7 minute read
Big Mike
OUR MAN ON THE INSIDE SHARES HIS THOUGHTS ON THE CAR BUSINESS
Who is Big Mike?
Well, that would be telling. What we can say is he’s had more than 40 years in the car trade so has probably forgotten more about it than we’re likely to know.
COMMENT It’s truly eye-opening the ‘accessories’ you can find tucked away
Irecently sold a Volvo estate to a clergyman – a pillar of the local community and someone fairly well known in the area near my dealership.
He’s a good customer and has had three or four cars off me over the years, so I won’t go naming him here, partly because that would be bad for business and partly because I’d probably end up getting sued, but it was (to say the least) an eye opener when I went to valet his V70 trade-in only to find some interesting items in the spare wheel well.
Admittedly, the spandex outfit may simply have reflected an interest in wrestling, while the handcuffs and ball gag could have been there for protection in road-rage incidents, but nevertheless my eyebrows are still somewhere close to my bald patch as a result. The only downside of it was that, as the pubs are still closed, I wasn’t able to discuss my findings with other members of the local community for the purposes of research. I did mention it to a few of my mates in the trade, of course, and we had a very amusing discussion via WhatsApp that I encourage you to perhaps replicate on the Car Dealer Forum. After all, we’ve all found some interesting things in cars we’ve taken in part-ex or picked up at the auction and I’m sure some of you can out-trump the ball gag and spandex.
One of my fellow traders, for example, recalled in our chat the time that he took a Jaguar XJ8 in PX against a newish Range Rover. The previous titled owner was a member of the House of Lords –and was also the proud owner of a dainty red suspender belt and some white stiletto heels (or was, until he chopped them in against one of Solihull’s finest), while another mate of mine, who deals in high-end performance cars, took a Mitsubishi Evo in a three-car deal with a professional footballer, who had left in the glovebox a selection of photos of him and an unidentified lady and gent presumably getting ready for bed, which would have been worth a fortune to the gutter press. Needless to say, the next time the footballer wanted to bargain him down by £20k on an Aston Martin they were slid across the desk and my mate ended up getting the full asking price plus a healthy tip…
Another car trade colleague recalled a Sierra Cosworth he bought from a police auction after the car had been used in a bank job. During their search, the investigating officers hadn’t checked the bag containing the jack and wheelbrace, which yielded my friend a fistful of fifties that he spent very sparingly afterwards, lest the notes were marked. He still hasn’t told us exactly how much he made on the deal, but I do recall him buying a speedboat soon afterwards. He sold the Cossie for a tidy mark-up as well.
Dodgy Dave meanwhile (and every town in Britain has a car dealer called Dodgy Dave, right?) once took a Jeep Cherokee that was chopped in rather urgently by two shifty-looking blokes in large coats, which he thought was a bit unusual given it was a hot summer’s day. But being Dave and being dodgy, he turned an eye as blind as that of his MOT tester to the rather unusual circumstances.
What was more obscure, though, was the false hatch he found in the bottom of the armrest cubby, beneath which were two handguns. He immediately alerted the local constabulary with a description of the two men that turned out to be as useless as most of his forecourt stock and the Jeep was seized, never to be seen again, although a likeness of it did appear on an episode of Crimewatch six months later, being used to hold up an offlicence in Stoke-on-Trent. Dave lost about four grand on that deal, which in his terms isn’t that bad a deal – I’ve known him to take a bigger hit on cars he bought in good faith.
Meanwhile, a mutual mate of ours who runs a bombsite banger lot in north Essex had an even better story.
He’d bought a Peugeot 106 at a customs and excise sale, which was offloading cars that had been seized at the port of Harwich for reasons undisclosed by HMRC but patently obvious when his Jack Russell started slavering all over the radio-cassette.
Led by the dog going bonkers, he decided to remove the stereo only to find two white blocks attached to the back of it, which hastily fell apart. In order to check he’d not just unearthed a big chunk of washing powder, he apparently decided to take a hefty hooterful of it and (according to his business partner) spent the next three hours babbling incoherently and proclaiming how damned good he felt to anyone who would listen. He then spent three days off work with the mother of all headaches and (so he tells us) handed it over to a ‘responsible party’, who allegedly advertises his wares in the small ads under the name of ‘Charlie’.
Of course, I’ve never done anything illegal with any of the things I’ve found in cars (not even the ball gag), and on discovering a quantity of white powder in a 5-Series BMW a few years ago I did the decent thing and called the police, only for them to identify it as a substantial quantity of Coffee Mate that had obviously exploded inside a carrier bag and leaked down the back of the seat.
I also had a BMW 7-Series for a while that had got an interesting past, as I once found out when driving through Birmingham’s Jewellery Quarter. I pulled over in a side street to pop to the corner shop for some cigars, but as I parked up, two young men in hoodies came out of nowhere and got in the car with me, proffering a handful of notes each and wondering why I didn’t pass them anything in return.
‘Are you Danny?’ one of them asked.
‘No,’ I replied.
‘Oh, right,’ he said ‘Well, you got any gear anyway?’
I bought that one an el cheapo private plate from the DVLA’s £99 bargain bucket before selling it on, as the last thing I wanted was a customer getting mistaken for the local Pablo Escobar. Such things aren’t good for business, really. Well, not the car sales business anyway.
Of course, I’ve found far more boring things in sales cars, too, including an entire collection of the Encyclopaedia Britannica and a very furry Cadbury’s crème egg that had obviously escaped the clutches of its owner and started a new cult of its own beneath the passenger seat, but such stories don’t have quite the same tabloid appeal.
As for the vicar, I decided not to embarrass him and disposed of the wrestling outfit via my private eBay account, only to find the winning bidder had a different name to the reverend but the very same address. I hope he finds it a snug fit.
