Max Hoffman.

In the summer of 1946 — likely among the first civilian businessmen back into Europe — he went shopping for franchises. In 1947 the Hoffman Motor Company opened on Park Avenue with a single car in the window, by most accounts a French Delahaye, displayed like a sculpture. It was not a car lot; it was an argument that a European automobile was a precious object.

Nobody was persuaded at first. "People laughed at me. I first had to teach the Americans what a real automobile is," he remembered. So he made the market himself, famously paying over the odds for lightly used European cars so that the prices — and the idea that these machines held their value — became real.

Jaguar signed in 1948, and XK120s anchored the early business. Volkswagen followed — and became the great exception to his golden touch: between 1950 and 1953 he moved barely 2,000 Beetles, pushing them on his sports-car dealers to fill out the transporters, and let the franchise go. He admitted later that it was his biggest mistake.

Porsche was the opposite story. When the first three 356s arrived in 1950, Ferry Porsche guessed America might absorb five or six cars a year; by the fourth year of the contract, Hoffman was selling seventy percent of the factory's entire production.

He shaped the product as much as he sold it. At a New York business lunch at the end of 1951 he pressed Ferry Porsche for a proper emblem — something for the steering-wheel hub, and later the hood. Ferry noted the idea down on 27 December 1951, and engineer Franz Xaver Reimspieß drew the crest. Legend prefers a napkin sketch at the table; the Porsche archive records the sober version.

In May 1952 he asked for something more radical: a stripped 356 to fight the cheap British roadsters, at under $3,000 — a figure he named first, which the car then had to hit. He called it the Speedster, ordered the first 200 on the spot, and watched it go on sale in September 1954 at exactly $2,995. Ferry Porsche grumbled that stripping a car "only degrades it"; the Speedster became one of the most loved Porsches ever built.

BMW got the full Hoffman treatment from 1954. Offered a staid roadster proposal, he rejected it and produced his own designer — Albrecht von Goertz, recruited after a chance encounter in New York, on terms that were pure Hoffman: "I told him if the design was accepted, I would make sure that he was paid — and that if it was not, he would get nothing." The result was the 507, the most beautiful BMW of its century.

It was also nearly the end of BMW. Hoffman had imagined a $5,000 car; it reached showrooms at nearly double that, his talk of thousands shrank to some 300 a year, and just 253 were built — one of them bought in Germany by a young G.I. named Elvis Presley. BMW cut Hoffman loose in 1959, then, unable to afford its own network, hired him back in 1962 as sole U.S. distributor — just in time for the Neue Klasse and the 2002. By 1967 he had 129 BMW dealerships, and sales were tripling.

The divorce, when it came, was the richest of his career. BMW founded its own North American subsidiary in 1973 and gave Hoffman notice in July 1974; he broke off negotiations and sued; BMW countersued on two continents. On 14 March 1975 the company bought him out with checks totaling roughly $36 million — and took over its own distribution the next morning. He was seventy, and done.

Bob Lutz, who ran BMW's sales in those years, remembered the charm, the standing offer to make him "very, very rich," and the machinery of kickbacks and exit clauses underneath it. His verdict was affectionate and damning at once: "He was such a crook."