At an impound lot in Gravesend, Brooklyn, bidders know that the car they nab for a song won’t come with a key. But will it have an engine?

The other morning, in Brooklyn’s Gravesend neighborhood, a heavyset man in unlaced work boots peered through a chain-link fence at Ken Ben Industries, a tow-impound yard at Shore Parkway and Bay Forty-fourth Street. “I see a truck in here we should probably get,” he barked into his phone.
car auction

“What kind?” a voice asked.

“I don’t know, man! Yo, hit me up on FaceTime right now.” He turned his camera toward the pickup—a red crew-cab Ford F-350 with a hundred-gallon gas tank. “That shit could pull a three-car trailer!” he said.

Another man walked up: “You better know what you’re getting, ’cause you could get a piece of shit.” He added,“Or you could get a gold mine.”

By 8 a.m., the parking lot had filled with conversation—in Russian, Arabic, Spanish, Farsi, English—maybe seventy-five people in all. Three balding men from Staten Island reviewed a list of Vehicle Identification Numbers neatly written on a sheet of notebook paper; a tow-truck driver explained the difference between numerators and denominators to his daughter; a South Brooklyn scrap-yard boss kibbitzed with his competition, a younger man from the Bronx. A guy sitting on the curb, repairing his sneakers with rubber cement, eavesdropped. Others looked at their phones.

Aneudy Gutierrez, a squat man in a tired blue hoodie, and an older man who introduced himself as Drew Chimmy—both veterans of New York City Department of Finance vehicle auctions—stood drinking deli coffee and offering advice.

“Get a good car,” Gutierrez said.

“An old car,” Chimmy added.

“You gotta think about the key, none of them come with a key.”

“Get a Honda.”

“Yeah, get a Honda!”

“Avoid Pontiacs.”

“The following contains scenes of people not accepting what they cannot change. Viewer discretion is advised.”

“Yes. Avoid Pontiacs, Saturns.”

“Fuck Saturn!”

“Certain G.M.C. cars you can’t fuck with.”

“If you don’t got no mechanic on lock, you’re straight on drugs.”

“If you find the right one, you can drive it clean to Texas.”

Near the gate, George and Tina Ortez, a couple wearing matching Adidas, reminisced about two decades’ worth of vehicle auctions. One time, a guy couldn’t start the car he’d bought because the fuel tank was full of blocks of cocaine. “I’ve seen people who fainted,” George said. “I remember one guy—”

Tina cut in, “—He spent a lot of money on a car, and then there wasn’t no engine in it!”

The auction began an hour late, around 10 a.m., after the auctioneer, Dennis Alestra—license plate “BID2BUY”—arrived in a pickup with a custom-built auction cab mounted on the truck bed. Police officers handed out blue surgical masks, and the crowd rushed to inspect the twenty-six impounded trucks, buses, and cars for sale. Chimmy looked under the hood of a 2000 Toyota. “This person didn’t care about the car,” he said, shaking his head. The oil smelled burned. He walked to the next car on his list, a 2001 Honda Accord. “The inside is clean, so maybe they took care of it,” he said, optimistically. But the trunk was full of garbage—fast-food wrappers, a deflated football, and four empty oil bottles, which meant that there was a leak. “I’m still gonna bid,” he said. “We’ll see.”

The auctioneer’s mike crackled to life: “All payments are made in cash. There’s no going to the cash machine! There’s no going to Aunt Tilly’s house to go get the money! You got to have the money in your pocket!” Several buyers walked away, disappointed. The first car—a 2003 Chevrolet from Florida—sold for five hundred and fifty dollars. The second—a 2002 G.M.C. from Pennsylvania—went for seven hundred and fifty. Alestra had lit a cigar by the time he started taking bids for the Honda Accord.

“One-fifty, one-fifty now.” Three hands shot up. “One-seventy-five!” Chimmy hesitated, then put his hand in the air. “Two hundred, two-twenty-five bid now, two-fifty, two-seventy-five, now three hundred.” The bids were coming quickly. “And now three-fifty now, now three-fifty now!” Alestra’s mouth was moving too fast to smoke. A man in an orange beanie waved rubber work gloves above his head. “Three-seventy-five!” Chimmy raised his hand; he was still in the game. “Four-hundred-dollar bid now, four-twenty-five, four-fifty, five hundred, want it now at five hundred?”—a man wearing a T-shirt covering his face cried, “Bullshit!”—“five hundred! Five hundred.” Chimmy laughed a loud laugh.

The car had an oil leak, but the price kept going up. “Eight-fifty, nine, nine, nine, would you give me nine, eight-fifty, would you give me nine hundred?” Eventually, three women, all in flip-flops despite the cold, walked up to the auction booth to pay. The car sold for one thousand and seventy-five dollars, plus a ninety-eight-dollar tow-out charge, and another seventy-five for a locksmith to cut a key. Chimmy was long gone. ♦