods.<\/p>\n \n\t\u201cWhat happens is someone buys a car, shows it at a concours event, and then another collector sees the car and says it was stolen from them,\u201d said Christopher Marinello, the founder of Art Recovery International. \u201cThe person who said they were robbed wants to go to the police, but they\u2019re not sure if they should litigate. So these cases are almost always settled confidentially. Nobody wants to be known for buying a stolen car. They don\u2019t even want to be known as a collector. They might get their own collection stolen!<\/p>\n \n\tJoe knew all about stolen cars at concours. In 2019, Les Wexner, the billionaire founder of L Brands, which owned Victoria\u2019s Secret, entered his 1954 Ferrari 375 Plus Spyder in the Pebble Beach Concours d\u2019Elegance. In 2014, Wexner had paid $18.3 million for the car at Bonhams, at the time the third-highest price ever paid for a car at auction.<\/p>\n \n\tBut there was one problem. It was stolen.<\/p>\n \n\tRepresenting the family of a previous owner, Joe had investigated how the Ferrari was nabbed from a Cincinnati property in 1989, transported to Belgium, and auctioned off under false pretenses. After Wexner bought it, the vehicle sank into a quagmire of litigation over its provenance before things were resolved in 2016. Now the car was on the concours circuit\u2014and Joe still carried a grudge. \u201cThere\u2019s a Belgian from the Ferrari case over there,\u201d he said, narrowing his eyes. \u201cHe\u2019s on my blacklist.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tIn the rare-car world, buyers and collectors aren\u2019t your neighborhood garage guys. Often they\u2019re Wall Street or tech titans looking for something novel to drive on the weekends and fuel cocktail party chatter. Los Angeles insurance tycoon Peter Mullin, for instance, collected French cars from the 1930s\u2014even buying period tools to restore them\u2014in an Art Deco, riveted-steel public museum complete with a miniature Eiffel Tower. Bestselling author Clive Cussler kept more than one hundred rare cars in a museum near Denver. John Oates, of Hall & Oates fame, collects Porsches and English sports cars. Often the collectors are white, male, and advanced in age\u2014icons of previous eras keen to see their reflection in a fancy automobile. \u201cCollectors are looking for milestones in technology and design, a true example of a rolling sculpture,\u201d Joe said. \u201cIt\u2019s all about the fastest car, the biggest engine, and the wildest body.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tUnlike most assets, however, collectible cars from before World War II almost never have independent verification. Which means that if a vehicle turns out to be fraudulent, the buyer has little in the way of legal recourse to get their money back. \u201cAll of these cars were considered junk,\u201d said Draneas. \u201cThe Ferraris, Jaguars, and other street-racing cars would get banged up, catch fire, and then the owner would throw it away and get a new one. So the records for these worn-out husks became kind of nonexistent.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tWealthy collectors need experts who can verify that a rare car they\u2019re interested in buying is authentic. To meet the demand, there are specialists who cater to this world: restoration experts, collection managers, custom-garage builders. They advise collectors to find a niche\u2014prewar Ferraris, say, or Talbot-Lagos from the 1930s\u2014then scour the planet to build out their collection. Truly rare cars are hard to keep secret, because searching for them makes others aware of what exists. \u201cPeople in the car world are gonna hear about it,\u201d Joe said. And sometimes it\u2019s these insiders who decide to go criminal\u2014which is what brought Joe here today.<\/p>\n \n\tJoe froze.<\/p>\n \n\tHe stared at an older man\u2014balding, glasses, blazer\u2014laughing in a large group. Joe was about to approach, glanced at Shari, paused. The man walked by.<\/p>\n \n\t\u201cThat\u2019s Paul Russell,\u201d Joe said. \u201cI need to talk with him. But I don\u2019t want this to get antagonistic.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tIn the world of high-end cars, Russell was a titan. He ran Paul Russell and Company, a 38,000-square-foot shop in Essex, Massachusetts, renowned for morphing rare cars into trophy vehicles for the world\u2019s wealthiest clients. A former mechanic, Russell and his team of 17 craftsmen had produced 46 best-in-show vehicles at top concours over the past 40 years. Russell fields calls from everywhere, but he\u2019s best known for restoring Ralph Lauren\u2019s vehicles.<\/a> When Russell refurbished Lauren\u2019s prewar Mercedes SSK, once owned by an Italian count, his team spent 4,000 hours on the project. Russell even traveled to Germany with a flashlight to find the car\u2019s original latches in a garage, a trip that also turned up the original oil pan. The vehicle won Best in Show at the Pebble Beach Concours d\u2019Elegance in 1993. \u201cWith Paul Russell, it\u2019s not a job,\u201d Lauren once said. \u201cIt\u2019s his life.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tA family man with glasses and gray hair, Russell had long been feted for his taste and integrity. But he was now linked to a crime, having helped broker the deal for the stolen Talbot-Lago between a millionaire collector and an alleged thief. \u201cThis sale had a lot of red flags,\u201d Joe said. (When asked for comment, Russell stated that he couldn\u2019t discuss the case because of the ongoing investigation.) Talking with Russell could help solve the case. But this wasn\u2019t the place or time. \u201cI don\u2019t want to make a scene,\u201d Joe said. \u201cNot here.\u201d<\/p>\n He glanced at his phone. No call from the FBI, and he hadn\u2019t seen the suspect. But he knew this was only the beginning of his case.<\/p>\n \u201cAccording to the FBI, I may be getting in over my head,\u201d Joe said, making for the parking lot as the sky grew darker. \u201cWe\u2019re taking down a 600 million-dollar international car-theft ring.\u201d<\/p>\n![\"Cover](\"https:\/\/robbreport.com\/wp-content\/themes\/pmc-robbreport-2017-v2\/assets\/public\/lazyload-fallback.gif\")
<\/p>\n
THE TEARDROP. OTHERWISE KNOWN as the 1938 Talbot-Lago T150C-SS Teardrop coupe. Built by two men named Figoni and Falaschi\u2014Italian immigrants to France who ran the world\u2019s top custom car shop in Paris from the Thirties through the Fifties\u2014the T150 was a model\u00a0Robb Report\u00a0once called \u201cthe most beautiful car in the world.\u201d One of only two T150s equipped with a race car engine, 90108 was an Art Deco masterpiece, a long, sleek body powered by ground-shaking horsepower. When it debuted, the Teardrop\u2019s wealthy owners commissioned custom couture to match its colors and lines; society-page fixtures used it to make grand entrances at balls during the last gasps of\u00a0Downton Abbey\u2013era Europe.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n