As the 1953 Siata 300 BC Barchetta is driven on stage, it catches fire. Enthusiasts call this car the “baby Ferrari.” It burns like a Pinto.
Thick smoke pours from the dashboard. The jockey in the driver’s seat jumps to safety. An acrid smell fills the Ritz-Carlton ballroom.
“Oh dear!” says Max Girardo.
This is a car sale. The auctioneer is Girardo—an Australian of such exaggerated urbanity he’s very close to imaginary. For just a moment, he watches the car going up with childish delight.
People rush willy-nilly onto the dais. Girardo appears with a fire extinguisher. It isn’t required. Whatever’s burning inside the dashboard has stopped.
Girardo returns to the podium to address his audience. There are 1,000 people wedged into the cavernous room. With few exceptions, they are old, moneyed and easily amused.
“Wasn’t that ex-CI-ting?” Girardo trills. Everyone coos. “We assure you, ladies and gentlemen, that we will have the electrics checked.”
The stricken jockey gets back into the car and stares dead ahead as it rotates slowly on the stage. Girardo begins picking buyers out of the crowd. The bids are subtle movements, impossible to catch from the periphery. There are spotters deployed, in case he misses one. Most of the action comes in from a bank of employees manning phones along the wall.
Four minutes later, the crisped Siata sells for $258,000 (U.S.). Three gloved men push it into the back. A Rolls-Royce the size of a bus replaces it.
This will go on for six hours—three or four minutes per car, 102 in all. In that time, they’ll shift $60-million worth of transportation. This is the RM Auctions Amelia Island sale, where the super-rich come once a year to spend jaw-dropping amounts on automobiles.
This event—along with nearly a dozen more around the world, in places like Paris, Monaco and Monterey, California—is the creation of Chatham, Ontario’s Rob Myers. Nearly 40 years ago, Myers, 58, got rooked in a sale like this one. Today, he’s the hub around which the highest end of the global vintage auto market rotates, along with the travelling circus it attracts.
Many of Myers’s employees are European sharpies who look as if they lived at the Ritz. Not Myers. While he services these people, spends time with these people, and is as rich as many of these people, Myers is not one of these people.
It’s midmorning, the day before the auction. Myers is schlepping around the Ritz lobby at Amelia Island, a lush spot a half-hour and a whole world away from Jacksonville, Florida.
The place is thronged with gawkers ogling cars they can’t afford. Buyers pay $300 to attend the auction and need a letter of credit.
Myers is easy to spot—blunt-featured, tilted forward, hands working in the air like he’s juggling. He is a great bear of a man, incapable of stillness. He’s the sort of guy you’d invite over for the weekend, and he’d build you a new shed.
He can’t move 10 feet without being stopped. I’d call it being pestered, but Myers enjoys the contact. He’s by turns uncouth, charming, solicitous or haughty, depending on the audience.
These people are the very top of the economic food chain. They are mostly men, all wearing the uniform of aging American aristocrats—$2,000 blazers and cheap ball caps. I put it to Myers that he’s not much like them.
“Maybe not. I’m a chameleon. I can talk to the president of the United States or the fellow sitting on the corner smoking a cigarette. I get it,” Myers says. “You tell someone they’re a chameleon, it almost sounds sneaky…but it’s making someone comfortable. I’m good at it. If you’re dead honest and dead true, you’re f---ed. People won’t put up with it.”
He is charismatic, but not suave. There’s no sense here of being finessed. The vintage car business is famously dodgy. It’s hard for even very experienced collectors to be precisely sure what they are buying. Who’s done what to the engine over the years? Unless you take it apart, it can be difficult to tell.
Myers employs eight researchers to hunt down every knowable detail about the cars he’s selling. He works on the resilient theory that if the product is above reproach, price becomes immaterial. Everyone at the auction has access to the company’s database of information compiled on each car. If they’re wrong about anything, Myers will work it out with the buyer personally.
To the newcomer, it’s hard to say what’s valuable by looking. The jewel of the Amelia Island sale is a 1960 Ferrari SuperAmerica. To me, it looks like an MG painted an off-putting olive green. It sells for $6.4 million.
This is my first experience of an auctioneer who really knows what he’s doing, and it’s a marvel. Girardo doesn’t wheedle. Quite the opposite. He’s your money’s spirit animal—he knows where it wants to be.
Switching seamlessly between English, Italian and French (he heads up RM’s European branch), Girardo gently badgers his jet-set customers. He huffs that a Lamborghini Miura is stuck “at just $2 million…I can’t believe it for such a car.”
The price jumps by $300,000.
“It’s just money,” Girardo purrs later to a diffident millionaire. “You can make more of it on Monday. But what you cannot do on Monday is buy a 599 [Ferrari].”
His target raises the bid by $50,000. He loses.
At one point—when I’ve been beaten senseless by the size of the numbers—a pristine, cherry-red 1987 Porsche 911 comes out. The bidding lingers in five figures for a while and a life-destroying thought occurs to me: “Why not?”
But, thank Christ, I don’t have a bid number, and I’m sober. It sells for $220,000. You begin to understand why this process works. It’s psycho-engineered to make you stupid.
The most exceptional offering—and not necessarily in a good way—is a 1971 Ferrari Berlinetta. This car lay tarped and on blocks in the parking lot of a Toronto condominium for a quarter-century. Eventually, the owner, Toronto businessman Patrick Sinn (who bought it for $18,000 new), decided to cash in. He did a little research, which led him to Myers. The day after he called them, an RM rep was in his garage, going over the car.
During the preview period, the Berlinetta is displayed on the lawn behind the Ritz. It doesn’t look like a Ferrari. Not in the Magnum P.I. sense. Or the Columbo sense. This bucket looks like a Datsun a high-school pal of mine used to deliver pizzas in. Every corner is chipped. The paint is bubbling. The wheels are bald, the spokes oil-caked. The whole thing is filthy.
The windows don’t quite line up with the frame. The hood doesn’t close properly. This car is proof of the “cracked window” theory of policing. No one touches the (far less valuable) Porsches and Mercedes lined up alongside it. But the so-called Condo Find is getting treated like a beater on a second-hand lot. Everyone opens the door for a look. Some idiot begins yanking hard on the crooked bonnet, trying to pry it open.
“This isn’t a car you’re going to drive home in,” RM’s vice-president, Alain Squindo, says drily.
The key to the Berlinetta’s value is threefold—its Ferrariness, the fact that all of its parts are original (almost unheard of) and that only one person has ever owned it. The provenance is unassailable.
Myers comes out to have his picture taken alongside it. It is a bit of a process. He’s spilled ketchup on his shirt, and someone has to find him a jacket. For his first pose, he extends his middle finger. Eventually, he climbs in to caress the interior.
The person who buys this is going to give it right back to you for a complete makeover, right?
“I hope not,” Myers says hotly. “F---, you can’t buy an original but once.”
It’s unlike anything else here, most of which is perfect metal art. I’m using Girardo as an inside-out guide. When he says something is “quite pretty,” it’s spectacular. When he says it’s “very special,” it needs a little work. The Condo Find is “very, very special.”
In the end, it nets $700,000. The bidder is Myers himself, working the phone for a client.
“He’ll make it brand new,” Myers grumbles. “I’m going to try my best to talk him into not doing it.”
Myers is a car guy, but he is, more importantly, a trader and a connector of people. He’s not particular about the commodities or the people. He once swapped a piano “and a whole bunch of other junk” for the contents of a men’s clothing store. The owner of the store had money. He’d bought it for a girlfriend. When they broke up, he wanted rid of it.
The two of them then bundled dozens of Armani suits into the back of a panel van, drove to another friend’s bike dealership, and exchanged everything for three Harley-Davidsons. Myers wedged the bikes into the truck and fled.
“I knew I had to get out of there fast or he’d call off the deal. He came to his senses while I was driving home, but I said, ‘No, no, no—we had an agreement.’”
Another time, he traded the interior restoration of a vintage car for a herd of pigs.
What did you do with them?
We’re sitting in Myers’s office in Chatham. He looks across his desk, trying to figure out if I’m a little thick: “I sold them to a pig farmer.”
Myers started his first business after dropping out of high school. His parents told him that if he wasn’t going to class, he’d have to leave home. Myers paid $1,000 for a shack on the Lake Erie shore and moved out. He was 16.
Like his father, he’d always been good at fixing things—they used to work on cars together when he was a kid. Myers began to custom-paint motorbikes for a local Honda dealer. The business grew. Myers hired a mechanic. He opened a garage. They began refurbishing cars. All this was self-taught. He built the business through referrals.
In his early 20s, he dipped his toe into auctions with a Cadillac he’d restored himself. In the midst of bidding, someone began screaming at him to drop his reserve—a minimum price set by the seller. He did. The car sold. The next day, it was back on the block. This time, it went for nearly double the price. He’d been taken.
“I thought to myself, ‘Okay, I get how this works.’”
(Many years later, he avenged himself by buying the assets of the company that had held the auction.)
In the late 1980s, Myers stumbled on a way to combine his obsessions—by creating a series of for-profit museums. It was a disaster. He went broke on paper.
But he was still trading.
It was 1991. He’d been buying and selling for more than a decade, figuring out the auction business. Like most really difficult things, it’s a simple premise. You give me something of value. I ballpark what it’s worth. I present it to a group of people interested in buying it. They bid up the price. It sells. I take money on both ends—10% of its sold value from the buyer, and 5% from the seller.
Most people auctioning high-end cars came at it from the buying-and-selling end. They didn’t fully understand their product. Myers spotted an exploitable wedge.
Though broke, he borrowed money to buy a modest Toronto auction house. “It cost me a hundred-and-twenty-seven thousand. I didn’t have 127 bucks.”
He found a bankrupt Lamborghini dealership outside the city. He convinced the creditors he could sell the cars. His first auction—at Toronto’s International Centre—made $4.6 million. There was still a ways to go. A poster in Myers’s office announces that the title sponsor of a 1994 auction was a downmarket chain of coffee shops.
Last year, RM Auctions and a subsidiary, Auctions America, did $470 million in total sales. Through three auctions in 2015, revenue has grown by nearly 40%.
Myers maintains a sprawling headquarters/museum/restoration business in Blenheim, Ontario, on the other side of the 401 from Chatham.
In February, the blue-blood firm Sotheby’s acquired a 25% stake in the business, now known as RM Sotheby’s (the rest is still owned by Myers and several other private shareholders the company declines to name). The London, England-based auction house is a much bigger fish. In 2014, Sotheby’s revenue from art and collectibles was $6 billion. But the definition of “collectible” is expanding. Sotheby’s CEO Bill Ruprecht says the company was attracted to RM Auctions because it is “the clear market leader in this field.”
Sotheby’s clients are beginning to think of cars as they think of art—as a safe, sexy place to put their money. Also, you can’t drive a Renoir. The partnership gives Myers a push into new markets in the Mideast, China and Russia.
Inside the Blenheim shop, it doesn’t look very Sotheby’s, and it never will.
In one corner, they’ve got the stripped chassis of a multimillion-dollar Bugatti. A ludicrously ornate Pontiac once owned by Hank Williams Jr. (and currently belonging to one of Myers’s pals, Kid Rock) is in another. A total restoration can take up to three years. In many cases, they’re not fixing a car. They’re recreating a unique work of art.
Most of the mechanics and craftspeople are local. Seven of them (plus three more on the auction side) have been with Myers for more than 20 years. He extends his protection to these people. He talks about their grandchildren working here for his grandchildren. It’s seigneurial.
The longest-serving current employee is edging into his late 70s. He has no plans to leave. Ever.
“If we send him home, what’s he going to do? He still tries his best to give you an honest day’s work,” says Myers. “So what do you do? You pay him. You pay him until he’s f---ing dead.”
This is a pretty typical Myers statement—designed to shock on at least two levels. You get the impression he crafted this personality to fascinate and unsettle. It works.
It also reinforces his working-class bona fides—something that can be hard to manage when you own your own plane and have two full-time pilots on staff.
“I have everything I want. I don’t want to own five houses around the world and have a bunch of people taking care of them. That’s a big f---ing pain in the ass,” Myers says. “We have a condo in Whistler, and it’s a pain in the ass. I’ve been there five times in eight years. I could care less if I ever go back again.
“What I really like is the art of the deal…” Myers starts waving himself off, because that may have sounded a little too self-important. “I don’t do f--- all, really. Hanging around. Talking to people. I have friends, lots of friends. I shoot the breeze.”
As the business grows bigger, Myers seems less interested in the macro view. He’s obsessed with details, which appeal to his sense of order. He tells a long story about how he fixed the lineups into the Ritz’s ballroom. He enjoys fussing.
Ahead of the sale, Myers is standing in the main hall, which is being used to display the most valuable cars. He begins ruminating on the design of his dream catalogue. All the photos expensively mounted around the room are (he points along the wall) “boring…boring…boring.” He’d prefer something artful. Also, girly.
He describes mise en scènes—a topless model leaning out the window of a car in a back alley. Or a woman standing in front of a car, her bare bum visible in the reflection of the hood. He’s casting about for the right adjective, hands pistoning up and down.
“Pirelli?” I suggest, referencing the nudie/haute-couture mash-up pioneered by the Italian tire company in their calendars.
“Right!” Myers says. A couple of employees—a man and a woman—are clustered around us, nodding seriously.
“I’m not talking porno,” Myers says. “Something that arouses the senses.”
This goes on for a while. It’s a glorious time capsule of a conversation.
“What do you think of when you think of cars?” Myers asks, and begins counting off on his fingers. “Pussy. Watches. Men’s things.”
I look around to see if someone’s going to laugh or scream or slap him. Nope.
It’s hard to say what Myers’s clientele will make of the Penthouse Forum approach to high society. Based on every reaction I’ve watched here, they’ll be delighted. Because it’s so Rob.
He’s built a business on a simple understanding that escapes many people. The hyper-successful and the idle rich have a well-developed sense of when someone’s trying to get his hands in their pockets. Nobody’s more used to it.
What attracts them is Myers’s backward approach to marketing—part coquette, part bully, always playful. He’s dealing fairly, while daring you to turn him down.
“I’ll give you an example,” he says, and begins twitching in anticipation.
Of the more than 100 lots at Amelia Island, four did not meet the reserve, and so went unsold. One of them was a fetching 1970 Aston Martin, valued between $650,000 and $850,000.
On Saturday night, Myers pigeonholed one of his regulars. This gentleman had offered a Ferrari Daytona Coupe for sale. Because the mix matters, and because Myers already had a similar car for sale, he pushed the client to a competitor. They gather near Myers’s events, picking around the edges. They couldn’t sell the car.
“After the sale, the owner said, ‘Rob, can you just deal with this?’ So I sent my guys over, picked it up and brought it back to our place. So I went to him Saturday night”—Myers begins warming to his story by clapping his hands so loudly I jump—“and said, ‘You’re in the mood to do a deal. I can tell. Here’s what we’re doing. You’re going to give me $75,000 and your Daytona, and you’re buying the Aston Martin. I’m going to fix the Daytona because I told you to f---ing do this and that before you sent it here, and you didn’t pay attention. So I’m going to bring the car back here and do this and that, and then I’m going to split the profit with you. Six-twenty-five is the cost. Whatever it brings, I’ll split with you 50/50. You get the Aston. I’m going to take it back, duke it up. You’re going to pay about another 15 grand to shape it up the way it needs to be”—Myers begins weaving back and forth—“bah-bah-bah-bah-bah-BAH! We got a deal?”
Myers pauses. He’s getting to the good part.
“He goes, ‘Well, what colour is it? What is it again?’ Then he says, ‘Let
me go take a look in the garage…’ And I said NO!” Myers slams his hand on his desk and I jump again. “Do the f---ing deal right now, and if you have to go to the f---ing garage, I’m going to charge you another 25 grand.”
Myers stops. I’m watching his hands.
“He bought the car. He f---ing doesn’t know what colour it is.”
The new owner of the conceptual Aston Martin can console himself with two thoughts—he’s probably going to make a lot of money on this deal, and he didn’t have much of a choice. Trying to get a word in edgewise on Myers when he’s on one of these tears would be like showering under a waterfall.
It’s suggested to Myers that his system might be called an anti-sales pitch.
“It’s truth. There’s no pitch about it,” Myers corrects. He stops fidgeting for a moment and leans way in, grinning in a vaguely menacing way: “That’s why it works.”