Car Salesman Gives Elderly Man a Really Good Deal
A Midwest car dealer I knew once bugged his own waiting room to eavesdrop on customers’ private conversations about what they were willing to pay on a pending deal. In my own car buying, I always seem to run into the salesman who desperately needs one more sale--mine--to pay for his wife or child’s hospital operation.
If you’ve shared similar experiences with car dealers, maybe we’ve just had a string of bad luck. Because there is another side.
There’s Noel McFarlane.
McFarlane, who works for Huntington Beach Chrysler-Jeep on Beach Boulevard, recently sacrificed three big car sales that were done deals. His conscience told him something was amiss. Let me take you to the beginning. . . .
On June 24, McFarlane took a call from a Pasadena man looking to buy Chrysler’s new 300M, which runs about $30,000. The man, who it turns out is 85, showed up at the dealership in a wheelchair. With him was a woman who said she was his secretary, plus two men said to be his employees.
After almost no negotiating, the group agreed on a sale price McFarlane suggested. McFarlane said the car and the paperwork would be ready the next day.
Right away, the three employees of the elderly man should have been suspicious of McFarlane’s own motives. You ever see a car salesperson who would willingly let you leave the lot without a done deal? What they didn’t know was that McFarlane wasn’t planning to sell them a car--he was planning to call the police.
“I could see it was a scam,” McFarlane said. “No way was this car for this elderly man in the wheelchair.”
Actually, the three had a little bad luck when they landed McFarlane at random as their salesperson. He’s been in the car business eight years. But before that, the Jamaican-born McFarlane, 54, spent 15 years as a minister. He quit a career as a singing evangelist because the travel kept him from his family.
“When the elderly man first looked at me, he said he could tell that I was an honest person,” McFarlane said. “I told myself right then, I’m not going to let this gentleman get taken by these three.”
McFarlane kept trying to get the elderly man alone, but the other three wouldn’t let him. They would also cut off any conversation with the man.
*
The next day, the trio called McFarlane on the phone: They decided they needed two cars. Most of us would expect a bit of a price break from a car salesperson who was going to get double business from us. These three said the same price for both was fine. Then they called again: Now they wanted three cars. Fine, McFarlane said, come on in.
The secretary and one of the men arrived with the elderly man. McFarlane turned them over to the dealership’s finance director, Ron Divito. Divito introduced them to a trainee working with him, Sam Lopez. Lopez, of course, was a Huntington Beach police undercover investigator.
Divito decided to test the waters a little. He mentioned the yearlong warranty package, which runs about $1,000 extra. Divito told them it would be $2,500--for each car. Fine, no problem, they said.
The elderly man pulled out a packet of checks from his pocket and wrote a check for the first car, more than $30,000. Divito called the man’s bank, which said the check would clear with no problem.
Things got sticky when Divito began to press the two about just what it was they did as employees of the elderly man. When they found it impossible to answer almost anything about themselves, they were arrested on suspicion of violating elder abuse laws.
The case has since been turned over to the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s elder abuse unit. Because it is pending, the names of the three arrested, and even the name of the alleged victim, have not been released.
But in a letter to the dealership, Huntington Beach Police Chief Ronald E. Lowenberg did relate these details: The alleged victim had recently been in a Los Angeles hospital with a broken hip. The three introduced themselves to him there and convinced him that they should be his caretakers. Though the man in the wheelchair was coherent at all times, personnel at the car dealership and the police chief described him as “very confused.”
Chief Lowenberg added in his letter that the man in the wheelchair “has a personal worth of $20 million.”
It’s easy to say that McFarlane only did what any of us would have done. But McFarlane lost three commissions out of this, a heavy hit to his wallet.
*
I suggested to Rick Evans, the owner of Huntington Beach Chrysler-Jeep, that there are a lot of dealerships that simply would have looked the other way with the chance to make those three easy sales.
“I’m sure there are,” Evans said. “But in the long run you get paid back when you do the right thing.”
Surely, I added, Evans knows that car salespeople generally have bad reputations among consumers.
“Yes, but you hear the same thing said about lawyers, carpet cleaners and people in Congress,” said Evans, who is current president of the California Motor Car Dealers Assn. “But my experience with car dealers is they’re just human beings trying to do a job.”
So maybe it’s only fair to acknowledge that there are more Noel McFarlanes out there than some of us realize.
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Police Chief Lowenberg wrote: “McFarlane could have sold several cars, but instead, chose to help the senior citizen from being a victim of fraud. This type of financial elder abuse is becoming very common.”
I asked McFarlane if he had any regrets about missing out on those three sales. “No,” he said. “As a minister you get to know people pretty well. I really believe that elderly man, in his own way, was reaching out to me for help.”
Jerry Hicks’ column appears Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday. Readers may reach Hicks by calling the Times Orange County Edition at (714) 966-7823 or by fax to (714) 966-7711, or e-mail to jerry.hicks@latimes.com
