VINwiki's Top 10 Lamborghini Stories

[Music] here at vinwicki we love exotic cars especially lamborghinis and so i thought today it'd be fun to compile our top 10 lamborghini-related car stories and today's video is sponsored by skillshare skillshare is a learning community with thousands of classes for creative and curious people i just finished greg mckeown's class which is based on his book essentialism and it was on how to accomplish more with less as an entrepreneur as i explored the skillshare database of classes i found a lot of amazing and motivating lessons that i could glean from other people who have been in similar situations or in other circumstances that i could apply to my own skillshare invites you to explore new skills develop existing interests and get lost in the creative process if you're uncertain about what's next creative challenges and productivity classes can be a great way to help you structure your time and set up achievable goals at a time when so many important conversations are happening in 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here are our top 10 lamborghini-related car stories [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] a car like this is such a unicorn that it's hard to even put a value on it so i am again constantly always searching for lost cars and treasured cars my wife thinks i'm probably i don't know who knows what i'm doing in the middle of the night but i'm on my laptop looking at registries and looking at cars that haven't been found in 20 30 years and there's always been a couple cars that stood out uh one was the walter wolf countaches there were these very famous countaches back in the day that were the first cars with wings and spoilers and as a lamborghini nut you'd say there's you know maybe 10 20 other really iconic cars like that so one day i'm actually on instagram of all places i would search and i still do search cars buy a hashtag i would look up coumtash hashtag and i'd scroll through the photos and you know most of the cars i knew or i knew where they were but sometimes something would pop up interesting scrolling through and i see this really odd countach in the back of a picture with its two countaches 25th anniversary and this odd like metallic colored countach with white interior what i noticed was it had these red wheels and like these crazy side skirts and i'm looking at the car and studying kundashas my entire life it occurred to me i think this is a special car i look at the username of the person on instagram i message them they message me back is your car where did you see it like you know is it for sale and they immediately responded saying no it's in storage at this storage facility so i got the name and i called i called the storage facility i said hi how are you i'm a lamborghini historian and a slash collector i didn't want to use the word dealer but i i heard you might have some interesting countaches do you know if they're for sale or some information pleasant lady but she was pretty short with me she's like no sorry we're storage and there's it's not for sale the car's not for sure i said okay still looked at that photo i'm like trying to zoom in on instagram and about like two three hours later i get a call from a gentleman incredibly nice guy he's like yes there's two countaches here no they're not for sale but one of the cars is the very famous twin turbo and i said how do you know that he said well no it says turbo on the side like in massive letters he says you open the engine there's these two big turbos and he goes no it's a it's from my understanding it's a multi-million dollar car and so i told him do you think the owner would sell it he goes well i know the whole history of the car it was it was it was owned by a car collector here for many years when he passed away this other gentleman purchased it and he doesn't want to sell it he actually typically keeps the cars in his living room and blah blah blah blah blah he doesn't want to sell i said do you mind if i come and see the car and i imagine so i'm calling this gentleman he's in reno nevada i'm in miami florida so it's a little bit of a hike but i was so intrigued that it could potentially be a countach turbo that i had to go and see the car so the back story is in the 1980s lamborghini was sort of struggling in a period where they were being purchased by the mim ram brothers and you had a lot of distributors and you had dealers and and people started to do interesting things i mean think about it this was a time with roof and gambala and kunig and all these crazy tuners creating different projects there was an incredible guy by the name of max bobnar and max was mb sports cars which mb sports cars was one of the lamborghini distributors in europe primarily in switzerland and max actually had a big lamborghini collection himself and was a very well respected guy max started experimenting with countach turbos max actually created two cars which were famously known as the countach turbo and the two cars were even i think if you google them even come up in wikipedia pages and they were very well known there was posters on the cars magazines on the cars there were even toy models built of both cars so there was a black black car that had black wheels and like these crazy side skirts and then personally my favorite was a really beautiful metallic red car with white interior racing seat belts and red wheels there's actually even a famous photo of the countach turbo with valentino balboni the famous lamborghini test driver ferruccio lamborghini obviously the founder of lamborghini standing next to the walter wolf countach arguably the most famous countach of all time and the countach turbo iconic photo again only adding to the history of these countach turbo cars so they were never actually built at the factory but they were done by the probably one of the most prominent distributors at the time and sort of done in a way where lamborghini felt it was okay the cars were shown they were used he was actually selling these as a kit only two cars were made and if you believe wikipedia at the time the red car was destroyed and it was it was in numerous forums and in groups it was actually considered as disappeared and destroyed jump on a flight i think i was in reno nevada maybe two three days later i couldn't wait i arrived to the storage facility and you know upon walking in you see like you know gt3rs an old c4 corvette nothing too crazy um but some nice cars i think there was a lotus esprit or something like that and then in the back there's these two countaches immediately as i walked in i could not hide my excitement if i was there to buy the car that day i probably had the worst poker face imaginable because i couldn't wipe the grin off my face i realized at that moment sitting in front of me was the lost countach turbo almost as like a little kid i ran up to the car and i started inspecting it and i'm looking at the tires and it's got the original pirelli p7rs it has the original boost gauge from the old photos it has the original turbos from old photos it has the original seat belts i mean the car looked like someone in 1984 drove this car maybe 2000 miles and put it away it was so well preserved the interior was still bright white the dash which was mouse hair material was still in very nice condition forgetting the fact that i'm in the business of buying and selling cars for a profit i had to buy the car almost to a fault i had to buy it um and and maybe would have paid anything for the car i ended up negotiating with the owner of this car and a sister car with it which was a countach 25th anniversary it had never been titled never registered it was a brand new car with 400 miles and both these cars were sitting in the gentleman's living room for many many years apparently in the 1980s there was a very famous casino operator in reno nevada he owned a casino called circus circus and he actually used to display cars inside the casino he had ferraris and lamborghinis his favorite car ironically and i've been told was the lamborghini countach turbo when he passed away he was quite the sort of icon in the area in in reno nevada another and i wouldn't even call him a collector another gentleman with the means was able to buy both countaches looked at the cars as art and actually put them in his living room over the years he'd have a move to storage sometimes and then brought back to the house but i actually negotiated with this gentleman for about a year he was very adamant at first about not selling the cars we went back and forth and i knew all along that i was taking a risk there was no way for me to really document further without going detailed into the car without really sending everything to lamborghini without talking to max bobner without talking to other historians and i didn't want anyone in the world to know that i had discovered the car so while trying to verify what it was i was also trying to keep things very quiet now i could verify the ownership history but i couldn't verify all the details because i didn't want people to know so i was almost negotiating against myself because i wanted the car so badly but i also knew as a business i had to be okay i had to be safe a car like this is such a unicorn that it's hard to even put a value on it is it worth this or is it worth this and really the only way to tell is when you finally put it out to market sometimes one day i get a call from the gentleman at the storage facility and he goes i think it's time i think he's finally ready to sell within about two three days i ended up getting into such a great argument with the owner that i almost wasn't even allowed to purchase the cars because he was that upset with me i wasn't being rude i wasn't being mean i was just being very honest about the value of kundasha's and the value of the market et cetera et cetera et cetera so after let's say almost a year and a half we ended up purchasing the cars bringing them back to miami i personally think the countach turbo was one of the most interesting discoveries that we had ever made not just because it was a very cool car and because it was you know a turbo countach with a lot of horsepower but because also it's an icon to lamborghini enthusiasts i've run into so many people since we discovered it since we showed photos to the world that called me and said oh my god i always wanted to see that car we even had a collector out of the northeast that called me and he said if i didn't already have two countaches i'd have to buy this car he flew down just to see it and then told me that he actually was going to figure out how to convince his wife to buy a third countach the story gets even funnier because he actually brought a poster of the car that he had when he was a kid and he told himself as a kid that he would one day own the car probably at some point five ten years ago when he started buying countaches he actually asked another historian to find him that exact car the historian couldn't at the time the car was you know very hidden away and he ended up buying two other cars unfortunately he didn't end up with the car but just seeing the smile on his face when he saw it that moment made the whole discovery and everything worthwhile [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] i look at the cop and i'm like what are you doing arrest this guy no response whatsoever [Music] around 2011 and 12 we started to get a lot of demand for exotic cars from south america and at that point the dealer network there was kind of underdeveloped and it was still a fairly novel concept that it was actually safe enough to drive cars that valuable in those countries particularly brazil because that's where a lot of the calls were coming from but we weren't being contacted by the end users down there instead it was brokers or businesses in south florida that were exporting the cars and since it's against our franchise agreement to sell cars that we know are probably going to be exported it wasn't really up to me whether or not we took these deals so i would talk to my general manager and at the time he was pretty open to that he wanted to sell as many as we could and so if that's what this meant okay so there was one guy in particular that we dealt with a lot and he was very professional and easy to deal with and made expectations clear and communicated well and he became a great client i would sell him five to ten cars a year and in general he would just call and say i've got a guy that wants a gallardo he's open to these colors what do you have and he would just buy something out of our inventory he would give us a deposit and two or three weeks later he'd have the rest of the money and he would send it it can take a long time to get that amount of money out of south america so it was nice to have this kind of buffer not only for some plausible deniability but to make the transactions a little bit more convenient but about a year into the relationship he came to me and said he had a request for two very specific cars a guy wanted a yellow 2012 brand new gallardo performante and a 2012 bentley continental flying spur speed and i could find the gallardo through another dealer but obviously we weren't a bentley dealer and so i told him let me do a day or two of research i'll find us a car figure out what discounts are available and i'll get you one so the next day i found a white one exactly what he wanted with the right options at a good discount and he was happy but we had to kind of lay down the rules a little bit differently because we told him look in most cases if your deal falls apart we'll be happy to give you your deposit back and we had in some cases but in this case we're having to secure two cars and buy them let the warranties start that we really don't want for inventory so we need a bigger deposit and truly in this case it is non-refundable and he agreed with that but he said look i don't have a bunch of cash right now but i do have an almost brand new bmw x6 that i secured for a client he gave me a deposit and then he didn't consummate the transactions so why don't i give you that and the title as a non-refundable deposit on these cars so we agreed to that it was worth about 55 grand so we bought the other two cars and brought them into inventory and a couple weeks later kind of as you'd imagine his deal fell apart so we ended up owning this brand new lamborghini and this brand new bentley that we really didn't want and we didn't know what it was really going to take to sell them and they sat around for a very long time but eventually we did sell the bentley to some professional golfer i don't remember who it was not tiger woods and the gallardo just sort of sat around for a good long while and a couple months later my boss was like guys we have got to move this gallardo and at that time the 200 or so thousand dollar price point that the lp 550s were at those cars sold great but the 280 to 300 lp 570s sat around for a good long while and he was starting to get nervous about it and so we were trying to call anybody but i didn't have anybody i could just snap my fingers and sell the car to and around that time there was a guy who came in fairly often trying to test drive cars and in general we didn't test drive many cars and certainly not new cars and never early in the process we would already have dealt with when you want to buy how you want to buy how you want to pay what the contingencies are what we've got to deal with before that because we weren't worried about you not liking the way the car drove and if you were just trying to drive a car to see which one you'd eventually want to buy i mean that's what magazines are for so we weren't doing much test driving and certainly i wasn't and i really didn't deal with that many people that were showroom ups that just walked in because about 80 percent of my business at that point was repeat customers but this guy had come in a few times fishing for test drives and i just kind of deflected it and he'd get a little bit upset but then just sort of leave and he was an exceedingly unpleasant person to deal with he had said that his wife was some professional tennis player and that he had some tech startup that he was in the process of selling to microsoft for like 80 million dollars but he wouldn't tell us who she was or what the business did or what it was called or anything like that and obviously the guy's lying but regardless he would just go away and it wasn't that big of a deal but he showed up one saturday and i was busy doing something else so he started talking to one of my co-workers and a little bit less gracefully than i would tend to he refused to let this guy test drive a car and things got a little heated then they got more hostile then they got a little bit combative and they were shouting at each other and he was screaming profanity across our showroom and i'm over in the corner with some cappuccino and popcorn just ready for the fireworks to start because this co-worker of mine generally kept more firearms on his person or around his desk than a jason bourne movie but my general manager didn't like the circumstance so he stepped in and tried to defuse everything and his solution was let me let you talk to ed so he calls me over and he's like ed knows everything about lamborghinis he'll be happy to help you with whatever you want to do all right hey i'm ed bullion how can i help you so he said i want to test drive that yellow lamborghini right now and i said well you know it's really up to him my general manager here if he wants you to i'll be more than happy to pull it out he said yep whatever you want ed go get the keys get it out of here so we began the 20 or 30 minute process of shuffling all these cars around to get this car out of the showroom because saturdays are the worst possible day to test drive a car at an exotic car dealership the showrooms are full of instagram photographers and everybody's busy doing different things delivering cars to people coming in from out of town so it's just a terrible time to tie up an hour or two with a particular customer especially one that you know is not going to buy a car so we get the car out of the showroom and we head out on the test drive and our test drive route is actually dictated by our insurance provider and it's designed to be an easy way to show someone a car in a very safe way so it's mostly right turns with good visibility no unaided lefts and we kind of go down a state highway and then we loop around and exit where there's a marta station our local georgia public transit and then back up to the dealership so it's about a 10 mile loop and we drive the first five miles just kind of showing them how all the controls work and this was before all the accidents that would happen in the subsequent years so our insurance company really liked us and we wanted to keep it that way so i was behaving myself although we didn't tend to along that route because that state highway is technically speed patrolled by the georgia state patrol not the local cops and there's no good places for them to set up speed traps and since it's kind of the only road like that on the north part of town there really are never cops on this route and that's kind of strategic on our part because sometimes we really want to show people what the cars can do and as we talked about in the press car video you can go pretty fast along our test drive route but in this case i was behaving myself just kind of showing him all right this is the car this is the speed limit let's just see how things go and keep everything safe so we get to the point where we change seats kind of in a parking deck at the smartest station and he gets in the driver's seat and i make sure his mirrors are adjusted as steering wheels where he wants it everything's comfortable and he starts driving and this guy goes absolutely insane i mean immediately just full acceleration hard braking upsetting the balance of the car i mean there are elegant ways to speed and this was not that it was dangerous it was entirely out of control and i immediately said dude this is not how we're going to drive like you can try to experience the car and see what you like but this is not how we're going to behave in this car on this test drive and he would kind of back off and then immediately just speed back up and i'm like sir i got to ask you to slow down like we cannot drive like this i understand that you want to see what the car can do but this is not how we're going to do it and again he kind of slowed down but he kept just speeding up and he's going 130 140 miles per hour weaving in and out of cars and i i finally say sir if you persist like this i'm going to have to ask you to pull over and we got to switch seats and he's like no no no i'm driving the car and then fortunately about a quarter mile ahead i see a local cop driving in our same direction and i said sir there's a cop let's just behave ourselves we need to keep a good relationship with them and he goes no downshifting two gears flooring the throttle and accelerating as hard and fast as he can at the rear of this police car and i'm like whoa what are you doing and he slams on the brakes and comes within inches of this cops rear bumper i mean just tailgating this guy and i'm like well fantastic this is going to save us all he's going to pull him over give him a ticket for following too close and i'll get to drive back to the dealership no the cop doesn't even notice he goes watch this and i go no no please don't and he downshifts again floors the car barely avoids knocking the cop's mirror off and flies away from him well over 100 miles an hour and of course we got the top down on this performante convertible i look at the cop and i'm like what are you doing arrest this guy no response whatsoever so as he's accelerating away from this completely non-responsive cop he looks over at me and says i am invincible and i said uh well i'm not and i'm like this is how i'm gonna die i don't know what witchcraft this guy is capable of but i don't know what's happening in my life at all right now but i know we have a cloverleaf exit coming up in half a mile and this guy doesn't have any clue how to drive a car so we're going to flip over and die right about now and magically we didn't the cop never responded in any way but we made it around that turn and i said sir we're almost back please just drive carefully and somehow we managed to get back with the car in one piece and us all still alive and i have no idea how that happened but of course as you would imagine he immediately said well let me continue to think about it and i'll call you if i decide this is what i want to buy and he immediately departed without saying anything to anybody else's dealership and i walk back in and of course their first question is well is he going to buy it i said you guys got to be kidding me [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] can we do you have butt in place kimmy do you have button plants kimmy do you have butt implants kimmy do you have blood implants and i said to her i said kimmy do you have butt implants last week was my hundredth car story here on the channel and i've got plenty more to tell but i was asking a few friends like what should i do to kind of commemorate that body of work or whatever it means and the overwhelming consensus was to retell the prostitute lamborghini story so without any further ado early in 2011 i was working as the director of sales at lamborghini atlanta and we had a flatbed come in on the back of it there was a 2004 blue che loom lamborghini gallardo and these two guys got out they didn't really speak much english but as best we could understand it they wanted us to tell them what it would take to get the car running and it was as rough as a car that still in one piece could be the tires were bald the wheels were curved every panel had some ding ding scratch whatever the taillights were broken the door handle was broken off and it obviously didn't start or run and so we get it off and put it around back and a couple days later we get it checked out so we put in the shop and we could tell that it needed a clutch and a throw out bearing and a rear main seal and all the obvious wear and tear items so it was a good 20 to 25 grand worth of stuff and so we put it out back after diagnosing it and we called the number that these two guys had left but of course there's no answer and so we try every morning but don't get anywhere but a couple days later this guy walks in and he says hey do you all have a blue lamborghini here for service and we said yes do you know anything at all about it can you tell us do you want us to fix it is it yours and he says no no it's not mine he said it belongs to my girlfriend's daughter and she's very attractive and i said well thank you that won't impact our level of service sir but it's always nice to know the information in the periphery you know can we talk to her or something like that he said no ah she's she's not available right now but let me see if i can get in touch with her mom and we'll see what we can do okay great so the next couple days we keep trying the number no answer but then the mom shows up and she says yeah it belongs to my daughter i don't think she's gonna be able to pay to fix it and she is in jail right now she says she got arrested for going 180 miles per hour in this car i was like okay well can we get in touch with her is she going to get out she's like yeah she should be out pretty quick okay well that doesn't make a ton of sense but she said she'll probably want you to buy the car because i don't think she's going to fix it we said well we you know we can do that it's what i told her and she leaves and we continue trying to get in touch no response from anything even the numbers they had left the boyfriend the mom nobody so a couple days after that kimmy shows up and kimmy is a prostitute and it might be politically correct to say she's allegedly a prostitute but that would be a disservice to the three metro atlanta municipalities that had convicted her of such things in the prior years so she shows up and as best i could understand it kimmy was half black and half vietnamese and certain parts of her appeared to be rather augmented you might say that she had some aftermarket parts and she was a very charming girl probably one of the most interesting people i've ever come to know but i suppose what kimmy would say is her most marketable feature is her backside i actually saw on one of her now banned social media profiles that kimmy has 50 inch hips so the girl could take a break while hula hooping and so she shows up and she's telling us a little bit about her car and she bought it about a year prior to that at lamborghini miami paying all cash and it'd actually been about nine months and during that time apparently somebody had bumped into it in a wendy's drive-through her mother was correct she couldn't afford to fix the car and so she asked us if we would buy it and i had already talked to my general manager and he had pretty much said look we don't want the thing for inventory and he wasn't really comfortable representing it to other wholesalers because he didn't really know what the car was going to need beyond what we could immediately diagnose because once you put the clutch and everything else in it then you could figure out if it needs a 17 000 shift actuator or an 8 000 front diff or all the other things that are kind of the time bomb problems on early gallardo's also you never know if it's been run low on oil it was a pretty low vin so there were a lot of kind of monsters in the closet and so i had asked him you know look if you don't want it can i try to buy it because about a year and a half prior to that my wife and i had bought one of t-payne's rappers 360s it was in a similar circumstance it needed about 10 grand worth of junk to be fixed enough to then drive and we hoped nothing else happened and it hadn't so we had made some good money on that i figured hey this might be a good way for lightning to strike twice and so i was talking to kimmy and i said all right yeah we can buy it but actually it's going to be probably me buying it because honestly there's nobody else bidding and i asked her kind of what does she want and so her thinking she paid 100 grand for this car and it needs 20 25 grand worth of work she's like well i want 75 000 i said well i appreciate that but there's all these things that it could still need it's not worth that but i will give you thirty thousand dollars for the car and i knew i wasn't really bidding against anybody but of course kimmy was a very shrewd negotiator so we met right smack dab in the middle at thirty thousand bucks so she comes over to my desk and we're kind of getting everything sorted out but she says you know i'm going to need another car i said okay what would you like she said i'd really like a pink bentley like the one paris hilton has i said well they didn't make an awful lot of pink bentleys but we could probably buy you a continental gt not for 30 grand maybe for 50 and for 10 grand we paint a rapid pink you know it's possible and if we've got 30 000 as a down payment we could probably get you a loan for the other half that's fairly reasonable would you like to try to get a loan she says yes so that meant that we got to talk about kimmy's credit and fortunately she had her social security card with her at all times she pulls it out i write all the information down get her driver's license and we get to talk about where she works she gives me the name of some pornography company and she uh noticed her address was kind of at a peculiar place in town and i googled it and it was actually a local spa and i confirmed that with her she said yes that's my official address and then we got to talk about her income and i said do you you know how much do you make and she kind of shook her head and i was like well is that because you don't file a tax return or you don't report it all and she said i don't i don't do any of that stuff well okay and so she kind of estimated and she said you know it really varies i said i'm i'm sure it does and we came up with a number that was kind of very fair to justify the loan that she would need and i took everything into my finance guy's office and he uh immediately entered it in and then just threw it back at me said you got it wrong i said no i'm quite sure i didn't he said well that's the case then this girl doesn't have a credit score has never had a library card a cell phone in her name a bill anything no one has ever trusted her to repay them a dollar and we didn't have any banks that were going to become the first to do so so i had to go back with the bad news to kimmy and say i'm sorry but we do not have a way to get you a loan for your bentley so you and paris hilton will not be moving along the road in the same way tomorrow but she was a little bit disappointed but just said okay you can just pay me for the lamborghini so i went back to my accounting controller's office and got a check cut for thirty thousand dollars for the car and i hand it to her and as a you know generally a glorified used car salesman i got looked at as i was being dishonest to people fairly often even if it weren't the case but in that case she looked at me with such a lack of trust i've never seen it in another human and i hand her this check and she says what am i supposed to do with that and i said well it's a check you could deposit it into your bank account or you know you could take it to our bank and they'll give you money and she had never held a check in her life girls in her early 20s i said well i promise you it's like money she said well could you just give me money and she said we don't have that much cash so she took it extremely reluctantly and and went on her way so i spent the next few weeks fixing up the car we got it running and i drove it for about a year almost daily in fact i ended up selling a mercedes that i had that i had been daily driving i was just very pleased to have this you know low-budget lamborghini gallardo that could drive as much as i want it had a ton of fun took on some great road trips took it to shows just had a blast i loved the car but the problem was kimmy had told me during this negotiation that she had a second key for it and obviously it wasn't with it when it was towed in and not to judge but i wasn't entirely comfortable with someone in her profession having a second key to my car and so i kept kind of pinging her calling her texting her asking her like can you bring me that second key and i wasn't getting any response a few months later kind of just out of the blue i got a text from her and it said tomorrow is my birthday do you still want that second key i said well i don't understand what those two things could have to do with each other but yes i do still want the second key and the immediate text that was queued up was can i get a hundred dollars for it and i said well i'm the only person that has any legal right to this key but yes you can extort another hundred dollars from me i'll be happy to pay you that but you have to have it here by 5 pm today because i didn't want this just hanging out there if i'm going to pay for it then bring it on so of course 5 o'clock comes and goes and i don't see kimmy the next day we close at about 7 o'clock at about 6 50 kimmy comes in and the best way for me to describe what kimmy was wearing is that it was a basketball net it was literally more holes than white fabric nothing at all left up to the imagination so she walks in out of a rainy day and there's a woman with a young child at our parts counter buying something i don't know she drops whatever she had on the counter grabs her child and runs out of the building screaming after seeing what kimmy was wearing kimmy was kind of oblivious to this and she comes over and i said kimmy what are you all dressed up for and she said it's my birthday i said well you're halfway to that outfit but i don't think she understood what i meant and she comes up and gives me a great big hug kimmy loves to hug and we sit down at my desk she's got the key of course the battery's dead i try to open it from my desk i have to walk out and make sure it works i come back it works i give kimmy 100 and you know given her attire and kind of the extent of our relationship at that point i've kind of felt like certain questions were not necessarily off limits and so i said to kimmy i said to her kenny do you have butt implants and she was excited i'm really proud to answer i guess she'd put a lot of energy or money or whatever into the achievement there and and she said no i don't i had a fat redistribution i said kimmy would you tell me more about that she said yes she said they maybe gained 30 pounds and then they liposuctioned it all out here and then they injected it right right here she pointed the scar there wasn't obviously anything covering it and they must have used something between like a turkey baster and a jackhammer to insert it back in there and i said kimmy does it feel peculiar is it is it strange no no it's just there like like when you sit on it and now it's just all it's just part of me now and it's well that is that is absolutely fascinating and so kimmy went on to celebrate her birthday in whatever way she saw fit and i went on to drive my gallardo obviously we had thoroughly disinfected it there was a lot of glitter to vacuum up and some exotic smells to mitigate and of course after that kimmy followed me on many social media platforms and she was banned from a lot of them but she was able to comment on my instagram and she was particularly fond of pictures of my large albino snake for some reason and my wife would notice these things and say you know who's this kimmy girl and i was like don't don't click on the profile and you just don't worry worry about her but you know she is where the lamborghini came from and you know as we released the first copy of this story about a year and a half ago and a popular quest is can we have kimmy on here to tell her side of the story and unfortunately she is indisposed on another period of confinement for professional reasons for the next 10 to 20 years so we can't have that happen but she's a very fascinating girl and i wish her all the best and i was very pleased to have met the recipient of such a pioneering medical procedure [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] this is the columbus police department we're about to tow your lamborghini [Applause] [Music] so not only have i had a string of run-ins with the cops i've also had a few close encounters and not so close encounters with getting some pretty fantastic cars towed one of the first ones was a 1973 porsche 911 s and i had been storing this car for customer and he asked me to come meet him for lunch and to bring the car and he said you know i need some exercise you know go for it he said oh you know check the check the plate you know i make sure it's registered before you leave and i looked at the date and i said 5 13. i said okay it's april april's four we're good and i thought to take a dealer tag with me but just didn't so i'm driving i'm on my way there cop starts following me he pulls me over okay you know your registration's expired no it isn't because yeah it expired in may of last year oh it's 2014. sorry about that he knows well do you have your license and insurance card i'm like i you know i couldn't find the guy's insurance card because again i've been in storage with me forever so he comes back what seemed like a half an hour later and he goes well we got another problem this plate is not for this car this is registered to a 2011 mercedes i said i guess there's no way i can convince you that this is a 2011 mercedes huh he said hey i'm not going to arrest you but i have to tow your car there's nothing i can do about that all the time i'm on the phone with my customer i said you know we're not going to make lunch cause uh you put the wrong plate on your car thanks for that by the way another time i was up in elkhart lake for the road america vintage races and i was staying with a friend and on i think saturday night they have a car show which is all the local cars vintage cars whatever that people have and they shut down downtown and line the streets with these cars they had asked him to bring his viper acrx to the show and an acrx as you know is a race version of the viper acr no van not street legal but in elkhart lake during vintage weekend you know pretty much anything goes so all the race cars from the track at a police escort they come down and and fill up the streets so i didn't see any issue with driving a race car three quarters of a mile down to the show and he asked me to take it for him because they had already started barbecuing and were a few beers deep and i hadn't had anything to drink so he goes hey you want to take the car down to the show because i i told him i'd take him like yeah no problem me and a friend hop in the car and go down to the show and after like an hour i look at her i'm like i really want steak you want to go back to the party the show is boring yeah yeah let's let's do that so i hop in the car may or may not have done a nice burnout you know between the rows of cars and this young whippersnapper cop on a bicycle pedal bicycle pulls up next to me and i'm thinking oh that's nice he's going to stop traffic for me and allow me to get out because that's the kind of things that happen on road america vintage weekend no sir is this car registered very simple question yes what's my answer yes it goes where's your plate and here again i'm thinking i had a dealer plate with me would have been as simple as slapping it on the windshield and no questions would have been asked so he goes pull around the corner and i'm gonna check your check your paperwork i just look at my passenger i'm like we're screwed and i hear his radio go off and he gets all flustered and he's just like i i gotta i gotta go to this call you just you just go straight home i was certainly relieved not to have to uh call him and say his his acrx had been impounded another time i was driving a 89 countach anniversary down to columbus for this exotic car rally where they shut down the roads and had a big police escort and overnight thing it was actually quite comfortable driving on the highway obviously terrible trying to maneuver it around with a 800 pound clutch that i think jay cutler would have a hard time pushing in and out i notice my volt meter is starting to creep down and you know i've been watching my gauges religiously because that's what you do with a lamborghini even though i know what's wrong i call my italian tech and i say hey this is happening what's wrong and he goes oh your alternator is going bad i'm like okay thanks i knew that but you know nothing i can really do can't turn off the air conditioning because it's probably off anyway even if it was on i wouldn't be able to tell in that car so we make it to the finish party so i let the cops know that hey i have to leave this car here it's stranded no problem we'll let the next shift know you know we'll take care of it so the next day i said okay i called a friend i said hey can you pick me up and can i borrow a car to go back to cleveland i'll get my enclosed trailer i'll trailer your car back and then go get the lamborghini so he picks me up at my hotel we're on our way back to his house he got a phone call from a 614 number i'm like i should probably pick this up mr tabit this is the columbus police department we're about to tow your lamborghini apparently the meters run on saturdays and the cop from last night had not let anyone else know that this was the situation so i had accumulated some parking tickets on the car but thankfully the cop didn't want the liability of towing the lamborghini so she looked up my dealer plate and found my number and called me and said listen you need to come get the car if we get a complaint call we have to tow it i'm like okay well i'll be there as quickly as i can please don't tow it thank you very very much so i called craig reed over at studio 47 and he was loading up getting ready to go away for race weekend and he said no problem come on over i've got my trailer hooked up we'll go get it now so we put the booster box on starts right up fine and i notice the the volt meter is back up to 14. i'm like that's kind of weird so i said you know i'm just going to try driving it back and see what happens and just follow me in case it ended up making it back to the shop with no alternator issues turns out it was something that happens when they get hot so he did end up rebuilding the alternator but thanks to craig i did not get the the lamborghini towed and impounded which would have stung because it was a super low mile anniversary countach some friends of mine and i decided to go down and stay at the hilton where the gold rush rally was staying when they came through cleveland and we happened to follow a mclaren inn that was probably the first person in from the rally and so we pull up to the valet and so we're not on the rally or anything we're just staying here for the night he said okay we'll just follow that mclaren that'll you know they'll tell you where to go watched all the cars come flying in you know took pictures this and that you know then got a cab and went out on the town we get back and i said hey let's go down into the parking garage and see all the cars that might have showed up after we left so we wander down into the parking garage and the security guard goes hey you can't come in here you don't have a wristband i said well those are our cars right there so he goes oh yeah we've been looking for you you're not part of the rally you you came under here under false pretentious and you pretended you were part of the rally and you're not supposed to be parked over here with these cars and you need to move it or we're going to tow you the people i was with were a little more hot-headed than i am and they had a little alcohol to fuel that as well so they started arguing with this guy i was the only one reasonably sober or within spinning distance of being sober so i i pulled my friends aside and i'm just like guys guys just hold on calm down just give me a minute so i went to security card and i said listen i know you're trying to do your job we're guests of the hotel i asked the valet where to park and he told us we don't have stickers on our car you can see that but i said none of us is in any position to move these cars we've all been drinking we're not moving the cars i said but it's not a great idea to tow us either because we're guests of the hotel in the back of my mind i wanted to be like do you like your job because if you do you're not going to tow a couple ferraris in the porsche that are parked here that are guests a hotel you will not have a job in the morning but i didn't say that i was trying to appeal to his sense of power and his ego and all that so he said okay all right i'll let it slide but i can't i can't speak for the guy that comes in at seven in the morning and i'm like i i can he's not really gonna care i'm i guarantee you he's just gonna be like whoa look at these cores you know so it ended up everything was fine and you know we came down the morning our cars were still there a potentially really bad situation was diffused thanks to clearer heads prevailing [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] it's sort of like having james bond dog sit for you or having kimmy do your [Applause] taxes [Music] i'll never forget the first magazine article i read about the murcielagos in 2001 and it was a rodent track article where they had taken a press car to naruto racetrack and they had broken the fastest hundred miles fastest hundred kilometers and the furthest distance driven in a car in an hour and i just fell in love with the car i thought it was so dramatic and it took everything that was awesome about a countach and a diablo and it brought it into enough of a modern context that it was something that could be driven but not so far into it that it had so much crazy technology it wouldn't be reliable years from then and i just i felt like i had to drive one and i was 16 17 years old at the time and i had the habit of sort of talking car dealers into letting me test drive cars but i couldn't get the local atlanta dealer to let me test drive one the dealership that i would end up working at not too long afterwards but i ended up calling lamborghini carolinas and i explained to them my business at the time and i had started an exotic animal breeding practice i had an albino iguana business out of my parents basement and it was not that profitable but it was able to sort of weave the illusion together that i might be much wealthier than a 17 year old ought to be and so i convinced them that if i would come up there they would let me test drive one of their new cars and so we took this gorgeous red example around and drove it all over the back roads around the dealership and i remember the only time the salesperson told me to slow down i think we were doing about 110 through a school zone now the school zone was closed but they had a terrific relationship with the local law enforcement in fact the only other person i saw on the dealership that day was the local chief of police that was getting to drive whatever he wanted in whatever manner he might choose and i you know was in no position at that point to afford one but i kind of you know filed that in the back pocket and set out in my life to find a way to have the means to do so and i started the exotic car rental company and it wasn't really the right car for that type of fleet and i ended up you know proceeding on to work at the dealership and not long after that we got in an orange manual lp 640. so the second generation of the mercy only go and that was really what i wanted it was so timeless had the gated shifter and everything that you could love about a big dramatic sports car and i knew long term that it would be much more reliable than the paddles because we were already starting to see you know the occasional shift actuator failure or excessive early clutch wear that you might find with an e-gear car so i really wanted a stick but the rule of thumb with the manufacturers had always been that about five percent of new sports cars particularly from the italian manufacturers were demanded as manual transmissions so it wasn't the lion's share of the market it wasn't something you saw all that often so i kind of started casually making a list of the vends of the cars that i would see and as i was adding them up and calling people and sort of searching classifieds and databases i only wound up finding 26 cars and as i was doing that i started to develop these relationships both with the owners but also with the people who wanted to buy them and they were starting to recognize particularly around early 2014 that these cars were a lot more rare than people gave them credit for i got a call from a friend of a friend and that mutual friend we had had a manual lp 640 he said i know ed's looking for these cars kind of keeping tabs on them why don't you call him and he'll find you one to buy because this guy had decided this was his dream car and he wanted to pay really whatever it took to get a nice one at that point and this was right after nicholas cage's old car a balloon white car that i had sold about 2011 had sold again for 329 grand so it was kind of a new market setting price but people weren't sure if they should attribute it to his celebrity status or the fact that the car was so rare and early in 2014 at the amelia island rm auction someone had paid way more than anyone imagined was possible for a manual 599 and the reason they did so is because the added stated there were only 19 ever brought to the u.s now in fact there were about 30 that we've got on vinwiki now but they're plenty rare much more rare than any of the modern cars that we're told are rare you know 599 gtos 16ms porsche 911rs that are built in much larger quantities than anything that was rare historically and so as i was building my list i ended up being able to source another car because i called everybody i knew that had them and i said look i've got someone who's interested in paying up for one and i ended up selling an 07 orange car to them for about 281 grand and that was a very strong number for the time but definitely evidence of where the market was headed but there weren't a ton of people out there at that point recognizing them now at that point i'd own two lp 640s myself i bought a orange roadster in 2012 and a red coupe in 2014. and so i was looking to trade into a manual car and was just kind of surveying the market that i could find and i ended up finding a green 08 that was like the nicest example of a coupe that i could find and i got it for 215 grand i had sold it a year or so prior for not much more than that but it was at a moment when i couldn't buy it myself and so i was very pleased to get the car back from the guy and he was ready to move it so i had my one of these 26 cars that i could identify as the lp 640 coupes and roadsters for the u.s market and i'd also seen how many of them had been damaged or hurt in some way and that the number was fast dwindling each year so i called the factory to kind of verify my findings and i said hey do you know how many lp 640s with a stick you brought into the u.s and they said now we have no idea we don't keep records like that what are you talking about i said well if you go into your sales system and you type this bin prefix you'll be able to tell me how many events it puts out and that'll be how many are in the u.s and oh yeah i guess that would work so what's the vin prefix i said well zhw bu 37m for the coupe and zhwbu 47m for the roadster according to their records there were 23 in the us and i had already found more but the factory has kind of a way of disavowing any knowledge of cars with a sorted past or anything like that it was just the perfect driving experience for a hyper car supercar that you could actually use and as i've talked about it really is an utterly useless car you know it doesn't fit anywhere you can't see anything behind you it's sort of like having james bond dog sit for you or having kimmy do your taxes that's really not what they're for but it would be wildly entertaining to watch them try and so if i take this car to the grocery store or out in some crowded parking lot it's stupid it's worthless and it doesn't work in that context but it makes every driving experience an awful lot of fun and so i love the green car but it was appreciating so fast because i was spreading the word of how rare these cars were even to the point that rm referenced and selling another car my website to say how rare they were and it was working and the values were skyrocketing and every month or two there was a new precedent transaction of how expensive the cars were and how valuable they were and it was legitimate because people were finding that these are so much more rare than anything else they might look at in terms of an investment exotic that they made a ton of sense to own but there was something about having owned the perfect one that was kind of a good and bad for me because i want to be able to drive the car all the time and as i have this perfect example of exactly the right spec and the it was the only green 640 coupe stick in the u.s i got kind of worried about putting so many miles on it so i drove it about 4 200 miles in a year and i ended up selling it to roy cats at cats exotics and i sold it to him for 350 grand and he ended up selling it i think for 365. the reason i let it go is that i'd been contacted by the owner of another one and i said you know look i have to have one of these cars i would just rather have one that's not as nice you know it's sort of like the end of gone in 60 seconds where nicholas cage has just had this profound experience with his dream car the 67 shelby gt500 and he ends up obviously doing away with this perfect example and at the close of the movie angelina jolie's character gives him a really rough example that's kind of a project of his dream car and so i found this guy and he had one with a bit of a story but he'd owned the car for a little while and spent a bit on maintenance but he said you know it needed a few things he was not very good at describing the condition of the car or the car's history and so that didn't make him much of a shrewd negotiator as you might imagine the car had a previous salvage or theft recovery title while it was in canada and it had been sold new in canada but then it was listed for sale around 2009 and the dealer that was representing the car had taken it out joyriding one night drunk what i came to understand is he had sort of spun it around and ended up on a curb and he had broken the front wheel and broken the rear control arm and so the car wasn't drivable but he was trashed and he didn't want to wait around for the cops to get a dui so rather than doing that he took his dealer tag off and got a taxi home and reported the car stolen when he got into work the next morning and so his insurance paid out for the theft and i don't know whatever happened to him in terms of that fraud but the car was issued a branded title in canada but for some reason when it came into the u.s around 2013 the brand washed off now that doesn't tend to happen so i'm not exactly sure how they did but now as i've got it in georgia it's got a clean georgia title it had a clean florida title in nevada when i bought it as i placed my green car with roy katz and i had made about 135 thousand dollars owning it in about a year and fortunately since i had financed all of it with woodside credit i'd done so with really no money out of pocket so this was all profit and all cash that i could use to buy the next car and he had wanted 150 grand for this car in its you know current form and it had some needs and so it seemed like the perfect thing it was my dream car that i could spend some time fixing up at the very least i could drive guiltlessly as many miles as i'd ever want to well i agreed to buy it for 130 to 140 grand but i'm like we'll finalize the exact number when i get out there and so i flew out to vegas with a friend it's a little worse than he's described and i'm kind of pot committed because i've got two guys in a one-way ticket in vegas and i was planning to drive the car home but the air conditioning didn't work the check engine light was on the airbag light was on the seat belt alarm was dinging constantly it was miserably out of alignment there were a few little cracks in the leading edges the rockers and the bumper that he hadn't disclosed and it was just filthy so we take it to a car wash to really discern exactly the state of things and i end up having to obviously talk him down a bit on it and i end up buying the car for 120 grand so i've made 135 on the green car and i buy the gray one for 120 so this is my dream lamborghini that i'm able to get for free just by curating the history of all these cars because there were the 26 us cars and this was one of five canadian cars it was also one in mexico but i've now got one and this is the first lamborghini that i've ever been able to own without a gigantic loan on it and i'm just on cloud nine i take it lamborghini las vegas we get the seat belt dinging to stop get the air conditioning recharged which becomes generally sufficient for the drive home and we get it aligned so it'll at least go straight and so we finally get the car home it's about 2300 miles from vegas to atlanta and we just have a blast you get to see the country and really experience it in a different way than we had on the cannonball record runs but it was not perfect it had blemishes everywhere but it was perfect for me because it was just a great driver car the same way that the prostitute gallardo was one that you could just own and drive guiltlessly that was this in the context of my dream manual lp640 and so over the next few months i got everything cleaned up and made it just a great driver example i've had it about a year now and i've driven it about eight nine thousand miles on it but i just love it at the moment the cl is down for suspension issues the 2904 s-class is down i just sold the limo so it's the only registered car i have that runs so i've been daily driving it for a couple of months now and loving every second of it i mean certainly it's a caricature of what a car ought to be or do but i just love it and as much as i have that car guy itch to trade for something new every day of my life i just can't find something that i think i'm gonna enjoy more particularly when you couple it with the fact that the car is paid for it's not depreciating it's actually appreciating i think today the cheapest one that's on the market is 309 and certainly it's a nicer car than mine but i love having the worst example of the coolest car i could ever want and so i just i'm having a blast and daily driving my dream car and not worrying about a thing [Applause] [Music] in 2011 i bought bitcoin at 2.52 cents and so technically this lamborghini only cost me about 115 dollars back in 2011. [Music] [Applause] [Music] as a startup entrepreneur i have created many different types of startups i've invested in many types of different ideas technologies companies and not all of them have worked out however there's been one investment that has worked significantly well and that has been bitcoin i first invested in bitcoin in november of 2011 and what this really was is just a it really was just a lucky lucky investment i read an ars technica article in october of 2011 and that really got my interest into this new and nascent technology and so being a noob i did a little bit of research it took me about a month to research it and in november of 2011 i bought my first bitcoin at two dollars and 52 cents so for those that don't know bitcoin is a radically different monetary system it's just like the pound or the yen it's an investment that you can make now like other like other traditional investments like stocks bonds mutual funds this one has high risk and high reward and so as an entrepreneur that's basically my game i love getting into new nascent bleeding edge technology and bitcoin is certainly one of those what makes me so excited about bitcoin is the proliferation of all these different cryptocurrencies that have come out after 2009 when bitcoin came out and what we have now is a plethora a huge a huge opportunity to invest in a multiplicity of different coins with potential high returns with also high risk as well i had no confidence that bitcoin was going to make a ton of money for me back in 2011. no idea it was a risky proposition and i invested more probably than i should have at the time and from that day i've been holding it until today now i wasn't really involved with bitcoin from about 2011 to about 2014. i really kind of forgot about it until i found out the price of bitcoin had reached about 200 to 250 dollars that's when i really woke up and i found that this was a technology not only as a great investment but as a great technology for the future it really is the future of money and so this has been my most successful investment over the last six years or so and one of my dreams has always been to buy a lamborghini with bitcoin now the memes and the trolls and the people online will always tell you to never buy a lambo with bitcoin because as bitcoin continues to rise in price then it's going to end up being a 20 million dollar lamborghini but sometimes you just have to reward yourself now i did a video previously about how my wife did not want me to buy a lamborghini she thought it was too pretentious she thought it was too ostentatious she thought it was too can i say rapper it's too it was too toot like gangsta rap of sorts uh for me and so i ended up buying an audi r8 and ended up putting about as much money into it as i could have just bought a lamborghini outright however when i was over at the vin wiki office my colleague of mine ed bowling had his green murcielago here and my son was with me and when my son got into his car my wife was here as well when my son got into the car my wife's heart was changed she looked at that and it changed her life and i remember asking her later i said so why are you allowing me to buy a lamborghini with bitcoin and she said well the reason is is because i saw my son in ed's murcielago and i was like well what does what does that mean she's like well he looked really good sitting in ed's car and i would really love to see my son drive a lamborghini in the future which obviously didn't include me but i guess i need to be the purchase the purchaser of this car so that my son can drive this in the future bitcoin in the last couple months has reached four thousand and close to five thousand dollars a coin and i thought that this would be the best time to just slam it down be a world first uh from what i understand no one in the world has ever bought a lamborghini with bitcoin before after seeing this car on dupont registry so excited this was the car that i needed to buy with bitcoin so i had my heart set on it went through the entire process of going back and forth back and forth with the dealership and we finally came to a satisfactory deal so we got to see the entire life cycle of me selling the bitcoin or transferring the bitcoin going to the dealership in the audi r8 dropping off signing the signing the papers and getting into my bitcoin lamborghini which is now technically the new name of this car which is the bitcoin lamborghini and so super excited about i'm sure you guys are gonna see pictures of it somewhere around here uh but yes this is a world first super excited to unveil to the world the bitcoin lamborghini and mostly i want to use the bitcoin lambo as a mechanism for having great conversations with people and help educate them about the power and potential of bitcoin so i want to drive it everywhere i would love everyone to see this awesome awesome machine not only the awesome awesomeness of this machine but i would love to have conversations with people around bitcoin and blockchain technology and how it can change their lives as well in 2011 i bought bitcoin at two dollars and 52 cents and so technically this lamborghini only cost me about 115 back in 2011. now bitcoin has grown from 2.52 cents to now over 4 000 and that's where i've been able to profit and so this bitcoin lamborghini has been completely paid for by profits from my original investment in 2011. [Music] [Applause] [Music] will you bring a lamborghini and just come pick me up around the corner at the waffle house [Music] [Applause] [Music] so about four years ago i got a call from a few guys in tennessee who had gathered up some seed capital from some family members and they wanted to start an exotic car rental company and i get a lot of calls like this and i've helped a few companies kind of in a consulting capacity kind of get their feet under them help with the first few problems that you have to solve and just kind of hit the ground running with these types of businesses they did a good job i sold them five or six cars that they could use that were kind of the right cars with some miles or some stories that were the right things to put more miles on and add more stories too and it did okay but like most exotic car rental companies they started to run into some issues some car crashes some accidents some difficult customers and things like that and so eventually their investors decided look i'd kind of like whatever money is still out there to come back and so they liquidated the cars but they wanted to stay in the business and what they told me they wanted to do was to start renting out other people's cars and anytime you're in the exotic car rental business i mean i know every day literally i would get a call from an exotic car owner thinking they were doing me the biggest favor in the world by offering to let me rent their cars out as part of my fleet but there are really three problems with this idea the first is that there's really not enough money to go around we talked about how the rental rates that you can charge today are so far less on a percentage basis of the value of the car that there's no money to be made in the industry anymore and turo's done this and people who have done this type of thing have just driven the prices down and it's just a very very hard way to earn a living so even if you can convince an owner to take too little for the time and the miles you're going to use your car there's just not enough money to go around the second issue is that in the event that a car gets totaled the renter's insurance is going to pay out what the car is actually worth not what the guy owes and generally the people that ask you to rent their cars out have huge loans against these cars that have faced some depreciation and they're just trying to keep afloat and make their payments and so they'd have to write a check to make up their negative equity in the event that the car gets totaled but both of those issues pale in comparison to the third issue and that is theft by the renter like we learned about with lucky in the 612 and the gallardo when you rent a car and you do something other than just go drive it around that is considered theft by conversion and in the scenario where someone else owns the car and you act as an intermediary to rent it to a customer you don't carry insurance on that car it would just be too expensive and the policies just don't exist the owner's policy won't cover it because it's a commercial activity and the renter's policy won't cover it because that would be like me calling my insurance and saying that i stole my own car that's not a real thing so a few weeks ago this company who was renting out other people's cars had an audi r8 go missing and it went from tennessee they brought it to atlanta and they told me where the tracking device had stopped working and the car was nowhere to be found the customer wasn't answering his phone the credit cards had been canceled everything was going poorly and they were going through the steps with the owner of trying to figure out how they're going to recover it if it can be recovered offering rewards around and things like that but the car hadn't turned up so last week on the 4th of july i got a bunch of phone calls from the owner of this company at about 12 30 12 45 in the morning and i didn't answer the first few but eventually i saw who it was and i answered and i said hey what's going on he said ed we just had somebody rent our lamborghini ericon and they're driving as fast as they seem to be able to towards atlanta and we're worried that it's about to go away so well that's a valid concern i think you should call the cops they're like we're not having any luck with the audi with the atlanta cops i don't know what we're going to do can you please just go try to figure out where they're taking the car because they were probably 20 minutes out of atlanta at that point so as i left from the northern suburbs of atlanta i sent out a glimpse a location service through an app to show them live where i was and they had their updates every 30 seconds to maybe two or three minutes at a time just depending on the granularity they were receiving from their tracking device which i later found out was an obd dongle that at any moment this guy could look down see hanging there and just throw out the window and we'd have nothing that we could do to find the car and so as i got down towards about atlantic station on 17th street i exited and that's about where they were and so i was probably two minutes behind them but it was very hard for us to get to exactly the same point because they would just send me an update in all new direction wherever the lamborghini was going so it kind of zigzagged around towards west midtown and then up towards buckhead but then went over towards i-75 and was headed almost back north towards tennessee but around 285 they remarked as watching the satellite feed it looked like they were trying to figure out in the lamborghini if somebody was following them because they went around some access road and some loops and cloverleafs around the interchange there but then they went back north on 75 and so i was following them up 75 still a ways back certainly not in visual range but i knew we were fairly close they're trying to direct me as to where to get off and in fact they missed the exit that i should have gotten off and i went and exit further so they went off on some side streets in the lamborghini and they said all right he stopped and it looks like he went into kind of a building let me give you the address and they gave me the address and it was next door to a body shop that i used to use a lot i don't know why i remember this body shop's address but i did send a lot of cars there through the dealership and through the rental company so i said all right i know exactly where that is i come around probably 12 minutes or so after they've pulled into this warehouse i arrive and there's lights on on the 4th of july at 2 45 in the morning in this warehouse and it's a wrap company it's got a there's an aston martin repeat outside and a mustang and some pretty legitimate looking cars but it's weird that there's people in there working so i kind of pull back out on the street and i tell the guys look we're not talking about any amount of money that's going to compel me to knock on these guys doors and interrupt these would-be car thieves right now i said now is the time we know where the car is you need to call the local police in marietta and see what they'll do and so a few minutes later about six police cars very quietly with their lights off pulled down this street that no one else is using at this hour and i'm parked a few driveways down just kind of looking at the driveway to see what's happened and they come up and i sort of explain the circumstance and they say all right well this is not really a criminal matter i said i know that but you know this is a circumstance where they're just about to lose a very expensive car based on what seems to be happening here and i said could you just kind of give me some kind of help in sort of figuring out exactly what's happening to the car right now they're like no no i mean it's really not our thing you know obviously it's not illegal for somebody to drive a car from tennessee to georgia we understand this against some rental agreement or whatever the case may be but that's a civil matter that's not for us right now eventually it can become a theft by conversion circumstance but that's not really where we're at at this moment so we don't really have any jurisdiction or probable cause to do anything and i'm like yeah but you know it's kind of weird that a lamborghini just pulled in here and there's lights on in this shop in the middle of the night to work on a car that's not allowed to be worked on i mean i know it's not exactly a criminal circumstance but can we at least just go see what's going on so they kind of talked amongst themselves for a little while and in the meantime i'm getting calls from the owner of the rental company the owner of the car their lawyer everyone's saying ed you just have to figure out some way we can't lose this car and i told him i said look i get it i know this is the worst nightmare you could ever imagine and i'm not here to say i told you so but this is a very difficult thing to proceed through because i don't even work for you i don't have any legal grounds to repossess this car and if they try to make things sticky we're not going to have a whole lot of outs here so i keep telling the cops they say all right let's just kind of drive around there so we do and their lights off very quiet and they kind of surround the building so i get out one of the cops gets out and we walk in there together and as we walk in it's like business as usual in this rap shop they've got a bunch of nice cars a new r8 and an nsx and a bunch of stuff they're in progress working on and there's five or six employees there at three in the morning on the holiday just working like it's two in the afternoon on a weekday in the middle of the shop there is a red lamborghini huracan and there's this guy pulling wires out of it he's got the dash out of the car the whole front trunk liner's out he's got all these tools out and there's things laying oh my goodness gracious and so i walk over there and i'm like what's going on here and he said this guy just sold the car and he's looking for us to take the camera system out so we can put it in his next car i said well this is actually a car he rented a few hours ago and there's no authorization to do any work and there's not a camera system in the car he's definitely not allowed to do that and we'd like you not to give him the car back and he's like look i see all these cops i'm not here to do anything wrong if that's what the circumstance is by all means you know i'm not here to put up a fight but i need to talk to this guy and just see what's going on so he does a facetime call with the person who had dropped the car off who was different than the female with a california driver's license who had rented the car just a few hours earlier in tennessee and he's like oh yeah man we just went out to get some dinner at uh waffle house and we'll be right there and i certainly couldn't fault waffle house as being the best choice of atlanta cuisine at three in the morning on a holiday but he said he was going to be back he was calling an uber or something like that but he said well you just told me that you sold this car and you wanted me to remove that and this guy's saying it's a rental car is it well well yeah so i said and so i kind of took the phone from him i said hey um i'm with the rental company we're going to be taking the car back right now you're welcome to come back and we can discuss it we've got the police here everything will be on the up and up but we're not going to be taking things out of the car anymore just so we're all clear he's like yeah yeah i'm on the way i'm on the way hangs up the phone so i'm like if you don't mind i don't know what he was going to pay you for this job i'll make sure that you're made whole beyond that but just go ahead let's try to put this thing back together and then i'm going to end up taking it out of here i'm going to park it in my warehouse and they can come pick it up in the next few days so he gets it buttoned up and the car starts and this guy calls again and i pick up his phone because he's been working and he had no problem with that and i'm like look you know i'm about to take this car back let's not worry about this anymore you can take anything up that you have outstanding with the rental company they'll be awaiting your call and he's like wait wait wait wait ah my my uber just got cancelled because my card got declined will you bring a lamborghini and just come pick me up around the corner at the waffle house i said yeah yeah you just ordered me around the hash browns and i'll be right around the corner so obviously i did not go around the corner and pick this guy up at the local waffle house i'll just leave that to him and the owner of the rental company to sort out but i was able to get the car home safe and sound of the vinwicki warehouse and a couple days later they sent their guys down to pick it up but i think we were really probably 15 or 20 minutes away from that car disappearing and never being seen again and as you think about these types of businesses all these interesting things that you can do with cars a lot of times the risks just really do outweigh the potential reward that the industry has to offer but fortunately in this circumstance then wiki was able to come to the rescue and save another stolen lamborghini but next time i can't imagine we get that lucky i need five thousand dollars to have it back i said you mean you want me to pay you for the return of my stolen property i said yep that's the only way i can give it back to you i had a customer who had rented my car several times in fact he was an ex-atlanta police officer and he rented the gallardo a few times so he wanted to rent that again but in addition he wanted to rent my ferrari 612 sky yeti so that his friend could have something to drive around while he was in town and so about i'd say it was on a wednesday or thursday they picked up both cars and began paying for the the rentals and gave us a credit card we verified the insurance and went through all the normal steps over the next few days they kept renewing the rental saying we're having so much fun we want to keep it and i'm continuing to make a good deal of money renting the cars out and i've got a you know good customer in them so i'm pleased with all that but around monday i stopped hearing back from them and i began telling them well it's time to either turn the cars back in or pay us for another day and they wouldn't answer and so i believe it was tuesday night i was out at my bachelor party because that saturday i was getting married and so we were out racing go-karts and having a good dinner and i got a phone call and it was peculiar there was a woman on the other end of the phone and she said my husband is the guy who bought your ferrari today but we've decided we don't want it in fact we'd like the bmw we gave you in the fifteen thousand dollars in cash as a down payment back and we'd like to undo this whole deal i said well ma'am literally every part of that sentence is a problem and fundamentally incorrect because i didn't sell your husband my car and whoever did uh was not uh authorized to do so and she said well he's told us that he was one of your employees and they worked for this rental car company i said well that's absolutely not the case and she proceeded to tell me that well i'm a lawyer and possession is nine tenths of the law i said ma'am it's a rental car so possession is literally zero tenths of the law and by saying that i highly doubt you're actually a lawyer but i'll need you to return to me this stolen property and understand that the police will very soon be going to find it so she got upset hung up the phone and uh i had to return to try to enjoy what was left of my bachelor party before spending the next day and the next several days trying to work this all out so i tried to contact the rental customer again no answer and i go on to track the cars and i see that the lamborghini is in a parking lot in midtown so i take the other key go to midtown find that the car has had the front knocked off of it and say well we found it at least and so the next day i had a tow truck take it to my preferred body shop and begin the process of repairs and we filed a claim with his insurance company still he wouldn't answer the phone and we could not find the ferrari because the battery had gone dead because like many of the ferraris i've owned the 612 was one of these cars that if you don't drive it every day or every two or three days the battery will be dead next time you return to it and so the tracking device was not functioning because the capacitance had worn out and i had no idea where to find it but i'd continue to have a little bit of luck getting in touch with this woman who was still not understanding that i didn't have her bmw or the money or access to the customer but that she did absolutely have a car that was stolen i came to find out that this is called theft by conversion meaning that you had the privilege of use of this car but that you converted it in a use that you were not permitted so selling it was something that a rental customer was not allowed to do so in converting it to an asset that they made for sale that is the theft now the problem is when you know who has your stolen property the police don't do a very good job of trying to find out where it is they seem to think that you'll go about finding it or that it's not the same thing as throwing out an apb and having everybody find it or at least everyone try because we had i had delivered the car in one county and a few miles over in the next county is where the car was being used and they were still occasionally driving it around because i'd see the tracking device work and it would be at the valet lot of some restaurant or a mall or anything like that but i could never get there in time to take my other key and repossess the car so i had spoken to the police they said well yeah we see it but the you know you've reported it stolen in your county and it's here so we don't have a system that allows us to just understand every car that's stolen in the world it seems like a market failure and something someone should explore but they were very very useless at the time so i continue trying to express to this woman uh exactly the gravity of the situation for her but she continues to be unwilling to return the car so my groomsmen and i we're all going around we've got the rehearsal dinner coming up and everything's happening and even as we led up to it i still couldn't get in touch with the rental customer but on friday literally the day before my wedding i was finally able to talk to him and i met him at a waffle house of all places he for some reason had convinced himself that i might be pleased that he had sold this car even though he had not specified a term of the loan any interest terms a selling price or anything other than the fact that he had taken this guy's bmw taken fifteen thousand dollars in cash as a down payment and agreed to some sort of payment schedule additional unfortunate news is that he didn't have a phone number an address an email address or literally anything other than the guy went by lucky so he was a very little use trying to get us the car back even once he realized that he had made such a mistake and so the police were starting to question him and trying to figure out things but they weren't moving at all quickly and i had my wedding the next day and then i was leaving on my honeymoon the day after and so the whole morning of our wedding i'm constantly on the phone we're trying to take photographs with the bridal party and everything like that and i just can't you know literally i cannot afford to have this go anyway other than perfectly and the reason for that is that the most difficult thing about setting up an exotic car rental company is managing the insurance and trying to get an exotic car rental insurance policy is nearly impossible and keeping it is also pretty much impossible particularly if you ever file a claim because even though the insurance is legitimate and it's in place and it will pay out a claim the accepted understanding on all parties is that if you file a claim you will not be invited to renew the policy and so while i could probably get the insurance company to pay for the theft i would be invited not to renew and so all the other car payments that i would need to make would not be possible because i would be out of business so it was a very much a rock and a hard place situation and as you'd imagine my new bride and her family and everybody else around the circumstance is pretty worried for me because they understand that this is a tremendous amount of money at risk and all the cars are completely financed it's not as though i own them and can just lose the money it would be a long-term debt situation to try to recover in the event that things did not go so well so we go through the wedding and i'm wondering all the time what do i do if my phone rings during the ceremony do i answer i mean certainly i can't afford not to but that seems like a bad decision and fortunately that didn't happen or i suppose unfortunately because the next morning i still had made no progress i called my lawyer and i said look i've got to leave this in your hands there's nothing else that i can do but please please please have my car by the time i get back from this week-long honeymoon in st lucia and so he says he's on it and i'm literally texting with lucky's wife trying to express to her the significance of the situation and the importance that she returns said stolen property as we're taking off from the airport so somehow i did manage to enjoy our honeymoon without too much stress and anxiety but it was certainly there in the background and when i got back i got back in touch with lucky finally i convinced his wife to have lucky call me and lucky said i've still got your car i understand sort of what's happened but i need five thousand dollars to have it back i said you mean you want me to pay you for the return of my stolen property i said yep that's the only way i can give it back to you i said well um let me see what i can do so i called the police officers that were in charge of the case and i explained to them what had happened they said well do you want to pay five thousand dollars i was like well i mean five thousand dollars at this moment particularly at the prospect of everything else that i'm gonna have to spend is a little bit daunting they said well ask if he'll take a check i said are you insinuating that i should stop payment on said check and therefore bounce a check to someone for five thousand dollars because i believe that's a felony they said yeah yeah but don't worry about it it's okay it'll all be fine so well okay so uh called him back lucky was happy to take a check lucky's got a bank account so go to meet lucky where he's told me the car is and so we go to this parking lot in downtown atlanta and the car is obviously completely dead so i've got to call a tow truck to come and get it and because you really don't want to be jumping off a ferrari ever and certainly not in that circumstance where you know the battery's been drained and even the alternator is questionable so i uh get the truck headed headed that way and uh you know at the time lucky and i are talking he's hanging out he has a friend actually drive up in this seafoam green atrocious maserati quattroporte and the paint which had obviously been a repaint was falling off in chunks and so he was asking me for advice on what body shop he might use so i made a great recommendation to him i don't know if he ever took me up on it then we parted ways i followed the tow truck home lucky went away with the check so as i'm headed home predictably i get a phone call from the bank they say hey we've got this check and it looks a little bit suspicious and the guy looks a little bit suspicious and so we just really want to know what's going on i said yes that's an extortion payment for the return of stolen property please don't honor it there should be a stop payment in your system oh great thank you so much mr bolion i hope you have a great day well it hasn't started out that way but it is what it is so we make it back to my warehouse and go on about trying to get the car charged back up and evaluating the state of things and fortunately it was in pretty good condition a little curb damage on a wheel and a scratch in the clear bra but nothing to be too terribly concerned about but a few minutes later lucky shows up his wife i guess had found our address and even though we generally delivered cars to customers and didn't have a whole lot of customers here he came to the warehouse to express his displeasure with the fact that he had not received his five thousand dollars i explained to him that's a felony what you've done is uh extort payment for the return of stolen property and i'm not interested in participating in that what'll be best is if we part ways and never speak of this again i've never seen or heard from lucky or that customer since then but uh it was definitely a very very dramatic week in my life where the ferrari got stolen and the lamborghini got crashed [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] and the car in true ferrari form went up in flames [Music] probably all of us have heard about the fantastic story of the ferrari f50 getting jacked on a test drive from algar ferrari and then being hidden in plain sight in kentucky via a vin swap and finally getting apprehended by the fbi and being wrecked by a careless fbi agent so of course that's one of the fantastic stories but we know that scams happen on a regular daily basis and if we do any searching on craigslist or ebay we come across them ourselves of course there's always the fake cashiers check warnings and the people who want to send you too much money and then you refund them for the shipping and things like that or people that want them to send you a 500 deposit for a deal that's too good to be true but i've got a collection of a number of pretty incredible stories that will make you probably never want to get into the car business or at least never try to buy a car from somebody you don't know again i believe this was actually my first client when i opened up switch cars after i left the land rover dealer and he had hired me to find him a range rover so we were looking around for pre-owned ones that were a decent deal but a good car and he was also looking and he found this one on ebay an aggressive deal but not too good to be true if retail was about 57 to 60 000 at the time i think this one was 55 grand buy it now and he had great pictures and vin number and he had a phone number where you could actually call and talk to him and he wasn't speaking in broken english could actually put sentences together in his email responses everything seemed to be legitimate the only somewhat red flag was that the car was in a warehouse in texas and he was in buffalo new york which isn't an immediate scam because i mean i've sold cars that are not in the same location that i am but it's certainly a something to be cautious of so my customer was ready to send this guy money and i noticed something was off and i called up my customer right away and i said mike we got a problem so if you look at the nav screen that is from a 2004 because it's got the twisty buttons and he was advertising it as a 2005 which has the touchscreen navigation i said that's that's not the right car so i started doing a little more digging through his ebay profile and he had hundreds of positive feedback so i went into the accounts that had left him feedback and i realized that all of their feedback for transactions were for penny transactions recipes and things like that and i started digging some more and realized that all of the ones below that were the same thing and they were basically just leaving each other feedback so this guy had created hundreds maybe thousands of ebay accounts to build up this large network of transactions and feedback to make himself look trustworthy this guy went to the rob pitts school of ebay manipulation and i contacted the fbi and let them know about this but they were busy and didn't get back to me but somebody i think i may have posted the details online as well to warn people and somebody contacted me a few weeks later and said hey we know you know about this guy but i sent him a cashier's check and i'm out 55 000 and he's disappeared what can you do for me and i'm like nothing like call the fbi sorry i mean he's probably overseas by now but next time call me first because i probably would have saved you the money there was a gentleman in ohio who had a penchant for buying black exotic cars with money that was not real and he knew how to play the part he was very personable he had fancy watches dressed well and actually had some money and knew how to talk the game so he would go into dealers and request a test drive he would even negotiate and he would buy a car and he got a mercedes dealer with a sl and wrote them a check that was not good and you would think okay well why would somebody do this and he really just did it for the fun of it he lived locally and had a local driver's license would report that he was an attorney and so of course you know a dealer would take a personal check from a local guy who lived in an affluent neighborhood who was an attorney why wouldn't you you can always send the sheriff if the check isn't good and of course attorneys have greater consequences if they write checks which are not good but of course he was not a real attorney and the checks were written on an account that was not real he ended up walking into another local dealer who is a friendly competitor of mine and bought a black ferrari 430 spider proceeded to wreck it that night unbeknownst to the dealer he took it out and got high and drunk and t-boned somebody at an intersection and the car in true ferrari form went up in flames so of course it got posted on wrecked exotics and stuff like that later on but the dealer had no idea at the time but they got a call from their bank the next day which was a saturday that said hey there's something funny going on with this check so he contacted them monday when they had called him frantically saying hey this check is no good and apologized profusely and said i'm sorry there was some error and said i'll wire you the money today and oh by the way i'd like to buy the ferrari california you have as well for my brother and would you deliver it to the justice center downtown irony of all ironies and they called the local police and said hey we have to deliver this other car you want to set up a sting operation so that's what they did the cops followed them down they parked outside the justice center with a ferrari and as soon as he got in the car the cops swarmed and arrested him my landlord at the time is a hudson police officer and she called me a few days later and said hey um just want to let you know sorry i didn't call you sooner but we had this guy in prison and he recently got out we put him away last time for buying black exotic cars with fake checks and he recently got released so just want to let you know because we know you sell exotic cars i said well thankfully he didn't get me but you're a few days too late because he just caught one of my buddies a client contacted me looking to sell their 996 porsche gt3 and they had it on consignment at a local dealer go motors out of boulder colorado the dealer would consign any car for a thousand dollar commission which i thought was a little bit odd you know maybe if you're doing lower end audi's which they did that would be acceptable but for a gt3 i just said hey listen you can't survive making a thousand dollars on these types of cars i did some more digging on this go motors and i found a lot of negative feedback kind of covered up under their positive reviews nothing scammy just these guys aren't the the most up and up guys the gut check gave me indigestion so i called the customer and said listen i'd prefer to just buy the car from you directly and and cut out this dealer why don't you go get the car and the title from him and you know i'll just tell him the deal's off so he did and i ended up wiring money to the customer directly which one would think is the less safe way to do things i'm wiring money to some individual who i don't know with whom i have no recourse but it turns out that was the best course of action maybe a month later it came out that the owner of go motors was indicted for fraud he was selling cars on consignment taking the money and not paying the consignors and unfortunately the consignors are always out the money because they have really no recourse through the courts with these companies who file bankruptcy and the money's gone overseas already and even if they get a court injunction to seize the car case law states that the person who bought the car bought it on good faith and the law typically protects the person who bought the car in the consignment dealership you know i wouldn't have gotten screwed on that because i would have received the title in the car but i saved my customer from being out the money and of course he was very grateful and we've done business since then as well and i think i've sold that gt3 a couple more times since then so then of course there's always the overseas buyers who like sending fake checks and usually i don't entertain these guys but i figured i'd have fun with one of them and he had emailed me about a diablo sv in some other car and asked me what my best price was and a couple months later he got back to me saying he wanted to buy the car and i think both of them were sold at that point but i just i'm gonna mess with him he's a scammer so why not so i tell him to fedex me a check and he does from nigeria or somewhere over there but it was a check drawn on a u.s account from a company in wisconsin and i looked up the company they're a large industrial company i looked at the signatures on the check and they were printed which is legitimate some companies will not sign their checks actually but i'm like this is i mean i knew it was a scam so i was just having fun with him at this point so i called up the company in wisconsin and i deciphered the name that was one of the signatures and i asked for that person and turns out they actually worked there they were the controller at the company and i said hey just so you know you know somebody over in africa is writing checks on your company's behalf to buy some cars and i'm sure you may be aware of this or may not be but i want to let you know so i messed with him a little more and said hey the check is for the wrong amount you know please send me another one and just want to see how much money i can make him spend on international overnight packages but he probably wasn't paying those bills either but in spite of all my caution and experience i did get scammed once and i guess i'm not ashamed to admit it because it was a pretty good scam it was back when the nissan gtrs were still being pre-ordered and of course i had a number of them at sticker price which i then sold for a hefty profit this guy contacted me out of the blue and said i have an allocation that i want to you know move on and it's at sticker and i just need you to reimburse me for my deposit amount now you might say why would somebody give up an allocation at sticker as did i but that actually happens so this one seemed legitimate he faxed me the contract that he had with the dealer and the order spec and confirmation of order and everything checked out his only request was hey please don't call the dealer because i don't want to you know get in hot water and have them pull the allocation because they know i'm flipping it which was a legitimate request i mean when i was flipping porsches i obviously didn't want the customers calling up the dealer saying hey i just bought your allocation for 50 grand over sticker from doug because that would have immediately annoyed them and they would have found reason to pull the allocation other than the reasons they did anyway i sent him the five thousand dollars and checked in with him every few weeks and the only red flag i got was he seemed to not really remember who i was when i called but i just chalked that up to scatterbrain or whatever and you know i'd send them the money so what could i do at this point but just to keep checking in and i was on the golf course having a somewhat enjoyable day and i got a call from a attorney general or some sort of detective or something like that in iowa and said hey did you send him some money i said yes let me guess i'm not getting it back and he said that was the case and i was pretty bummed it definitely uh ruined a nice day on the golf course and i also thought later that it would be an even better scam if the detective who called me wasn't a real detective but he was somebody hired by this guy to call everybody so that they would feel at ease that oh well it's being investigated and there's nothing else i can do and therefore not take any legal action [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] he said well it sounds like it's probably a stolen car so for six years i was the director of sales for lamborghini atlanta and during that time i sold a few hundred lamborghinis many of which stayed local and i think when i started one year we checked and there were 93 lamborghinis registered in georgia i certainly increased that during the time that i worked there and we had others were registered in montana and elsewhere but over time i became pretty familiar with just about all the lamborghinis that were in town and so not long after we launched then wiki last summer probably sometime in july i was driving home from the office and i looked in the parking lot of the target near my house and i saw an orange 2008 super lugera and i didn't think there were any orange 08 superleggera's registered in town and i was going to post the car to then wiki like a lot of exotic car spotters do so i drove down into the parking lot and it was sprinkling rain so i snapped some pictures through my window but then i noticed that the car had a dealer tag on it a reasonable explanation why it had shown up and i didn't know anything about it but it meant that our plate to vent system wouldn't decode the ven from the license plate so i decided well i'll get out and i'll actually get it off the car so as i walked up to the car it was fascinating it was a normal option superleggera but it had ceramic brakes which were about a fifteen thousand dollar option back in 2008 it was a rancio borealis the pearl orange color it had the large rear wing the extended interior carbon package the backup camera and presumably navigation those four options were pretty much universal to super luxurious but when i looked at the then there was something peculiar about it and it was printed in the wrong font now most people wouldn't know the font that lamborghini prints their vends in but i did and i knew it was wrong so that was a little bit strange and when i typed it into vinwicki it didn't immediately validate the vin so in the u.s thens use a check digit so the vehicle identification number just like a credit card number has a check digit that you can run an algorithm through and it'll immediately tell you if it's a valid vin now that doesn't work in some parts of europe and in other parts of the world but in the us it does it's a law that cars sold in the u.s have to have a mathematically validating vent so that didn't validate but i snapped a few pictures walked around and got back in my car and went home but the next day when i was looking back through the pictures trying to figure out what was wrong i noticed why the ven wasn't validating in fact it was only 16 digits so in the us a gallardo superleggera then for 2008 would start chw like any lamborghini then g for gallardo u for the us 43 is for gallardo superleggera coupe t for an e-gear transmission then it'll have a check digit then we'll have an 8 for model year 2008 then it'll say la 0 and then i'll have four digits that are the build number and so in this car's case the u wasn't there so there was no country identifying character and that's why the then wasn't validating through our system so i thought that was pretty peculiar so i called a friend of mine who's the chief of police in a local town and told him about it he said well it sounds like it's probably a stolen car well that's fascinating let's see what we can find out he said let me ask around to the auto theft unit see if anybody's looking for the car and we'll have somebody get back in touch with you so i thought we were onto something interesting and i wanted to keep digging through and it turned out that a couple other people had already spotted that same car around atlanta and so we were able to sort of compile the history of when it had come in on a truck and what parts of town it had been seen driving in and within wiki one of the interesting things you can do is build a list of cars so you can add all the examples of a certain car like 2008 superleggeras in the us and one vinwicki user who aspires to one day own one of these cars had gone through and done just that so pretty much all the u.s superleggeras were in venwiki already and we could browse through and see which ones made sense which ones didn't have ceramic brace which ones were orange because in 2008 they didn't allow any ad persona orders they were all standard range colors they were either white black gray orange or yellow obviously in their italian names so we ruled out all the cars that weren't orange we ruled out cars with cosmetic modifications and we rolled out cars that had been exported and we rolled out cars that didn't have ceramic brakes and we got down to about 25 cars that this one could be assuming that it's vin was wrong and we knew it's that even the suffix the build number of the vin was wrong because it wasn't in the range of super legere events so after that we went through and i ran the carfaxes and looked across all the information that i could gather on each one and we found out that only one of these cars had ever been reported stolen and it was then i think 6668 a few days later i got a call from an officer with the department of revenue and they had been looking into this car and i told them that we had done some digging and we thought that the car was probably 6668 and he said yeah we think that too but we were a little surprised that you were able to figure that out i said yeah and i told him how we'd done it and stuff like that and he said he didn't really know much about it but it wasn't stolen strictly speaking but it was probably misrepresented to an insurance company not a wildly uncommon thing particularly back in 2008 and 2009 because at the time these cars were just depreciating catastrophically and prior to that banks had been financing way over sticker so it's not uncommon for the owner of one of these cars to be 100 150 000 upside down in equity so it was a hard thing for them to get rid of and the most convenient solution it seemed at times was just to call their insurance and say it had been stolen and collect on their insurance and potentially gap coverage as well so he didn't have a whole lot more he said they were going to continue looking for it but that wasn't really good enough for me i wanted to find out more about the car so i went down to our local tag office and i said that i had found this car with a dealer tag on it that i wanted to buy not untrue i'm always interested in buying a cheap gallardo and so i gave her the dealer tag number and i asked if she would just give me the dealer's name so that i could contact them and see because obviously the car wasn't listed for sale online or anything like that and she was very reluctant but i convinced her to let me know what the name of the dealership was and i found out that it wasn't terribly far from where i live so i drove by the place where it was and walked up and knocked on the door and i i said hey do you guys have an orange superleggera for sale and the guy who owned the place wasn't there but there was a guy subletting some part of the building for detailing and he said oh yeah it's right back here and you want to come and take a look at it and absolutely so i walked back there and got to have a little bit more of a look around the car and the guy didn't care he was happy to let somebody look he assumed the car was for sale because he knew that it was in the building owned by a dealership but next to the car was another 2008 gallardo it was a spider and so we were looking around both i opened the car it had about 39 000 miles which i think it had been stolen with under 5 000 or under 3 000 miles when it left california and so someone had put a lot of miles on the car it had cheap tires and some little scuffs around the carbon diffusers and things like that it wasn't in great shape but it was definitely a cool orange 0-8 superleggera so i looked on the door jamb where there's the then sticker with all the manufacturer data on it and it had also been altered you could kind of see where someone had gone in and changed it but on that one they had put the u so it was 17 digits and wouldn't mathematically validate because the check digit was wrong but it was a full 17 digit lamborghini looking vin that was probably passable to all but maybe me i can't imagine anybody else in the state would have ever taken the time to look or have any about a knowledge to be able to say that it didn't make sense for the car to be as it was but i get uh looking around the car and i knew there's no real other place for me to find the car's reel then without getting it up on a lift and looking at the frame rail but i look in the glove box and the owner's manuals are there and whenever we got a new lamborghini from the factory we would take out the owner's manual and there's a warranty and maintenance book and on it there's boxes 17 of them to write in each character of the vin and whoever had gotten this car or purchased it as a stolen car and was using it hadn't bothered to throw that away so i opened it up and look and lo and behold that's exactly which car it was the one we thought the one the department of revenue thought it was and so i took a picture and told the guy hey you know have the owner call me i'd love to talk to him about buying the car stuff like that obviously i never heard from him but i followed back up with the department of revenue and gave them the information that they had and also told them about the other car which had an identically replicated vent and someone had really gone through some trouble here you'd have to have removed the windshields to install the new vin plates but they were thrilled with this silver platter case of auto theft and to discover and i guess they didn't have to worry about you know trying to corroborate any of the other information because it was all presented to them nicely packaged so i talked to a another friend on the police force that was in that area because it was a different area than the chief of police that i knew and he said that they were going to go in and uh and get them and so i tried to talk to them a few days later and they were obviously hugely grateful that vinwicki had been such a help collectively to figure out what the plight was of these cars and i asked him you know did the guy tell you like how he came about them or what he had found or whatever the case may be because over the years i mean i'll be honest i've been offered to buy some stolen cars stolen exotics and they don't tend to bring much money because there's not that much you can do with them i remember i got offered a stolen 03 360 spider it was when they were worth probably 130 grand and he said it was in south georgia wrapped in aluminum foil because he wasn't sure if there was a tracking device that might have been telling the people where to come and find it it was exactly the same case as this where he had been upside down couldn't sell the car and rather than um getting it repo'ed he just reported it stolen got it paid off and then hid the car he he said you know you can have it for 25 grand but you have to go and pick it up and uh obviously i was not interested in doing that but you know for plenty of people that might want to track car to export something or whatever the case may be there's a lot of fun to be had for 25 grand and that was certainly what had happened here but the guy who'd had the car for so long was in trouble for a lot more so in fact i don't even believe he was prosecuted for grand theft auto because the cops said that when they got there there were all these illegal drugs and weapons and other things like hidden in the walls of this car dealership lot unit whatever the case may be and uh so they didn't really bother too much with the lamborghinis but i i was curious who i could try to buy these things from because theoretically they were going to be owned by insurance companies so i called lamborghini newport beach and i asked them to run the the actual then and to see who the title owner was and they told me that it was titled to manhattan leasing and that the second lien holder was all points capital all points capital is one of these banks that does secondary lending through the different leasing companies like manhattan leasing they'll do balloon loans with a 35 to 55 percent residual in a 60 or 48 month term and so i was familiar with them if we had someone with not quite good enough credit to go with any of the other banks we'd sometimes call manhattan so i called them up and i talked to the president and i said hey are y'all missing an orange 2008 superleggera he said you know we're missing a few cars let me check he said yep that one's mine and so i explained to him the circumstance that i'd found and he was extremely grateful he seemed and uh told me that you know he'd send me a five thousand dollar check for finding the car which i was thrilled with um unfortunately he never did that i never heard another word from him and after following up he seems to have decided that it wasn't worth that to return his car but it was a cool experience it was a demonstration of the power of vinwicki the way we can crowdsource information to achieve an outcome that other platforms other sources of information never could the cops were grateful they've asked us to find other stolen cars we've made progress to that since then but it was a great experience a great time and a fun little chase [Applause] [Music] uh

Channel: VINwiki

Views: 138,322

Rating: 4.8370371 out of 5

Keywords: Lamborghini, Gallardo, Performante, Countach, Miura, Murcielago, Murci, Diablo, Aventador, LP640, gated manual, stick, manual, v12, italian, supercar, stolen, stolen cars, exotic car rental, scam

Id: qln64gHNRs8

Length: 112min 51sec (6771 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 10 2021