Club Cobra - Carroll Shelby & SAAC dispute

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Originally Posted by race-it (Post 808728)

WASAAC
From reading both articles and assuming the information is correct I think that Mr. Shelby has the right as owner of the loaned items to expect them back if the agreed upon terms of the loan have not been kept

This was part of the response from Rick Kopec of SAAC...

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All this said, there seems to be some misinformation about the details surrounding what I discovered in the attic of Shelby's Gardena building. and what became of it. I have no problem laying out these details as I expect that if this matter finds its way into court I will be asked about them in detail. And I will say the same thing under oath than I am saying now. I offer them only to clear up any misconceptions and to hopefully set the record straight.

In the early 1980s, when I was visiting Los Angeles, I would stop by Shelby's Gardena facility to see Lew Spencer and Al Dowd, who were working as Mr. Shelby's administrative assistants. On one such visit, in 1984, Lew Spencer was showing me something the storage area in the attic above the offices when I noticed a long row of cardboard boxes stacked up, two or three high, against the eves. There were probably 100 or more. I asked Spencer what was in them and he said he didn't know. They were temporary cardboard file boxes with a handle which was used to pull out a drawer. Each drawer was filled with paperwork, documents, files of correspondence, work orders, invoices for parts, ledgers and financial records. All of the paperwork left behind by a medium-sized company which was no longer in operation. In the few drawers I opened I could not see any sort of organization. Things seemed to be thrown in haphazardly. Some boxes had obviously been spilled out and the contents scooped up and thrown back in the drawers. There were too many boxes to go through, each containing hundreds and maybe thousands of separate pieces of paper so I asked Spencer if I could come back the next time I was in town to take a closer look. He said I could spend all the time I liked.

Over the next ten years I was able to visit the attic perhaps a dozen or more times. Sometimes I brought one or two other club members with me. At first we were happy to make copies of what we considered the more important pieces of paperwork—usually anything with serial numbers on it. Some shipping orders listed 6 or more cars, all shipped on the same day. We often came in the summer when the temperature in the uninsulated attic was over 100 degrees. We had to bend down under the low rafters and there was only a single bare light bulb. Everything was dusty. The things we found were all pieces of a large puzzle but we quickly realized that not all the pieces were there. At some point, we knew we would never have enough time to go through each document or work order individually. And we didn't want to wear out our welcome (and Shelby's photocopy machine) so I asked Spencer if we could sort through everything and take entire boxes of stuff which I would pay to have shipped back to CT where we could review them more thoroughly and at a more leisurely pace. He said he would ask Mr. Shelby. He did, and Mr. Shelby said we could take anything we wanted because it had been there for 25 years and nobody had even looked in those boxes in all that time.

We separated out the boxes which had material that appeared promising. Since this was slow and tedious work it required several visits, over the period of a couple of years. As a box was filled we marked it to be saved and Spencer labeled them "Save for Rick Kopec" with my address on them. His worry was that somebody would give the order for the place to be cleaned out when he wasn't around and the stuff would be hauled out to the dumpster.

After we had looked through all of the boxes, we had separated 14 of them which would be shipped back to CT. Spencer said he would have some of his employees move them down to the first floor at some point and stack them on a pallet. I made arrangements for a couple of SAAC members to drop by a few days later, pick up the boxes and take them to a freight forwarding company for shipment back to CT. Included in the documents were two boxes of cancelled Shelby American company checks from 1962 to 1966. To my knowledge, Mr. Shelby never saw what was inside any of the boxes and neither did Lew Spencer.

Back in CT we sorted through the boxes and separated out everything which pertained to types of cars: 289 and 427 Cobras, 1965 and 1966 GT350s and even a few things relating to King Cobras and 1966 Trans-Am but every piece helped. It provided nowhere near a full accounting of the cars but it was better than anything we had discovered to date. This information was used in the 1997 registry. In most cases it confirmed what we had already discovered about these cars through owners and former owners. In a lot of cases the paperwork created more questions than it answered.

One of the chapters in the 1997 Registry was titled "The Evolution of the Registry." It outlined how the registry began and who was involved. It recounted the publication of each registry chronologically, ending at the present with the 1997 edition. In it I gave credit to Shelby for allowing us access to this factory paperwork and as we were interested in only the information on it, once we took that information the actual papers themselves had no value to us. It hardly mattered whether we had originals or photocopies. So I said that if Mr. Shelby ever wanted this stuff back he had only to ask because all we were interested in was the information. References to this was in Mr. Shelby's response statement. But, as Paul Harvey says, there's the rest of the story.

This Registry was printed and shipped to about 1000 people who had ordered a copy in advance of printing in December of 1997. About 200 more copies were ordered by members outside of the U.S. and shipping those required detailed customs forms which each had to be filled out by hand, one at a time, and attached to the boxes by a special plastic envelope. This took a lot of time and instead of attending the 1998 Las Vegas event in January, I chose to stay home to ship the overseas orders.

Mr. Shelby did not attend SAAC-23 in Charlotte in July, so the next time I saw him in person was at the Las Vegas event in February of 1998. There he told me what a great job we did on the book. I responded that the paperwork we found in his attic was a big help in filling in some gaps and answering some questions. He said that he was happy it was put to good use and there was no need for me to return it. When he said this, in the parking lot of his facility at the Las Vegas Motor Speedway on the Sunday of the event, there were four other SAAC members standing with us who all heard him tell me I could keep everything. Mr. Shelby seems to have forgotten that.