Hershel Zelcer and his colleagues started searching for a Ferrari once owned by NBA superstar Michael Jordan that had been lost for a decade. Through a stroke of luck, they found the car in just an hour.
The Ferrari 512 Testarossa owned by Jordan during his first Bulls three-peat had become a focal point for a client of Zelcer’s and his colleagues at Miami’s Curated Vintage Supercars. They had previously helped the client acquire a 1986 Testarossa used in TV’s “Miami Vice.”
Jordan’s former super car was the client’s — and by extension, Zelcer’s — white whale.
The rare Ferrari has a 412-horsepower V-12 engine, but it’s not a particularly valuable car as far as collectibles go. It last sold at the Barrett-Jackson auto auction in 2010 for $61,600. Zelcer said that without the client’s interest, his team would probably not have sought out the super car, which has more than 54,000 miles on the odometer.
But despite an eager client, the Curated team couldn’t track the car down. At one point they thought they had found the vehicle, only to discover they’d been strung along for weeks for a similar car — but without the Jordan provenance.
“This car was a ghost, it was sold and it was gone, no one knew where it went,” Zelcer told the Sun-Times. “It just was not an easy car to find.”
Jordan bought the car new in 1992 from Lake Forest Sportscars, now Ferrari Lake Forest. It was made famous by a Sports Illustrated photo of the super star stepping out of the car before a 1992 playoff game against the New York Knicks.
Jordan could be spotted around the city with an “M-AIR-J” license plate. The car’s next owner — Chris Gardner, the inspiration behind Will Smith’s character in the movie “Pursuit of Happyness” — changed his plates to “NOT MJ” when he bought it in 1995.
The film depicts Gardner’s encounter with a man driving a red Ferrari, a turning point on his path from homelessness to millionaire stockbroker and philanthropist.
“When a man in a red Ferrari changed my life, I promised myself when I made it I would buy a Ferrari,” Gardner wrote in a 2021 social media post. “It just so happened, I bought one owned by the man himself, Michael Jordan.”
A third owner had it until it sold at a 2010 auction to a man who now lives in Los Angeles, where Zelcer and his team tracked it this month, hours after discovering that the other Ferrari they’d been chasing wasn’t Jordan’s.
He started making calls to everyone in the area with the same last name, finally getting a voicemail after the fourth call. Minutes later they had confirmation from the owner’s wife that the car was intact, in their possession, and most importantly, possibly for sale.
Zelcer and members of his team got on a plane to L.A., where they drove through neighborhoods devastated by January’s wildfires. The owner’s home was surrounded by the rubble of his neighbor’s homes, though his home remained untouched, as did the Ferrari, which sat covered in the driveway, unscathed by the historic blazes.
“It was all very dramatic,” Zelcer said. “The thing was sitting outside in the middle of wildfires that burned the neighborhood down. … I was fully expecting to see a shell of a car.”
The current owner was diagnosed with cancer just months after buying the car, and the car had sat parked as he fought for his health. The owner and the Curated team struck a deal for the Ferrari, and it was shipped back to the Miami shop. The team marveled that their decade-long search was over.
The vehicle is being shipped to Italy, where the new owner will finance a $250,000 restoration, more than four times the value of the car, by mechanics in the country’s Motor Valley — home to generations of mechanics who built Ferraris, Lamborghinis and other Italian super cars.
Zelcer said it’ll be the best way to ensure the car is fixed up by people who know its history best.
“It’s generations of families who worked at these factories,” Zelcer said. “You get this artisan’s approach to restoration.”
Zelcer and the team at Curated are hoping to to set up a reunion between the car’s previous owners after it’s restored and before it is shipped off to the new owner. An invite is out to both Jordan and Gardner for the meetup.