Every Bidder Bailed on the WikiLeaks Truck

Adam Martin

Remember how the guy who owns the WikiLeaks truck was going to sell it and use the money to start building a whole fleet of WikiLeaks vehicles? Well, the eBay sale ended last week and all the bidders backed out at the last minute, so that never happened. The truck's owner, Clark Stoeckley, tells us he had three bidders, who had pushed the price up to $7,700 from the original ask of $7,500. As the bidding came to a close, however, they all dropped out. One said she wanted the truck but couldn't get a loan. Another said he had accidentally entered the wrong amount. A third said he wouldn't really be able to buy it, but was just bidding for fun. "I contacted eBay about his retraction, but all they said they would do was to give them a warning," Stoeckley said. "But hey, I got in the Wall Street Journal, which is totally winning. I do all kinds of crazy things with the truck and it never gets in the Wall Street Journal until I decide to sell it."

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Stoeckley had planned to use the money from the truck's sale to pay for WikiLeaks graphics to apply to a whole fleet of vehicles. He said even though the sale never happened, he had been able to get some graphics printed up, and planned to apply them to a second vehicle: The RV currently touring Occupy sites under the name Occupy the Roads. "Next week, it's going to become the WikiLeaks RV," Stoeckley said. So the fleet is growing. But slowly.

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Meanwhile the WikiLeaks truck, which had taken up a semipermanent residence across Broadway from Zuccotti Park during Occupy Wall Street, is at something of a loss for purpose. Stoeckley drove it down to Washington D.C. for this week's Occupy Congress action, and he's going to park it outside a performance art piece on Bradley Manning he's doing this weekend, but mostly it stays parked in a garage "somewhere in the Tri-State area," Stoeckley said. "It's my car, so I drive it wherever I go." But he's going to put it on eBay again in March, when the registration runs out. Meanwhile, it's still for sale for $7,500.