The conspiracy to ruin the coolest American car company of all time

but somebody complained in washington and said you know something there's something we don't like about that preston tucker guy preston tucker is one of the best known names in automotive history in america but not many people know the true story behind him there's the movie tucker the man in his dream with uh jeff bridges in it people have seen that people wonder how much that is true the interesting part is the story is actually pretty true but it's very very interesting what happened and basically preston tucker was a guy from michigan who tried to start his own car company after world war ii so during the war the united states government shut down the auto industry and made them start building war material so chrysler was building army tanks ford's building airplanes they had to stop building civilian cars i think it's 1942. so by 1945 the fleet of cars on the road in america was trash it was junk and so everyone knew that when the war ended there's gonna be a huge boom for cars people are gonna wanna buy brand new cars preston tucker had been building stuff for the us government during that time he had a manufacturing facility in michigan and he thought you know something he loved cars i bet i could start a car company and because i don't have the legacy problems of gm ford and chrysler i can start from scratch so he loved cars he loved motorcycles he spent a lot of time with the indianapolis 500 he'd sold cars his entire life he thought you know something with my know-how i'm gonna do this so he came up with the idea about building a rear engine rear-wheel rear-wheel-drive car that was going to come out right after the war and he met with a car designer they put his design on paper and he started going around shopping around looking for investors to start a car company and the other car companies the big three for instance basically said you know since people will buy anything so desperate we'll just dust off the dyes and molds from 1942 and put those in the road and we'll call them 47s and 48s and so the interesting thing is that tucker starting from blank slate actually had a leg up in a way because he's actually saying i can do anything i want so he's talking about putting fuel injection in the cars and disc brakes and all kinds of really fancy things but of course he doesn't have a car company so he has the drawing of a car he wants to make the great thing about tucker was he's a very very flamboyant sales person he could sell anything to anybody and as he went around he found people who are fascinated by the idea and they go you know this guy's so dynamic he might be able to do it so he actually got a journalist to write an article about him and his car and this article came out and it caused a huge storm of publicity and you know this is long before social media but everyone in america found out who tucker was this tucker guy is going to launch a car company he's going to build this car and sell these cars and the cars will be less expensive because their rear engine rear wheel drive there'll be more room inside the car he's also talking about auto safety he wants to put padding on the dashboards he was even talking about putting seat belts in cars which back then was insane people look at the drawings and stuff go that's a good looking car i'd buy one of those cars and based on the attention he was getting he spoke to some people at you know wall street type people and said you know what would it take to start a car company they go well we could do an initial stock offering and sell tucker stock for the tucker corporation but we'd probably need a car so tucker got together some guys and they built a car based on his drawing and this is often referred to as the tin goose and he got some really really talented guys to work with him guy named alex tremulis for instance a very very well-known designer helped him build the tin goose and and take the designs that were on paper and make them practical and they also were talking about building he's talking about building his own engine this you know 589 cubic inch flat six that would go in the back of the car not all of his ideas came to fruition but he had some really really cool ideas so they built this prototype they got nicknamed the tin goose they built this prototype and the prototype actually ran and if you saw the movie you know there's a famous scene where they unveil this car to the public people saw the car and they freaked out because the car was so beautiful and think back to what cars looked like in 1947 and 1948 they looked like boxes on wheels just unaerodynamic toasters you know just the thing going down the road is ugly but you bought it because you had to you know here's a car that's streamlined it's got nice lines and it's gonna come in some really cool colors it's got some neat technological features they display this car to the public and go we're gonna start manufacturing these and tucker actually knows some people in positions of power he lines up a deal where they agreed to let him lease a plant in chicago that had been used to build engines for bombers and now they don't need to do that anymore so this plant is vacant so he actually gets the people in washington to say yeah you can lease that plant if you can come up with the money then he goes to his investors and goes look i've got a prototype i've got a plant i just need some money so they started selling tucker stock they raised like 15 million dollars very very quickly and tucker then starts on this project of starting to build cars he brings in all the people and all the you know manufacturing stuff you need to start building cars and while he's doing this he's getting attention every time he turns around the tin goose is being brought around places and displayed and shown to people whenever he brought his prototype someplace to put it on display it would cause a ruckus they actually charged admission to see it in new york city and it outgrossed some broadway plays that's how much attention this guy got for his car he was in the news constantly everyone in america knew who preston tucker was he's the guy taken on the big three launching his own car company and while he's doing this and he's starting to put together the initial runs of the cars he's setting up an assembly line he's starting to build cars he starts then selling dealership franchises people are coming to the factory walking around going i want a franchise so he starts selling franchises for for the cars when the cars start coming out he's constantly talking the press and somewhere along the line and we don't know who but somebody complained in washington and said you know something there's something we don't like about that preston tucker guy there's something going on there because he's raised 15 million dollars he's built a couple cars but how do you get this big plant for instance how do you pull that off and back then raising that kind of money through an initial stock offering is one of those things where people go was that on the up and up or not so the sec started investigating securities and exchange commission and they started investigating tucker and they were actually snooping around as plants and they were you know using undercover people and then at one point in time they actually walked into subpoenas and literally seized all the papers that were in the plant and hauled them all off blueprints contracts everything and it basically crippled the company company could not operate without the stuff and then a while later they said okay we're done and he goes well can i get my papers back and they're like well we'll see the weird part was that nothing happened but tucker's plant was kind of shut down but not quite but he managed to build 20 or 30 cars and these cars had gotten out people saw the cars people who saw the cars loved the cars so there's this guy who's trying to build cars the government does this investigation and then the weirdest thing happens there's a man named drew pearson in washington dc who's got a syndicated newspaper column and a syndicated radio show and one weekend on his show he announces along with a column that accompanies in the papers that preston tucker is a fraud and the fraud has been proven by the sec securities exchange commission is about to announce that tucker's entire operation is a scam and a hoax and all he's doing is ripping people off tucker's stock went to almost zero the next day now suddenly tucker's a bad guy but the weird thing about it is that all that had happened was this guy made this announcement the news newspapers around the country picked the story up and the front page detroit news is you know tucker fraud but the weird part is is that what what caused this no one knew what caused this how'd this word get out that this was happening so finally the fed stepped up and said you know something we're going to prosecute tucker for violations of the securities and exchange commission rules and so on so we're to prosecute them for violating federal law so they actually charged tucker and his entire board of directors with a stack of federal crimes and they shut his factory down and they put him all on trial in chicago while he was on trial they forced his company into bankruptcy the company isn't bankruptcy and the irony of it is it's all happening in the same building the same courthouse in chicago tucker and his men are on trial down here for criminal stuff his company's being liquidated at the other end of the same building they hold a trial that lasts months these guys are all out of work he's got guys who are on his payroll who actually have to moonlight like it's like used car salesmen while they're trying to just eat during the trial the prosecution the state you know government puts in its entire case against tucker saying that you know he sold stock when all he had was one prototype he's only built 25 or 30 cars he's leased this big plan he's not using the whole plan and at the end of the prosecution's case the defense actually said your honor we're not even going to bother putting in a defense we can go straight to closing arguments and i'm an attorney and i can tell you that in the history of mankind that has happened so rarely i spoke once uh where i'm giving a talk and i recognize a judge in the front row of the audience and i said excuse me your honor can i ask you a question sure i go in all of your criminal trials how many times have you seen a defendant actually say your honor will skip the defense go straight to closing arguments he goes never never happens so they did closing arguments at the end of closing arguments the jury came back not guilty all defendants all counts but the problem is everyone remembers the tucker fraud headlines and the tucker trial that lasted six months the man was acquitted but the problem is his factory is gone and his name is equated with a massive fraud interestingly enough 51 tuckers got built 51 10 goose plus 50. of those 51 cars 47 of them still exist if you can find one it's worth a million dollars complete one is sold at auction for 3.4 million something like that they're still out there and so the odd thing about the story is that tucker got ruined his his his life his his reputation everything was ruined he wound up spending the last years of his life running his machine shop which is where he started but all anybody knew was oh yeah tucker that's the fraud guy and so back in the 50s and 60s you could pick a tucker up for five ten grand now they're in the millions of dollars and what's amazing is even i said there's 47 that still exist in the 51 that got built they've actually tracked down the four missing ones and we know where they went and that's how much interest there is in these and so if you go to a car show or a museum and you see a tucker absolute thing of beauty most recognizable it's got a cyclops headlight in the front so there's two main headlights and there's a center headlight and if you had your high beams on and you turned the corner just a little bit this the center headlight would turn on and turn with the wheels as a safety feature that's what he was pitching it as the car had a padded dashboard did not have seat belts that's a mistake that some people think but even tucker couldn't convince the people put seat belts because that was considered such a crazy thing back then one of the interesting things about them is they have a manual transmission with a clutch but if you look for the shifter you'll see this little tiny stalk sticking off of the steering column and the stock has got a little lollipop lever on it that goes into different positions and the transmission in a tucker is the same transmission it's an accord it's very unusual but think about this the tucker is rear engine rear-wheel drive so the engine is backed by the rear bumper and in front of that is a transmission so when you go to shift this car before you do anything the first thing is you pick you select what gear you want so you wanna put it in first gear you push the lever into first then you depress the clutch and when you hit the clutch solenoids do the shifting for you and now it's such a cool idea you go what a great idea but then you realize why is nobody doing that now and the problem of course is that solenoids in the 1940s were not exactly the most reliable things so i can tell you that if you owned a tucker today and wanted to drive it you want to be real careful that transmission because only about three guys on earth know how to fix them but the interesting thing is i wrote a book about tucker and i've researched all of this i've been to the archives i've gone through the criminal files and we've tried to figure out who shut him down because his people ought to say well it had to be general motors ford chrysler had to be the big three it had to be well we found a guy who worked for the securities and exchange commission his name was harry mcdonald and harry mcdonald admitted that after they did their investigation of tucker they created a 600 page report and they had this report and they didn't know what to do with it so they gave it to the press they actually called a reporter in the detroit news and said look here's a report you can't say where you got it you can't say where you saw it you can't make copies but you're gonna read it all you want you can quote it we'll back you up on it so they smeared him to put him out of business premier financial services has been a sponsor of benwicke for the last four years and we can't thank them enough for their support and we love them for that but also because their simple lease truly is a tremendous product in the world of exotic car financing they allow you to minimize your payment minimize your down payment take all the tax advantages that are available for a lease while still giving you the ability to 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Channel: VINwiki

Views: 374,773

Keywords: Steve Lehto, Lehto's Law, Preston Tucker, Tucker, Tucker 48, Tin Goose, conspiracy, big 3, american cars, american automakers, elon musk, trial, investment, stock offering, wall street, news, vinwiki, car stories, historian

Id: rF2IGmkXKn4

Length: 14min 14sec (854 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 05 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/su007]

Steve Lehto is a super nice dude, I emailed him a while back and bought an autographed copy of his tucker book.

[u/zeozero]

Tesla is like Tucker’s revenge.