Before we get to the Supercar melodrama unfolding, first, let me officially acknowledge how incredible it is that this new city council has already installed a new city attorney and has sent City Manager Rosemary Hoerning home, in the first quarter of this year. Plus, the new City Treasurer Greg Bradley is also everything he promised to be and more! The town has been course correcting so quickly since the 2020 election, that I took the luxury of a mini-writing hiatus.
While on hiatus, I’ve still watched the city council meetings, read the Sentinel and social media group posts of course, while trying to train a very unruly and incredibly smart Aussie. I know everyone thinks their dog is smart, but this dog has trained me and now we’re trying to break his bad habits. Such as about 20 times a day, this dog will shoplift items that we’ve left out on a countertop or table, with this long-arm reach technique he’s developed and perfected. Items like remotes, sunglasses, pens, wallets, hairbrushes, toothpaste, contact lens case, cellphones, etc.
He does not destroy these things but instead, he uses these items as currency, for a piece of cheese exchange. He will not even let you put on his leash or harness, without a piece of cheese. If you’ve got a morsel of cheese on your person, the dog will do anything you ask. Other than that, it’s like chasing down a rodeo clown. We say, “cheese, cheese, cheese,” so many times a day trying to get our property back, that we have neighbors that thought our dog’s name was “Cheese.” I’ve never been dogless in my life except for four miserable months in 2019 and never, ever have I had a dog this naughty. So everyone, meet Cheese!
Unfortunately, my monitoring our daily cheese supply has been abruptly interrupted by now FOURTEEN YouTube videos sent to me by multiple sources that I will not name. It’s been more than a month since seeing the first video and I’m still at a complete loss for words. I’m not even remotely ready to write about this and God knows I don’t want to. My denial and my fears regarding what kind of notorious spotlight this may cast on the City of Upland, is now sobering. Like all of you, I love the “Shop Upland Campaigns” and how Councilmembers Maust and Garcia have gone so far out of their way to promote Upland businesses for years, before ever running for city council. I would never want to hurt any Upland business owners, nor would I want to ever hurt any Upland patrons.
I know like most of you reading this, I felt a sense of pride about the Supercar Dealership being the first thing that thousands of drivers would see when entering, leaving or passing through the City of Gracious Living, everyday. Who could forget how ungracious the city had become before Chief Goodman came to town and somehow, miraculously, restored it and everyone’s sense of Upland Pride too. Every Uplander, has driven past that showroom and been awe-struck at the inventory and felt that it being there, made the city feel edgy and badass. However, four weeks ago a surreal story started breaking on a YouTube Channel called Normal Guy Supercar, unbeknownst to me.
I can’t help but think that Upland’s elected leadership and UPD are also now learning about the size and scope of the alleged allegations being broadcast there, at the same time as the rest of us are, which is right now. It’s been such sensory overload, that it has seriously taking me days to process each new video that’s being published there. Especially this video, featuring a conversation with Newsweek’s Editor At-Large Naveed Jamali, who also happens to be a Former FBI Double Agent.
What a badass is this guy and after watching, doesn’t the lyric “Secret Agent Man” get stuck in your head too, or is that just me? Jamali in the video above kept referencing another Supercar Dealership Scandal regarding someone named Bobbi Khan. I was like who in the hell is Bobbi Khan? I kept thinking to myself Bobbi Khan, Bobbi Khan………where have I heard that name before? Then I realized I don’t know Bobbi Khan but rather Chaka Khan. Try watching the first 30 seconds of the video below and tell me you don’t feel like popping and break dancing too, for real.
I forgot how much I liked that song and Chaka Khan but freaking Bobbi Khan, holly hell, that story is so juicy that it got turned into the episode of American Greed below.
WOW! I couldn’t even bring myself to show my hubby the first Normal Guy Supercar video below about a guy named Shane and his Ferrari, for more than 2 days. I finally couldn’t NOT break it to him and I couldn’t keep this to myself any longer.
I wish I had a video for you of my hubby’s reaction while watching the above, which captured his full range of emotions, facial expressions and comments, like, “No……….can’t be……this has to get better, right?……..God, ohhhh please no….I can’t watch anymore.” You see my hubby, has been a Supercar fan since we met in middle school, where after school a group of us would go over to a friend’s house because our friend, would take the car cover off his dad’s Testarossa while his dad was at work. There’d be six to eight of us kids in that garage gawking, like a scene right out of Ferris Bueller.
In fact I think my husband finally decided to marry me because of an “incident” at a Supercar Ferrari Club Event, at Summit Point Raceway. We were there countless times between the age of 18 and 21 if a race or car club event was scheduled, so long as someone had the gas money to get us there and back. During those years, my future husband had friend zoned me so badly, because I had broken up with him at the end of the 8th grade, because I knew I’d be going off to a Catholic Girl’s Boarding School that next year.
Fast forward 4.5 years later, I finally decided to apologize by inviting him to meet me for lunch, thinking I’d leave there with a clear conscious and go on my marry way. Please keep in mind, that the last time I saw him was when we were 14. So when I walked into the pizza place and saw him sitting there, I was stunned because hand to God, he was so much prettier than me and looked just like Tom Cruise in Risky Business.
I don’t even remember what the hell I had to say for myself. What was very clear, was that he was still holding an enormous grudge and was/is a VERY stubborn man. I remember leaving the pizza parlor, watching him get on his sport-bike and ride away and I thought, I’m a freaking idiot. I decided then and there, I was going to get him back no matter what. So of course I found a way to insert myself back into his friend group, which were the same friends he had in the 8th grade. Unfortunately, I became like one of the guys because he was firmly convinced I was very fickle and presumed I would break his heart again, if we got back together.
While patiently enduring a year of this friend zone crap, we were once again back at Summit Point as spectators for a Ferrari Club Event and it dawned on me, that he may never consider me anything more than a friend and I may be completely wasting my time. Instead of just asking him will I be friend zoned forever, at anytime over that past year, in my 19 year old brain I thought the better thing to do was, to see if I could make him jealous. While pondering all of this, I saw some people standing off in the distance near the track, in the owner’s area, who would get picked up by the Ferrari drivers and then get whisked around the racetrack. So like a damn fool, I impulsively hopped a fence and some kind of barricade and hiked over there and started waving down drivers, in the direct eyesight of the man I wanted to marry, plus all of his friends. Talk about risky business, what the hell I was thinking?
I spent the next hour going well over a 100 miles per hour for countless laps around the beautifully long and winding raceway below, in what seemed like every model of Ferrari that was there that day. Afterwards, I had the adrenaline level of a horse jockey which gave me the courage to go back over the barricade, hop the fence and walk back to my future husband and all of his friends and say, “Are you jealous that I did that, or that you didn’t?” His cocky reply was, “Both!”
My hairbrained idea actually worked and left no doubt that I finally had his undivided attention. Which was a huge freaking relief, because I actually thought the odds of him never speaking to me again after that were quite high, because I may have appeared to wild and crazy.
After the “Supercar Incident” we officially resumed our romance and two years later, we eloped. I knew I was marrying a man that would be perfectly content to live in an RV, if there was the remote possibility of a Supercar being parked outside it someday. My argument then was, “Where we would put a car seat, stroller and a nursery?” So the someday Supercar dream has been a part of my man’s DNA, from the jump. I can’t even imagine how I’d feel if his dream had finally come true and something like this had happened to him. There just are no words. Please forgive my blabbering on about my husband in this report, as I rather do that, then to talk about somebody else’s.
This Upland Supercar Dealership saga is so complex, that repeating the details of the unfolding storyline is mentally more draining than I can even fathom. Seriously, if you watch all the YouTube videos at Normal Guy Supercar, next imagine trying to write a book report about it all. I think a less daunting task might be trying to climb Mount Everest. I do know official sources are doing a very deep dive, plus, the Sentinel just tackled the issue in their labor-intensive article, HERE! Next, NBC on April 19th @ 11PM, aired a segment about the scandal, HERE! Then on April 22nd @ 5PM, Reporter Randy Mac did a Special Report for NBC4, HERE! Finally, on April 24th, the Daily Bulletin covered this story, HERE! Plus, The Drive has done a very in-depth article published on May 5th, HERE!
The Upland Report is proud that the article you are reading right now, was published before all of the other sources named above. We’ll update this story as more information is uncovered, down the proverbial highway.
There’s nothing funny at all about this Supercar Dealership drama that’s unfolding but trying to write this report, without a bit of levity added into my storytelling, would be to dark for me. I do feel so very, VERY badly for the people reporting to be without their cars, or their car titles, or without being paid for a car they consigned, etc. I also feel terribly for Upland today. I feel horribly for the new city council, because who would want to be sworn in, then have this happen in their first quarter.
And poor UPD, they finally break free of a city manager who was allegedly reported to be sabotaging the efforts of the best Police Chief in the city’s sorted history and then this erupts, days later. I don’t even know what else to say today, besides, I hope everyone is made whole. I also hope for world peace, a cure for cancer, an end to world hunger and COVID, a farm with lots of acreage so Cheese can run free and a cold-fusion free energy generator. Anyone want to calculate the pot odds on all that? Me either. Buonanotte and Ciao.
The Upland Report 
What a stain on the community this is!
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