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To: drmorgan who wrote (13686)	3/11/1998 11:29:00 PM
From: Moonray	Respond to of 22053

Death car sells for $104,600 in Geneva Wednesday March 11 4:55 PM EST GENEVA (Reuters) - Italian dictator Benito Mussolini stared down from a black and white photograph as the Fiat Berlinetta that drove him and his mistress to their deaths in 1945 fetched $104,600 at an auction in Geneva Wednesday. After nearly half a century of concealment in a Swiss garage, the fateful Berlinetta went to an unnamed American collector at the sale by auctioneers Brooks which had expected it to sell for $100,000 because of "the Mussolini factor." Parked in a corner of Geneva's automobile museum underneath a photograph of a uniformed Mussolini, the sleek black two-door coupe had a role in a defining moment of 20th century history. "Il Duce" and his mistress Clara Petacci, who had vowed to stay with Mussolini to the very end, were captured in the Fiat as they attempted to flee Italy and were executed by resistance fighters on April 28, 1945. The car was pushed into a lake by the fighters, who regarded it as a symbol of fascism, before they took the couple's corpses to Milan where they were hung upside down for display. The Berlinetta was recovered from its watery grave and smuggled to Switzerland on a railway car under piles of hay. Today, there is no sign of damage in the interior of sumptuous red leather, superlight aluminum bodywork and fastback tail. Mussolini, a notorious womanizer reputed to have fathered a string of illegitimate children, gave the Berlinetta to Petacci as a present. She could not drive so Mussolini had the luxury coupe with fascist number plates chauffeur-driven for her. The car has done a mere 1,000 km (600 miles) in the past 40 years and since 1950 has remained in the family of its current Swiss owner in French-speaking Switzerland. Mussolini, who ruled Italy from the early 1920s until 1943, was a keen motorist and owned a series of Alfa Romeos. The only Mussolini car to hit the market recently was a 1935 Alfa 6C 2300, which Brooks sold for a cool $320,000 three years ago. The Berlinetta was not the only car at the Geneva auction to have survived the war. A 1938 Bugatti, which was owned by a Parisian industrialist who was on Gestapo's wanted list, was bought by an unnamed European collector bidding by telephone for a whopping $392,500. The industrialist joined the French army after the outbreak of World War Two and locked away his Type 57 Atalante black and cream sports coupe in a garage. After the fall of France in 1940, the owner joined the French resistance and hid his car behind old machine tools in a factory as the Nazis were commandeering all the aluminium-bodied cars they could find to provide raw materials to build aircraft. Both the industrialist and his Bugatti survived the war. o~~~ O