[exoticar1]

All you guys who have been following the saga of the '69 Yenko Chevelle "L88" will love this. I got a message from Michael a couple days ago explaining what he had and its "significance". This threw up a red flag immediately...as I really only buy and sell cars from the '30's through the '50's as well as sports cars and sometimes exotics, but never muscle cars. I did just list a '64 GTO on eBay so that must be where he found me. But with a car supposedly so "big", a person really should be talking to an acknowledged expert or a big auction house, not me.

Anyway, I called the guy back and, boy, what a mistake. He kept me on the phone for 35 minutes. His "story" for how he acquired it is a hoot, so I have to tell you all. He claimed to be a rebellious 17-year-old youth in 1969-1970 whose father was an old-school marine who fought in The Battle of the Bulge. His father sent him to Catholic school and tried to instill some discipline in Michael, but nothing worked (or so the story goes). All he could think about was goofing-off and cars, and one car in particular that he had seen in magazines and at the drag strip. The "one-of-three" Yenko Chevelle L88.

The nuns at the school had had it with this kid and called in the father. After much debate, the nuns told the father what he had to do. Buy the car for the kid (at a big-buck price of $6000 in 1970, which would buy two modest new cars), lock it away, and not give it to him until the kid got straight A's. Michael said it worked, and he went on in life to collect four patents and collect big royalties (for what he did not say).

This story was went off on several tangents such as the German strategy during The Battle of The Bulge and what is apparently his other great love, baseball. (At times, I would just put the phone down on the desk and do other work while he talked...since he never took a breath he never noticed that I wasn't listening).

The baseball thing diverged into the next tangent of the story...that Reggie Jackson once knocked on his door. He "told" him, "Look Reggie, I know why you're here. You're here for my car, and I'm sorry, I love you, man, but you're not going to get it". At this point, Reggie pulled from his jacket a baseball...a baseball he said was one of the three he hit out in his famous World Series game. "The car for the ball", was the offer (seems fair right? one of three for one of three), and although Michael was "tempted", bless his heart, he decided to keep the car!

His story now is that he must sell the car immediately to buy into a business...and if he misses out on buying-in this car will be off-the-market. If everything else he told me is true ;-) at least this is an obvious lie as he has had the car market forever.

But the fact is that everything he says is a lie and he knows it. This man is a criminal and looking for a stooge such as myself whose only knowledge of Yenko Chevelles is that they built 99 of them. He is also oh-so-foolish as he doesn't seem to realize that in this wired world in which we live, his story can be checked out and dismissed in two minutes by anyone who knows how to use a search engine.

When he calls me back, and I'm sure he will, this is what I will tell him: that if he is successful in selling the car for anything close to what he is asking ($1M by the way), that one of three things is going to happen: if he's lucky he will end up in civil court and lose everything he owns. More probably he will end up in Federal prison (and I'll be happy to testify for the prosecution). Or, if he really sells it to the wrong person, he'll end up in a back alley with a bullet in the back of his head.

This sort of scam used to be possible years ago, but not any more, and this guy just doesn't seem to get it. He entertained quite a bit, really gave me a lot of laughs for the last couple days, and for that I thank him. But in reality, he is purely a criminal scumbab.