The Lord and Ferrari fraud

Brocket lost $300,000 after buying a 1966 Ferrari from an American dealer only to find that it had been resold to someone else for twice the price before the necessary restoration was even finished. Another $120,000 was lost in buying a ‘complete’ Maserati 450S engine that was in reality just a pile of scrap. Worse still was a Ferrari believed to be an authentic competition 250 GT SWB that was later deemed by a well-known Ferrari expert to be a fake and was sold at a huge loss.

Eventually Brocket’s enviable collection was valued at £20 million and numbered over 40 cars. Among them were some historically important sports and racing models, including a 1974 Ferrari 312B3 Formula 1 car driven by Niki Lauda and Clay Regazzoni and a Maserati 300S raced by Juan Manuel Fangio and Stirling Moss. Brocket competed in some of the cars, especially his Ferrari 250 MM, in historic racing events in the US and Europe. His cars were frequently invited to participate at the Goodwood Festival of Speed and he regularly raced in the annual House of Lords vs House of Commons contests at Brands Hatch, one of which he recalls winning.

However, by 1990 the cars had started to become more of a burden than a pleasure to Brocket. The classic car company had generated £1 million of profits on trading but overall had made big losses thanks to various poor deals, dishonesty within the trade and tax disputes with HM Customs & Excise on cars that had been imported. With interest rates in the UK having doubled to 15 per cent in little more than a year, repaying the bank loans, which now totalled £7.5 million, had become cripplingly expensive. Some of Bosisto’s deals had been excellent, for example Ferrari Daytonas that had been bought for £80,000 were selling for £250,000, but others had been disastrous. Not only was the collection in debt but in March 1990 Brocket had his first real disagreement with Bosisto after he paid far too much for three Maseratis from the US that turned out to be total wrecks.

Bosisto threatened to leave Brocket’s employment if his decisions were questioned, saying that without him the bank would pull the plug on the whole operation. Worse was to come when Bosisto was found dead in his home under what Brocket was convinced were suspicious circumstances. He knew Bosisto, who lived in a mobile home, had always kept a pistol for his personal protection in a bedside drawer but when his body was found the weapon was on top of the drawer, suggesting that he had been expecting trouble. In addition, the keys that he would have used to open his exterior door were nowhere to be seen so it was likely that someone had removed them, and there was £3000 cash in his jacket pocket. Later that morning an Italian phoned the showroom asking if Bosisto had left for London, saying that he was expecting payment of £30,000 cash, but no one knew for what and whether the banknotes found were a deposit.

After Bosisto’s burial near the Pembrokeshire coast in his native Wales, the executors of his will contacted Brocket to inform him that one of Bosisto’s bank accounts contained £120,000, which was an astounding amount for an old man who had always professed to having no savings. When the only surviving relative came to collect the former racing driver’s possessions, he unearthed paperwork that explained everything, namely that the prices that Bosisto had actually paid for cars were generally very much lower than what had been charged to the collection, with the discrepancies sometimes being as much as three-fold. It also transpired that he had been syphoning money from the company into his own account, so it seemed likely that the £120,000 was the tip of the iceberg and that other bank accounts probably existed – but the truth had gone with him to the grave.

Meanwhile, Brocket found an American called Rick Furtado to take Bosisto’s place as an agent but in due course discovered that his new employee had more than a dozen convictions in his home country, including larceny of controlled substances, breaking and entering, cheque fraud and falsifying number plates. With the classic car market by now showing signs of overheating, Brocket, anxious to clear his debts, accepted an offer from a Japanese consortium of £15 million for ten of the cars sourced by Furtado, but several months passed and the deal didn’t materialise. By this time, it was too late as Brocket’s car business, and more, was about to crash. As the collection had been used as security, the bank’s position was that Brocket Hall and the estate would have to be sold.

In 1990, the British economy was in recession. Many banks were guilty of irresponsible lending of money to people who, like Brocket, could no longer afford to service their debt after interest rates spiralled. The property market was on the verge of crashing and the collector car market was not too far behind it. In August, Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait and the rise in international tensions impacted the travel industry and led to a decline in corporate bookings at Brocket Hall. By Christmas, with the Gulf War against Iraq soon to begin, there were signs that prices of collector cars had peaked. Sales of even the most historically important cars stopped abruptly and there was suddenly a shortage of buyers at any price.

The value of Brocket Hall, around £9 million, was almost the same amount as Brocket now owed to his bank. One evening when discussing the dire financial problems with his wife Isabel and two shocked mechanics, Mark Caswell and Steve Gwyther, he told them that the conference business was solid, despite its problems, but that the car collection was where the serious worries lay. He explained that he couldn’t simply close the car company and turn the stock over to the bank because he had given a personal guarantee to them using the house as security, which meant that this was at risk of being seized by the bank. The four calculated that £4.5 million was the sum needed to ease the immediate financial pressure by reducing the debt and lowering the interest repayments for long enough for the market to recover.

They all knew that most of the cars were insured for more than their actual values, so the idea was hatched to dispose of four cars, each worth over £1 million, and claim on the insurance. The problem was how best to do it. Caswell, a tough Cockney who had worked in his spare time as a nightclub bouncer and a special policeman, proposed that the cars be destroyed in a crusher owned by one of his contacts. Brocket declined this suggestion on the basis that it would be sacrilege to eradicate works of art. Instead, they plotted to dismantle the chosen cars, remove them from the estate, report them as stolen and then claim on the insurance policy. This plan had the advantage that if the claim went ahead, the dismantled cars could be hidden, but if for any reason it was rejected, they could be miraculously discovered after a ‘tip-off’ and be rebuilt. Gwyther agreed to help for a sum of £25,000, enough to buy his dream car, a second-hand Porsche 911 Targa, but Caswell insisted on £40,000 (later increased to £100,000) as he still favoured the finality of his crusher plan.

The cars they decided to report as missing were a 1960 Maserati ‘Birdcage’ and three Ferraris, a 1950 195 Berlinetta Sport, a 1952 340 America and a competition 1955 250 GT Europa. Brocket later pointed out that the choices were arrived at not just because of insurance value but because of shortcomings in the cars: ‘The Maserati had a replica body, the 195’s body had rotted and had to be scrapped, and the 340 and Europa’s bodies were made from steel which could be more easily replaced.’ He also later recalled that it was with a heavy heart that the demolition took place: ‘I again promised myself that these cars would, one day, be rebuilt.’

It took the men three nights of hard work to dismantle the four ‘stolen’ cars and grind the incriminating chassis and engine numbers off various components, because, for once, the fraudsters didn’t want them to be identifiable in any way. Larger parts of beautifully sculpted bodywork were burned in the vast furnace used for heating the garage complex.

In May 1991, the ‘theft’ was reported, and the story made headlines across Britain. At first the police thought that the cars had been taken to order and whisked away on a transporter under cover of darkness, although suspicions did arise because it seemed unlikely that thieves would have been able to disable the sophisticated alarm system without leaving signs. Despite subsequent widespread conjecture in the press, the dismantled cars were neither buried under the park’s golf course nor submerged in the lake but were transported to a less glamorous location on the outskirts of London where they were stored in a shipping container. However, as the cars went to pieces, so too did Lady Brocket.

In 1982, Charles had been forbidden from marrying Judy, the previous love of his life, by his family and trustees of the estate because they disapproved after discovering that she had done some nude modelling to make ends meet as an impoverished student at Cambridge. On the rebound, he rushed into a mismatched union with Isabel Lorenzo, an American who had once been one of the world’s most successful supermodels. The relationship had been doomed from the outset and became increasingly fractious due to his wife’s drug addiction combined with a heavy dependency on prescription painkillers that had a profound and destructive effect. As things deteriorated, she had repeatedly made threats to tell the police about the false insurance claim and had already chosen to tell certain people, including her husband’s mother and some of their close friends.

In some respects, things also looked up for Brocket. In an extraordinary turnaround, his bank recognised that the local manager, with whom the loans had been arranged, had been out of his depth and decided to take responsibility for having lent £5 million at the height of the market and then leaving the combined businesses stranded when car prices collapsed. In recognition of this, the bank’s board of directors agreed a rescue package in which it offered to lend Brocket £15 million interest-free over ten years. In return it would take a 25 per cent stake in the business that could later be bought back at extremely favourable terms and all Brocket would need to do was meet the capital repayments. Fulfilment of this obligation required Brocket Hall to trade at an easily achievable minimum occupancy rate of only 15 per cent. By the end of 1993, the attractive interest-free deal was done.

The security of the working capital meant that Brocket himself no longer needed, nor wanted, to pursue his fraudulent insurance claim, which the insurance company, General Accident, continued to contest, refusing to pay out until theft could actually be proven. But there was the matter of how to go about dropping the claim after the various legal actions and prolonged delay along the way. It was decided that, through his lawyer, Brocket would tell General Accident that he was going to take the company to court, a move that encouraged the insurer to apply to the court asking it to order him to lodge his share of the costs (£700,000) to prove that he could afford the proposed action. However, Brocket didn’t have the means to pay this himself and the bank wasn’t prepared to allow its loan to be used on a lawsuit that he might lose, so he was forced to drop his case against the insurer and the claim was formally withdrawn. It seemed to be an elegant escape from a hole: General Accident had won the battle, no suspicion could be attached to him as he hadn’t received a penny in compensation, and he and his accomplices would be in the clear – or so he thought.

Isabel’s drug abuse was now out of control and she was descending into self-destruction, unwilling to seek help or treatment. The couple were living separately and divorce was inevitable. Her irrational behaviour was the result of hallucinations caused by taking vast amounts of painkillers that she obtained by means of duplicate prescriptions from a pharmacy in the nearby town, Welwyn Garden City, and taking them to other chemists to get the extra supplies. In September 1994 she was arrested for forging prescriptions. In retaliation for her mistaken belief that her husband had hidden some of her pills, she finally carried out her threat and told the police about the plot, making detailed criminal allegations. Despite the police having no physical evidence of the cars or their whereabouts, Brocket and his accomplices were arrested in February 1995. Under questioning and fearful of a heavy sentence, Caswell cracked and divulged where the cars were stored.

Almost exactly a year later at Luton Crown Court, 43-year-old Charles Brocket was sentenced to five years imprisonment by Judge Daniel Rodwell, who described his coercion of two men ‘previously of good record to take part in a criminal operation as quite disgraceful’. Caswell and Gwyther were each given 21-month sentences suspended for two years. Part of Brocket’s more severe sentence was for obtaining money by deception.

This offence involved the aforementioned fake Ferrari 250 GT SWB Berlinetta with the 3565 GT chassis plate. In late 1992 the car had been put up for sale with an asking price of $750,000 and well-known Ferrari collector Jon Shirley, a top Microsoft executive, had bought it through an intermediary, Ron Spangler, after believing that its provenance had been thoroughly checked. The truth only emerged in 1994 when the real 3565 GT was discovered in a garage in France where it had lain unused for many years. Brocket was adamant that he hadn’t been involved in the transaction but pleaded guilty in any case to secure a move from Littlehey prison, near Huntingdon, where he had been on the receiving end of vicious knife attacks.

After serving two and a half years of his sentence in seven different prisons, Lord Brocket was released after remission in August 1998. The butchered cars have all been reassembled and returned to their former glory.

This story is just one of over 90 published in a new book ‘Driven To Crime’ by Crispian Besley. It details tales of drug trafficking, corruption, embezzlement, robbery, fraud, murder and money laundering and many other examples of everything from high crimes to simply terrible behaviour over 480 well researched and fluently written pages. It’s on sale now priced at £40 and is available from EVRO Publishing here.