What's Wrong With This Picture: The Wages Of Sin Edition
From John Dillinger to Nicolas Cage, the car industry has always needed villains. In fact, one could almost make the argument that the entire top quarter or so of the luxury car market is wholly dependent on scumbags of one kind or another. As Raymond Chandler once noted, there’s no honest way to make a hundred million bucks… and spending millions on cars is a great way to advertise one’s comfort with the moral ambiguities of ostentatious wealth. So when America’s most notoriously crooked car dealer, a certain Denny Hecker, auctions off his personal fleet as part of his $767m bankruptcy (itself triggered by 25 counts of fraud and related criminal charges), you expect to see some good stuff hitting the block.
If not an Atlantique or a D-Type, then at least a chrome Veyron, a Gemballa or something tastelessly modified by Mansory. Instead, Hecker’s auction site shows… a Mitsubishi Montero? An Eclipse Sypder? An Escalade with matching golf cart? For a guy who took Chrysler Financial for $550m (including $50m to him personally), Hecker is definitely not living up to America’s high standards for felonious excess. Or he’s hiding the good stuff in some kind of underground lair. Either way, color us unimpressed with his official collection of ill-gotten conveyances.
More by Edward Niedermeyer
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"Or he’s hiding the good stuff in some kind of underground lair." This is so obvious... I should have called the related super-hero *rolleyes* "Either way, color us unimpressed with his official collection of ill-gotten conveyances." Granted, but considering it's most possibly not the real stuff, meh.
I thought Bill Heard was America's most notoriously crooked car dealer.