6 minute read
Hunting Holden's true history
Editorial: Jesse Wray-McCann
Photography: Jesse Wray-McCann and supplied
When a story detailing the discovery of a historic Holden hit the national media in May 2011, car enthusiasts were exhilarated and described it as “Holden’s missing link”.
The car’s then-owner Damon Donnelly claimed it was GM Prototype Holden No. 2, the second Holden to ever be created and one of the first three prototypes built in Detroit in the United States in 1946 and shipped to Australia. These prototypes formed the basis of the FX Holden, the first put into production in this country.
Unlike Prototype 1, which is one of the centrepiece exhibits at Canberra’s National Museum of Australia, Prototype 2 had been thought long lost until Donnelly went public with it, spruiking it for sale for a whopping $1.2 million.
But when Leading Senior Constable Jordan Brown’s curiosity brought him across the car in 2015, something didn’t seem right.
Working as a detective at the Vehicle Crime Squad (VCS) at the time, Ldg Sen Const Brown combined his investigative skills with his passion for cars and his vehicle identification expertise from a previous career in automotive sales.
What resulted was a multi-year investigation that would help re-write Australian automotive history.
Ldg Sen Const Brown and his VCS colleagues first became interested in Donnelly in June 2015 over another matter.
While that investigation did not progress, it prompted Ldg Sen Const Brown to do a simple Google search on Donnelly — who had changed his name from Damon Cavalieri after twice being convicted in 2008 for deception offences relating to online marketplace fraud — and discover the 2011 media coverage about Prototype 2.
“Like a person who appreciates art, it becomes a sixth sense to be able to spot a fake,” Ldg Sen Const Brown said.
“And that’s what it was like for me when I was looking at the online article and saw there was a picture of the identification plate on the vehicle that just didn’t seem right.”
Suspecting it may have been an early Holden production car secretly modified to appear like the hand-built Prototype 2, Ldg Sen Const Brown tracked down the new owner of the car, who had bought it from Donnelly for $246,000 about three years earlier.
The owner showed Ldg Sen Const Brown all the documentation Donnelly had provided to him that purportedly confirmed it was the genuine Prototype 2.
This included historic registration records from VicRoads with previous owners' details redacted.
While Victoria Police’s Vehicle Examination Unit took the car in for extensive forensic analysis, Ldg Sen Const Brown took a deep dive into the documented history of the car and its ownership.
Donnelly’s account was that he had bought it in 2009 from the deceased estate of Drouin man and long-time Holden mechanic Gabriel “Victor” Brusco.
Donnelly claimed the name redacted from the registration records was Mr Brusco’s and that Mr Brusco had bought it directly from Holden in 1951.
Based on this origins story, he had the car re-registered by VicRoads in February 2010 under its original Victorian number plates, JP 481, and therefore legally recognised as the long-lost Prototype 2.
But when Ldg Sen Const Brown tracked down the unredacted registration records with VicRoads, it showed the 1951 purchase of the car directly from Holden was actually by a Holden employee called Albert Kleye.
Through searching documents at the Public Record Office Victoria, Ldg Sen Const Brown tracked down Mr Kleye’s grandson who was able to turn up a photo of the Kleye family with the car.
Ldg Sen Const Brown dug even further by searching through the engine number cards in a private collection held by the Association of Motoring Clubs, which revealed Prototype 2 had been reregistered in May 1953 to a Maurice Wood with the new number plate of GAB 694.
Mr Wood’s three sons shared stories about the car with Ldg Sen Const Brown but knowledge of Prototype 2’s whereabouts was lost around 1956 when the Wood family got rid of the car.
“Through following every line of enquiry to its nth degree, I was able to prove, through the unredacted documents, that Damon had fabricated a story for his vehicle to try to establish and legitimise it as Prototype 2,” Ldg Sen Const Brown said.
Donnelly’s fake story was further dismantled thanks to the meticulous work done by Forensic Officer Nigel Alves from the Vehicle Examination Unit, who found Donnelly had tried to recreate Prototype 2 by modifying a circa-1951 FX Holden.
“Damon falsified welds along the length of the body of the car to make it look hand-built, but Nigel’s forensic testing showed that these welds had no purpose other than to give the appearance that these panels were hand-welded together like with the prototypes,” Ldg Sen Const Brown said.
It was also discovered Donnelly had doctored identification plates on the body and engine of the car, but Mr Alves was able to use restoration methods to recover the original stamped numbers.
Ldg Sen Const Brown’s investigation discovered Donnelly’s car was in fact made largely from parts of an FX Holden he bought in Altona in September 2009.
After more than two years of investigation, Donnelly was interviewed in 2017 and denied any wrongdoing.
Following years of pandemic-related delays, Donnelly was found guilty by a jury at the County Court in August last year of obtaining property by deception.
He was sentenced to three years’ prison, with a minimum of 18 months — one of the longest sentences for a Vehicle Crime Squad case.
Ldg Sen Const Brown said along with exacting justice, he was proud to correct and protect the true history of Prototype 2.
“Damon probably saw it as a chance to make a quick buck, but we're talking about something that is Australia's history, and that’s so important because automotive design and construction in Australia doesn’t exist anymore,” he said.
