Did you hear the one about the elderly car enthusiast who took it on the chin from Jay Leno?
The family of Macy’s heir John Straus is suing Leno and the owners of an East Side garage who allegedly duped the octogenarian out of his beloved – and one-of-a-kind – 1931 Duesenberg Model J.
The car’s estimated value is $1.2 million, but Leno bought it from the garage after a “sham” auction for a mere $180,000, Straus’ family charges in a Manhattan Supreme Court lawsuit.
The garage had also “auctioned” off another of Straus’ cars – a 1930 Rolls Royce Phantom convertible – to a corporate alter-ego for a whopping $0. The car, which is worth $500,000, now belongs to an executive of the Windsor Garage, Dennis Ricca.
“The whole thing was a sham,” said one of the Straus family’s lawyers, Nathan Goldberg.
The lawyer for Leno (pictured above with his Duesenberg collection) and the garage said his clients did everything on the up and up, and were entitled to sell the cars because Straus had become “extremely delinquent in the payment of storage fees.”
“Leno bought the car in good faith” and “for fair market value,” said the lawyer, Bruce Bronster. The suit says Straus had rebuffed the car-collecting comic’s offers to buy the rare car for years, but it ended up in Leno’s lap after the garage pulled a fast one in 2005.
That’s when, the suit says, the garage warned Straus it would auction off his cars unless he paid his parking bill. He’d been making periodic installments at the East 76th Street garage for decades.
Straus, who was in his 80s and beginning to suffer from dementia, attempted to do so, but the garage applied his payment to two of his less valuable cars in another garage, the suit says.
The ensuing public auction was anything but, the suit says, with the garage’s corporate alter-ego winning the bidding for both cars for zero dollars.
Straus, grandson of Macy’s co-founders and Titanic victims Isidor and Ida Straus, died in May at age 88, and his adult daughters found out about the funny business soon after.
“These were precious family heirlooms, and the family wants them back,” said another Straus lawyer, Andrew Solomon.