- The mayor of Cranston, RI, has been hit with a lawsuit alleging he drove off in a classic MGB without paying the owner or even agreeing to a sale.
- Davide Broccoli claims Ken Hopkins has since been pressuring him to turn over the 1975 roadster’s title and also waged a campaign of harassment.
- Hopkins says that Broccoli handed him the keys and told him to take the car and that the suit is a hit job designed to make him look bad ahead of the GOP primary.
The mayor of Cranston, RI, has been painted as a thieving bully by a lawsuit that alleges he took a classic British MG sports car without paying the owner and then waged a campaign of harassment to get the owner to turn over the title.
In the suit, Davide Broccoli’s legal team accuses Mayor Kenneth Hopkins of “wrongfully taking a motor vehicle owned by Davide C. Broccoli without his authorization and without any agreement with him to pay for it.”
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Broccoli says Hopkins and an unidentified woman turned up at his property in 2021 to view the 1975 MGB roadster, having spied it previously, although Broccoli claims there was no mention at this stage of the mayor buying the MG. Hopkins admits he was drawn to the car because its ‘MG’ badge matched the initials of his late wife.
“He got in it, went in forward and reverse and said ‘I’m taking it.’” Broccoli told the Providence Journal. “’What do you mean you’re taking it?’ I said. How are you going to take it: there’s no plate, you don’t even know if the thing is roadworthy.”
“‘I’m the mayor I can do what I want,” Broccoli claims Hopkins responded.
After fitting one of the official Cranston “30000” license plates from his SUV, Hopkins drove the white MG away and later had it repainted green by State Auto Body in Providence and fitted with new leather seats.
Broccoli says Hopkins then hassled him to hand over the car’s title, and that the harassment extended to interfering in Broccoli’s business affairs by dissuading a potential tenant from leasing one of his properties and instigating the forced removal of up to 35 other classic cars belonging to Broccoli and stored behind a locked chain fence.
Hopkins claims he doesn’t meddle in police matters and told the Providence Journal that those other cars “must have either been illegally parked, or a blight to the city.”
He also says that the timing of the lawsuit – only days before a GOP Primary, and three years after he drove the MG away – proves the whole thing is a political hit-job. But even so, without a bill of sale or a record of any money changing hands, Hopkins’ ownership claim on the MG looks sketchy.
“My attorney said that once you got the keys and drove it away, you were in a verbal agreement to purchase the car,” Hopkins told the Boston Globe. We wonder if that same defense will work for the gang that stole a bunch of Raptor trucks from a Ford lot in July using keys that were left inside the cabs.
The MGB pictured is not the car from the suit and is used only for illustrative purposes (credit: Mecum/Cinema Vehicles)