The historical record shows that despotic heads of state with exotic-car fetishes generally meet ignominious ends. But after the fall, where do their cars go?
At Jalopnik on Tuesday, a video was posted showing a yellow Ferrari 599 GTB Fiorano belonging to the deposed Tunisian president, Ben Ali, on a forklift, being carried down a highway to an unknown resting place. Whether the supercar was a singular pleasure or one of hundreds in Mr. Ali’s possession is not known.
Despots’ cars have taken circuitous routes through history, with some crossing the auction block, others being spirited away into private collections and a few going to museums. Benito Mussolini‘s 1935 Alfa Romeo 6C 2300 Pescara Spyder sold in 2008 for roughly $1.1 million at England’s Cheltenham Racecourse sale. Another Mussolini Alfa, a 1937 2300 MM, surfaced on eBay in 2009 with a $1.2 million “buy it now” price.
At the sprawling Historic Auto Attractions in Roscoe, Ill., the collector Wayne Lensing displays a six-wheel 1939 Mercedes-Benz G4, in which Adolf Hitler was chauffeured.
Steve Heller, an author and co-chairman of the design department at the School of Visual Arts in New York, has written extensively about totalitarian propaganda. “The larger question here is what happens to a dictator’s effects when he’s gone,” he said in a telephone interview. “They might get looted, but do some get absorbed by whatever treasury is still standing?”
One of the largest troves ever expropriated belonged to the Shah of Iran, and some 100 vehicles are now displayed in Iran’s Historic Auto Museum. The current president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has a 1977 Peugeot 504 that is looking for a buyer, but the sedan would certainly strike a proletarian pose beside the Shah’s 1934 Mercedes-Benz 540K Autobahn-Kurier.
Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier, Haiti’s self-appointed president for life and an inveterate car lover, returned to the island last week after a 25-year exile. Mr. Duvalier was particularly fond of his Mercedes 600 Pullman limousine, in which he fled to the airport in 1986. The limo’s current whereabouts are unknown.
Only rarely does a congress wield sufficient power to rein in a leader’s car lust. During Carlos Menem‘s first term as president of Argentina, he received a Ferrari 348 from a grateful Italian investor whose deals in Argentina Mr. Menem reportedly facilitated. Members of congress, as well as Argentine citizens, pressured Mr. Menem to donate the car for a public auction, prompting the president to plea, “¡La Ferrari es mía, mía!” This bout of petulance came to symbolize the Menem administration’s enthusiastic embrace of the free market.
Whatever these cars’ whereabouts, Mr. Heller thinks that the market for the former rides of despots is ripe for parody. “I can easily see a TV commercial for this,” he said. “‘We’ve got the Hussein brothers’ cars! Don’t like that? How about Hitler’s? We’ve got ’em all!'”