World's Worst Ferrari Customer

[Music] in the exotic car business and really in any business we have some incredibly difficult clients now the business age from our grandparents was the customer is always right I don't agree with that and I do not live by that as evidenced by the fact that I have a Wall of Shame on my website that literally takes ridiculous things that customers have emailed me and puts it right up front and center essentially it's a reverse review to to make fun of that now I don't call them out by name or anything like that because it doesn't matter but it it is funny to hear some of the interactions we get and some of the ridiculous questions that people ask us about cars that you know we're expected to respond to professionally and kindly even when they're just asinine but it seems like when you get into the upper echelon of clients that that those difficult clients get even more difficult because they become entitled they have achieved a certain level of success that I think in some senses grants them the uh you know they start assuming that they have a right or they have earned the right to be unkind to people and that they deserve some sort of special level of treatment and yes in some senses success and money does give you power right like if you buy a VIP pass to a concert and the other guy didn't then you get special treatment but it does not give you a right to be a jerk but there are many people that operate from a world view different from that that their status has afforded them more importance than other people and they have a right to look down on them and I've certainly experienced that as a car dealer for the sometimes super wealthy is that they look at me not as an equal in business but as somebody who is just serving them you know I'm the same as their janitor because I'm just their car guy I'm making their life better and like I enjoy doing that for some people when they appreciate it but not when it's you know looked down upon so there's one client in particular that just essentially used and abused his privilege and it was on one of the most beautiful cars I've ever seen it was a Rosso Rubino 599 and it was actually the car whose color inspired my 911 hot rod maroon 6 build I used that paint color Rosa Rubino for the 911 because I thought it was just the most beautiful Rich deep burgundy metallic I had ever seen but I got this Rosa Rubino 599 with ceramic brakes and cream interior with burgundy Dash and you know headliner and I even had the yellow calipers changed out to Rosa Rubino so it matched the car and it had the ball polish Challenge wheels and I was hoping that somebody else would appreciate that specification as I did and pay a little bit more than your standard red tan car and I did find a customer in Cleveland that that loved it and we negotiated a price and it was a cash price and this was important to me because this was 2009 I was a little bit strapped as were many car dealers and I had opened a dealership in Las Vegas and had a lot of expenses and had probably leverage myself a little bit too thin so a cash deal for me was important because I could then go buy some other cars quickly what started as a cash deal and negotiated as a cash deal then turned into oh well you know I like using other people's money so we're just we're going to make it a leasing deal so you got to jump through all those Hoops to get paid I wasn't super happy about that because I'm like I'm expecting a wire transfer Tomorrow based on the buyer's representation of how the deal would go and that changed but you know I'm the client you you serve me and I'm like okay whatever so we go through all the Hoops to get funded and then you know the deal changes again he's out of town can't sign papers you just gotta wait for me a couple more weeks goes by and it was supposed to be an easy quick deal has dragged out for nearly a month and I have to go down and meet him at his Yacht Club in order to sign paperwork and get the deposit money from him and it finally closed but in the midst of this I was talking with another car dealer and just venting to him about it and he said something interesting he goes will you win I said how do I win this was the worst deal ever he goes well you took his money I was like okay and he goes sometimes a difficult clients are the most satisfying because they're difficult for everybody and nobody wants their business and they don't like giving their money away like they're so tight with their money that when you finally get a deal done you win because you got the difficult clients money and nobody else can and I thought okay that's certainly a good perspective on it I don't want to cater to those types of clients and I certainly don't want a long-term relationship but yeah okay fine I I win I got a deal done with him but the the issue with those guys is there's no loyalty there's no relationship they don't actually value what you do because again they see themselves as the center of the world they'll call you text you at 10 pm and just you gotta jump through all these hoops in order to earn my business and I just yeah I'm not all about that but my good friend and business associate John Sabo had an equally odd feeling about this guy and he he never quite could figure him out but his one red flag about this guy was like we go into his office and he always bragged about how much money he had he couldn't just have stuff he always had to talk about what his stuff was worth and what he had but he went into his office and he has this giant tropical fish tank in built into the wall of his office and Sable is like well there's no fish in it who has a fish tank with no fish in it he was like that's just weird something's off about this guy because he doesn't have fish in his fish tank and this guy was the type of guy he actually made it onto the Wall of Shame because he would be on my email list for for Cleveland car events and he would often respond and one of his best ones was essentially well I'm not going to come out on a sunny Saturday because I have a sun Seeker yacht and my son Seeker yacht costs 15 times what my Ferrari costs so on a good weather day obviously I'm going to use that it's like great happy to know how much your yacht costs back to the whole leasing thing so the reason he wanted to lease his Ferraris because he wanted it as a tax write-off now I have no CPA I'm not here to give tax advice but it seems sketchy that somebody could just write off a Ferrari as a legitimate business use because they're leasing it I guess technically you can but I'm like you're not using it for business you drive it to work at your office and you drive it home and you drive it to work and you drive it home well it turns out he also was using his son Seeker for business because number of years later I Googled his name just out of curiosity and an article came up that he had been indicted by the IRS for tax fraud tax evasion and it was actually related to his son Seeker yacht that he had bragged about and how he had been essentially using it as a fake tax write-off claiming that he had this yacht leasing company or whatever but you know had no Revenue it was just his personal yacht that he had docked at the shorby club He was ordered to pay 500 000 in fines and 1.3 million dollars in restitution in addition to six months in jail and six months on house arrest I'm sure with enough money he didn't actually spend any time in jail but that is that is what the article said but it gets better so then I started looking through his other history and and legal files and I found out that in 2011 he bought a property lakefront property very high-end expensive that included an easement with red interlocking bricks so there's this like you know path by the lake in front of all of these houses in this development and they have an easement for it so he submitted an architectural plan to basically redo the part in front of his house and redo the Landscaping that included replacing all the red interlocking bricks and he then installed yellow interlocking bricks on the part of the easement in front of his house the trustees of said easement who were probably fed up with his Shenanigans because he's the type of person that you know it's just constant with him they pulled up his Yellow Bricks without any notice they just went in and ripped them all up so he sued the trust the court granted a summary judgment against Tom Tom appealed and included in his claims was get this all this is public record quote intentional infliction of emotional distress ladies and gentlemen the justice system is broken it's broken because of people like this it's broken because of Rich entitled asshats Who tie up the courts and the legal system with their complaints about emotional distress because they couldn't have yellow bricks in front of their house when they're required to have red bricks so yes I took his money I never got another dime of his money but I did sell the the beautiful Rosa Rubino 599 I didn't get the car back because I just stopped responding to his whiny texts and so he probably found somebody else to bother with his time and they eventually won and uh got the 599 from him at some point but likely he doesn't have any long-standing relationship with any exotic car dealer because at some point like the trustees of the trust of the easement we all get tired of his shenanigans buying a used car especially sight unseen can be a very scary process and you should never do that without getting the car inspected first and the best and easiest way to have that done is using the lemon Squad they are an amazing resource that can almost immediately inspect a car for you anywhere in the country they have no hidden fees they're the largest company in the industry and they have the fastest response times in the industry so check them out now at the link in the description below you can use the code binwiki for a 10 discount and they will literally go tomorrow and check out any car in the country that you are looking to buy it is the best way not only to find out if you're being scammed find out if the car is a piece of garbage and to make sure that you're buying exactly the car that you're looking for so next time you buy a car make sure to use the lemon squash [Music] foreign [Music] [Applause] [Music]

Channel: VINwiki

Views: 944,227

Keywords: Doug, Ferrari 599, bad customers, sales stories, car stories, vinwiki

Id: x8U7X3qCzeI

Length: 11min 38sec (698 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 07 2022