The Hunt for a $7M Talbot-Lago, the World’s Most Beautiful Stolen Car

In recent years, thieves have pulled off elaborate heists of rare, million-dollar collectible cars, sometimes smuggling them out of their country of origin, retrofitting them with fake paperwork, and reselling them on the international market. And when this happens, victims and the FBI call Joe Ford, a detective with a particular set of skills. “I’m a very specific private investigator,” he said. “I’m in a niche of a niche of a niche.”

This excerpt from The Million Dollar Car Detective, a new book by bestselling author Stayton Bonner, tells the story of Joe hunting a stolen $7 million Figoni and Falaschi Talbot-Lago teardrop coupe, a model that Robb Report once called “the most beautiful car in the world,” one taken in a spectacular heist. The investigation would span a decade and involve the FBI, Interpol, a global crime ring, and a shocking betrayal Joe never saw coming.

Joe Ford looked at the moray eel and ordered another Bloody Mary.

This was the Breakers Seafood Bar, a glass-walled room with floor-to-ceiling views of the Atlantic. It was nestled in the Breakers resort, a sweeping spread of fairways, fountains, and castle-like accommodations in Palm Beach, Florida, four square miles comprising the fourth-wealthiest zip code in the U.S. Beneath Joe’s cocktail napkin, orange fish and black eels swam in a glass aquarium bar. Surrounding him, old men in blazers with floral pocket squares drank 55-dollar Beluga caviar-infused martinis and chatted up young women in cocktail dresses. But Joe, a private detective who specializes in finding rare stolen vehicles, was here for something else—the alleged thief of a 1938 Talbot-Lago T150C-SS Teardrop coupe, chassis number 90108, current value $7.6 million.“

The FBI may arrive with undercover agents,” he said, stirring his Bloody Mary with a celery stick the size of a paddle. “I’m supposed to call if I see our suspect—we’re hoping he shows.”

Joe took a sip of his Bloody Mary. Sixty-two, he was more Magnum, P.I. than Sam Spade—tall, trim, tan, usually dressed in a fitted polo or a Hawaiian shirt. He drank sweet tea by the gallon and spoke like the New Orleans native he was. (“I grew up in east New Orleans, near the Ninth Wah-ard.”) He liked to swim and dive for lobster and drive boats. Recently, he’d cruised on a 65-footer down to Utila, “this coral-reef island off the coast of Honduras,” he said. “It was incredible, diving with whale sharks and drinking with outlaws.”

Joe may mingle with the billionaires of the world, but he lived a few miles west of the $15 million mansions lining the shore, on the workaday side of the Intracoastal Waterway. For years, he’d crashed in a condo owned by his girlfriend, Shari, a knockout who waitressed at a pricey restaurant in a nearby resort, and helped care for her teacup poodle. Outside their place sat a tarp-covered sports car, a 1976 MGB two-door convertible Joe hadn’t driven in months. “The battery’s dead,” he once told me. “I bought the car to drive on Sundays and then never got to it. But, you know, you still need a convertible in Florida.”

Joe had dabbled in architecture and law school before stumbling into buying and selling rare cars and, eventually, being hired to find stolen ones. When tracking each vehicle, he offered the same deal to the victim of the theft. Joe would take majority ownership of the car, working for free until it was recovered. Then he and his partner would sell it on the open market and split the reward. Joe had made money along the way, but lost more, and was no stranger to filing bankruptcy. Still, through it all, he loved the chase. “Joe’s a bounty hunter,” said John Draneas, an attorney in Portland, Oregon, who specializes in rare cars. “It’s an incredibly risky thing—but it works for him.”

For Joe, the $7 million Talbot Lago case was a big one, the kind that could set him up for a long time. Maybe help him get his own boat, his own rare sports car. Help his daughter, Julia, be more comfortable as she coped with retinitis pigmentosa, a disease that was slowly making her go blind. “We first noticed she had vision problems when she was seven,” Joe said. “But she wasn’t formally diagnosed until high school. Once, she was performing as a flag waver during halftime at a football game when the stadium went black. My [former] wife, Tessie, rushed to the field because she knew Julia couldn’t see anything.” Joe paused, collecting himself. “The night vision goes first.”

Joe was proud of Julia, amazed by her resilience and her ability to lead a pretty normal life despite her disease. Still, he wanted a better future for his daughter as her vision went, her world shrinking to blackness. He hoped the payday from a job like this, potentially millions, would give her a better life, set her up with what she needed—ensure she’d be taken care of forever. “As a dad, you want to do everything you can,” he said.

Joe glanced around the room. It was a gray, drizzly day at the Cavallino Classic Palm Beach, one of dozens of rare-car competitions held annually around the world where top collectors come to mingle and pit their restored multi-million cars against each other. Known as concours d’elegance, French for “competition of elegance,” these events are held in locations ranging from Pebble Beach—the Super Bowl of car competitions taking place every August—to the shores of Lake Como, Italy, and are multiday parties for the .01 percent. They include high-end auctions, vintage-car races, and black-tie cocktail parties, culminating in best-in-show contests where white-gloved judges peek under hoods, rev engines, and inspect seat linings for historical accuracy. Winning vehicles receive renown and high valuations—the car-world equivalent of a prize racehorse. Their owners get respectability. And it is this goal, adulation by one’s peers, that might drive ambitious owners to take risks acquiring spectacular cars—a factor Joe believed figured into the mystery of the Talbot-Lago.

“Concours are prestige events,” he said. “This is where high-end owners come to win and get recognition. And sometimes they get snookered.”

Joe learned about stolen cars in all manner of ways. Sometimes victims found him through the grapevine. Other times he came across cold cases in decades-old car magazines or in the files of investigations abandoned by law enforcement, picking up the trail on his own. At the moment, Joe had a range of cases in various stages of progress. In one, he was trying to find the heir to a series of stolen cars, including a rare Bugatti, involving a father who may have disinherited his son. In another, he was researching a missing car in the former Soviet Bloc, “where they’ll kill you for a million-dollar vehicle—not sure I want to touch that one yet.” In yet another, he was tracking down a wealthy collector in the Midwest who, decades ago, angrily bulldozed a barn full of rare cars after a fire had destroyed a few of them. “I read a story about the incident in an old Road & Track magazine,” Joe said. “A forgotten news piece.” Joe was convinced he could rescue the remaining chassis from their gravesite and have them restored. “Back then the cars weren’t worth what they are today,” he said. “The former landowner is dead, but I’m using Google Maps to search the area. The barn might be under a highway.” Yet another case involved a collector in Oxnard, California, a wealthy Ferrari owner whose vintage $5 million racer had gone missing in Asia. “When he said Asia, I said, ‘Oh fuck, good luck with that,’” Joe said, noting how difficult the vehicle would be to recover from there. “But then I called back: ‘Tell me more.’” None, however, compared with the Talbot-Lago. “It’s a poker tournament,” Joe said, finishing his beer. “And now my big pot’s come in.”

THE TEARDROP. OTHERWISE KNOWN as the 1938 Talbot-Lago T150C-SS Teardrop coupe. Built by two men named Figoni and Falaschi—Italian immigrants to France who ran the world’s top custom car shop in Paris from the Thirties through the Fifties—the T150 was a model Robb Report once called “the most beautiful car in the world.” One of only two T150s equipped with a race car engine, 90108 was an Art Deco masterpiece, a long, sleek body powered by ground-shaking horsepower. When it debuted, the Teardrop’s wealthy owners commissioned custom couture to match its colors and lines; society-page fixtures used it to make grand entrances at balls during the last gasps of Downton Abbey–era Europe.

In 1939, Teardrop 90108 was imported into the U.S. by Luigi Chinetti, an Italian race car driver who won Le Mans three times before retiring to Greenwich, Connecticut, to start America’s first Ferrari dealership. That year, Chinetti sold the Teardrop to Tommy Lee, the son of a wealthy owner of Cadillac dealerships in Los Angeles. (Mount Lee, home to the Hollywood sign, was a property of the family.) Receiving a cut of every Cadillac sold in California, Tommy lived a playboy life, speeding cars, dating starlets, and competing in drag races along the dry desert lake beds of the Mojave Desert, hurtling across the sand in goggles at over 100 miles per hour. In 1950, following an accident with a truck that left him with chronic pain, Lee leapt to his death from a twelfth-story window, leaving behind a fortune and a world-class collection of cars, which were subsequently sold off, among them the T150.

In 1967, Roy Leiske, a self-made millionaire and the founder of Monarch Plastic Products, an injection-molding company in Milwaukee, bought the Teardrop for 100 dollars. He took the ravaged T150 to a cluttered garage near his home and began tinkering with it. Leiske’s wife had died from cancer in 1962. After his son, a pilot, died in an airplane crash in 1996, Leiske withdrew from anything that resembled the life he had been living—everything except the Talbot-Lago.

He shut down Monarch Plastic and became obsessed with the T150. He didn’t go outside, didn’t see many people, and spent his days working on the car amid piles of machine parts in his former factory. Collectors traveled to see the vehicle, including the former Tonight Show host Jay Leno. “I arrived at this warehouse-type building in the wintertime,” Leno recalled. “The guy was old and unshaven. The car looked damaged, was in pieces, and the wood was rotten. He wanted like seven hundred thousand dollars for it, rushing me about the sale, and I knew I was looking at another million just to restore it. It just didn’t feel right.”

Leiske never sold.

One day in 2001, the Talbot-Lago disappeared. In the middle of the night, men in white overalls cut the phone lines at Leiske’s home. Then they drove about two miles to his former factory. They parked an unmarked white box truck in front and drilled out the cylinders of the lock to a garage door. “It was a very sophisticated way to steal it,” said Jeff Thiele, a Milwaukee policeman who worked the case. “Like some shit out of the movies.”

For years, the Teardrop had remained partially disassembled at the back of the facility, its parts in various places, the paperwork scattered among office drawers. Somehow the thieves knew exactly where to look for all of it. They used an overhead crane already in the building to move the Teardrop’s parts into the box truck, which they backed up to the main door. According to eyewitnesses, only one thief was seen well enough to be described: a white male about 35, “thin build, with sandy-brown shoulder-length hair.”

At 10 a.m., Leiske arrived to drink his coffee and begin working on the car, as he did every morning. Only the Teardrop wasn’t there. The parts and nearly all the paperwork—even some receipts dating back to the 1960s—were gone. No sign of a forced entry, even though the doors had been dead-bolted when he left. Nothing else was taken. “If Roy had arrived a half hour earlier, they probably would’ve killed him,” said Richard Mueller, his second cousin. “Afterward, he called me every day asking about that car. It broke his heart.”

Four years later, Leiske died. He bequeathed the car—which technically he still owned—to Mueller, who figured he’d never see it again.

Until Joe entered the picture.

“AH, THE CAVALLINO,” JOE SAID, rattling the ice in his drink. “A real ball-swinging event.”

Standing at the bar, Joe sniffed for clues. He had been hired by Leiske’s heirs to find the Teardrop, his investigation eventually dovetailing with the FBI’s own hunt for the vehicle’s alleged thief. Now, they were working together. Sort of. “Joe Ford has been instrumental in helping with this case,” said Thiele. “A lot of the leads we got on this vehicle came from Joe, and we followed up on them.” He paused. “Sometimes, though, Joe has to remember that he’s not law enforcement.”

Joe believed he knew who had stolen the Talbot Lago and then sold it to a millionaire collector, and both men could be here today. So Joe was chatting up contacts, looking for information, and also acting as a lookout for the FBI. The feds needed Joe’s help identifying the suspect. Joe knew him on sight. They used to be friends and even once worked together in the world of rare cars before having a spectacular fallout. Now Joe was working with the FBI to help track him down.

“The FBI gave me a number to call if I see him,” Joe said. “They have information he may show up, so something may happen here.”

Joe was wearing a navy blazer, turquoise shirt, and white pants, like he’d just stepped off a yacht. He was here with Shari. Whenever Joe visited concours, she took time off from work to go along. The cars? Whatever. The resorts, though? These she could get excited about. “I keep telling him to get rid of that old car outside our home, it’s annoying,” she said. “But he’s very independent.”

For Joe, this type of high-end soiree was the everyday world of his detective work. In the realm of concours, it was an open secret that among the multimillion-dollar cars on display could be fake or stolen goods.

“What happens is someone buys a car, shows it at a concours event, and then another collector sees the car and says it was stolen from them,” said Christopher Marinello, the founder of Art Recovery International. “The person who said they were robbed wants to go to the police, but they’re not sure if they should litigate. So these cases are almost always settled confidentially. Nobody wants to be known for buying a stolen car. They don’t even want to be known as a collector. They might get their own collection stolen!

Joe knew all about stolen cars at concours. In 2019, Les Wexner, the billionaire founder of L Brands, which owned Victoria’s Secret, entered his 1954 Ferrari 375 Plus Spyder in the Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance. In 2014, Wexner had paid $18.3 million for the car at Bonhams, at the time the third-highest price ever paid for a car at auction.

But there was one problem. It was stolen.

Representing the family of a previous owner, Joe had investigated how the Ferrari was nabbed from a Cincinnati property in 1989, transported to Belgium, and auctioned off under false pretenses. After Wexner bought it, the vehicle sank into a quagmire of litigation over its provenance before things were resolved in 2016. Now the car was on the concours circuit—and Joe still carried a grudge. “There’s a Belgian from the Ferrari case over there,” he said, narrowing his eyes. “He’s on my blacklist.”

In the rare-car world, buyers and collectors aren’t your neighborhood garage guys. Often they’re Wall Street or tech titans looking for something novel to drive on the weekends and fuel cocktail party chatter. Los Angeles insurance tycoon Peter Mullin, for instance, collected French cars from the 1930s—even buying period tools to restore them—in an Art Deco, riveted-steel public museum complete with a miniature Eiffel Tower. Bestselling author Clive Cussler kept more than one hundred rare cars in a museum near Denver. John Oates, of Hall & Oates fame, collects Porsches and English sports cars. Often the collectors are white, male, and advanced in age—icons of previous eras keen to see their reflection in a fancy automobile. “Collectors are looking for milestones in technology and design, a true example of a rolling sculpture,” Joe said. “It’s all about the fastest car, the biggest engine, and the wildest body.”

Unlike most assets, however, collectible cars from before World War II almost never have independent verification. Which means that if a vehicle turns out to be fraudulent, the buyer has little in the way of legal recourse to get their money back. “All of these cars were considered junk,” said Draneas. “The Ferraris, Jaguars, and other street-racing cars would get banged up, catch fire, and then the owner would throw it away and get a new one. So the records for these worn-out husks became kind of nonexistent.”

Wealthy collectors need experts who can verify that a rare car they’re interested in buying is authentic. To meet the demand, there are specialists who cater to this world: restoration experts, collection managers, custom-garage builders. They advise collectors to find a niche—prewar Ferraris, say, or Talbot-Lagos from the 1930s—then scour the planet to build out their collection. Truly rare cars are hard to keep secret, because searching for them makes others aware of what exists. “People in the car world are gonna hear about it,” Joe said. And sometimes it’s these insiders who decide to go criminal—which is what brought Joe here today.

Joe froze.

He stared at an older man—balding, glasses, blazer—laughing in a large group. Joe was about to approach, glanced at Shari, paused. The man walked by.

“That’s Paul Russell,” Joe said. “I need to talk with him. But I don’t want this to get antagonistic.”

In the world of high-end cars, Russell was a titan. He ran Paul Russell and Company, a 38,000-square-foot shop in Essex, Massachusetts, renowned for morphing rare cars into trophy vehicles for the world’s wealthiest clients. A former mechanic, Russell and his team of 17 craftsmen had produced 46 best-in-show vehicles at top concours over the past 40 years. Russell fields calls from everywhere, but he’s best known for restoring Ralph Lauren’s vehicles. When Russell refurbished Lauren’s prewar Mercedes SSK, once owned by an Italian count, his team spent 4,000 hours on the project. Russell even traveled to Germany with a flashlight to find the car’s original latches in a garage, a trip that also turned up the original oil pan. The vehicle won Best in Show at the Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance in 1993. “With Paul Russell, it’s not a job,” Lauren once said. “It’s his life.”

A family man with glasses and gray hair, Russell had long been feted for his taste and integrity. But he was now linked to a crime, having helped broker the deal for the stolen Talbot-Lago between a millionaire collector and an alleged thief. “This sale had a lot of red flags,” Joe said. (When asked for comment, Russell stated that he couldn’t discuss the case because of the ongoing investigation.) Talking with Russell could help solve the case. But this wasn’t the place or time. “I don’t want to make a scene,” Joe said. “Not here.”

He glanced at his phone. No call from the FBI, and he hadn’t seen the suspect. But he knew this was only the beginning of his case.

“According to the FBI, I may be getting in over my head,” Joe said, making for the parking lot as the sky grew darker. “We’re taking down a 600 million-dollar international car-theft ring.”

This excerpt originally appeared in Rolling Stone.

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Excerpted from the book The Million Dollar Car Detective by Stayton Bonner, out Aug. 26. Copyright © 2025 by Stayton Bonner. From Blackstone Publishing. Reprinted by permission.