It’s been 10 years since David Farrier, a New Zealand journalist and documentarian, first heard about his neighborhood car menace. In 2013, a co-worker tearfully reported that she accidentally parked her car in the lot for a store called Bashford Antiques, in the Auckland neighborhood of Ponsonby (which Farrier describes as “the Beverly Hills of Auckland”), only to return to a tow truck with a pugilistic operator and a steep ransom. After hours of negotiation, she paid $250 for her car.
At the time, there was no cap on the amount one could demand for a car parked on private property, and the people at Bashford Antiques were especially enthusiastic exploiters. Clamping – in which someone arrests the wheels of an easily misparked car for a ransom of hundreds of dollars – became a routine sport at the nondescript suburban store, enough to fill its Facebook page with furious one-star reviews from belittled, exasperated victims. It was the type of serious enough but also weird local story that fascinated Farrier, no stranger himself to odd obsessions; he directed the 2016 film Tickled, on the sport of competitive endurance tickling, which is one of the more bizarre documentaries I’ve ever seen. The same year, he also began blogging about the clamping at Bashford Antiques and the mysterious man he suspected was behind it, Michael Organ. The blogs and a subsequent documentary were supposed to be straightforward dissections of a small-fish predator.
