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Fifteen years and one bankruptcy ago, Pete Ellis was sitting on top of the world.
Owner of a high-profile string of 16 auto dealerships and related businesses in California and Arizona that included the largest Jeep-Eagle-Chrysler dealership in the United States, Ellis was a Southern California marketing icon. His catchy advertising jingle rattled around the brain pan of every statusconscious, upwardly mobile consumer of the spend-crazy ' 80s. Everybody, it seems, was taking the "Long Beach Freeway, Firestone Exit, South Gate" to buy a car from Ellis.
And Ellis admits he himself was caught up in the heady drive to acquire all the flashy trappings that such unbridled success bred as he flew among homes in Bel Air, Aspen and Palm Springs in his private jet.
Seated today in his modestly furnished office in a Balboa Peninsula executive suite, the 53-year-old Ellis says that the motivating force behind the things he did back then was, as he puts it, "slanted wrong." Thriving though it was at the time, his automobile empire was dangerously leveraged.
"I was driven every day to take care of debt or personal expenses," he recalls. By the late '80s, Ellis was grappling with a series of soured consumer loans that he had personally guaranteed in an aggressive grab for more market share. And when the Southern California economy went into a tailspin in 1989, so did he and his dealerships. Fueled by recession and Gulf War angst, people stopped buying cars, and before long, Ellis started shutting down stores.
In February 1991, Chrysler Corp., owed $12 million, shuttered all three of Ellis' moneylosing, flagship dealerships in South Gate and claimed about 800 unsold cars. Even $700,000 in federal loans and grants from a desperate city of Bellflower couldn't brake the slide: Blaming a credit line dispute with Ford Motor Co., Ellis closed his last dealership that June. A spate of lawsuits ensued. In 1993 Ellis made an abortive attempt to start up a fixed-price used car lot in Costa Mesa; he filed for personal bankruptcy the following year.
"When I lost it, I lost everything," Ellis says with the calm reflection of one who has emerged from the ashes of professional and personal ruin healthier, wealthier and wiser for the experience.