Ed Niles & the Ferrari Breadvan

In response to the 'Gary Wales & the Ferrari Breadvan' post comes this anecdote from Ed Niles:

"Along with Matthew, Gary is one of the great characters of our world. Although I’ve heard this tale before (several times?) it still brings a chuckle.

Speaking of oft-repeated tales, I was responsible for the B-V coming here. My friend and Lusso owner Gordon Culp saw that I was having fun and making money, so he said, “Let me have the next Ferrari that your friend Roberto (Goldoni, in Rome) comes up with.” OK, so the next one was the B-V. I told Roberto to put a substantial deposit on it, which he did, although somewhat impecunious at the time. Then Gordon got to look at the pix, and said, “Gee, I’m going to have to spend some money re-shaping the body; I want the back to look like a GTO.” After I talked him out of that idea, he went to his banker, whose first question was, “The car is here in LA so we can inspect it, right?” Followed by, “you do have a California pink slip, right?” Somehow I thought that Gordon had the money.

Well, the upshot of it all was that my friend Gordon was not as hip as I had thought, and in the meantime Roberto was mailing me every day about his deposit. So much for trying to be a nice guy/middleman. That was when I started calling around, and when I got to Dick Merritt I hit the jackpot. Dick had just teamed up with Gary, a former stock-broker, and they were buying.

Dick has his own version of bringing the car back, which very roughly approximates Gary’s.

You can’t imagine two more disparate characters than Dick and Gary, but that’s another story."