It appears one car collector’s loss is a Turkish police force’s gain.
The Istanbul Police Department has seized a fleet of luxury cars from a criminal and repurposed them for the field, according to a video Turkish interior minister Ali Yerlikaya posted to X on December 26.
The police impounded 23 vehicles belonging to Hakan Ayik. (The 44-year-old is alleged to be one of the largest drug dealers in the world and has around $1 billion in assets, according to The Daily Telegraph.) Ayik and 36 of his associates were arrested in Istanbul last month. Following a court decision, Ayik’s sports cars, supercars, and SUVs were handed over to the police.
“From now on, these tools do not belong to criminal organizations,” writes Yerlikaya. “They will be at the disposal of our police and at the service of our nation.”
The collection runs the gamut from high-end rides like a Bentley Continental GT and Porsche Taycan to high-powered beasts such as a Ferrari 458 and Volkswagen Golf R to swanky SUVs including a Range Rover Sport and Mercedes-Benz GLS. The fleet is estimated to be worth around $3.4 million (100 million Turkish Liras). It will be used by traffic police in Turkey moving forward.
This is not the first time a criminal’s fleet has been seized and used for good, of course. A collection of vehicles belonging to a disgraced car vlogger was auctioned off by U.S. Marshals in Maryland last October. In March, Bill Omar Carrasquillo, the man behind the Omi in a Hellcat YouTube channel, was sentenced to five and a half years in prison and five years of supervised release for crimes related to a “wide-ranging copyright infringement scheme that involved piracy of cable TV,” according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office, Eastern District of Pennsylvania. He was found guilty of multiple counts and ordered to pay $10.7 million to the affected cable companies, $5 million to the IRS, and forfeit over $30 million he made from the scheme. Authorities also sold his collection of 60 cars and motorcycles. The Department of Justice uses asset forfeiture as a tool to deter, disrupt, and dismantle criminal enterprises, denying them the proceeds and the instruments of criminal activity.
Losing a multimillion-dollar car fleet certainly seems like a good deterrent.
