
After the second
Ryan Wedding indictment, the FBI’s Los Angeles field office dropped a photo of an open-top Mercedes-Benz CLK-GTR roadster parked in a federal impound warehouse. It one of the rarest and most valuable cars the U.S. government has ever confiscated.
 | The road-legal “Straßenversion” were hand-assembled at AMG’s facility in Affalterbach, Germany, in the late 1990s, with six roofless roadsters sold to unspeakably wealthy clients. |
The two key money men behind Wedding's network were Toronto jeweller Rolan Sokolovski and former Italian special forces member Gianluca Tiepolo. Tiepolo “worked closely with Sokolovski to procure and manage Wedding’s physical assets, including high-end vehicles,” and held “millions of dollars in Wedding’s property under his own name to conceal these assets from authorities.” Tiepolo owns Italian and U.K. firms — Stile Italiano S.R.L. and TMR Ltd. They trade in luxury motorcycles and cars.
 | 25 road cars were built to qualify the CLK GTR for racing, and one is set to cross the block at Gooding & Company Aug. 13-14. Developed by AMG, the 1998 Mercedes-Benz CLK GTR Strassenversion (road version) was built to comply with FIA GT1 class rules. While GT cars are generally production-based, the rules allowed manufacturers to field full-on race cars, as long as they built 25 street-legal versions. | |
The Mercedes-Benz CLK GTR was the world's most expensive production vehicle in 1998 with an asking price of $1,547,620.
 | The CLK GTR is powered by a mid-mounted 6.9-liter V-12 producing 604 hp channeled to the rear wheels through a paddle-shifted 6-speed Xtrac sequential transaxle. Gooding & Company expects this CLK GTR to sell for between $8.5m to $10m. | |