Rare 1938 Talbot Lago classic car, stolen in 2001, resurfaces and court fight ensues

Bruce Vielmetti | Milwaukee

MILWAUKEE -- If someone stole your car, and 15 years later you saw a stranger driving it, would you have a legal claim to getting it back?

For most cars, you probably wouldn't even care by then. But two parties with claims to a $7 million classic car that amounts to being rolling French art stolen from a Milwaukee garage care a lot. And a court in Wisconsin could decide who gets the vehicle, now being sequestered at an East Coast business .

In 2001, thieves broke into the old Monarch Plastic Products factory on Milwaukee's lower east side and stole a disassembled French sports car that its elderly owner had been trying to restore since 1967.

Roy Leiske was not just angry and disappointed, he was shaken. He knew it was no ordinary burglary. Someone had cut the phone lines at his home that night. The car's parts and paperwork were hidden and stored in various parts of the building, yet they were all gone, and nothing else was taken.

Though he had locked up at 8:30 the night before, there was no sign of forced entry when he returned at 10 a.m. Sunday. Some neighbors had seen a white box truck backed up to the building's big door earlier that morning, but it didn't seem sinister; they figured Leiske finally sold his antique car.

This wasn't a classic Mustang, Corvette or T-Bird. Rather, it was a 1938 Talbot Lago T150 C teardrop coupe, one of fewer than two dozen handmade in France. In recent years, the cars have become among the most coveted pre-World War II examples of Art Deco design. It has been called the most beautiful car ever made, and has won awards as the best of the best collectible automobiles.

Leiske, a self-made millionaire, had purchased it in 1967, in pieces, for about $10,000, and obtained a Wisconsin title in 1968. For the next 30 years, he talked about the car more than he worked on it.

After he discovered the heist, Leiske asked the police to keep a lid on their investigation, so he could reach out into the small world of international car collectors who might see the Talbot Lago.

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But despite the best efforts of Leiske, police, the FBI and Interpol, the coupe had not resurfaced when Leiske died in 2005 at age 93.

He willed his entire estate, including the missing Talbot Lago, to his cousin, Richard "Skip" Muelle, who knew the car as a kid. "We used to go down there and play around the old plastic factory," climbing in, out, around and over the Talbot Lago, Mueller said.

Leiske "loved classic cars," Mueller said. "That was his gem and when it got stolen, it took a lot of wind out of his sails."

Leiske's ship had already slowed. His wife died at 50, in 1962, and his namesake son, a pilot, died in an Iowa plane crash in 1996. Leiske himself took up aviation at age 70, Mueller said, by getting a pilot license and an airplane.

An ally appears

Years after Leiske died, Joseph L. Ford III, an architect, lawyer and former classic car seller from Florida heard about the phantom Milwaukee Talbot while pursuing the recovery of a stolen rare Ferrari in Europe.

After determining the Talbot Lago was stolen, he backtracked reports all the way to Mueller and gave him a call.

Ford was impressed with Leiske's story. "He picked this car out because of his eye for design and engineering," Ford said. "They weren't really recognized as epitomes of design until the 1970s."

"I told (Mueller) what I do, recovering stolen niche cars, what I know, and that it's a crap shoot. We're going to need to chase international car thieves around Europe, and it could be life and death because these guys are very serious.

"I bought a majority piece. I'll try to recover. One day, if we're lucky, we split" the proceeds from selling the car.

A lucky break

In 2016, they got a lot closer.

That's when TL90108, LLC, tried to register the now completely restored Talbot with the Illinois DMV. Because Leiske had persuaded law enforcement officials to keep it on a national database of stolen cars after the usual 10-year period, the Illinois officials got an alert.

They contacted Milwaukee police, who advised not to register the car, and then contacted Mueller. He and Ford demanded the car from the latest buyer. Since the buyer just paid nearly $7 million for it through a European broker in 2015, in what he assumed was a legitimate deal, he declined.

So in February 2017, Mueller and Ford sued TL90108, LLC, for replevin, or return of property.

TL90108 refers to Talbot Lago's chassis number. Using a limited-liability corporation obscures the name of the actual buyer, Illinois dental company founder Rick Workman. Workman is known among high-end car collectors, most recently for commissioning a one-of-a-kind Ferrari directly from the Italian manufacturer.

In Milwaukee Circuit Court, Workman's Chicago lawyers convinced then-Circuit Judge Rebecca Dallet that Mueller and Ford were too late to make a claim on the car. They had six years from when it was first "converted," or stolen, they argued, citing state statutes.

Dallet granted Workman's motion to dismiss.

But the Court of Appeals recently reversed the decision. It adopted the argument Ford, a non-practicing lawyer, advanced: That their right to sue started when Workman refused to give back the car. .

The panel agreed with Ford that wrongful detention by Workman began when he refused to return the car upon the plaintiffs' claim of rightful ownership.

Even though Workman was not involved in the original theft, once he learned of the prior, legal title to the car, his refusal to give it up became an action the plaintiffs could claim was a wrongful detention and a basis for their lawsuit.

Robert Pluth, one of the attorneys representing TL90108, LLC, said his side believes Dallet's "thoughtful, well-reasoned" decision was correct, and they plan to ask the Wisconsin Supreme Court to review the Court of Appeals ruling.

Forged signatures

When Milwaukee police first heard from the Illinois DMV in 2016, detectives learned the Talbot Lago was currently at Paul Russell and Co., a high-end auto restoration business in Massachusetts. The company agreed to hold the car while the lawsuit proceeded,

Russell declined to discuss the car or his role in helping Workman obtain it.

Ford said he is very surprised someone like Russell, if he was part of brokering the deal, wouldn't have checked the stolen car database.

Mueller said he may have inadvertently abetted the missing car's export to Europe under forged papers. He recalls that about a year after Leiske died, while he was administering the estate, someone showed up who said he was interested in buying a different Talbot frame and body Leiske kept as a potential parts car for the teardrop.

Mueller sold it, and signed a bill of sale.

"This guy came to get my name on something, and sure enough, my signature showed up later," on what he says the FBI believes are bogus documents used to move and sell the 1938 Talbot Lago. "They grilled me, I'll tell you that" but ultimately believed he had not signed the document.

According to Mueller, Leiske said he had seen the car, in a pile of parts, out on the lawn of a house he drove by daily to get to his shop. One day he stopped and asked if it was for sale, and the homeowner said it had been abandoned by one her tenants. Leiski moved it in several trips to Marshall Street, and later found the owner and paid him for it.

Over the years, Mueller recalled, Leiske loved to talk about the car, its beauty, history and his restoration plans. He showed it to several people who wanted to buy it but could never let it go. Even Jay Leno stopped by to see it when he was in Milwaukee for a performance, Mueller said.

In 1999, he took an ad in Hemmings Motor News, and several prospective buyers came to inspect the car, according to the lawsuit. Leiske kept records on each visitor — but those were all stolen along with the car.

Another interesting note to the car's provenance: According to an article in Road & Track magazine, Milwaukee-born, famed industrial designer Brooks Stevens once owned the car in the 1950s, but it was damaged in transit and stored in a shed outside his Mequon auto museum before it wound up on the east side lawn where Leiske saw it.

But Stevens acquired another 1938 Talbot Lago teardrop coupe, which was later on display in the museum, which closed in the late 1990s.