Interesting blog from someone who is in the know.
About Me
Name: Rick Carey
Auctions Editor of Car Collector and Victory Lane magazines. Reporting on the collector car auction market since 1991. Editor of Car Collector's Online Market Journal
www.ccomj.com. For more see
www.rickcarey.com.
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Friday, February 02, 2007
The Barrett-Jackson Rumor Mill, Again
It’s no wonder Craig Jackson sometimes acts paranoid. How many times does Barrett-Jackson have to deal with uninformed rumors?
We’re still putting down the “the Futurliner didn’t sell for $4 million” stories, a year after the $3,680,000 (that’s the $4 million hammer bid less the 8% seller’s commission) wire transfer landed in Montreal.
This week it was “did you hear about the class action against B-J? It’s all over the Internet.”
Well, no I hadn’t, so I went looking.
I found someone named Sam Barer’s posting on his blog. A wide-ranging rant, it started off by accusing B-J of fraud (“some hobbyists are claiming a worst [sic]: fraud”), which must have gotten Mr. Jackson’s attention. Then there it was, Barer says someone “has filed papers with the court” and “this is already being discussed as translating into class-action status.”
Sam claims to be “a collector car journalist” who has “been watching the Barrett-Jackson auction for years.”
From reading his rambling posting it didn’t even appear that he was at B-J, much less on the block where he might have become aware of what goes on there so to find out I called the phone number for his company’s “Business Office.”
I reached Sam at home.
Not only wasn’t Sam at Barrett-Jackson this year, he’s never been to Barrett-Jackson at all. He has been “watching the Barrett-Jackson auction” though. On SPEED Channel. He watched the whole thing, he said – except for the parts he missed. And he “knows people” who’ve bought and sold cars at Barrett-Jackson.
When pressed, Sam admitted that he didn’t know if a suit had been filed. He further allowed that the “class action” was complete conjecture.
This is pathetic. Barrett-Jackson (and Craig Jackson and even Keith Martin who came in for his share of Barer-bashing) has been taking flack from someone who hasn’t any firsthand knowledge of what went on at Barrett-Jackson in 2007 (or any other year). He’s just dishing out recirculated rumors, then piling surmise and conjecture on top of them.
Barrett-Jackson has now issued a statement dealing with Mr. Barer’s rumors and surmise. The statement is clear, concise and factual, unlike the rambling rant that prompted it.
In the case of the lawsuit/class action rumor, there is no “there” there.
Craig Jackson isn’t the one who is paranoid.
Rick Carey
February 2, 2007
Labels: barrett-jackson, collector car auction
posted by Rick Carey at 3:12 PM 0 comments