![]() Rewind back to the old, broke, and unemployed me on the porch. Foolproof never works, though, as it underestimates the ingenuity of the fool. The manufacturers and their dealers have worked to design a foolproof system that will prevent you from buying a car to export to another country. It is not as simple as it sounds, but it’s not that hard, either. You need a heartbeat, a driver’s license, and that’s about it. But an enterprising individual can make $10,000 this month buying luxury cars. You will not get rich day-trading or flipping houses. There are many ways for someone without education, experience, or ingenuity to make money in America. If you think that you have the right to sell a car you own to whomever you like, you are absolutely correct. But he wished me well and gave me his number, saying that this whole export business was something he was interested in, and that working for the TSA on Christmas Day sucked. The TSA guy listened to all this before he ran a background check on me, which probably raised a few eyebrows, due to my criminal record. In a band, I am the guy with a tambourine. Important-critical, even-but not in any individual sense. It is slightly more glamorous than the life of a roadie or a towel boy, but only just. I was a straw buyer, the bottom rung of the ladder, kind of like a multilevel marketing recruit but without the ambition. I was buying them for a company in San Diego, which was fronting me the money. For example, the current base price of a new Range Rover is $88,345 here, but it starts at 1,518,000 yuan in China, which is about $240,000. Combine this with car companies charging steeper prices for luxury vehicles there than they do in the U.S., and it is easy to see how exporters can turn a profit, even after shipping across the ocean and paying the likes of me. Flush with wealth, the Chinese have also taken a shine to cars-big ones, with lots of leather, executive rear seating, and panoramic sunroofs that open up like a Colorado sunrise.īut China puts a heavy 25 percent tariff on new-car imports, in part to encourage manufacturers to build cars in its country. Though still far from a true democracy, China has adopted many of Adam Smith’s economic principles, creating something of a meritocracy and laying the foundation for the Chinese version of the American Dream. Keep in mind that I have only a state college education, the first two years of which were earned in prison. ![]() I explained then, as I will now, the details of exporting luxury vehicles to China’s gray market. When I got to the front of the security line with no luggage and a six-figure cashier’s check, the TSA agent had some questions. So I paid cash for the next flight back to Atlanta, which didn’t leave until Christmas Day. But as the stockings were hung by the chimney with care, it became clear that I had a better chance of Saint Nick himself delivering the Range Rover. There was an eight-month wait on them then, even if you were a Kardashian, so I kept telling myself it would be worth it. I had been holed up in a La Quinta for days, hoping against hope that a transport truck would deliver my new Range Rover to the local dealership. On Christmas Eve, I woke up on a bench in the Charleston, South Carolina, airport, hung over, with pieces of a vending-machine Moon Pie stuck to my shirt. My wife was happy because I finally put floors in the house (laminates, but they looked damn good), and even my mother-in-law was less ornery after I paid back the bail she posted for me earlier that year.īut my new lifestyle wasn’t all champagne wishes and caviar dreams. Before my Thanksgiving leftovers had disappeared from the fridge, I had purchased more than a dozen vehicles and spent nearly a million dollars. A Rover plus a pair of Porsches in October, and in November, I paid cash for six more luxury vehicles. ![]() Then in August, I bought a new Range Rover, and another of each in September. Being June in Georgia, it was hotter than two hamsters farting in a wool sock. ![]() In the summer of 2013, I was an unemployed ex-con, twice over, living next door to my mother-in-law in a house with no floors.
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