Behind the car, two young men sporting baggy jeans and backward baseball caps peruse a flier and chat with the pitchman for the car, who is sitting behind a small table that displays a sign indicating membership in the Better Business Bureau's Customer Assistance Program. The flier tells the young men how they can "test drive" the Lamborghini, or a Ferrari, or a Dodge Viper, for an hour -- an hour that Jaeson Smith, the man behind the table and the creator of this scheme, prefers to call "the thrill of a lifetime."
It is a $195 thrill.
The young men pause and stare for a moment, perhaps picturing themselves behind the wheel. Smith turns his attention to an older man on the other side of his table.
"How are you doing today? Thanks for stopping by."
Smith says that hundreds -- maybe even thousands -- of people have signed on for his sports car test drives, which were first advertised in Bay Area newspapers before Christmas. No one has actually driven the car yet, but, Smith says, that's because he has it on display in the mall. About the third week of March, he says, he'll begin the driving appointments for those people who've paid their money. Of course, some people have certificates that should have allowed them to drive the car as of Jan. 2. But, Smith allows, the Lamborghini arrangement got off to a rough start. Everyone who paid, Smith insists, will be scheduled in 1997.
And this type of scheduling nightmare will not be repeated, Smith suggests, because he will be dealing with the Lamborghini in a different way from now on.
"After this week, I'm probably not going to be offering this anymore," he continues. "This has been very successful. But I'd like to experiment with a smaller group of people in a time share."
Smith's latest thrill-of-a-lifetime venture involves the same Lamborghini. As he describes it, though, the new deal will work something along the lines of vacation condominium time shares.
As of last week, the deal involved a $950 down payment. Thereafter, investors would pay $95 a month for the right to drive the car for one hour each month.
Last month, fliers sent through the mail told investors they would pay $2,500 down and $65 a month on a car to be purchased with the funds from the Lamborghini syndication.
"I'm making a transition here," is the way Smith explains the difference. "It's going to be very complicated for people to understand."
And given his history, Smith is almost certainly right. The time sharing of this particular 1991 Lamborghini Diablo is going to be complicated indeed.
Smith, you see, is known in various Bay Area courts by at least six last names. He's been convicted of an assortment of fraud-related felonies. There are other scams that have yet to draw the attention of law enforcement authorities, and a broad variety of angry victims.
But Smith (aka Martell, Mantel, Marcell, Danfort, and Lodder) is upbeat and certain that time sharing a Lamborghini he does not own is a good business idea.
"I've made some mistakes. I'm not proud of that," he says, but "I've never intentionally tried to defraud anyone."
And has he paid for those mistakes?
"Some of them I've paid for, and some of them I haven't."
Jaeson Smith is also known as Jayson and Jason Smith; Jaeson, Jayson, and Jason Martell, Mantel, and Marcell; D.W. Smith; Jason and Daniel Danfort; and Daen Lodder. He is officially Daniel W. Smith, a 36-year-old man with a colorful resume in small-time crime.
It's no accident that he's named his current company Dreamshare International. Smith sells dreams -- like the Lamborghini. "It's my dream car," he explains. "I want to fulfill other people's dreams as well."
Through the past decade, he has periodically made a living off of people who want to believe in dreams too good to be true. There have been many victims of his fraud, theft, and lies. And, though he's been convicted for several of his past crimes, Smith has been fortunate; because of the Bay Area's balkanized criminal justice system, he's served precious little prison time, and his victims have gotten little or no restitution.
Smith's documentary past is parceled among municipal, superior, and small claims courts in cities and counties along Highway 880, none of which is connected in any meaningful way to any other.
Smith doesn't come with a warning label. And no one -- not law enforcement groups, the court system, other public agencies, or the media -- has been able to protect the general public from the likes of Smith.
He defines the phrase "Let the buyer beware."
On a Sunday afternoon in July 1988, Charles and Sharon Simmons weren't being particularly wary. They noticed a 1979 Dodge Omni parked on the frontage road of Mowry Avenue near Blacow Road in Fremont. The car had a for-sale sign in the windshield; the price seemed to be $600. They were interested.
When they took a closer look, they saw another sign in the side window; it said the actual price was $1,300. The deal was: $600 down, the rest by monthly payments. According to the sign, the car was in excellent condition, with a new paint job and recently completed engine work. The couple jotted down the phone number on the sign.
A Fremont Police report tells the rest of the story:
The phone number was connected to an answering service, where the Simmonses left a message. About 20 minutes later, they received a call from a man identifying himself as Jason, whom they arranged to meet at the car later that day. Both Charles and Sharon Simmons test-drove the car, and they offered Jason $1,100 for it -- $500 down and $300 in each of the next two months. They got the car; the accompanying paperwork was signed by Jason Mantel.
The car broke down the next day. When Sharon Simmons called to complain, Jason Mantel (who is really Daniel Smith) told her that the car had been repaired at Jackson Auto Garage in Fremont and suggested she take it back there. Simmons told Smith she wanted him to give her money back or to fix the car. Smith told her he did not have the money just then. She should, he said, pay for the car repairs, and then he would "make it right."
Simmons had already registered the car in her name, which cost $100. She took the car to the garage, where she paid $247 for repairs. Shortly afterward, the car broke down again. Again, the Simmonses demanded their money back from Smith. Again, he told her he would make payments and, again, they took the car back to the repair shop. This time, however, they were told that the car needed a new engine. The car stayed there for about a week.
When Simmons returned to retrieve the car, she was told that Jason had already picked it up. Simmons called the state Department of Motor Vehicles, told her story to an investigator, and asked for help. She didn't get it. Two weeks later -- now out $849 in cash and a car -- Simmons filed a police report against Jason Mantel.
Her car was already in the hands of another buyer.
On Aug. 2, 1988, shortly after Jason had nabbed the Dodge from the auto repair shop, Chantay Hernandez saw it parked at the corner of Mission Boulevard and Nursery Avenue in Fremont. It had a for-sale sign in the windshield. She was interested.
Hernandez gave Jason $300 in cash and agreed to make $100 payments in each of the next four months. She got the car and a bill of sale signed by Jason Marcell, who told her she would get the title when she finished paying for it.
While Hernandez was driving the car home, it began to lose water. Smoke began pouring from the engine. Hernandez called the answering service number Smith had given her but didn't hear from him for two weeks. Finally he called and arranged to take the car and have it repaired.
She never saw it again.
When Hernandez tried to register the car in her name, the DMV told her to contact the police. She did.
Meanwhile, Smith was busy selling other cars.
Between the time the Simmonses and Hernandez were buying and losing the same Dodge Omni, Vu Dung, a Fremont woman, was trying to sell a 1977 Cougar for her uncle, who didn't speak English. Jason approached and told her that he had a friend who was interested in buying a car. Jason offered to sell the Cougar to his friend. A deal was struck: Dung would get the first $700, and Smith would get anything above that. Smith took the car.
Dung never saw it again.
In August 1988, though -- while Hernandez was waiting to hear from Smith about her Dodge, and while Vu was waiting for the money for her uncle's Cougar -- Abel Arias saw the Cougar at the same corner where Hernandez had seen the Dodge. A sign in the window advertised the car for sale; the price was $1,100. Arias called the phone number and met Smith at the car. Arias made a $400 down payment and agreed to pay the rest in installments by the end of September. He got the car and accompanying paperwork signed by Jason Martel.
During the next few weeks, Smith collected a total of $670 from Arias, all but $30 of the total. But Arias still did not have the title to the car when Fremont Police impounded it, along with the Dodge Omni, both of which had been reported stolen by this time.
Smith would go on to sell at least two more cars in this way before he could be convicted of theft in Fremont Municipal Court.
"That was an incredibly unfair situation," Smith says. "To have been convicted of auto theft on my own cars was absurd."
Smith says that he "repossessed" the cars from the people he sold them to because they still owed him money. He used a variety of pseudonyms, he says, to skirt a state law that requires anyone who sells more than seven cars within one year to have a dealer's license.
"They were my cars, but they weren't in my name," he says. "I had the right to repossess those cars. What I should have done was called the police and told them I was going to repossess the cars first."
In the spring of 1989, Todd and Pamela Araujo saw a flier distributed by a company called Dream Home Developments; it advertised home remodeling services. They called the number on the flier and spoke to a man calling himself Daen Lodder, who is actually Daniel Smith, and who was on probation for the theft conviction in Fremont at the time.
During the next three months or so, the Araujos and Smith discussed plans to remodel the Araujos' house in Newark and negotiated a contract. Pamela Araujo remembers that they talked often and even got to be friends. Smith would sometimes come to the house to discuss plans and wind up watching a movie with them.
Police and court records tell the rest of the story this way:
Smith told the Araujos that Dream Home Developments was a new company, operating under the contracting license of one of its investors, An Trong Do of Spectrum Building & Painting Co., who was a general contractor and would be overseeing the project. The California Contractors License Board confirmed that the license belonged to Do and was in good standing. Do would later tell the court that Smith talked to him about the job, but that he turned it down. Smith, he said, got his license number off of his business card.
By May, the Araujos had signed a contract and taken a second mortgage on their home to pay for the $38,252 remodeling job. The work was to include new cabinets in the kitchen, new bathroom fixtures, a new exterior, and some extra goodies: a hot tub and deck in the back yard, a fish tank in the living room wall, and upgraded carpet throughout the house. Simply put, it was going to be the Araujos' dream home.
Work on the house began in July. Smith paid for the Araujos to stay at a Holiday Inn for four weeks while the work was being done on their home.
A few weeks into the job, Smith came to Pamela Araujo's workplace to pick up the last of the $30,000 in payments.
"The following day he was gone," Araujo remembers. "There was nothing in the house except for painted walls, and all the guys were lined up outside of the house, and he was gone."
Smith had not paid any of the subcontractors hired to work on the house. He had also sold or given away the Araujos' appliances (something he later told police they had authorized him to do).
The Araujos were, understandably, furious. Todd Araujo, brandishing a gun, went to an address in Union City given to him by Smith's answering service. Smith ran out of the house to a neighbor's and called the police. Before it was over, both men were arrested.
But the Araujos were not the only ones who had hired Smith's remodeling firm. About a month before the Araujos hired Smith, he met Gwendolyn and Philip Senegal. He even brought Do, the contractor, to their house to take a look at the job.
"I had been recently married," remembers Gwen Senegal. "I owned the house before I got married. We needed to do something to the house to change it, so that it would become our house. We were anxious to have it happen. He was offering a remarkable price."
Senegal says she too called the Contractors State License Board and the Better Business Bureau, which told her simply that they didn't have any complaints filed against the company. Smith put the Senegals up in the Holiday Inn in Union City for a few weeks. The Senegals made three payments to Smith totaling $25,000 during the three weeks that work was under way on their home.
"They gutted the place and did a lot of work," Senegal says. "After 10 days, he was missing. I kept calling, he would not call me back. This went on for about a month. After two weeks, we moved back home with things up in the air."
In the end, the Araujo and the Senegal families were each out more than $25,000. Each had to hire new contractors. The families also had to pay the subcontractors Smith had hired, many of whom had filed liens on the families' homes, and reimburse them for materials that had been ordered in their names.
"We had lived in the house for four years before this. [Then] we paid $2,400 a month for six years on a $100,000 house," says Pamela Araujo. "Everything we had went back into putting things back into the house."
Smith was charged with four felony counts of fraud in Newark. Eventually, a plea bargain involving these and other charges would earn him five years probation and what the law calls "mandatory restitution."
Alameda County Probation Department refuses to release information regarding the status of Smith's restitution payments to his victims. But both Gwendolyn Senegal and Pamela Araujo say they received just $25 every other month for about four years. Then, they say, Smith stopped paying.
The Senegals lost a lawsuit they filed against Do, the contractor; the court found that Smith had used Do's license without his permission.
The Araujos eventually sold their house at a loss.
Pamela Araujo sums it up simply:
"He has ruined my life."
"That was another situation that unnecessarily went sour," Smith says. "Unfortunately my track record doesn't look that great."
Smith contends that he became ill and missed two days of work, an absence that caused the Senegals and the Araujos to mistakenly think he wasn't coming back. It was, he says, just another misunderstanding.
"I did not pay them off," he says. "That's why I'm trying to get on my feet [with the Lamborghini time-share deal], so that I can pay the people I owe.
"Both owners were very negative," he says. "They didn't want me to finish the projects."
The advertisement in the Oakland Tribune on Feb. 10, 1990, was enticing -- a two-bedroom "luxury condo" near Lake Merritt for $655 a month.
During the next few days, a stream of would-be tenants flowed through the condominium, all of them meeting with a man who introduced himself as Dane Smith, the landlord. In fact, it was Daniel Smith, who did not own, but was leasing the condo.
According to court files, Smith took a $25 fee for a credit check and a $500 security deposit from at least 11 people before he was arrested. One woman remembered seeing a pile of money on the floor of a closet as Smith was showing her around the condo. When the prospective renters couldn't get ahold of Smith after giving him deposits, they began showing up at Oakland Police stations.
In August 1990, Smith pleaded guilty to three felony counts of grand theft. It was a deal that included the remodeling scams in Union City, which were still moving through the court system there. He spent 90 days in a minimum security prison and was sentenced to five years probation and restitution.
On Nov. 15, 1996, as Smith prepared to launch the Lamborghini test-drive business, he petitioned the Alameda Superior Court to release him from those past sins. Judge Carl Morris granted that petition on Dec. 16, dismissing him from penalties and reducing the conviction to a misdemeanor.
Neither the Araujos nor the Senegals had any idea where Smith was, let alone that he was back in court. And no one contested his petition.
"That was probably the only thing that I intentionally did to acquire money on a temporary basis that I'm actually guilty of," Smith says. "I was going to use the money and then pay them back. I'm guilty of intentionally taking the money, but it was just supposed to be taking it temporarily."
Smith says he took the money to invest in property, having just attended an inspiring real estate seminar. The plan was to buy the property, sell it for a profit, and then repay the security deposits. But there was a problem: He got arrested before the plan was fully executed.
"I unethically did this little thing to borrow the money and I was going to pay them back," he says. "They probably don't believe that I was going to pay them back."
But, Smith insists, he will.
"I've taken a year off to stop making payments and get on my feet."
By 8:50 a.m., an assortment of people start to gravitate toward Department 8 of the Hayward Courthouse, waiting for their chances to participate in what is truly the People's Court.
When the door to small claims court opens, the group files into theater seats, clearly awaiting someone to tell them what to do next. A clerk swears the whole bunch in at once. A deputy shuffles in and, almost as an aside to his conversation with the clerk, announces that court is now in session.
Judge Julia Spain begins to call each case on the roster -- evictions, rent due, money owed on a loan. Eventually comes the call, "Porter versus Smith."
Stephanie Porter moves up to the table in front of the judge. Daniel Smith is not present this morning. Judge Spain studies the paperwork in front of her. It seems that Smith was supposed to make payments on a car, and Porter has not received them. Inside of 10 minutes, the case that took more than two years to get here is over. The judgment against Smith is for $3,500.
In October of 1994, Stephanie Porter advertised her 1979 Fiat for sale in the Hayward Daily Review. She says she got a call from a man calling himself D.W. Smith, who asked if she would be interested in investing in a business by giving him her car. He was putting together a group investors to buy a restaurant, he said.
They met at the Old Spaghetti House in Newark, where Smith explained his proposition.
"He was very professional," she remembers. "He showed us all around the restaurant. People seemed to know him.
"He was dressed in a nice suit, carried a briefcase. He was very polite, very nice, very charming. He had an answer for every question."
Before it was over, Porter had signed an agreement with Smith, giving him the Fiat. He would, in turn, give her $3,500 -- paid in $500 monthly payments -- and co-ownership in a company called Panther Financial Group, which would own the new restaurant. To be exact, she was to get seven shares of Panther Financial.
The agreement gives the address for Panther Financial Group as 44 Montgomery St. in San Francisco. Attached to the agreement are four pages of the various rules and specifics of a business deal in which investors pay $30 monthly dues to eat, drink, enjoy VIP parking, and have priority in employment opportunities at the new restaurant. And that's not to mention the "drawings and contests for fabulous prizes."
Porter remembers that Smith also told her he was going to buy a Lamborghini for the investors' use.
The first payment on the car was due Feb. 1, 1995. It didn't come. Instead, Smith called a couple of times, Porter says, telling her that things weren't going quite the way he'd planned and that he didn't have the money together. But if she gave him a few more months, he said, everything would be fine.
Porter says she received a $25 payment on May 3, 1995, and a $30 payment the next month. She has not received anything since, nor has she seen her car again. Smith told her that he'd sold it but didn't get enough money to pay her back.
Panther Financial Group does not exist. The restaurant owners later told Porter that Smith had approached them about buying the place but never did. After Porter spent two years and $400 searching for Smith to serve him court papers, she read about Dreamshare International in the newspaper and realized it involved the person who had taken her car.
Smith called Porter after he was served and told her that he had a money order for her, but had lost her address and didn't know where to send it.
Porter has never received it.
The day after Thanksgiving 1996, Postal Inspector Judy Groome was at home reading the San Francisco Chronicle, when she saw Dreamshare International's advertisement offering test drives of a Lamborghini.
The same advertisement ran in the San Francisco Examiner, the San Jose Mercury News, the Oakland Tribune, and several other Bay Area newspapers. Above the picture of the car was: "Experience the Dream." The ad included a vehicle identification number for the car and said that Dreamshare International was a member of the Better Business Bureau.
This just didn't look right to a gumshoe who'd spent 14 years investigating mail fraud, especially near Christmas, which is peak scam season. According to her federal court declaration, this is what Groome's ensuing investigation found:
Dreamshare International's address is a commercial mail receiving agency, where the first check for rent bounced. So did the $32,000 in checks used to pay various newspapers for advertisements. They are still unpaid.
On Dec. 4, the Postal Service began withholding mail from delivery to Dreamshare for suspicion of fraud. Two days later, Smith was sitting in Groome's office with some explaining to do.
In the meeting, Smith told her he'd secured six different driver's licenses and identification cards during a four-month period because he had lost the others. He said he did not currently have access to a Lamborghini but was hoping to have one by the following week, using funds from the customers who were responding to the ads. And he was hoping to make good on the worthless checks he'd given the newspapers.
The vehicle identification number in Dreamshare's advertisement belonged to a Lamborghini, but not one Smith owned. This one was at Veracom Lamborghini in San Mateo, where the owner said that Smith had come in and talked to him about the idea of renting the car to the public. But the owner said he wanted no part of such an arrangement. Smith left with the vehicle identification number.
The Postal Service refused to release Dreamshare's mail, which included more than 150 responses to the newspaper ads, and filed a complaint against Smith in federal court. They also sent out a press release announcing their investigation, which was picked up by several Bay Area newspapers and television stations.
Dreamshare International's business license in Newark expired at the end of 1996. Inquiries to the Better Business Bureau prompt a recording that mentions the Postal Service's restraining order.
By late January, Smith had secured access to a Lamborghini, and yet another address. He sent out a notice to customers stating, "We have been experiencing an interruption with our mail service," and asked them to reissue their checks to Auto Sport International in San Jose.
Auto Sport is owned by car collector Andrew Douglas, who also alleges to own the Lamborghini in the mall. His explanation for going into business with Smith is simple -- money.
"So far this month, we've got $10,000 in test drives," says Douglas. "That's only one month. The payment on the car is $2,700 a month. So they tear it up; I'll go buy another one. I'm putting out $2,700 a month in car payment, and the car sits and does nothing. I might as well put it to good use."
Earlier this month, Smith signed an agreement that he would not misrepresent anything sent or received through the mail, which effectively ended the federal court case.
"As long as he can pull this thing off without misrepresenting anything through the mail, it's out of our jurisdiction," says Tom Taylor, spokesman for the Postal Service.
Smith says the whole postal investigation was overblown. "The Post Office already had me summed up before I got there," explains Smith. "I felt it was unfair."
Smith says that he had access to the yellow Lamborghini in the mall all along. But he was going to use that only as an alternate, because market research had shown him that people preferred a red Lamborghini.
"The only thing I did wrong, I shouldn't have put the vehicle ID number in the paper," he says. "This whole thing with the Post Office was absurd. I went around it anyway."
"Even without the Better Business Bureau, I still have my own standard of ethics."
Beyond the paid advertising, a handful of newspapers and television stations helped to promote Smith's unique Christmas gift idea before the Postal Service investigation.
In mid-December, San Jose Mercury News columnist Dennis Rockstroh wrote about Dreamshare, saying:
"Business is so good, Smith has turned down interviews with three television stations and asked me not to publicize his order telephone number." And: "This is a new business for Smith, who until now, was a house painter."
On Jan. 30, more than a month later, and after the postal investigation had been reported, Rockstroh wrote another column with the headline: "Behold, a Lamborghini! Ride hawker's off the hook." In it, he told readers that the Lamborghini deal was back on, despite the Postal Service.
About the first of December, Jaclyn Hunter saw the advertisement in the San Jose Mercury News offering the test drives.
"I thought it would be really neat for my husband's Christmas present," Hunter says. "His favorite car has always been a Lamborghini. He started a new job this year, and he's been working his tail off, and it was just something special I could do."
She called the number in the ad and soon received a packet of information in the mail, including a color brochure on the Lamborghini. She sent in $95 for a half-hour test drive and received another packet of information, including the certificate for the test drive she gave her husband for Christmas. But he's never driven the car.
Shortly after Christmas, Hunter heard about the Postal Service investigation. She called and wrote to Smith, requesting a refund. He sent her information on the time-share venture (which includes "a beautiful female escort"). She says she called again and Smith promised her money back by Feb. 15. She hasn't gotten it.
"He's very good at making this stuff look good on paper," Hunter says of Smith. "I normally check into everything, and the one time I don't, something happens. We don't have this kind of money to be tied up in something that's not true."
Smith insists that he's been the victim of a decade of unfortunate situations. "Appearance is the imitation of reality," he says. "I've taken shortcuts, and I've made mistakes, and it all just looks bad. I've always done things on a shoestring budget, and sometimes that forces you to have to do things creatively.
"I just need to stop taking shortcuts," Smith says. "But the thing is that I've got myself so deep in the hole that I've got to get into something really big in order to pay these people back and survive myself.
"I really want this thing to work because I'm tired of walking away from something," he says. "The smart thing for me to do probably would be for me to go bankrupt and leave the state or the country. I'm not going to do that. I could do so -- I'm major in debt.
