GET-AWAY LINCOLN

Bonnie and Clyde famously loved stealing plentiful Ford V-8s as get-away cars in the early 1930s and wrote to Henry Ford saying as much. Compared to other gangsters of the era, the financial take from Bonnie and Clyde’s crime spree of robbing stores and gas stations was small potatoes. Big-time gangsters were moving contraband and running extortion schemes that netted them big bucks, allowing them to buy bigger and more powerful cars than Fords. Al Capone owned a Cadillac and one of his associates a Duesenberg, but gangsters’ rides of choice were as varied as the gangsters themselves. As for the Purple Gang of Detroit, William Kendall is convinced that Lincoln was the get-away car of choice — specifically, his Lincoln.

In 2005, the Lincoln collector was alerted that a long-hidden five-passenger 1930 Tonneau Cowl Sport Phaeton had become available near him in Hamtramck, Mich. The Lincoln was owned by one Bruno Rusniak, who had bought the car