The Car Too Famous to Steal
Anthony Pugliese III was the sort of American collector who made British aristocrats seem positively restrained. By 1997, the Florida real estate magnate had assembled a private museum that read like a twisted fairy tale: the Wicked Witch's hat from The Wizard of Oz, Oddjob's deadly bowler from Goldfinger, Harrison Ford's bullwhip from Indiana Jones, and the Colt revolver Jack Ruby used to kill Lee Harvey Oswald. If it appeared on screen or shaped history, Pugliese wanted to own it. His philosophy, as he liked to say, was built on "old world traditions" where "your word is your bond", though given his later legal troubles involving fake companies and phony billings, one suspects his interpretation of tradition was rather creative.
A Quiet Night in Florida
At the crown of this bizarre collection sat chassis DP/216/1, the original effects car from Goldfinger. Pugliese had acquired it in 1986 for $275,000, a fraction of what he'd paid for his natural swimming pools empire that had made him rich by age 21. The DB5 lived in a private aircraft hangar at Boca Raton Airport, that temple of wealthy discretion where Florida's elite stored their toys behind concrete walls and electronic gates. However, in 1997, airport security possessed all the sophistication of a country club, which is to say, it relied more on social propriety than actual protection.
On the humid night of June 18, 1997, someone cut through the hangar's locks with the precision of a surgeon and the confidence of a cat burglar. No alarms sounded. No guards noticed. The most famous car in the world was simply dragged onto a truck and vanished into the Florida darkness, leaving only tire marks on the concrete floor like automotive chalk outlines. The theft had been planned with precision. The thieves knew exactly which hangar, exactly which car, and exactly how to defeat the sleepy security systems of pre-9/11 America.
A Cloud of Theories
The investigation that followed possessed all the international drama of a Bond film without any of the resolution. Scotland Yard dispatched detectives. The FBI opened files. Insurance companies offered rewards. Art recovery specialists began their patient hunt through the shadowy networks where stolen treasures hide. The theories multiplied like conspiracy novels: the car had been airlifted by cargo plane to some Middle Eastern stronghold, dropped into the Atlantic to claim insurance money, or hidden in one of Pugliese's own storage facilities in an elaborate fraud. For his part, Pugliese collected $4.2 million from his insurers and maintained the wounded dignity of a man whose most prized possession had been violated by common criminals.
Enter the Ghost Hunter
Enter Christopher Marinello, a man who has spent three decades chasing ghosts. If Pugliese collected the artefacts of popular culture, Marinello specialised in hunting them down when they disappeared. The founder of Art Recovery International possessed the methodical patience of a chess master and the cultural literacy of a museum curator. His usual quarry was far more serious than stolen sports cars - Nazi-looted Matisses, plundered Cambodian antiquities, Byzantine artefacts smuggled from Syrian churches. He was the sort of man who could negotiate the return of a stolen Rodin with Swiss bankers in the morning and track down missing Mesopotamian tablets with Interpol in the afternoon.
For Marinello, the missing DB5 represented a fascinating change of pace from his usual work. Here was a theft that was purely about desire rather than ideology, greed rather than genocide. The car had become what he called a "toxic asset" - too famous to sell, too valuable to destroy, too distinctive to drive. Somewhere in the world, he suspected, it sat in a climate-controlled garage, admired by a collector who either didn't know or didn't care about its criminal provenance.
A Whisper from the Desert
Twenty-four years after the theft, Marinello began receiving the sort of tips that make art recovery specialists take notice. An anonymous contact claimed to have seen the car in a private collection somewhere in the Middle East, a detail that surprised no one familiar with the region's enthusiasm for acquiring unique automotive treasures. More intriguingly, the informant could identify specific details about chassis DP/216/1 that only someone who had seen the actual car would know - serial numbers in secret locations, particular modifications made during filming, the sort of forensic evidence that separates the genuine article from the countless replicas and an authentic witness from fantasists.
The Ghost in the Machine
The hunt continues with the quiet intensity of a diplomatic mission. Marinello and his network operate in the grey zones between law enforcement and private negotiation, where recovered art is often returned through carefully worded settlements rather than dramatic arrests. The missing DB5 has become something of a holy grail for automotive enthusiasts, its absence only adding to its mystique. Meanwhile, Aston Martin has responded to the car's legendary status in the most practical way imaginable - by building new ones. Their Continuation series offers paying customers the chance to own a brand-new 'Goldfinger' DB5, complete with working gadgets, for a mere few million pounds.
Perhaps the most delicious irony is that the theft has transformed the car from a famous film prop into something approaching mythological status. The missing DB5 has inspired podcasts, documentaries, and countless internet theories. It has become the automotive equivalent of a missing Vermeer, more valuable for its absence than its presence. Until it resurfaces, chassis DP/216/1 remains Aston Martin's most celebrated ghost, a machine that achieved the ultimate Bond fantasy by simply vanishing into legend. But ghosts, as any proper story knows, have a habit of returning when least expected.