As we mentioned last week, Jay Leno is being sued for illegally purchasing a 1931 Duesenberg back in 2005 at a sham auction. The car, along with an expensive 1930 Rolls Royce were sold at auction after a Manhattan parking garage, owned by Garage Management Corp, claimed it stopped receiving payments to store the car.
The cars were owned by the heir to Macy’s, John W. Straus who reportedly didn’t pay for the cars, which he stored there for over 50 years, because he was ill with dementia at the time.
According to the Manhattan Supreme Court filing, it claims that exec Dennis Ricca, Leno, some other top execs at Garage Management Corp. and their affiliates “knowingly participated in certain unlawful purported auctions and sales of” Straus’ two cars. The Rolls convertible, valued at $500,000, somehow ended up in the possession of the parking garage’s director of maintenance, Ricca.
In 2005, the garage informed the demented Straus that his account “was massively in arrears and that the cars would be auctioned off if he didn’t pay the more than $20,000 he owed.”
So Straus, who was in his 80s at the time, sent a check. However, the garage “allegedly did a bait-and-switch and applied the payments to arrears he owed for two far less valuable cars he was keeping in another facility owned by GMC.”
SHADY!!!!
That’s when the garage then “purportedly held sham “public” auctions for the cars, with its corporate alter ego getting the Duesenberg for a $0 bid and the Rolls for an unknown amount.”
However, Leno and the garage’s attorney said they were entitled to sell the car because Straus had become “extremely delinquent in the payment of storage fees.”
Yea right, that’s why he sent in the check and they still got sold? We smell something fishy here.
As for some people, they might say that the guilt has gotten the best of exec Dennis Ricca. Reports are being released that Ricca killed himself just days after they were all sued for the alleged illegal sell of Straus’ cars. Turns out Ricca shot himself in the head with his 9 mm pistol last Friday while sitting in a pickup truck outside one of his homes.
Though, according to his neighbors, Ricca appeared depressed for months. One neighbor, Bob Hadley, added, “He seemed stressed out from work.” While another neighbor said, “That did it to him.”
Ricca was found dead in his car.
No suicide note was left.
[Image via Buzz Foto.]
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