Remember the stolen F50 from Algar?

Great story - thank you. Got a couple more steps added to the due diligence checklist.

 

Yes, I've missed the last two years and this one is nice and close. Hope to see you there

 

Simply amazing. Thank you for sharing.

 

Jim,

thanks for your thoughts and friendship as this unfolded way back when. It was invaluable advice and above all an outlet that allowed me to keep an even head through it all. Those days were dark and fraught for a while, but the sun eventually came up

Thanks again Jim, Sanj and I look forward to seeing you again soon.

 

Wow! This Febbie must have really stepped on it. How hard do you have to hit to damage the tub? On second thought, this question has already been asked and answered, hasn't it.

Dale

 

It's the first and only one I have ever seen. I drove from Nash to see it on the very same morning, and I waited to leave until it had driven off the lawn that afternoon. It was at the tail end of quite the convoy, if I remember correctly.

It's funny to me that the only example of my favorite car that I ever had the pleasure of seeing was from the infamous Algar case.

Jas--sad for you, but glad you came out alright in the end. You have quite the story as well. Thanks for sharing. I am a bit sad, however, that your move to Music City did not bring an F50 with it.

Cheers.

 

Fantastic! We will be there, and finally we'll meet!

 

wow what a story,glad to know that the person is locked up and finally serving time for what they did,i'm still trying to figure out how he managed to get away without anyone else seeing it,unless it was put into a transporter asap and then moved

 

+1

 

What better way to hide than in plain sight?

 

that usually would be true,and I guess it was when it came to the car itself going to several events etc after it was stolen

however,when the car was stolen,wasn't it reported right away and the police should have been on a look out for an F50,be it on the road/state lines etc,as we know,they stand out from normal cars.

 

The sun always comes up eventually for good guys, if you know what I mean. Its all about how one handles adversity. Some people handle it well, and you obviously do. Much respect.

Glad to see this is all in the rear view mirror, where I think it belongs !

 

Glad you came out on top Jas!

 

Incredible story Jas. Sad, but encouraging that you were made whole.

 

I really appreciate that Joe. I learned alot from this whole experience and clearly my due diligence paled in comparison to the typical dossier and research you put into each collector car placement. Information and background research is invaluable and your success is based on it. I almost got burned by assumption and that is something I will never do with any car ever again.

Of all the F50's that had to cross my path, in little old Lexington KY, it had to be the Algar F50...still makes me shake my head in disbelief.

 

Do you have any pictures of the replaced VIN plate? Was it a copy of another actual F50?

 

one pausible explanation on how the car was moved,could be that the chap simply put it onto a plane,and flew the plane himself to the hanger where the car was usually kept?? he has the mean's to do so..

 

Much simpler than that, it was driven to a secluded spot and loaded onto a waiting enclosed truck. Went to Lexington KY after that and a few months later was sporting KY tags and a clean title. I was told by the FBI that this is a rare instance of single purpose theft, ie steal for your own subsequent use. Most of the time high dollar cars like this are stolen by pros, immediately parted or loaded onto a waiting overseas container.

What I'm baffled by, is the fact that he had to know that at some point the identity would be betrayed by the VIN. For example, when I would have had it serviced via a dealer, the falsification would have come to light. Even after the sale, the guy made no attempt to leave town with the money (the only thing he did was hide it in a girlfriends account). I figured he would have been long gone. He had mentioned the desire to fly overseas in the middle east, but I guess he didn't have time to do it prior to my discovery of the car's true identity.

The FBI also interviewed his ex wife. They cleared her quite quickly as the crook had the cars before he met her. Needless to say, she was stunned.

 

Crazy story Jas. So glad you came out as whole as you could. I can totally understand your hesitance now in future large exotic purchases. Makes dealing with New Ferrari's a bit less aggravating.

 

Jas, unbelievable story..

Glad you came out whole $$

 

Well, I don't usually have much good to say about thieves, but this guy had gigantic stones to do what he did and for as long as he did.

 

What an awesome story!!!! Glad to hear you got your money back.

 

that's cleared that up then ,thanks for that

 

Wow. Even after the poser crook refunded all the money and the cars were recovered intact, the FBI and police land on him like ten tons of bricks, pulling out all the stops to make sure he gets caught, prosecuted, and sentenced (believe me, two years is mighty stiff for stealing three cars, even if one is a supercar). Out-bleeping-standing.

I could use some federal help too. Anybody got any tips on attracting FBI attention in cases like these ...

Two lawyers team up in 2004 and start advertising their ability to eliminate credit card debt, and use their nationwide network of con artists to convince 2,219 desperate drowning-in-debt families to give them thousands of dollars each, usually the last few thousand that these people had to their names. In return, the victims got idiotic dispute letters written by the black helicopter crowd that they were supposed to send to creditors and collectors, who would then have to forgive all the debts and the credit bureaus would have to delete all the tradelines. Because "a lawyer told me I could," the victims stopped paying their credit cards, mostly owed to FDIC-insured banks. Of course, all they really got were collection lawsuits, judgments, bankruptcy, divorce, ruined credit, foreclosed houses, and the occasional suicide attempt. Total take, at least $8 million. After filing civil suits on my clients' behalf, I had a long talk (for which I had to wait months) with a Special Agent of the FBI Misdemeanor Squad (US Secret Service) and he took it to the Useless Attorney's Office, who "didn't see a federal crime," and that was that. 19 months later, a federal judge in South Carolina ruled in Capital One's suit against them that they owe Cap One $3.7 mil and referred the case to USAO for prosecution, which USAO promptly ignored. The scammers have stopped defending the civil cases I'm running against them and we'll win eventually, but by the time we recover our pennies on the dollar it will have taken longer than World War One.

A lawyer in Philly teams up with some "mortgage modification" scammers in South Jersey and advertise their "legal team's" ability to reduce anybody's payments, interest, and/or principal, for only a couple thousand up front. Once they got the money, which went first to the lawyer's trust account and then to the scammers less the lawyer's commission (for which he did not a lick of work), they told many of their victims to stop paying their mortgages because "we got it under control" and we already got your mortgage reduced. Unlucky for them, they picked one of my personal friends to do this to, and we filed suit and shut them down within a week. Of the 70-odd victims from 27 states who called my cell phone after Googling this scam and finding our lawsuit, the worst was when I was in the frozen food aisle listening to a man tell me his wife was in the corner with her head between her knees, crying her eyes out because they just found out their house was being sold in two weeks. This happened to several hundred of the 1,008 families who gave up a total of $1,288,000, and I know that figure by heart because I personally added up all the transactions in his business records and trust account statements. The local police and county prosecutor are all over it and I expect indictments and arrests very soon, but they've told me the feds probably aren't interested--it's below their minimum account or something. Too bad, they could have frozen the bad guys' assets and we might have recovered some money before they spent it all.

A "natural product formulator" and his sidekick, a "board certified chiropractor" (even though his chiro license was cancelled in 1998), make a widely viewed infomercial where they assure the viewer that all Americans have 5 to 22 pounds of rotting red meat in their intestines, and everybody is supposed to "eat a meal and then release a meal" instead of crapping only once a day, and that's why you're so fat and sluggish and sick all the time. Not to worry; the "formulator, author, researcher"'s company just happens to sell an all-natural geltab with 63 herbs and spices that'll clean you right out in mere days, at which the "chiropractor" nods like a bobblehead and tells everybody to call this toll-free number for a "low deep discount." My 80-year-old non-native-English-speaking client does so, and gives them his credit card number, and is charged over $100 for a product that sells for $34.95 at GNC and $22.88 at Walmart. Fortunately, he doesn't land in the hospital with perforated bowels like a few other people who took it, but it also doesn't cure his constipation, and he tries to get his money back but is told to write a letter explaining how the product didn't work. Two months later his credit card gets charged for an "auto-ship" program that the infomercial never mentioned, and then two months after that he gets charged again, and then two months after THAT he gets charged AGAIN. These crooks have been doing the same thing since AT LEAST 2007 to AT LEAST 200,000 people (my very low estimate, arrived at by knocking 90% off of the "two million" customers the infomercial claimed) and have stolen AT LEAST $20 mil through credit card fraud, without ANY law enforcement action. Oh, until a month ago when he agreed to a $2.65 mil settlement with some state prosecutors, $2.55 mil of which will go to fines and investigative costs and only $0.1 mil of which will actually go to the people he ripped off. This guy is WAY bigger than the Enzyte creep who got 25 years for doing the exact same thing on a smaller scale. If our class gets certified, we should score a big enough judgment to put the lot of them out of business and a big enough contingent fee to buy ME an F50 and a few other supercars (the main defendant, I'm reliably told by the lawyer for one of the guys who almost died from a perforated bowel, rolls around SoCal in a convertible Bentley, which I'll take as a war prize and trade it in on something decent like an LP640 Roadster), but it seems to be not a big enough problem to get him arrested and his assets frozen.

There's lots more where that came from, but these will do to go on. I genuinely am glad that justice was done to the jerk pilot who desecrated three fine cars he didn't deserve. I do, though, wish I knew the secret of how to get federal law enforcement to enforce federal laws other than those against interstate car theft.