HUH?:The Lamborghini has been spotted all over the Bay area. Odds are it has been shipped out of the Port of Oakland by now.
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In the wee hours of last Tuesday morning, a $260,000 yellow sports car belonging to spiky-haired TV host Guy Fieri disappeared in San Francisco.
The Food Network star and host of the NBC game show “Minute to Win It” collects cars — but none of them was as expensive or irreplaceable as his customized 2008 Lamborghini Gallardo.
Since the theft, the car has shown up on security cameras around the Bay area. But a week after the heist — and more on the heist later — the cops are no closer to finding the car or the thief.
Using rock-climbing gear, the thief lowered himself from the roof of a dealership, shimmied through a window and cut the locks off the garage where Fieri had been storing the car before driving off into the night.
“It’s a very distinctive car, for sure,” San Francisco police officer Albie Esparza said last week.
The first sign of the car was last Wednesday, when security cameras on the Golden Gate Bridge spotted it heading north out of San Francisco.
It was picked up again a short time later by security cameras in Tiburon, a small town just north of San Francisco.
Then, it fell off the radar.
So, where do you hide a quarter-million-dollar, canary-yellow Lambo?
And why steal a car so distinctive that trying to sell it would be like trying to unload a stolen Rembrandt at Sotheby’s?
“Hypothetically speaking, chopping it would not be the best move,” says Adam Ferrara, one of the hosts of History’s “Top Gear.”
“If there is a hole in the glass of a Lamborghini dealership, a missing Gallardo and carbon fiber parts start showing up on eBay, somebody might raise an eyebrow.”
Ferrara, who drove a similar-model Lamborghini on the show, speculates the thief may have simply wanted to see what driving a car like that would be like.
“At 150 miles an hour, the car will feel like it’s floating,” he says. “Because it is.”
Fieri has refused to be interviewed about the theft. Ditto the San Francisco police and the dealership where it was being stored.
In all likelihood, the car is no longer in the Bay area, say those familiar with the trade of stolen cars. Chances are, it is on a container ship that left the Port of Oakland.
Ferrara was thinking along the same lines.
“You’ll get more selling it to a sultan looking for a gift for his son’s 16th birthday than you would trying to unload it up in The Bronx,” he says.