Dumpster Driving: Inside the Treasures From the Los Angeles ‘Junkyard’ Car Collection

Classic car enthusiast Rudi Klein was, by all accounts, a unique character.

The German émigré lived in Los Angeles, where he opened a junkyard called Porche Foreign Auto Dismantling (with the automaker’s name misspelled to avoid litigation). Klein, who passed away in 2001, took in only high-end foreign cars, mostly Mercedes and Porsche, but also BMWs and every brand of supercar, including many very rare examples. The junkyard’s trophies included famous Grand Prix driver Rudolf Caracciola’s 1935 Mercedes 500 K Special Coupe, a rare 1955 Mercedes-Benz 300 SL “Gullwing” (one of 29 with alloy bodywork), and many more.

Stacked-up Porsches are still in place for the auction.
Robin Adams/RM Sotheby’s

Most, but certainly not all, of the cars that Klein bought were crashed, burned, or otherwise derelict. A German crew managed to get into Klein’s closely guarded sanctuary, subsequently producing the unauthorised 2017 photo book Junkyard . Many other people were turned away from the gates, and Klein charged such high prices for salvaged parts that purchases were fraught. The doors remained closed after Klein’s sons, Ben and Jason, took over. But now, everything is coming into the light as RM Sotheby’s prepares to auction cars from the Klein collection on Oct. 26 in its current South Los Angeles location, including those two notable Mercedes-Benzes.

Andrew Olson, car specialist at RM Sotheby’s, said Klein’s premises have “an interesting and special atmosphere—if we moved the cars, some of that would be lost. There’s still a rack of Porsche 356s. We took them out to photograph them, but then they went back to where they were.” In Monterey last year, the auction house staged a horde of storm-damaged Ferraris as if they were still in a collapsing warehouse. Klein’s yard provides natural staging.

There’s a total of 180 cars in the sale, Olson says. Most of what was in the yard will be sold, minus some extensively burned cars and those with a current value that would not justify restoration.

The 500 K Mercedes coupe has bodywork by Sindelfingen. It is a one-of-one vehicle, still wearing its original body. The car was restored and caused a stir at the famed Pebble Beach car show in 1966 and then again in 1978. But it was parked under Klein’s ownership in 1980, fortunately under cover. “The condition is surprisingly good,” Olson says. “It’s very solid and should be a straightforward restoration.”

A roomful of Porsche 356s at Rudi Klein’s yard.
Robin Adams/RM Sotheby’s

The alloy-bodied 1955 Mercedes 300 SL was the only one delivered in black, and had once been owned by Ferrari importer Luigi Chinetti. The auction house describes it as “a unique example of the most sought-after of all 300 SLs, virtually unseen for decades.” Complementing it is a 1957 300 SL Roadster that was painted Fire Engine Red from the factory, with a cream interior, and coveted Rudge wheels.

Rudolf Caracciola’s 1935 Mercedes 500 K Special Coupe is in “surprisingly good” condition.
Kegun Morkin/RM Sotheby’s photo

The 1967 Iso Grifo A3/L Spider is a prototype built by the Italian coachmaker Bertone, and is the only factory-built Grifo convertible. Klein acquired the car, with Chevrolet V8 power, reportedly from auto enthusiast and Hollywood producer Greg Garrison. According to Junkyard : “It was one of Rudi Klein’s all-time favourites, and he hoped one day to rebuild it and take part in a classic-car rally in Bavaria.”

Administrative cowardice. Rampant cheating. The soaking and scamming of undergrads and grad students. Performative wokeism. Intensifying competition for international tuition dollars from an expansive China.

These are either the latest dire headlines about American higher ed or the myriad subplots of “Lords of Serendipity,” an ambitious new novel by Randy Boyagoda. Unlike most campus fiction, its scope extends well beyond the cloister of the liberal arts classroom to whammy the entire university system, from its financial model to its function within a globalized economy. Along the way, it skewers its lightning-rod targets with a precision too sharp to be considered entirely fictional.

That its author is not only well-versed in satire, having written four other novels in the genre, but is also a professor of English at the University of Toronto and an experienced college administrator, further blurs the lines between comic fiction and brutal fact. It’s the kind of no-holds-barred book only a consummate insider would know to write—but only one who is also conveniently outside the American university system could get away with writing.

“This is someone who’s got the inside dope on what can go on at universities, especially with international students, and what kind of con games are going on,” said Margaret Atwood, a friend and fellow Torontonian.

The novel, like Boyagoda himself, is often very funny—even as the dilemmas its characters face read as tragedy. Its cast includes the bickering members of a Sri Lankan hotel cleaner’s family, insecure American freshmen, dead-end third-tier college professors and their highflying Ivy League counterparts and dispirited university functionaries. An old-fashioned Dickensian tale, it sweeps across continents and campuses, from a classic liberal-arts college to a stand-in for Harvard University to an urban technical school to the dilapidated buildings of a state-run university in Sri Lanka.

“I’m a joyful person,” Boyagoda said in an interview, though he prefers to see his outlook on academia as “hopeful” rather than optimistic. He smiles and laughs frequently. He bikes everywhere. He derives energy from his students and from his four daughters, ages 14 to 20. They help him and his American wife, Anna, also an educator, care for Boyagoda’s father, an immigrant from Sri Lanka who has dementia and lives with the family.

Randy Boyagoda speaks at a panel discussion. — Randy Boyagoda taking part in a panel discussion at the University of Toronto in 2024. Polina Teif/University of Toronto

The germ of the novel came to Boyagoda during the pandemic, when he was serving as a vice-dean. An urban legend was circulating about a statistics grad student selling passing grades to international students. The cheating scheme itself may well have been apocryphal, but it felt tantalizingly plausible.

“As a novelist, it stayed with me,” Boyagoda said. “Who would sell grades for a stats course? Why would someone buy grades? What’s motivating them? Why wouldn’t the university be doing something about it?” What he didn’t want to do, he explained, was write “another novel about a creative writing professor and his drama with students.”

In addition to writing novels—the first of which was a finalist for Canada’s prestigious Giller Prize; he’s written eight books in total—Boyagoda teaches literature full-time. For his students next semester, kids raised in a purportedly “post-literature era,” he’s assigning three 700-page novels, he noted mischievously, books by George Eliot, Ralph Ellison and Kiran Desai.

On RateMyProfessors, students remark on Boyagoda’s heavy assignments, tough grading and distaste for cellphones, but also hail his “comedy.” When alerted to these reviews, Boyagoda laughed. “Guilty as charged,” he said.

“Randy’s one of those people in academia who is very well educated but doesn’t have an ounce of superiority about him,” said John Irving, who frequently guest lectures in Boyagoda’s classroom. “It’s amazing to see how willing students are to talk in his classrooms, how little afraid they feel of being mocked or put down—he gets complete candor out of them.”

Negotiating competing interests seems to come naturally to him. Like many college campuses, after the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel, the University of Toronto was embroiled in protests, encampments and discord; part of the school’s response was to convene a working group on civil discourse. Boyagoda was put in charge, serving for two years. It’s the kind of thankless task many professors would flee from, but Boyagoda relished the prospect and thinks the group, which is ongoing, made progress.

He has since pivoted to another formidable academic concern: the waning prestige of the humanities. In July, Boyagoda became the director of the Jackman Humanities Institute and special advisor on the humanities to the dean of arts and science. This fall, he is starting a series of gatherings he calls the Dead Book Club. (Dead writers feature heavily among his favorites: St. Augustine, Dante, William Faulkner, Evelyn Waugh, Saul Bellow.)

“The goal is to encourage students to read for its own sake and have conversation for its own sake,” Boyagoda said. “The importance of the humanities will be revealed to those who participate.”

Illustration of the book cover for "Lords of Serendipity" by Randy Boyagoda, depicting a woman wearing a hat with various buildings on top, against a blue background with a white airplane.

“Lords of Serendipity,” which publishes next week, reflects Boyagoda’s commitment to the pursuit of knowledge: “I’m supposed to say I learn more from my students than they do from me, but no,” Boyagoda said. “I enjoy sharing my excitement and joy about literature and ideas. There are these moments when you are teaching and you can see someone’s face change because they didn’t know something and then they did. That moment when you’re actually watch someone enlarge themselves is deeply satisfying.”

In literary circles, Boyagoda is often referred to as a Catholic novelist, a description he embraces. “A novelist willing to give shape and voice to contemporary religious experience is needed,” Boyagoda said. “I understand myself as a Catholic novelist, provided that I’m not only a Catholic novelist, I’m also a South Asian novelist and I’m a Canadian novelist. I don’t want to be captive to one label.”

His characters, he said, are subjected to what he calls “Graham Greene character situations.”

“They are trying to do good in a fallen world and realize the most they can do is less harm than someone else would do in that same role,” he explained. “They have to accept they are complicit in something that provides some good thing to others. It’s a very Graham Greene way of thinking about sacrifice.”

The campus green they inhabit is a febrile zone in which lofty ideals and cynicism regularly collide. It’s a place where a traditional holiday college celebration is now an occasion for political protest. Kids freely police one another inside and out of the classroom with social media their constant, ready weapon of choice. International students, knowing their family’s financial futures hinge on their degrees, operate in terror of failure and deportation.

Early readers of the book include Gary Shteyngart and Junot Diaz, both of whom have taught at universities and written comic novels. They each contacted Boyagoda midway through to say, in essence, “You nailed it.”

As biting as “Lords of Serendipity” can be, Boyagoda’s faith in higher education remains undaunted.

“It’s absurd that we live in societies that make the decision to take people between the ages of 18 and 22, when they are most physically capable of contributing to our nations and communities, and tell them, ‘Go away for four years, and read and learn and have conversations,’” he said. “I want students to be aware of what an incredible privilege that is.”

Corrections & Amplifications
Randy Boyagoda is a special advisor on the humanities to the dean of arts and science at the University of Toronto. An earlier version of this article incorrectly said he is a special adviser to the dean of humanities. (Corrected on Sept. 2)

Dumpster Driving: Inside the Treasures From the Los Angeles ‘Junkyard’ Car Collection

Randy Boyagoda’s new novel, “Lords of Serendipity,” delivers a biting satire of cheating, politics and dysfunction across modern universities.