The Car Guys
That 1996 Honda Accord is part of the story, really, and it’s a doozy. It’s the car Raymond Milo was driving two years ago when he pulled up at the house in Bakersfield, to which he had been invited, finally, to look at the doorless, seatless, hoodless, engine-less carcass of an early 1950s Deutsch-Bonnet that the owner, a woman who had inherited it from her husband, was trying to sell.
Her son-in-law had contacted Milo months before, probably because of the ads he runs in car magazines seeking obscure American and European race cars. The telephone call caught Milo at the airport in Singapore. When he declined to say what the car was worth sight unseen, the son-in-law began phoning around, and everyone else declined to say what the car was worth--and advised him to call Milo. This, of course, got back to Milo, who waited patiently until the son-in-law contacted him again and said, we’d like you to come out and look over the car.
Even before Milo got there, he knew this car was unique. From its chassis number, he realized it was one of a tiny number of special body competition roadsters built in the 1950s by the French company. Suddenly he was staring at one. He was also trying to read the seller’s face, and he could see the mistrust, that she and her son-in-law were afraid they would sell the car for too little. Milo, who had brought cash and told them so, asked what they wanted for the car. They said $4,000. “I know if I say OK, they’re going to say, let us think it over some more,” says Milo. “I do my best Stanislavsky school number. Four thousand dollars? What do you think you are selling?”
After a long conversation, during which he made the point that it would cost him $200 just to haul the car back to L.A., they settled on $3,800. Actually, he paid $500 to have it trucked, but that’s OK. The next day he sold the Deutsch-Bonnet to a Japanese collector for $44,500. And he would make additional fees overseeing the car’s restoration in Paris. And that’s not all.
Just before the French were to make the replacement doors, the seller called with the news that she had found the originals. “I said, ‘Would you like to have lunch with me at 12 or 12:30?’ She said, ‘I have no time for lunch, but you’re welcome to come for the doors.’ I sent her a bottle of champagne and a thank-you card afterward.” Then he made $7,000 selling the doors to the collector.
If this sounds ruthless, it’s not. Milo is one of the few people on the planet who knows the importance of this car, that it was eligible to race at Le Mans and had actually raced twice at Sebring, winning its class one time and coming in second the other. This makes it of enormous value to an even smaller number of people who have the desire and the money to buy it. Without him this car might never have acquired its heavenly new life.
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The May 2007 Hemmings Motor News is an inch thick. The bible of the collector car industry, it’s filled with thousands of vehicles for sale. You would think America is car crazy.
Car collecting gained real speed in the early 1970s, says Milo, as Americans realized that a Corvette or a Shelby Cobra from the 1960s was infinitely more interesting than anything Detroit was churning out. By the 1980s, collecting cars was a full-blown passion, with the turbocharged prices to go with it.
Then the market hit a tough patch in the 1990s. Milo, a mechanical engineer who owned a publishing company before devoting himself to car dealing, survived, emerging from the slump with less of a desire to compete against the masses dealing in Bentleys and Ferraris and a wish to specialize in the vintage race cars--the Elvas, Delahayes, Auburns, Dorettis--that had gained a monied following. He also realized that for him these cars had a certain indescribable beauty. “The market follows the intrinsic value of a car, which is nebulous and intangible,” he says. “You can’t define it, but you know it when you see it. It’s hard to put into words. I deal in cars that have that.”
His sense of what’s collectible works about 70% of the time, he says. “The rest of the time I sweat it.” Looking back on the early ‘90s, he shudders. “But now we have a completely different market,” he says. “I would say that since 2001 the market has gone mad. I used to say nothing can go up forever.” He bites down on the unlit cigar he carries since he quit smoking March 30. “But if I had bought every car that I wanted to in 2002, I would have doubled or tripled my money by now.”
He likens it to the Southern California real estate market. His house in the Hollywood Hills, which he bought in 1977 for $75,000, is now surrounded by multimillion-dollar properties. “I don’t know who these people are, but there seem to be a lot of people with a lot of money. And they’re not buying these cars as investments.
“A guy owns 15 Ferraris of recent manufacture, and he doesn’t know how to drive a single one of them. But before he takes his friend to his wine cellar he takes him to his 15-car garage. There’s a tribe in East Africa that doesn’t eat cows yet it supports large herds of cows. Why? Because it’s a sign of wealth. Collecting cars has become cool as a way to show your flash.”
He’s content now to sell maybe 10 cars a year, to learn, at the ripe age of 69, even more esoterica, like when he discovered at the vintage car fair in Paris this year that a certain Deutsch-Bonnet he had owned had been made with a supercharger. He’s fascinated by hot rods and might expand into that arena, probably because, like the cars he deals in, their value comes from their racing history.
He’s past needing to drive a Ferrari or Shelby Cobra as he once did, when he was only able to afford them on an engineer’s salary by dealing in cars on the side. So the old Honda that he inherited from his stepfather sits by itself in the garage, while its owner jets around the world seeking the rarest of cars.
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If Raymond Milo has a foot in the past, Henry Gruszniewski is very much in the moment. He has just taken a call from Barry Greenfield, a business manager for a number of Hollywood celebrities. An actor client wants a flint mica Lexus SUV hybrid--now. The problem is the color, an uncommon pearlescent black. There are only four of them for sale in the West, and all are spoken for except for one in Reno. Gruszniewski starts dickering with the Reno dealer, who is only willing to come down $1,000 on the sticker price. Gruszniewski, who understands every wrinkle of what that car is worth, also knows that Lexus is about do to a radical redesign on the RX, which makes this ’08 model in Reno obsolete before it’s even sold. He doesn’t think it’s a good deal until the price comes down $3,000. Meanwhile, he places an order for an identical car through an L.A. dealership. Should the Reno dealer not budge, and the actor decides to wait for a better deal, it will arrive from Japan in a matter of weeks. In typical fashion, Gruszniewski’s got all the bases covered.
Gruszniewski advertises his business, Henry’s Werkstatt und Koachwerks, as a complete car service. For his clients, who include Hollywood and business world heavy-hitters--and their relatives and secretaries and their relatives--he might do things as mundane as starting their cars while they’re gone, getting them washed, figuring out why a battery died (the restaurant valet left the car trunk open and so the bulb stayed on). Or they might be as sophisticated as taking a precious vintage car to a fancy show and displaying it so that the owner, who won’t be attending, can brag about it at his office. For this last service, he charges $500 for the day.
Like Milo, Gruszniewski believes bragging rights have a lot to do with the big money in collectible cars. He’s a bit tired of it. “Nowadays it’s my wheels are better than your wheels, my paint is better than your paint. I just spent $50,000 on my engine, how much did you spend?” The shows that excite him are the ones on the fringes, where “the old guy in his 80s pulls up in his car and he’s the original owner. He’s kept it up and he’s proud of it. His wife never gets out of the car, because she can barely walk, and he gets out with his duster and cleans it off.”
Now 53, with the charming habit of saying “correct” for “yes,” he’s been a gearhead since he was 13. That’s when he revived a 1950 Chevy his father bought for $50, and got his first of many unlicensed driver tickets. Deeply immersed in cars by the time he graduated from Fairfax High School, he put himself through UCLA fixing up and selling them.
The bulk of his work today is brokering new and collector cars for his clients, and then protecting them. “When I bring in one of their cars to be serviced, I know what’s wrong with the car, so the service writers can’t take advantage of them,” he says. “Service managers get a percentage of what they write up. So they’re going to say you have only 15% left on your brake pads and make you feel like the tires will go out tomorrow. When, for most drivers, that’s 2,000 more miles left on the pads.”
But there are still the goose-bump moments when he’s on the trail of a hot vintage car. A 1957 Fiat Abarth surfaces in San Luis Obispo, this close to serious deterioration, rescued by Nino and Leo Gaudino, two mechanics who know its significance and do a partial restoration. The Abarth, whose counterparts had made the weekend “gentleman racers” of the 1950s feel like professional drivers, is worth acquiring, Gruszniewski tells the owner of Inline Automotive, a vintage car showroom. One more car saved.
And he’s the soothsayer when actor Jason Priestley, one of Greenfield’s clients, decides to clean out his garage, including a Ford Cosworth. The car is barely a decade old, but it’s a modern-day rarity, sold only in Europe for its thriving rally-car scene. There is definitely a cult following for that car, he advises the showroom.
Like Milo, he remembers the early ‘90s as a shakedown for car collectors, when the Ferrari and Porsche people were stung the worst. He’s waiting for another market correction, and predicts that those who got into the market last, paying $100,000 for a Camaro or $500,000 for a Corvette, will be the ones to go upside-down. Sometimes he watches the car auctions on the Speed channel and he can’t believe how overheated the car market is.
But some cars are gold--the prewar Bugattis, Delages, Duesenbergs, Packards and Rolls, any Bentley, the V-12 Ferraris of the ‘50s and ‘60s--and those are the ones he might focus on someday. He’s waiting for real estate prices to correct, and then he’ll buy a home with room for a workshop where he can restore a few world-class cars and one day, he hopes most of all, to be invited to the Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance. “Just once in my lifetime,” he says, “then I’m done.”
