Inside the wild hunt for the stolen 1938 Talbot

It started, as many of Joe Ford’s jobs did, with a phone call about a car so rare that only a handful of men alive had ever seen one.

The 1938 Talbot-Lago T150C-SS Teardrop coupe, an Art Deco dream of swooping lines and sculpted chrome, and one of only two in existence, vanished in 2001 from a shuttered plastics factory in Milwaukee. In the world of vintage cars, it was a unicorn — built in postwar France, worth an estimated $7.6 million, and utterly irreplaceable. 8

It wasn’t like losing a car; it was like losing a famous painting by a master artist.

“Stealing high-end cars is like stealing the Mona Lisa,” Ford tells author Stayton Bonner in “ The Million-Dollar Car Detective: Inside the Worldwide Hunt for a Stolen $7 Million Car ” (Blackstone Publishing, out now). “You can’t se