DRIVEN TO CRIME PART 2

YESTERDAY WE GLEANED TIDBITS from Crispian Besley’s Driven to Crime: True Stories of Wrongdoing in Motor Racing. Today in Part 2, we find that clever deceits have a way of unraveling. 

A Copperstate Interlude. It was on one of the Arizona Copperstate 1000s that I met Lord Brocket. Given that Wife Dottie and I enjoyed Copperstates for more than a decade, including the inaugural 1991 event, I don’t remember the precise year he attended. 1994? 1995? Suffice to say, we all found Lord Brocket to be a charming guy.  

Image from “Copperstate Lore.”

Bosisto Offed. To pick up on Besley’s commentary, “Worse was to come, when Bosisto [sorta Brocket’s fixer] was found dead in his home under what Brocket was convinced were suspicious circumstances.” 

Subsequent investigation revealed that Bosisto had been skimming profits from Brocket Hall big time.

A Weak Economy; a Devilish Ploy. “In 1990,” Besley continues, “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 spiraled….. The value of Brocket Hall, around £9 million, was almost the same amount as Brocket now owed to his bank.”

This prompted Brocket and his mechanics Mark Caswell and Steve Gwyther to concoct a scheme; his wife Isabel listened in: Select several cars to be dismantled, removed from the estate, reported stolen, and claimed on the insurance. 

Besley observes, “This plan had the advantage that if a 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.”

From top to bottom, the four cars dismantled: a Ferrari 340 America Spider Touring, a Ferrari 195, a Ferrari Europa, and a Maserati Tipo 60 (Birdcage). Representative images from hagerty.com.

Convolutions. “However,” Besley recounts, “as the cars went to pieces, so too did Lady Brocket.” Isabel Lorenzo “had been one of the world’s most successful supermodels,” but she was also a serious druggie. “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.” 

Loose lips sink ships. Er, float dismantled car parts.

For a while there, banking skullduggery seemingly rescued Brocket and he, Besley notes, “no longer needed, nor wanted , to pursue his fraudulent insurance claim….” 

But then Lady Brocket got nicked for shopping chemists and, as she had threatened, she spilled the beans. (Sorry for the mixed metaphors; it was a complex case.) 

Besley describes, “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 [in a shipping container on the outskirts of London].”

Brocket got five years’ imprisonment. Caswell and Gwyther were each given 21-month sentences suspended for two years. 

“After serving two and a half years of his sentence in seven different prisons, Brocket was released after remission [i.e., more lenient than a supervised parole] in August 1998. The butchered cars have all been reassembled and returned to their former glory.” 

According to Wikipedia, Charles Nall-Cain, 3rd Baron Brocket, has transformed all this into his being a television presenter in the U.K. I told you he was a charming guy.

© Dennis Simanaitis, SimanaitisSays.com, 2023