For now, it might very well be a “dirty car that looks like an old shoe,” but the 1947 Davis three-wheeler prototype that just hit the market may be the most significant remnant of one of the more audacious automotive con jobs of the postwar era.

In the late Forties, Gary Davis lived high on the hog. His new automotive company paid him $1,000 a week, enough for a house in the hills, for his wife to wear a mink coat, and for him to afford multiple luxury cars. He posed opposite a Hollywood starlet from one of his Davis three-wheelers, he had one grace the holiday displays of high-end department stores, and he even drove one in the 1948 Rose Bowl parade.

Except it was all an illusion. The cars he’d promised his investors and franchisees never showed up, and he never paid his employees the double wages he’d swore they’d make once production began in earnest. Davis claimed in an interview decades later that he’d only sold the right to sell cars, not the actual cars itself, but one car in particular (not to mention his actual conviction for fraud and two-year prison term) shoots holes all through Davis’s excuse because that one car, painted different colors at different times, served all the roles mentioned a paragraph above.

The three-wheeled prototype that was into grifting, not drifting.