Saddam's Ferrari? And the stolen cars from Kuwait

I did a story for a magazine on Saddam's Mercedes, which was a prewar car
which he stole from the Royal Museum. At the time all I could find was one snapshot
of the car taken by some of the US troops but later I found on the net lots of pictures of collector cars that Saddam's sons had , but none of those pictured were Italian, and they were a little worse for wear when they were suddenly bulldozed to make a wall to defend against sniper fire. But I heard from an appraiser who said he went to Baghdad and looked at some Testarossas and more recent cars, and also heard a rumor (can't remember from where) about a Ferrari Barchetta that belonged to Saddam or his sons. I didn't think they were into old cars so I would discount this. But on the other hand, Saddam was pretty tight with the King of Jordan who was an old car collector and maybe something was traded there.

I also talked to an Iraqi who came here as a refugee (and now makes good money buying wrecked luxury cars and fixing them up in Salt Lake City) who told me he was inon the invasion of Kuwait and that they took everything that wasn't nailed down, so I only know about the 90 Rolls Royce and Bentleys--I wonder how many Ferraris they took from Kuwait and who those cars belong to now (yeah, I know "spoils of war.")

 

I have an unproved undocumented theory that, if you look at any given geographical area, and ask "when was the boom?" you might find some rare cars there. For instance, I noticed at Pebble Beach that some of the Chrysler dream cars that were sold off the dais after their show careers ended, went to Venezuela. I thought "why Venezuela?" but then concluded that their big oil boom must have been around the early'50s and cash was flowing in. And also I found a listing for a 275GTB in Alaska and figured that probably went there just when Alaska was swimming in oil money. Just like Dubai now...

Also I have a similar theory that there might be interesting cars "marooned" on islands. If you can't sell a car to anyone on the island, it sits there because the owner is loathe to ship it to the mainland to be sold, especially if it doesn't run. I met a British vintage car racer at Monterey whose practice it was to go to islands like Madagascar, check into a nice hotel and spread the word among the staff that he was "looking for old cars" and soon there would be steady steam of tips on this and that, and , in a few short weeks, he'd clean an island out of anything interesting. One of his best finds was in Cuba where he found a D-type Jag that had been hit in the nose and refitted (poorly) with an E-type nose and all the other so-called experts who saw pictures thought "An e-type is not worth going after" but didn't realize that beyond that nose was a car worth a 100 times more.

 

I heard there was a few Ferraris in an underground garage in either Paris or Lebanon, the garage was damaged by a bomb and you couldn't reach the cars without removing a lot of concrete. Anybody you know that knows about when this was and which country? Maybe they could be bought as "scrap metal"?