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Automotive Lifestyle
AUTOS: Celebrity Car At Auction Was Stolen
Barrett-Jackson pulls Hemi 'Cuda owned by Beach Boy Al Jardine; it was stolen in 1976.
Bob Golfen  |  Posted January 14, 2010   Scottsdale, AZ
This 1971 Hemi Cuda recreation owned by Beach Boy Al Jardine was reported stolen in 1976. (Photo: Barrett-Jackson
Barrett-Jackson officials, still smarting from the loss of the reputed Buddy Holly Impala over authenticity questions, were hit again today with another critical problem with a celebrity consignment for the Scottsdale auction.

The 1971 Plymouth Hemi Cuda recreation owned by the Beach Boys’ Al Jardine turned out be a stolen car.

What Jardine apparently didn’t know about the Plymouth, which he had custom built several years ago, was that the car had been reported stolen in 1976, said Steve Davis, Barrett-Jackson president.

The car has been impounded by Scottsdale Police and, obviously, pulled from the auction docket.

“This has to fall under the category of you cannot make this stuff up,” Davis said. “It’s something about celebrity cars this year.”

The heavily promoted Al Jardine ‘Cuda, scheduled for prime-time bidding next Saturday, was going through final inspection by the Scottsdale auction’s consignment team, who found a discrepancy with the VIN plate and the title, Davis said.

When the problem could not be reconciled on-site, he said, the auction team loaded the Cuda hardtop onto a flat-bed truck and took it to the Arizona Motor Vehicle Division to have it checked out. This was not an unprecedented procedure, Davis added, with two other cars also going over to MVD this week to have their titles confirmed.

But the result with the ‘Cuda was certainly a surprise, he said, when MVD found the car had been stolen 34 years ago. No information was immediately available about where the car was stolen or from whom.

“Isn’t that amazing, right on the heels of this Buddy Holly thing?” Davis said. “It goes to show you, we do what we do because we have to.”

The 1958 Chevy Impala that was represented by the consigner of having been bought new by rock n’ roll star Buddy Holly was found to have too many questions about its provenance, Davis said, so they had to remove it from the auction list on Tuesday.

Although the Impala’s documents checked out, he added, earlier allegations that this Impala was not the one that Holly once owned could not be rectified.

Discovering a stolen car decades after it disappeared is the result of computer technology that creates a nationwide databank of theft reports. In October, a Volkswagen microbus stolen from a Washington State woman in 1974 was recovered, fully restored, in a shipping container bound for Europe.

In 2006, a California man got back his 1968 Corvette that was stolen in New York City in 1969. The Corvette also was found in a shipping container that was headed to Sweden.

Barrett-Jackson Scottsdale: Jan 19th-24th
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