Inside the wild hunt for a stolen, one-of-a-kind car worth an eye-popping $7 million

It started, as many of Joe Ford’s jobs did, with a phone call about a car so rare that only a handful of men alive had ever seen one. 

The 1938 Talbot-Lago T150C-SS Teardrop coupe, an Art Deco dream of swooping lines and sculpted chrome, and one of only two in existence, vanished in 2001 from a shuttered plastics factory in Milwaukee. In the world of vintage cars, it was a unicorn — built in postwar France, worth an estimated $7.6 million, and utterly irreplaceable.

It wasn’t like losing a car; it was like losing a famous painting by a master artist. 

“Stealing high-end cars is like stealing the Mona Lisa,” Ford tells author Stayton Bonner in “The Million-Dollar Car Detective: Inside the Worldwide Hunt for a Stolen $7 Million Car” (Blackstone Publishing, out now). “You can’t sell it. You can’t fence it. So the collector just keeps it in his basement to look at it. Then when he dies, the heirs try to sell it and they figure out, ‘Oh s–t, Dad had a stolen car.’”

Ford, a detective in his 60s from Boca Raton, Florida, specializes in recovering stolen cars. But he doesn’t look for cars snatched from parking garages or shopping malls. 

“I’m a very specific private investigator,” Ford told Bonner. “I’m in a niche of a niche of a niche.”

He lives in the shadow world of car obsession, somewhere between bounty hunter and historian. Police departments rarely have the time or resources to pursue a stolen Maserati across three borders. Insurance companies want recoveries, not trials. And collectors themselves are reluctant to invite too much scrutiny into their dealings.

That leaves Ford chasing ghosts with nothing more than a Rolodex of shady contacts and an encyclopedic knowledge of chassis numbers.

In 1984, while looking for a car for himself, Ford met Chris Gardner, an importer of German luxury automobiles. Gardner showed him the ropes, and soon Ford was running his own business out of a French Quarter townhouse. At his peak, he was selling 120 cars a year, pocketing $12,000 or more per vehicle. From those deals, Ford built the web of contacts and hard-won knowledge that would later make him invaluable as a car detective.

Sometimes Ford’s cases play like Hollywood thrillers, but with grease and subpoenas instead of car chases. In Texas, he hunted for a Ferrari engine that had been installed in a race boat, only to tear through the fiberglass hull and sink straight into the Houston Ship Channel. Tracking it through salvage yards and paperwork, he eventually surfaced the wreckage.

He had seen every variety of automotive crime. Once, he wore a wire for the FBI inside a Milwaukee restoration shop suspected of trafficking stolen cars. Another time, he helped investigators crack an Atlanta-based theft ring, in which mechanics were moving multimillion-dollar classics through brokers to overseas buyers. And in one of his wildest assignments, he tracked Mafia-linked Ferraris smuggled into the US with forged VINs, part of a case so sprawling the feds dubbed it Operation Horseplay.

But the car that made Ford’s career — and became his personal obsession — was the Talbot-Lago, what Bonner calls “one of the most brazen automobile heists in history.” For Ford, the mystery was irresistible. “Some cars speak to me,” he ells the author. “This one screams.”

The theft was as strange as it was surgical. On a cold March night in 2001, men in white overalls cut the phone lines at the Milwaukee home of Roy Leiske, the eccentric plastics magnate who owned the Teardrop. Then they drove to his former factory, where the car was stored. There was no sign of forced entry. According to accounts, the thieves dismantled their prize piece by piece, using a crane to load it into a waiting truck.

“The parts and nearly all the paperwork — even some receipts dating back to the 1960s — were gone,” Bonner writes. Nothing else was touched.

Leiske was shattered. He spent years obsessively hunting for the Teardrop. When he died in 2005, still empty-handed, his estate passed to a distant cousin, Richard Mueller, who suddenly inherited a uniquely complex problem: a multimillion-dollar car that legally belonged to him but physically no longer existed.

“The lawyer said, ‘Well, it’s part of the estate, but it’s gone,’” Mueller tells the author. “‘And until it pops up, you can’t do anything about it.’”

In 2006, Mueller turned to Ford. He agreed to take the case on his own dime, in exchange for an 80% ownership stake if the car was ever found. He had personal reasons for the gamble. Ford’s daughter, Julia, was slowly going blind from retinitis pigmentosa, a rare genetic disease that kills the cells in the retina. Recovering the Talbot-Lago wasn’t just about professional pride, it was about securing her future.

Years passed. Then, in 2016, he got a break. The Teardrop had resurfaced in Illinois, now in the possession of Rick Workman, the multimillionaire founder of Heartland Dental. Workman, a novice collector, had wired $7.6 million to purchase the car in 2015 from none other than Chris Gardner, Ford’s old mentor-turned-nemesis. Gardner had simply put the stolen Teardrop on the open market, complete with fabricated paperwork, and sold it to Workman as if nothing were amiss.

But when Workman tried to register the car in Illinois, it immediately tripped the NCIC database of stolen vehicles. The case landed on the desk of Milwaukee detective Jeff Thiele, a 22-year veteran of the police force who suddenly found himself holding a file unlike anything he’d seen before. 

“Domestic violence, homicide, I’ve done a lot,” Thiele told the author. “But this was the biggest, coolest case I ever had. This burglary was the thing that movies are made out of.”

Gardner has insisted that he bought the Teardrop lawfully and had every right to sell it to Workman.

“These baseless allegations are nothing more than an attempt to damage my reputation without merit,” he told the author in an email. “I stand by my lifelong record of honesty and ethical conduct.”

The fight dragged to the Wisconsin Supreme Court. In 2020, the justices ruled that Workman’s possession of the stolen Teardrop restarted the six-year statute of limitations clock, giving Ford and Mueller fresh legal ground to reclaim it. But Mueller, who was 77, died of a stroke in May of 2024, days before the FBI announced it was dropping its case against Gardner for lack of testimony.

“The FBI said Richard was a key witness, and now they don’t think they can meet their burden of proof beyond a reasonable doubt,” Ford tells the author. “It’s just a chickenshit, spineless move.” 

That’s left the Teardrop in limbo, locked away in storage and tied up in legal uncertainty. But Ford had already turned his eye toward another mystery.

While investigating the Talbot-Lago, he learned a detail that set off alarm bells. Chris Burke, a Florida mechanic who claimed to have helped Gardner steal the Teardrop, testified that Gardner had bolted from the state in 1997 — the same year the Aston Martin DB5 from “Goldfinger,” the most famous stolen car in the world, disappeared from a private hangar at the Boca Raton airport.

Ford believed Gardner could have taken the Bond car, hidden it, and shipped it overseas under a false VIN. It was exactly the kind of play Gardner had pulled before. Gardner laughs it off.

“I am James Bond,” he tells the author of the latest accusations. “Ass clowns.”

Ford is currently still hunting for the Aston Martin. The Teardrop remains in legal purgatory, locked away in storage, its exact whereabouts unknown.

With Gardner on the loose, Ford isn’t taking any chances. “I was cooking the other night,” he tells Bonner, “and kept a pistol in my waistband.”