Shaquille O’Neal bought a black 2025 Land Rover price a reported $180,000 from an auto dealer in Riverside. He paid much more to have it custom-made for his 7-foot-1 body.
It was meant to be delivered to Baton Rouge, La., earlier this month however by no means arrived at its supposed vacation spot.
As an alternative, Shaq’s newest vehicle buy seems to be the “high-value automobile” that’s being investigated as stolen by the Lumpkin County Sheriff’s Workplace in Georgia and regarded as someplace in Atlanta as of Monday morning.
In a information launch final week, the Sheriff’s Workplace indicated that the automobile had been “initially ordered by means of a California-based auto brokerage on behalf of a high-profile shopper.”
The New York Submit was first to report that the shopper was O’Neal and the corporate was Riverside’s Easy Motors. Ahmad Abdelrahman, proprietor of Easy Motors, confirmed each information to The Occasions throughout a telephone interview.
Abdelrahman stated his firm had supplied O’Neal with quite a few custom-made automobiles over the past two years. He referred to the NBA and Louisiana State legend as “a tremendous human being” and stated that Easy Motors was providing a $10,000 reward for data resulting in the restoration of the automobile.
“The final man you need to steal a automobile from is Shaquille O’Neal, ?” Abdelrahman stated. “I’ve by no means had this occur to us earlier than. We do all his automobiles. We’ve transported offers for him a whole lot of instances, and one thing like that is undoubtedly insane.”
In a press release emailed to The Occasions on Monday, the Lumpkin County Sheriff’s Workplace stated that its legal investigations division “is actively investigating the theft of a high-value automobile that was fraudulently faraway from a enterprise within the Dahlonega space earlier this month. Investigators have confirmed that the automobile was transported from a neighborhood fabrication enterprise below false pretenses and is believed to have been taken to the Atlanta metropolitan space.”
The division added that a number of search warrants had been obtained and executed as a part of the investigation and a number of other individuals of curiosity had been recognized.
Abdelrahman instructed The Occasions that O’Neal’s Land Rover was custom-made domestically by Easy Motors however was speculated to have extra fabrication work executed in Georgia earlier than finishing its journey to Louisiana.
After studying that the automobile by no means arrived in Baton Rouge, Abdelrahman stated, he contacted the corporate he had employed to ship the automobile, FirstLine Trucking LLC, and was instructed that “their system was hacked.”
“They by no means acquired our order,” Abdelrahman stated he was instructed, “and the hackers intercepted the automobile and picked it up, they usually vanished with the automobile.”
FirstLine Trucking didn’t instantly reply to messages from The Occasions. O’Neal has not publicly commented on the matter.
