[music playing] brad howard: hello, mike. it's brad howard calling . and listen, i read your storyabout the buried dino. quite interesting. just wanted to let you knowthat you had the-- you had it pretty goodup until the point the car was stolen. and, of course, it's my car.
and i've had thiscar since 1978. i've had it ever since it prettymuch almost came out of the ground. and it's in awesome shape. let me know if youwant to see it. i'm in the la area. and i'd be more than happy toget you straight there. obviously, i got it beforei was married. so i was like any other male.
mike spinelli: it was just oneof those stories that came out of just web surfing. sometimes a jalopnik storywill just come out of one photograph. one day i just happened to besurfing around on tumblr. just a black and whitephoto popped up on somebody's tumblr page. it was a dino that was beingpulled out of the ground. and it's just a reallycompelling photo.
i had never heard of a storyof a dino being unearthed anywhere before. luckily, we live in the ageof google, and it took, obviously, almost nothing. i just started googling "burieddino," and i found the original story that ran in thela times about how some kids had been playing in the yard ina house in south central or nearby south central. brad howard: and tap, tap,heard something, kind of
unearthed it, and gotthe police involved. the little story behind the caris that it was purchased in 1974 from hollywoodsports car. the guy bought it forhis wife's birthday. they had it for about a week,a little over a week, and decided to take a nice dinnerouting to the brown derby restaurant. and lo and behold, whenthey came out from dinner, they had no car.
it was gone. so this mysterious cardisappeared and did not surface until early 1978. giuseppe cappalonga: the firsttime i saw the car, it actually looked like it hadchicken pox all over it, little circles all over thecar, all over the paint. brad howard: the assumption wasthat there was a swimming pool, it was dried out orwhatever, and they had ramped it, and they had pulled thecar into a swimming pool.
they had wrappedit in plastic. they put all kinds of-- theyput towels inside to absorb certain areas, to take themoisture away, hoping to preserve the car, protectit from the elements. dennis carroll: i had to pullall the rugging off of it. we were concerned therewas a victim in it. in fact, i had to go down to theside of the car, open up and check inside. and we checked the trunk,because if there had been a
body, we would have had to stopour investigation, call homicide, and they would'vetaken over the total investigation. that same day we gotapproximately 40 to 50 calls wanting to buy thecar from us. mike spinelli: that story hadkind of been and gone. i thought it would make a prettygood post, just sort of a random kind of cool carculture post on jalopnik. so i wrote it up, found a fewarticles about it that had
been written. i just wrote it up straight,as much information as we could find, and figuredthat was that. that was a good post forwhatever day it was, and that was it and moved on. kind of to my surprise, it endedup becoming a pretty big, well-read story. so next thing you know, i get acall from a guy who says he owns the car.
and i'm thinking,owns the car? you mean, like nobody had beenable to find the dino before. i guess nobody had really lookedreal hard, because i mean, it really would have takena couple of phone calls. it had been registered with thedino club and the ferrari club and all that stuff. so people knew that bradhoward had a dino. and i think they probably knew,since his license plate said "dug up," that it was thatdino that was dug up in
la in 1978. i was like, yeah. i think we have to come out andmeet this guy and check out this car. [rock music] brad howard: in 1978, the earlypart of '78, i was doing a real estate transaction overon la cienega with a client named ara manoogian. we're about ready to get intonegotiations, and he gets a
phone call and starts arguingwith somebody. he gets off the phone, it turnsout he was arguing with his partner, who had just comeby a 1974 dino that they had bought from an insuranceauction. and i found out a little aboutthe car at that time. and i said, gee whiz, i'llbuy it from you. and he goes, you don'twant this car. it's been underground. and i said, nah, that soundslike my style.
i was actually thinking aboutdino ferraris at the time, only as a passing, because, youknow, they were kind of a hot item back in the '70s. and this one came up, and atthat time, i know it sounds really ridiculously expensive,but in '78 it was in a price range. and i said, ok. fine. i can deal with that.
and i just said, ok. i'll do that. and i forgot what they weregoing for back then. they were probably maybe$23,000, $24,000, something like that. and i picked it up forless than that. i immediately got the dugup plates that year. my interest in the car was thatif you go back and look at time and weather, from 1974to 1978 was a drought, a very
big drought in los angeles. so my brain quickly figured thatgee whiz, this thing's underground. there's not going to bea lot of moisture. and if they took halfway decentcare of it, maybe there's a shot. my theory was pretty correct. [inaudible] when i bought the car, notknowing a lot about the
ferraris, and i was mostly ajaguar person, and i'd asked ara, i said, ara, oneof the things, this thing's got to run. i want this thing to run,and run right to get it. i can take care of the paint. i can get the carlooking good. but it's got to run. so at that point araran into giuseppe. and giuseppe ended up takingthe car to his garage.
and he went throughthe engine. he pulled it down. he was going through to makesure it was oiled right, to make sure all the parts were ingood shape, the thing was dialed in, everythingwas working. and that's the way i got itback from him in 1978. and outside of oil changes andone water pump, it's still the same engine. giuseppe cappalonga: itried to start it.
the car didn't start. we checked compression. of course, there was very littlecompression, which we figured probably the ringswere stuck, or something of that-- we don't know. so that's when we tookthe engine apart. and sure enough, all the ringswere stuck together. we replaced three pistons and,of course, all the rings.
that would be like a minorengine overhaul, refreshed the rod bearings and main bearingsand did a nice valve job and put it together, andthe car ran good. ara was a little bit-- how can i say? economical? he didn't want to put too muchmoney in the car, so he could not afford to have the cardone at the dealer. and me working out of my garageat home, and part-time
too, because i was working allthe time, i could practically do it for one third ofthe price that the dealer would have. supposedly i worked on thecar when it was new. i can not confirmthat or deny it. brad howard: the keyto the car was getting a good painter. and i was very fortunatethere. and paul used to work fora guy named benito.
and it was afm auto,i believe. and rather than go throughbenito directly, i got paul on the side. he took the car to hisgarage in los feliz. and it spent, i would say, nokidding, there was at least close to three weeks toa month on the body. he would take it insmall sections, probably about this big. and he would take it, and he'dbuff it down to the steel to
get it nice and clean. then he'd throw acoat over it. and he did the entire car thatway, all the way around. there was no bondo usedon the car whatsoever. anything, if it washeat-treated, they would heat-treat the metal becauseof the aluminum, so any damaged areas were verycarefully brought back to ferrari standards fora brand new car. as you see the car now, thatwas painted in 1978.
it has not been touched since. the forest green paint that wasput on the outside, the formula was gottendirectly from the factory, from ferrari. and if you were to take the doorpanels off and see the inside, you'd see a total matchbetween the exterior and the interior, the interiorbeing original and the exterior being the paintingwhich was done in 1978. i'd actually taken it to-- manydifferent mechanics that
i had that would work on gettingthe oil changed and so forth, were absolutely shockedat the fact and the condition the car was in comparedto a lot of cars that had been on the road. it did not receive the amountof damage that you would've gotten from smog. but i guess life'schanged now. we don't have the same ozoneaction going on. we don't have the same amountof smog that we had.
so as it got better in the '70sand '80s, this car kind of skipped a lot of that fromits being underground. and of course, when i drove it,i did not drive it all the time, so it was always kept ina garage and/or under cover. most recently, the interior idid in june of last year. prior to that, i did do a lineraround the seat, just the outside liner, because i hada girlfriend that didn't know how to get in andout of the car. she kind of droppedher butt down.
she split it rightat the corner. but outside of that, itwas all original. and the biggest problem is thefoam that they used back then after time just disintegrates. and it got to the point whereall the stitching was there. you could see everything. but there was just no substancebehind the car. and it was very uncomfortableto drive. and so i said, that's it.
i'm going to haveto do something. so i went ahead and we got allthe original material and redid the interior. the bumpers, we buffedthem out. the front grille is alloriginal, all the lighting around the side. i think one of these taillights,which was interesting back in the day,those were actually done by fiat at the time.
it was before fiat reallystarted the fiat line. but they're the samebasic side lamps. and i ended up replacingone of those. as time went on, discoveringthe car, it turns out that this is a 1974 chairsand flares. it's a very rare car. i believe it's the last, andonly in the last year of '74 did they do the chairs and flareversion, which was a california special car,primarily built for the
california market. on the fender wells, you'll seethat the fenders have a little bit of a flareon the outside. that is part of the flare thatthey threw on the '74 gts version of the chairsand flares. the chairs is basicallythe daytona package. when you went and got a daytona,you had a certain type of chair, interior motif. that was completely put into thecar as part of that model.
now, i mean, i guess peoplecould upgrade their dinos to that, but it would clearlybe an update or an add-on at the time. but this came stock this way. a lot of people afterwardswould ship them in from europe, and then they haveto go through all these conversions and so forth. this car is clearly a californiaregistered car, therefore it had all the smogfor california on it.
it had air conditioning. it had all the modernconveniences of the hollywood-ites, you know, powerwindows and all the goodies for the day. a lot of people noticethe wheels on it. and they say, well, gee, wheredid these come from? and i say, well, theycame with the car. they're only on the dino 246. if you read it, it saysdino right on it.
there are very few of thesewheels available. they were only given as apackage for the daytona chairs and flare package. at that time in which i boughtit, i think the last three that they had in florida at themain factory [inaudible], which was a good thing. i had no idea at the time,considering in 1978 i think they cost me $555 a piece. i thought that waspretty stiff.
but what do you know? i wouldn't want tobuy them today. in a picture, you'll see when itcame out of the ground, and i don't know who did it, butsomebody had actually torched out the dino gt insignia. and rather than just popping thetwo pins and taking it on, they actually cut a hole out,which you can clearly see in the picture. we obviously had to metalthat back in again
before it was painted. and then i had to put thedino sticker back on. well, since it didn't come withone, i chose to put mine on a little differentlythan what's out there. but i thought itlooked better. i've always liked the dino. a, it's small. it's very maneuverable. i like the go kart feeling.
you know, it's one thing to go200 miles an hour, but you can never find a place to reallydo that legally, not even close to it. at least a dino, you can getthe performance out of it. it's just an amazinghandling car. i love the looks. i just like the humpy fenders. it's just very stylish. it's very unique.
it's not flat, torpedo-looking. i guess the best way, when thecar is sitting there, it looks like it's moving. it's a fun car. i don't have a lot of cars,but i have fun cars. mike spinelli: so after brad gotin touch with me, i wanted to track down theother players in the buried dino story. unfortunately, i found out thatjoe sabas, one of the
detectives, passedaway in 2005. and i had a suspicion that thela times had gotten the other detective's name wrong. lenny carroll was the namein the la times piece. i couldn't find any recordof any lenny carroll ever having been-- or leonard carroll or anythinglike that had ever been a sheriff's deputy in la county. so i just kind of had asuspicion that it was dennis,
instead of lenny, like it wouldhave been denny carroll. and so i found an organizationthat represents retired sheriff deputies. and sure enough, his namewas dennis carroll. dennis carroll: my nameis dennis carroll. d-e-n-n-i-s c-a-r-r-o-l-l.unlike the newspaper article, kids in the neighborhooddidn't contact us. my partner and i, joe sabas,we had an informant. and the informant ledus to the address.
and we weren't sure about it. it sounded silly that anybodywould bury a car, especially a ferrari. well, he was a heroin addict,i remember that. and we went by, and he said,that's the house. the car's buried back therein the backyard. we took him and released himand came back the next day. and we went to the house andknocked on the door. and there was tenants there, andthey give us permission to
go check in the backyard. and after a few pokes in theground and whatever, there was something hard metal-wise. so that's when we stopped andcalled for assistance to help dig out the hole. well, what he said was theowner wanted to collect insurance on the car. and he asked these guys to takethe car, dismantle it, and destroy it, get ridof all the evidence.
but when they took it home,they liked the car so much they decided to keep itand bury it rather than destroy it. once we found the car,then his whole story became kind of credible. it's like the huntsman andsnow white, right? the huntsman couldn'tland the dagger. these guys couldn'tland the chainsaw. they just fell such in love withit, those curves and the
flared fenders and the beautifulgreen paint, they just loved it so much thatthey couldn't kill it. and so they buried it. they did torch outthe dino badge. and maybe that was their claimcheck that they were going to come back and get it. but they never did. when it came down to it,they couldn't do it. they just couldn't kill it.
it's beautiful. i mean, could you cut it up? this was about 1983. we left burbank. we're going on coldwatercanyon. and somebody in a camaro z28 wasin front of us doing about 20 miles an hour, 15 or20 miles an hour. so i thought he was looking foran address or whatever. my wife's sisterwas behind us.
they were in a turbo carrera. and we were just cruising. and i decided, well, i don'twant to go 15, 20 miles an hour up the hill. so i decided to pullout around him. and lo and behold, as i pull outaround him, he thinks he's got a lot of horsies. and so he hits itto the floor. the next thing i know is we'recoming up to the very first
turn there, whichis pretty sharp. and we're side by side comingaround that turn. when you come around that turn,you can actually see another turn coming up wherethere's garages. and i saw lights on the garage,which means opposite traffic was coming. and at that point, i wasgoing pretty damn fast. and so i had no choice but toeither back off, which i have a carrera right behind medoing the same thing,
or just go for it. slammed it in second gear, hitit to the floor, made a cut for the line right, cuthim off at the corner. i never saw the car coming theother way, obviously made it. and all i remember is trying tomake every corner all the way to the top of the hill. i had no idea that the handlingcapability of the car was what it was. but when i got to the top ofthe hill on mulholland, i
remember pulling offto the edge. and literally my feet, my hands,i was just shaking. and it absolutelyblew me away. the car will out-drive you. you cannot out-drive this car. amazing car. my wife said explicits. dennis carroll: we couldn'tidentify the actual thieves who took the car in the firstplace and buried it.
so if you don't have the thievesthat did that, you can't even really get them backto the owner of the car. mike spinelli: when i talked todennis carroll later on, i asked him, so what do youremember about this case? he said, well, i remembera lot of the attention around it. but to be honest, i've seenevery riot in la history. he goes, it was just a car. i was like, just a car?
i guess compared to a riot,it's not that memorable. dennis carroll: i was onthe force 35 years. throughout my careeri was involved in several things, though. i was in every riotprior to '95. i was on the corner when theriot started in 1965, watching everybody go crazy. i worked the manson trial twice,the manson people. you name it, i pretty much wasinvolved in most happenings in
the sheriff's departmentduring that time, malibu fires. i can go on and go on.
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