Los Angeles, 1978. Two children start digging in the garden of their house while playing and under the grass, to everyone’s surprise, a luxurious Ferrari Dino emerges that had been buried underground for several years. What could be the synopsis of a thriller movie is what really happened to the children of the Underwood family while they were playing in the garden of the house they had recently moved into. After finding some plastic, they pulled it and discovered that underneath there was something metallic and green, which seemed to be the parts of a car.
Disturbed by the discovery and because a year earlier the body of a woman had been found inside a car that was also underground, the children’s mother notified the police to take charge of the case. Suspicions that a car or part of it was buried under the grass would later be confirmed when a police rescue team excavated the site and extracted an exclusive Ferrari Dino, Chairs and Flares model, whose production had been limited to less than a hundred units.
Now, why did that car appear buried in the Underwood garden? How did it end up there? These and many other questions were resolved as soon as the investigators began to connect the dots by crossing the data on the Ferrari’s license plate and chassis number with the list of missing vehicles that remained at an unknown location. From there everything was very easy to find the owner of the car and to have him sing about what happened, since the Underwood neighbors were also unaware that this 195 HP jewel was sold four years ago for $22,500 at the Hollywood Sports dealership. Cars will have been underground all this time.
Rosendo Cruz, a plumber of Hispanic origin, was the man who hatched the plan. Although his financial situation was not very buoyant, quite the opposite, he decided to spend his savings on the purchase of the Ferrari Dino to win back his wife on their wedding anniversary. In this way he planned to redirect a relationship that was faltering. So after showing him the luxurious vehicle they went to dinner at Brown Derby, one of the most exclusive restaurants in Los Angeles. But after the lively evening, when they returned to the place where they had left the car parked, it was no longer there. Had disappeared.
Cruz reported the theft, but the Ferrari Dino did not appear, so after a few months the insurance company reimbursed him for the value of the car at the time of purchase: $22,500. The case would have ended here had it not been for the fact that four years later the luxurious vehicle was found buried under the Underwoods’ garden and the cake was discovered.
It turns out that the plumber commissioned some friends to make the vehicle disappear by throwing it into the sea to collect compensation from the insurance company. But his collaborators carried out an alternative plan by keeping the vehicle underground with the aim of recovering it some time later. For this reason, they took him to an open field and dug a huge hole to place him there wrapped with plastic, towels and cloth to protect him from dirt and humidity. What they did not foresee is that what was a vacant area would end up becoming a private urbanization and that buildings would be built on their plots.
When the vehicle was recovered by the police it became the property of the insurer. Although it had been buried for four years, was rusty and had suffered damage to the body when it was extracted from the hole, it did not take much work for someone to buy the Ferrari Dino. The car had already become an icon due to the impact the news had in Los Angeles, so a young Californian mechanic would end up becoming its new owner after paying $6,000.
The car underwent a total facelift and today looks like new. Of course, the mechanic who bought it added a final chapter to this bizarre story as a wink when he decided to personalize the license plate with the words Dug Up, that is, ‘The Unearthed One’.
