Stolen Mustang--or What’s Left of It--Is Rounded Up

Lee Iacocca must feel gratified. The original Mustang he created 35 years ago still has plenty of fans.

They responded quickly after I spun the sad saga of my Methuselah the Mustang in this space last Saturday. Methuze, the 1965 poppy red friend who had carried me through my adult life for nearly 34 years, had been stolen April 24 from a Koo Koo Roo parking lot in Larchmont Village during the half-hour it took me to eat lunch.

Advice was voluminous and swift: Publish the license plate number so Mustang aficionados can watch for Methuselah roaming the freeways. Enlist the help of every member of every Mustang club. Contact truck drivers, who are sure to spot it. Never give up. Even police and insurance officials kept reminding me that 95% of stolen cars are recovered.

And, inevitably, a scolding from an older woman caller: “In retrospect, don’t you think you should have had a LoJack on your car?”

Frankly, ma’am, until this happened, I had never even heard of LoJacks, those silent tracking devices.

Clearly, nobody who loves Iacocca’s little masterpiece could conceive of any thief doing anything other than driving a Mustang.

“We can at least hope that he is intact and being enjoyed by some Middle Eastern potentate who ordered such a car, and isn’t in pieces in a chop shop in Mexico,”

wrote a Westside friend of Methuselah’s and mine.

I espoused the potentate theory myself--telling everyone that I believed a professional had stolen Methuselah and shipped it abroad to a wealthy collector, perhaps even on order. Since I once explored the Nile with an Egyptologist who drove a new Mercedes but coveted a 1965 Mustang, I knew there was a Middle Eastern market. I understand the car is popular in Japan too.

But late Monday, nine days after Methuselah’s disappearance, I got an e-mail that began: “We read the article on Saturday about your lost car.”

Somehow I knew this message was not another of the many accounts sent to me about a love affair with a vintage vehicle.

“Being the most diligent and professional real estate brokers,” the e-mail continued somewhat tongue in cheek, “we have promptly located your car--at least most of it. Please call me for more information.”

At least most of it.

The note was signed Barry Baker of Grubb & Ellis. One digit was missing from the included phone number, but I guessed and on the first try managed to punch in the number of his partner, David Lachoff.

Baker, the diligent and professional Westside real estate broker, quickly came on the phone to describe his unintentional--but truly diligent and professional--detective work.

He had gone to inspect a South-Central Los Angeles day-care center property in foreclosure, planning to list it for California National Bank. Walking behind the abandoned building, he related, he saw in a sort of carport what he could still recognize as a 1965 Mustang.

Good eyes. Times ace photographer Ken Lubas, who managed to follow Baker’s directions to Methuselah well ahead of the police, found the remains hidden on three sides and in no way visible from the street.

Without license plates or registration--or much else, really--how did Baker decide the hulk was Methuselah my Mustang? Must be that diligence and professionalism. Curiosity, at least.

In the glove compartment he found a few odd pieces of paper--my Winston guarantee for the steel-belted radials amazingly still on the car. A service receipt from Chuck’s Auto. A newspaper clipping he looked at only when we were finally talking on the phone.

And a 25th birthday card addressed to “Methuselah.” The clipping, of course, was my earlier Times story of Methuselah on the car’s 25th birthday in 1990.

“It was the name,” he said. “Your article flashed through my mind.”

As word filtered out, reaction again was swift: You must rebuild Methuselah. Whatever is left, it’s still Methuselah.

Los Angeles Police Department auto Det. Thomas Marchetti of the 77th Street Division, who investigated and set the car on its way to either reconstruction or the junkyard, had no problem remembering my case. They don’t get many 1965 Mustangs in 77th Street, he said.

Marchetti called the crime a “strategic strip.”

“They wanted those parts for another ’65 Mustang,” he said.

They must have needed a lot of parts. Chrome. Whole front body. Doors. Trunk lid. Seats. Air conditioner. Radiator. Battery. Completely worn out spare tire. Even the throw rugs I used to line the trunk. All gone.

Throw rugs?

I consulted the expert--Chuck Francis, the Chuck of Chuck’s Auto and Dream Machines of America, who has cared for Methuselah in recent memory and last year installed that spiffy new air conditioning.

He hesitated. Then said slowly, “It would be a very long walk in the park. We could do it but. . . . “ From previous conversations, I knew that state-of-the-art reconstruction of an original Mustang can run well into five figures, 15 or 20 times Methuselah’s original $2,400 price. Certainly well beyond what insurance will cover (negotiations continue) and probably beyond my budget and depth of fortitude.

But, after tracking Methuselah by phone from foreclosed property to storage lot and almost to a salvage yard, I persuaded the insurance adjuster to have it towed to Chuck’s. That may not be routine, I told the insurance man, but this isn’t a routine car. Chuck, I reasoned, could either rebuild it or use what’s left in another work of art. If anybody is going to pick Methuselah’s bones, I want it to be a friend.

Will Methuselah the Mustang be resurrected? I dunno.

I’ve heard actor Liam Neeson recently disparaging the cultism surrounding the imminent “Star Wars: The Phantom Menace” by saying: “After all, it’s just a movie.”

Well, after all, Lee Iacocca’s brilliant little 1965 Mustang is just a car.

Yeah, right.