Terrance was, and remains, a lying fuck. I wouldn’t believe a word he says.

This. I’ve been a small business owner for 30+ years and I’d have been all over those Quickbooks looonnng before 6 years was up.

I think it’s less common to find a true car enthusiast vs someone who is into a particular company, make, model, engine, style of racing or drivetrain layout these days.

Great article.

Interesting point about arbitrarily long probation sentences - extended probation is a functional deathtrap for a lot of people. I’ve legitimately seen people reset because they accrue 2-3 minor infractions over the course of multiple years - and we’re talking stuff like unpaid parking tickets. I’ve seen…

Nah, you’d drive a first-gen Prius as punishment. Utter shit in every way conceivable.

I’m not going to try to armchair diagnose the guy (well, a little, but at least not with anything specific). But red flags pointing to a severe mental illness are in almost every paragraph, from replacing one obsessive behavior with another, to the weak rationalizations for impulsive and irrational behavior, to the…

Wow. “Exactly 50" BMW’s = a lot of non-working turn signals.

It’s not really addiction though, is it? It’s OCD. I had a friend who could not stop having sex with strange men. She didn’t care if she met them on a street corner at 2am. She was diagnosed with OCD “Obsessive Compulsive Disorder”. It just happens that her obsession was random sex, whereas this guy has BMWs instead.

An ex-coworker of mine would sometimes ship parts for his E34 to another car guy coworker’s house so his wife wouldn’t see them. I heard he kept redundant parts in his garage for just about everything on that car. I don’t think he had any problem or obsession, but yeah, this is definitely a part of car culture.

I’m…

If he truly wants reconciliation, he should get rid of his “mistress”, no matter how much he thinks it’s junk.

This was a well written and tragic tale. A cautionary one too, about how important it is to be honest with ourselves and those we love.

I know a dude like this minus the stealing. He’s gone from camera equipment, to wine, to Porsches, etc. the family lives paycheck to paycheck despite a decent income because of his obsessions.

I agree. He doesn’t have an addiction so much as a personality disorder. At least in the article, he never really expressed any remorse about what he did to his family and employer. Now he has the same behavior with his church? Faith would have healed him, not given him a new outlet for his urges. Seems a little…

Wow ! It strikes me that this guy Terrance is very good at finding his mark and is a very, very bad man. First he finds an employer that lets him indulge in his fascination of the day (BMWs) until he gets caught. Chances are, he used his so-called fascination with BMWs simply to real in his victims. (There are…

Usually a fairly wide gap between how things are supposed to work and how they do work.

Couldn’t agree more. You look at people who hoard, those sad shows where people can’t even move around their home anymore because of the sheer mass of stuff they have, and it’s not about whether or not they need something- it’s that they can’t find a way to let go of something, so things just build up. Then it becomes…

What happened to all the cars? Seems like he could sell them all off and fund some of the restitution.

Thanks for your comment, and observation. The more I spoke with him, the less I felt like he really even cared about cars. It just happened to be the thing he was addicted to. And addiction is a pretty ubiquitous thing.

What a sad, sobering read... for this man it was BMWs, but I can’t help but look around my Metro train and wonder how many people staring out windows or at their phones right now deal with the same demon as this poor man did, with the only difference being the object of the obsession rather than the method.

That struck me, too. In fact, it wasn’t even like he decided to take the cut in pay when he found out it was embezzlement. The way Terrance did it, he simply made it seem like the company was not performing well for those six or seven years. So, Byron’s response was to then stop paying himself, but keep everyone else…