Is This What Happened to James Bond’s Stolen Car?
“The name is Bond, James Bond.”
The only aspect of the 007 film franchise more iconic than that line may be the Aston Martin DB5 from Goldfinger, the most famous stolen car in the world—and one that may soon be found thanks to a new revelation.
Two Aston Martins were used in the 1964 film, one for road scenes and another for shots with gadgets, which included hidden Browning machine guns, retractable tire shredders, oil sprayers, and an ejection seat taken from a fighter jet. Today the original road car resides in a private museum in Cincinnati.
The gadgets vehicle, however, is another story.
The car, chassis number DP/2161/1, was in fact a DB5 prototype—a modified DB4 designed for Aston Martin by the Italian coachbuilder Carrozzeria Touring Superleggera. In 1968, after filming the driving scenes in the movie—as well as the 1965 film Thunderball and an episode of The Saint with future Bond actor Roger Moore—the Aston Martin was stripped of its gadgets and sold to Gavin Keyzar, a businessman in a London suburb. In 1971, after fitting the vehicle with replica gadgets, Keyzar sold it to Richard Losee, a collector in Utah, who also purchased the 1937 Rolls-Royce Phantom III driven by Goldfinger’s villain. In 1986, Losee sold both vehicles at a Sotheby’s auction, with the Aston Martin bought for $275,000 by Anthony Pugliese, a real estate developer in greater Boca Raton who also owned a witch’s hat from The Wizard of Oz and Harrison Ford’s bullwhip from Raiders of the Lost Ark. For the next decade, Pugliese lent out the car to exhibitions and stored it in his private hangar at Boca Raton Airport, ultimately seeing his investment rise to an insured value of $3.2 million.
Then, in the middle of the night in June 1997, a thief sliced through the hangar’s door, cutting its metal latch and alarm wires. The keys weren’t kept in the hangar, so the thief either hot-wired the vehicle or pushed it out. The guards on duty saw nothing. One, who had been asleep, was later fired.
Within days, the theft was national news—leading to theories about who’d taken the Aston Martin and sightings across the U.S. It was seen in a Home Depot parking lot in Seekonk, Massachusetts; glimpsed near O’Hare in Chicago; and spotted in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina. It was said to have been dropped into the ocean off the Florida Keys, or hidden away in a private museum. Yet the stories always proved false. At one point, police detectives reportedly suspected Pugliese himself of planning the theft, but that theory didn’t pan out either, and the case went cold.
According to a report by the insurance agency Hagerty, Pugliese received the full amount of the car’s estimated value: $3.2 million.
The story didn’t end there, however. In 2018, Art Recovery International (ARI)—specialists hired by the insurance company—claimed to have a break in the twenty-year-old cold case. According to reports, the DB5 was so heavy and laden with gadgets that it had to be dragged out of the hangar by its axles, leaving tire marks. One theory is that the marks ended at a waiting cargo plane, which was used to smuggle the DB5 out of the country. “I got a very credible tip,” said Christopher Marinello, the chief executive of ARI, who suggested the car could be worth up to $13 million. “We believe that the car is currently with a collector in the Middle East who has maybe four thousand vehicles that almost never get driven—rows and rows of Astons, rows and rows of Lamborghinis and Ferraris, and he just doesn’t care.”
The case appeared to be nearing closure, until a private investigator in Boca Raton came up with another theory, one that had never been shared.
Until now.
Joe Ford takes a call.
Joe Ford is a detective who hunts missing million-dollar cars—and business is booming.
In recent years, collectible cars—rare vehicles representing milestones in automotive history—have skyrocketed in value, becoming a newly-sought trophy for titans of industry to buy alongside their Basquiats and Picassos. According to a 2025 report by McKinsey, the global value of collectible vehicles reached $929 billion last year. Yet just as with any art, the growing demand for these rare cars is also attracting forgers and thieves. Criminals have pulled off elaborate heists of million-dollar vehicles, sometimes smuggling them out of their country of origin, retrofitting them with fake paperwork, and reselling them on the international market. “We’re seeing more stolen classic cars than ever before,” said Marinello. “Thieves know Ferrari like they know Picasso.”
And when people get ripped off, they call one man—Joe Ford, the million-dollar car detective. “I’m a very specific private investigator,” he said. “I’m in a niche of a niche of a niche.”
Joe, 62, was more Magnum, P.I. than Sam Spade—tall, trim, tan, usually dressed in a fitted polo or a Hawaiian shirt. He drank sweet tea by the gallon and spoke like the New Orleans native he was. (“I grew up in east New Orleans, near the Ninth Wah-ard.”) He liked to swim and dive for lobster and drive boats. Recently, he’d cruised on a sixty-five-footer down to Utila, “this coral-reef island off the coast of Honduras,” he said. “It was incredible, diving with whale sharks and drinking with outlaws. One guy didn’t come back.”
Joe is a detective for hire who specializes in recovering stolen cars. But not your car.
Over the years, Joe had investigated all types of cases. In one, he was trying to find the heir to a series of stolen cars, including a rare Bugatti, involving a father who may have disinherited his son. In another, he was researching a missing car in the former Soviet Bloc, “Where they’ll kill you for a million-dollar vehicle—not sure I want to touch that one yet.” In yet another, he was tracking down a wealthy collector in the Midwest who, decades ago, angrily bulldozed a barn full of rare cars after a fire had destroyed a few of them. Joe was convinced he could rescue the remaining chassis from their gravesite and have them restored. “Back then the cars weren’t worth what they are today,” Joe said. “The former landowner is dead, but I’m using Google Maps to search the area. The barn might be under a highway.” Yet another involved a collector in Oxnard, California, a wealthy Ferrari owner whose vintage $5-million racer had gone missing in Asia. “When he said Asia, I said, ‘Oh fuck, good luck with that,’” Joe said. “But then I said, ‘Tell me more.’”
Recently, Joe had been preoccupied with a yearslong case, recovering a stolen 1938 Talbot-Lago T150C-SS Teardrop coupe, chassis number 90108, current value $7.6 million, a model that The Robb Report had once called “the most beautiful car in the world”. The story of its theft was seemingly ripped from a paperback thriller. In the middle of the night on March 3, 2001, men in white overalls cut the phone lines at the home of the car’s owner, a plastics mogul. Then the thieves drove about two miles to his former factory. They parked an unmarked white box truck in front and drilled out the cylinders of the lock to an overhead door. “It was a very sophisticated way to steal it,” said Jeff Thiele, a Milwaukee policeman who worked the case. “Like some shit out of the movies.”
For years, the Teardrop had remained partially disassembled at the back of the facility, its parts in various places, the paperwork scattered among office drawers. Somehow the thieves knew exactly where to look for all of it. They used an overhead crane already in the building to move the Teardrop’s parts into the box truck, which they backed up to the main door. According to eyewitnesses, only one thief was seen well enough to be described: a white male about thirty-five, “thin build, with sandy-brown shoulder-length hair.”
A suspect in the theft was Chris Gardner, a former business partner and friend of Joe. The two had come up together in New Orleans, trading in grey-market imports (European-made vehicles shipped to the US) and rare cars, before an epic falling out over a 1954 Ferrari 375 Plus Spyder worth $18.3 million. After that legal battle, Joe had been tipped off that Gardner was allegedly behind the theft of the Talbot-Lago, so he helped the FBI investigate the matter and partnered with the car’s heir to gain it back. In 2019, a federal grand jury in the Eastern District of Wisconsin released a five-count indictment against Gardner, charging him with wire fraud and causing a stolen car to be transported in foreign commerce. In 2021, Gardner was arrested by authorities at his home in Switzerland, extradited to the United States by the FBI, and imprisoned in Wisconsin. He maintained his innocence and, after the death of a key witness in the case in 2024, all charges against him were dropped. Gardner walked free and blamed one man for his downfall—Joe. “I ran a legitimate business for fifty years with a good reputation and won awards and trophies,” Gardner said. “I was never going to share that with Joe. And suddenly he steps into my shoes saying he owns the car that I once owned.”
Gardner and Joe figured their paths would never cross again.
Until the Goldfinger Aston Martin.
The revelation about James Bond’s stolen car all started with a tip from a thief.
Chris Burke, a mechanic who claimed to have helped Gardner steal the Talbot-Lago Teardrop, testified about how Gardner left Florida very suddenly in 1997, when the Goldfinger Aston Martin was stolen from a private hangar at the Boca Raton airport. “It was around the same time that Gardner had me move all his cars from the same Boca Raton airport and ship them to Europe,” Burke said.
Joe Ford, on the case.
Back then, Burke didn’t think much about the Bond car incident. But after helping Gardner steal the Teardrop, he recalled a funny thing Gardner told him. “Right after the Aston Martin theft happened, he showed me a newspaper article about it and said, ‘Look at this asshole who got his car stolen from him. He should have paid his debts,’” Burke recalled. “At the time, I didn’t put two and two together. I didn’t know [Gardner] was a thief. But later, when I looked back—yeah, I think Gardner stole it.”
Gardner denied stealing the 1964 Aston Martin DB5. “I am James Bond,” he said, laughing. “Ass clowns.”
Joe wasn’t surprised by the theory. “I’ve always wondered in the back of my mind if that motherfucker Gardner stole the James Bond Aston Martin,” he said. At the time of the theft, Gardner lived nearby at Lighthouse Point and rented a hangar at the Pompano Beach executive airfield, near the Boca Raton airport where the theft occurred. “It’s too coincidental,” Joe said. “It’s a perfect setting and Gardner’s a willing thief.”
Sean Connery with the 1964 Aston Martin DB5 in question.
Currently, Marinello from ARI was hunting the stolen DB5. The fifty-seven-year-old former Manhattan litigator had served as in-house counsel at Art Loss Register, whose experts trained the FBI’s art crime team in how to identify stolen art. Over the years, he’d recovered a wide variety of artifacts: Cézannes, medieval books, a ceremonial Masonic sword, antique firearms, Yukon antler carvings, even sixteenth-century astrolabes (similar to a sextant). He’d been tracking the Goldfinger Aston Martin for a decade. So far, nothing. “The FBI’s offered to help,” Marinello said.
Perhaps Joe will get there first.
Joe was doing his research. He found a local newspaper article from the time of the theft that included the names of the investigating officers. More important, he came across a new wrinkle—one that hit close to home.
Joe didn’t believe the theory about the DB5 being absconded with by cargo plane. “The airport’s not big enough for a plane like that,” he said.
Joe believed Gardner may have stolen the DB5, hidden it away, then shipped it overseas under the guise of a different VIN. According to Joe, such an approach would line up with Gardner’s typical MO. “Gardner lived in the area and kept his own cars at another airport hangar nearby,” he said. “I told the FBI, ‘You’d better chase that down.’” Speaking on condition of anonymity, an FBI agent confirmed that they had looked into the case and that Gardner mentioned the Goldfinger Aston Martin while in jail. “During our review of jail-cell calls, something came up about the Aston Martin,” the agent said. “Like he’s almost claiming that he was responsible for it.”
Joe had some leads. In the end, however, it came down to one question. Would he pick up Gardner’s trail again, try to find the long-lost Goldfinger Aston Martin and collect a million-dollar insurance payout?
Joe smiled.
“It’s the same old story.”
Excerpt adapted from The Million-Dollar Car Detective by Stayton Bonner. Copyright © 2025. Reprinted with permission of Blackstone Publishing and Stayton Bonner. All rights reserved.
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