Enzo Ferrari topped 194 mph before crash

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Sheriff’s officials confirm there is videotape shot from inside the Enzo Ferrari, which recorded the speed at which Stefan Eriksson was driving at almost 200 mph.

By Hans Laetz / Special to The Malibu Times

Los Angeles County Sheriff’s deputies now say former Swedish game company executive Stefan Eriksson was driving 194 mph when his Enzo Ferrari wiped out Feb. 21 on Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu. New computations based on the skid marks were released by Sgt. Philip Brooks from the Lost Hills/Malibu Sheriff’s Station on Monday.

Brooks also confirmed that a videotape shot from inside the car has been seen by at least one witness, who said the digital speedometer read 199 when the tape suddenly went “all flippy” as the camera malfunctioned during the crash. The tape is believed to be with Trevor Karney, a passenger in the Enzo when it crashed, Brooks said.

The saga of Eriksson and his associate, Carl Freer, a pair of known European playboys, one with a lengthy criminal record, keeps growing as new details about the two men are learned almost daily. Accustomed to the finer things in life, such as driving in the world’s hottest cars, schmoozing with beautiful people and owning mansions in the finest parts of London and Beverly Hills, Eriksson and Freer have burned a great deal of cash: more than $350 million in investors’ money, which fueled lavish salaries, incredible perks and questionable business dealings. It paid for million-dollar Ferraris, Mercedes and racecars on the LeMans circuit.

The story of how Eriksson met the intersection of Decker Canyon Road and Pacific Coast Highway, and the aftermath of tales of allegedly stolen exotic racecars and the downfall of a game company that he headed, has fascinated people around the world. The wrecked Ferrari elicited so much awe that one fan actually lit a rosary candle at the crash site with a picture of the Enzo tacked to a cross.

On Monday, Eriksson looked glum and said little when he was shuffled in ankle chains into yet another pretrial hearing in the Criminal Courts Building in downtown Los Angeles. He’s allowed no visitors at his isolation cell at the Men’s Central Jail, where he’s been incarcerated for five weeks now. And he faces 14 years imprisonment if convicted on embezzlement, theft, drug and gun charges. He also faces unspecified federal charges, which might include immigration and security fraud charges.

Tabloids, Los Angeles television news stations and Swedish Public Radio are covering every move in the case. Someone is selling T-shirts with a picture of the crash, captioned “Dietrich?,” after the alleged made-up person who Eriksson first blamed for the Enzo crash.

One Swedish reporter calls Eriksson the most-famous Swede since the Swedish Bikini Team. Other Swedish businessmen cringe at the joke, and worry.

“By and large, we had a pretty good reputation as a solid and boring people, but ‘Fat Steven’ [Eriksson’s nickname in Sweden] changed that perception,” said Olof Hult, who represents a Swedish electronics firm in L.A.

And details about Eriksson’s long rise and fall are bubbling to the surface, in newspapers in Sweden and in the Los Angeles Times. At the center of it all are the two Swedes: Eriksson and his one time partner, Carl Freer. Freer has never been convicted of a crime in Sweden, although police there caught him at age 18 trying to take out a loan against his parent’s pension.

According to Swedish newspaper accounts, the two countrymen met in the mid-1990s, when Eriksson had gotten out of prison on racketeering charges and was working as a debt collector.

One of the debts he was assigned to collect was from Freer, who was working along the French and Spanish Riviera coasts, obtaining expensive cars for people. The Swedish newspapers report that Freer was operating close to the law and theLos Angeles Times reports that Freer was convicted in Germany for fraud during that period. He was sentenced to prison for 18 months, the L.A. Times reports, for buying luxury cars with bad checks and delivering them to a dealership in France.

Freer’s PR agency told the L.A. Times he stopped payment for the cars, after he suspected they were stolen.

Stockholm reporters Ewa Stenberg and Lasse Wierup, writing for the newspaper Dagens Nyheter, have uncovered the path of Eriksson and Freer, and how the two engineered small-time stock dealings into control of a small electronics firm. The firm was merged into a startup electronic games manufacturer called Gizmondo, which Freer and Eriksson ran and that had a paper value at one time of more than $1 billion.

One British newspaper called Gizmondo the United Kingdom’s answer to Nintendo. The company burned cash, but Freer had a plan: he bought a carpet store in Florida, a store that happened to be listed on the NASDAQ over-the-counter market. Using its stock listing as a way to raise cash, they began spending money like mad: Eriksson was set up as a racecar driver for Team Gizmondo, according to the London Mail on Sunday.

While awarding themselves high salaries and perks, Gizmondo directors hired old cronies and girlfriends to lucrative contracts. Investors threw money at the company, which was advertising its high concept: sell cheap game consoles to college students, subsidized by commercials that would be downloaded to the devices every day.

The Gizmondo game device was a nonstarter-no one wanted to buy a technologically buggy game that offered such titles as “Mom, Can I Mow The Lawn?” The company went bankrupt, with more than $300 million in debt.

Eriksson and Freer left for Beverly Hills, and shipped a small fleet of exotic cars to America via Virgin Airways and began a new venture.

Freer has been helping to raise cash for Xero Mobile, another high-tech startup. The business plan? Sell cheap video-capable cellphones to teens, subsidized by commercials that would be downloaded to the devices every day.

Three former Gizmondo executives are now working at Xero Mobile. And although there are no official links visible between Xero Mobile and Eriksson, the company’s spokesman, Mika Astrom, said that Freer is an investor.

Freer faces charges here for allegedly using a badge from a phony police agency to illegally buy a gun. His lawyer has threatened to sue anyone who quotes police descriptions of him as a Swedish mobster.

The story of the Enzo has struck a chord. The Malibu Times photos of the crash were the most e-mailed pictures on Yahoo for two weeks, and have appeared all around the world: a car magazine in South Africa, The Irish Times, Geraldo Rivera’s TV show, the New York Times, among many other online and print publications, and on TV news stations.