BORN TO RUST

Kept under lock and key for decades, Rudi Klein's collection is the stuff of myth and legend. We take a tour before it crosses the block

- JACK RIX

What is it about junkyards that's so magnetic?

Apart from all the ferrous metal. Probably the hope you're going to stumble across some matching numbers Ferrari that everyone else has missed or forgotten about and make your fortune, when in reality the best you'll do is trip over a smashed wing mirror from a Vauxhall Corsa. But what if I told you there was a place in south Los Angeles, a modest lot where everywhere you looked and every dust sheet you lifted revealed another classic car wonder, in some cases worth millions? We're talking about the Disneyland of barn finds, and we had the chance to explore it before the collection was sold at auction.

The collection belonged to Rudi Klein, a German businessman who moved to the US in the 1950s, and figured out if he got his hands on wrecked exotic European cars before they became rare and highly sought after, he'd have a treasure trove of spare parts to keep other exotics going. Business boomed, so he started treating himself to some special stuff that wasn’t for breaking, and kept it in this walled and guarded junkyard that envelops an entire block in one of LA’s less salubrious areas. The business was known as Porche Foreign Auto Wrecking (Porsche deliberately spelled without the S to keep lawyers happy), and Rudi - who died in 2001 - was famous for not letting the public or journalists in. He also disliked selling anything back to manufacturers for restoration, so a lot of the cars were left to rot.