Bio: Lord Brocket, the Ferraris & the Furnace
Charles Nall-Cain inherited his family seat and Peerage aged 15 when his grandfather, the millionaire businessman, Sir Charles Nall-Cain, died in 1967.
Brocket’s own father had died when he was nine: the family’s 25-bedroom Georgian mansion set in 1400 acres of prime Hertfordshire real estate thus passed to the teenager.
At the time, much of the estate was semi-derelict but, with a loan from American Express, Lord Brocket converted the house into a hotel and conference centre adding bedrooms in the old stable block and building two golf courses.
By the early 1980s, Brocket Hall had been transformed into one of Europe’s top conference centres.
Lord Brocket began collecting classic cars in 1979 with a Ferrari 365 GT that he restored from the ground up.
In 1982, he married South American model, Isabell Lorenzo, and by the mid 1980s had amassed a collection of 15 valuable sports cars.
By the late 1980s, the conference business was booming and Brocket Hall was being hired for £25,000 per day.
In early 1989, Brocket’s bank noted that some of his old Ferraris listed on the accounts had tripled in value and loaned him £5m to turn it into a proper business. This rose to £7m shortly afterwards and then a £3m overdraft was added to the account.
Lord Brocket eventually accumulated over 50 Italian exotics valued at around £20m.
However, by early 1991, the conference business was depressed, interest rates were soaring and buyers had deserted the free-falling collector car market.
Having used the family seat as security, Brocket was struggling to finance debts of over £10m and needed £4.5m to get out of the hole.
With his cars insured for far more than they were worth, Brocket colluded with his wife and two estate workers to pull an insurance scam that would result in four cars being cut up and reported as stolen.
Over the course of three nights in May 1991, Brocket and the two estate workers dismantled a Ferrari 195 Inter, a Ferrari 340 America, a Ferrari 250 Europa and a Maserati Birdcage.
Many of the parts were burned in the vast furnace used for heating Brocket’s garage complex. Some smaller bits were stored in a lock-up outside London.
Brocket waited a few weeks before making the ‘discovery’ that the cars were missing and subsequently lodged a claim for £4.5m.
Police were suspicious from the outset as were Brocket’s insurers, General Accident, who refused to pay up.
Brocket initially took the case to court but withdrew the claim when his bank stepped in with a £15m rescue package for Brocket Hall.
That was that until his by-now estranged wife, Lady Isabell Lorenzo, spilled the beans to police in late 1994 after she was arrested for forging a number of prescriptions.
Lord Brocket was charged with fraud. His court case began in December 1995 and lasted until February 1996 when he was jailed for seven years.
Part of that sentence was for obtaining money by deception - in 1994 it had emerged Brocket had sold Jon Shirley of Microsoft a fake 250 GT SWB Berlinetta that was actually based on a GTE and given the number of a missing SWB Berlinetta.
Lord Brocket was released after remission in August 1998.
Text copyright: Supercar Nostalgia
Photo copyright: unattributed
