Yahoo Autos Former Owner Of Mansion With Mercedes Buried In The Yard Was One Sketchy Dude
Last week, landscapers discovered an unidentified car buried in the yard of a $15 million mansion in Atherton, California. If you read that story and got the feeling something criminal had to have happened, you weren’t alone. We felt the same way. While we still don’t know exactly what happened, new information seems to confirm our initial suspicions were far from unfounded.
NBC Bay Area reports that the car, a Mercedes convertible that appears to be a 1990s SL, is out of the ground and currently being examined for any evidence that may point to what actually happened. Police say they still don’t know why the car was buried, but KRON4 says it was reported stolen in 1992. So insurance fraud seems likely, although it’s possible the insurance fraud was connected to another crime.
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That’s not the most exciting update in the world, but the information that’s come out about the house’s former owner, Johnny Bocktune Lew? That’s very, very interesting.
Lew, who died in 2015 at the age of 77, had a criminal history and at one point reportedly told police he was involved in organized crime. Not only was he arrested for allegedly murdering his girlfriend in the ‘60s, he was later convicted of the attempted murder of another person in 1977.
He wasn’t a stranger to insurance fraud, either. In 1999, he was arrested for planning to sink his yacht (because of course he had a yacht) to claim the insurance money. At the time, it was possibly “the largest single case of insurance fraud the state has seen.”
