From John Dillinger to Nicolas Cage, the car industry has always needed villains. In fact, one could almost make the argument that the entire top quarter or so of the luxury car market is wholly dependent on scumbags of one kind or another. As Raymond Chandler once noted, there’s no honest way to make a hundred million bucks… and spending millions on cars is a great way to advertise one’s comfort with the moral ambiguities of ostentatious wealth. So when America’s most notoriously crooked car dealer, a certain Denny Hecker, auctions off his personal fleet as part of his $767m bankruptcy (itself triggered by 25 counts of fraud and related criminal charges), you expect to see some good stuff hitting the block.

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