Solved! Mystery Of How A Ferrari Ended Up Buried In Someone’s Yard

de bene esse: literally, of well-being, morally acceptable but subject to future validation or exception

This past January, Jalopnik on Drive told readers about a 1974 Dino 246 GTS found buried in someone's yard in Los Angeles back in 1978. Through a bit of luck and some ... digging, we found the car (it's alive and looks gorgeous) and an even more, tantalizing back story. 

Act I: The Dig, January 1978

The snitch didn't mention anything about victims, but in this corner of Los Angeles County's sprawl — across the 105 from South Central — one never knows.

Whoever buried it had thrown a few rugs on top, a tender, if lame attempt to shield the car's sleek, Italian form from the sub-terrain. LA County Sheriff's detective Dennis Carroll heaved the rugs aside, wiped a smear of grime from the windshield with his hand and peered through. No bodies.

A sweep of the interior and trunk turned up no drugs or contraband either, but a run of the plates confirmed what his detective's gut — hell, anyone's gut — told him. The dug-up sports car, a 1974 Dino 246 GTS, was on the LAPD's stolen list.

Next, there's a lady reporter from the LA Times poking around. She wants to know how the Sheriff's department knew the Dino (is that a Ferrari or what?) was down there. Carroll and his partner, Sgt. Joe Sabas, gruff veterans of the burglary and narcotics beats, were ready with an answer. Some kids playing in the dirt found it. Ain't that something?

Yeah, sure. Better to make up a story than compromise a good snitch. Even if he is on the needle. You never know who knows what about whom around here, and right now — regarding the pock-marked sports car peering up at them from a backyard hidey hole — they knew Jack squat.

Then the snitch adds a twist of lime. An insurance scam.

Act II: The Crime, December, 1974

The snitch says the Dino's owner had hired a couple guys to make it disappear. The plan was to snatch it up on the night of December 7, Pearl Harbor Day, while the owner sipped martinis with his wife at the Brown Derby on Wilshire.

Then the owner would feed the cops a cock-and-bull story. A too-hungry look in the eyes of the Derby's parking valet spooked him, he'd say, so he'd parked the sparkling green Dino on Wilshire. That's where the mooks lifted it. Shame, too. The car had been a present for his wife.

Poor bastard won't be getting laid tonight, the cops'd joke, after sending the owner — one Rosendo Cruz of Alhambra, California — on his way. A "righteous theft," is how they'd write it up.

Act III: The Search, May 2012

I'm walking down a back alley in the West Athens section of Los Angeles. I'm looking for any evidence that a 1974 Dino was once buried around here. All I've got to go on is a sketchy address and a couple black-and-white newspaper photos.

We wander a bit further down the alley, toward a lot on which stands an assortment of ramshackle out buildings, one of which vaguely captures the feel of the scene in the photo from 1978. Could this be it? There's no way to be sure. Who knows if the LA Times even got the address right? After all, they got detective Carroll's name wrong. Maybe they botched the address too.

Carroll, now 74, is at his home in Southern California. He says he'd been wary about speaking with me. He thinks I've been in touch with the Dino's original owner — the guy who had the car clipped. I explain it's the car's current owner I've located, and he loosens up. That's when he tells me about the snitch and the alleged insurance scam.

Act III: The Car

Brad Howard says I got most of he story right in the first Jalopnik article. But I got one thing majorly wrong. The 1974 Dino 246 GTS has been registered to him since it was lovingly restored back in 1978.

Howard's story comes in after Farmer's Insurance sold the car to a Los Angeles businessman named Ara Manoogian. Howard, who was was engaged in a real-estate deal with Manoogian, overheard him on the phone talking to a mechanic he'd hired. They were talking about the Dino. Howard sensed Manoogian wanted out, and made him an offer for the car, if he could get it running. Manoogian hired another local mechanic — this time, Ferrari expert Giuseppe Cappalonga — to sort out the engine, which needed serious attention. Watch the video for more on the Dino's revival and post-restoration life.

If it wasn't for the drought — the same one that led to the water-conservation laws that led the Z-Boys skate crew to invent swimming-pool pool skating — the Dino might have been in worse shape. But because the soil had been mostly dry through the years 1976 and 1977 and most of 1978, it had been preserved like a mummy in Egyptian sands.

That, along with a few, star-struck car thieves and one man's desire to see a beautiful Italian car nursed back to health, is how the buried Dino survived to carve the canyons for three extra decades.

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