Court battle rages over rare stolen car
Buyer of $7m Talbot Lago says 15 years is too long to claim ownership of missing vehicle
A curious legal battle over an extremely rare US$7-million French coach-built car stolen in 2001 may soon be settled by a Wisconsin court.
The story begins in 1967, when Roy Leiske, a self-made millionaire from Milwaukee, bought a 1938 Talbot Lago T150 C teardrop coupe in pieces for $10,000, explains an article by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.
The car, which once belonged to renowned car designer Brooks Stevens, had been abandoned and left by its owner on the landlord’s lawn. Leiske tracked down the owner and paid for it and his aim was to re-assemble and restore it, but instead, for the next three decades, he hemmed and hawed on selling it.
In 2001, the car was expertly stolen from the place he’d stored it. Early on a Sunday morning, the burglars cut Leiske’s home phone lines, slipped into the factory and removed every part of the car and its affiliated documents from the various corners they’d been hidden, loading them into a white truck.
When he died in 2005, neither Leiske, nor the police, nor the FBI or Interpol could track down the car. In his will, he left his estate and the missing car to one of his only remaining family members, his cousin Richard Mueller.
Shortly after, Mueller was contacted by Florida’s Joseph Ford, an attorney who also specialized in locating stolen classic cars. He decided to try to help Mueller find the car, and the pair agreed to sell it and split the funds if it was ever recovered.
Leiske had convinced authorities to keep the car in a national stolen car database for longer than the usual 10-year limit, a move that paid off when a shell corporation popped up in 2016 trying to register the now fully restored Talbot-Lago in Illinois. Police contacted Mueller, who demanded the car back from its new owner, Rick Workman, the man behind the corporation. Workman, a collector of high-end vehicles, had purchased the car the year prior from a European broker for US$7 million, and refused to give up the vehicle. So in February 2017, Mueller and Ford sued for the car’s return.
Workman’s lawyers got a Milwaukee Circuit Court judge to dismiss the case, arguing Wisconsin state statutes on stolen cars gave Mueller and Ford six years after its theft to claim the car.
Ford got an appeals court to reverse that decision by noting their right to sue began not when the car was stolen, but when Workman first learned of its theft and refused to give it back.
Workman’s lawyers now plan to bring the case to the Wisconsin Supreme Court to have the original ruling upheld.
In the meantime, the car is being held at a restoration business in Massachusetts.
The nature of the theft of the car remains a mystery, though Mueller says the car may have been exported to Europe using his forged signature. In 2006, someone approached Mueller to buy a second, less-valuable Talbot-Lago parts car Leiske had kept;thebillofsaleMueller handed over when the transaction was completed may have been doctored so the ’38 teardrop coupe could be more easily moved across borders.