[USC_COWBOY]

Originally Posted by 1ntCobra

The Cartage/Drayage thing seems to be related to international cargo shipments, warehousing and delivery. At first I was thinking that maybe Shelby American had Mr Curry store the car in a warehouse and was tired of paying for him for the storage of the car. But reading the letter again, Shelby American had the wrecked car in their possession.

So why send information from the Department of Motor Vehicles, the bank, the legal owner and wanting to get a mechanics lien to Mr Curry? Maybe with international shipping business angle, they wanted Mr Curry to ship the wreck back to AC cars? That seems highly unlikely. It seems more likely Mr Curry might be familiar with how to fill out the paperwork to get a mechanics lien on a wrecked car that Shelby American considers abandoned at their shop for several months. The letter says that Shelby American knows who the legal owner is. The car has been in their possession for months. It seems logical knowing who the legal owner is, to just ask the legal owner to come and pick up the wreck. Asking the legal owner to pick up the car is both easy and FREE. Getting a mechanics lien involves time and money. Perhaps they had contacted the legal owner on multiple occassions and for whatever reason, the legal owner is not responding, or the legal owner told Shelby American that they don't want or need the wreck back.

Reading the letter, I can see 2 possiblities for contacting Mr Curry:
1) They want Mr Curry to fill out the paperwork to get the mechanics lien.
2) They are getting someone else to fill out the paperwork to get the mechanics lien, but when they have the lien, they want Mr Curry to do something with the wreck.

In any case, it seems the wheels were in motion for Shelby American to get a mechanics lien on the wrecked car. The end result of which would be for Shelby American to take ownership of the car by getting their own title to the car. Shelby American intended to get a title to a wrecked car that seems to be abandoned at their shop.

So whoever legally owned the wreck, whether that was Paul Cunningham, Ann or somebody else, they were going to no longer own the car, so that Shelby could get rid of it. Perhaps Shelby American got the mechanics lien and then got the title to the car and then took it to a junk yard got a few bucks for their trouble. Who knows, maybe Ann Abidin owned a junk yard and Shelby sold the wreck to her, then a few years later Lanse sees the wreck in the junk yard and buys it from Ann. And perhaps Ann makes up a story about the wreck when she sells it to Lanse. Or perhaps Lanse misunderstood Ann and thinks she originally owned the car when she did not.

Anyway if Shelby American eventually got the mechanics lien and even if Paul Cunningham was the legal owner at the time of the crash, it is possible that the Cunningham family has not owned the wreck since 1964 when Shelby American took over ownership and got the title for CSX2049. It is also possible that Shelby sold the wreck to a junk yard or to someone else, who eventually sold it to Ann Abidin who later sold it to Lanse. Lanse could very well be the legitimate "title owner" and not an "imposter".

However as CompClassics has pointed out, Lanse may not have originally intended to restore the wreck and simply parted it out. And only many years later realized that he still had the title and then claimed that his intention was to restore the car.

The Cunningham family was never contacted by Shelby regarding the lien process and therefore we were never able to recover the wreck.

Upon Paul's death, my mom was unconsolable and I became the dominant male in the household at 19 years of age. Several month's later she and my sister moved back to Illinois to be near her mom and dad.