He sold 54, vehicles last year and is on track to sell slightly more this year. The Dorchester native and former Navy aviation electrician spoke about his business background and his billionaire status.
Chambers started out in the copier business. After he got out of the Navy at the age of 21, he landed a job fixing copiers in Cambridge. The technicians need parts, so you have to have a parts department. He pioneered the now-widespread practice of cleaning cars when they come in for service.
It was shiny, it was clean. About one in seven people in the state buy a car from his dealerships each year, nearly all of which bear his name. Now and again his foot yacht, the Excellence V, makes an appearance in the harbor. A lot of the investment banking firms, several of them in the Boston area, have been talking to me. Auto conglomerates as well as investors including George Soros are interested in acquiring large dealers, said Mark D.
Johnson, president of MD Johnson Inc. US annualized auto sales are up 70 percent from their low. Dealer count totals 17,, half the number when Chambers began in He has a beautiful girlfriend. He lives on the 12th floor of the Mandarin Oriental, and in a tastefully renovated farmhouse in Connecticut. He takes lunch with Herald publisher and president Pat Purcell and dinner with his friend Herb Lipson, who owns this magazine.
Then again, some of it goes to just about every media outlet in the region. Though Chambers is among friends — he socializes occasionally with Siegel and Costa — the interview has taken on an edge, mostly because Siegel revels in starting trouble.
The station cuts to a commercial break and everyone moves to a lobby adjacent to the studio. He did it the easy way. What do you need, another helicopter? Siegel, who likes cars, asks about the collection of automobiles Chambers keeps at his Connecticut home. He has several vintage Ferraris and one of only 65 street-ready McLaren F1s in the world. He has a complicated relationship with Boch. Chambers would never admit it, but this fact may bother him.
Boch can come across as a kind of nouveau-riche buffoon, and you get the feeling that Chambers, a fellow big-spending, high-profile car dealer, worries his image takes a hit by association. Long before Chambers conquered automobiles, he used to sell copiers to Boch Sr.
He thought that I was just a guy with some money. I just choose not to. Before he can say anything, though, Siegel slaps him on the shoulder. When he was a toddler, a photographer for the old Boston American captured him at the beach, scooping up water with a metal can.
I had a paint can. Chambers was born in a two-family Dorchester home owned by his maternal grandmother. His father was a commercial artist, and his mother was a homemaker.
His brother and two sisters got the same deal. You were supposed to be He collected the shopping carts in the parking lot. Far from drudgery, it was fun. He excelled at the supermarket, earning a series of promotions and raises. School, however, was a different matter. He ended up dropping out during his senior year. It was , he was 17 years old, and he needed something to do. So he joined the Navy.
While serving in the Florida Keys, his job was to supervise the cleaning of fighter jets. The guys working for him were generally lazy and uninspired. But Chambers was intrigued by the challenge of motivating his shiftless charges.
He worked out a contest in which the two hardest workers got extra time off. Soon everyone was hustling. In Chambers got out of the Navy and moved back in with his parents, working for a couple of months at a rough-and-tumble bar in the South End his mother had inherited from a deceased brother.
The place was dingy, the mirrors so discolored from cigarette smoke that the barflies could scarcely see themselves. Chambers, though, was undaunted. Before he got the chance, however, he was out of a job. This is his regular commute, lifting off from the helipad atop his Mercedes dealership in Somerville and touching down 38 minutes later right outside his front door in Connecticut.
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