The setting for this story is Bergen County, New Jersey. It borders the Hudson River and stretches up to the New York state line, through some of the nation’s most outrageously costly real estate. Wall Street chieftains, Broadway stars and New York sports heroes have always found it a friendly place. Riding the rails of NJ Transit may be the only practical way to get in and out of the city, but once they’re back in Jersey and off the platform, many prefer Cadillacs.
In general, that means new ones. But not a few want the old stuff, too, and in primo, show-ready shape. Which brings us to our protagonists. Their shop in South Hackensack doesn’t have a huge amount of floor space, but what occupies it is unfailingly fantastic. Plus, the guys who run Troby’s are Cadillac experts of the first rank. They know quality when they see it. Better yet, they’re willing to go search for it, anytime. See, right down the road is Newark Liberty Airport, and you can get a flight out practically 24/7, and . . .
Two Tonys — Tony Averso and Tony Trobiano
“I’ve probably had 10 phone calls already today from people looking to buy cars,” said Tony Averso. “We try to buy quality, and to sell quality. We’ll spend more money on a car, buying it, if it’s correct. If it’s not correct, we won’t even look at it. If I have to fly to Iowa to look at a car, I do it. I’ve got spotters out all over the country, and I’ll send them out to look at it. If they don’t think it’s what I’m looking for, they’ll just flat-out call me and tell me, ‘It’s not for you.’”
Tony Averso is one of the two Tonys–this is North Jersey, you know–who run Troby’s, a nondescript brick garage in a backstreet industrial area that nevertheless is bursting with utterly gorgeous cars, not all of them Cadillacs. The other Tony’s last name is Trobiano, shortened to Troby’s as a trademark of sorts. The gentlemen have been business partners selling highly collectible cars for 14 years, but Tony A, who just turned 60, told us he’s been close pals with Tony T for 55 years. They grew up in adjacent towns on opposite sides of Route 17 in Bergen County: Tony T in Hackensack, and Tony A in Lodi.
So the Tonys, plural, began heading for their collaboration when their roaming grounds were becoming forcefully infused with cars and everything related to them. Drivers snarled the ramps at 17 and Route 4 to reach the Garden State Plaza in Paramus, New Jersey’s first regional shopping mall, nationally famous for the huge modernist mural on the side of Alexander’s department store. It was a fantastic place to get into the car business. By the late 1950s, Tony Trobiano was running a used-car lot with a fantastic location: on U.S. 46 in Little Ferry, New Jersey, right at one of the then-ubiquitous traffic circles. He specialized in low-mileage, well-kept Cadillacs. Many of them weren’t even used cars.
“In 1955, the cars Troby was getting for his lot were 1955 Cadillacs. He was getting new Cadillacs before the dealers were,” Tony Averso said.
The younger Tony, Averso, took a more traditional route into selling Cadillacs. It’s next to impossible for a young, inexperienced salesman to come into a Cadillac showroom as a Vince Papale-like walk-on. You had to prove you had earned a shot at selling these high-commission American classics. Bergen County has long been a hotbed for high-volume and specialty dealerships, particularly in the Route 17 corridor (One example was the fabled Malcolm Konner Chevrolet in Paramus, which once laid claim to selling more Corvettes than any other retailer in the country). Tony A started out at a Chevrolet dealership, got married, and then felt the floor cracking under his feet as the first fuel crisis hit and he faced the retailer’s last-in, first-out layoff plan as car sales tumbled.
It was 1974 when Tony A joined the sales team of De Massi Cadillac in Lyndhurst. He was 20 years old, with exactly eight months under his belt selling new cars. “Put it this way. Cadillac back in the Seventies and Eighties was, to me, the car to own. You were selling the best product there was. It was head and shoulders over Lincoln. Mercedes wasn’t where it was now; it was more like the third stepchild back then. You were at the pinnacle of auto sales if you sold Cadillacs. To walk into a Cadillac store was the ultimate.
“I swear, I went to college to be a lawyer, to Rutgers,” he assured us. “So I went to buy my mother a brand-new Chevy in 1972. I was just taken by the fact that I knew more about the car than the salesman did. So, jokingly, I said to the manager, ‘Can I get another salesman? I know more about the car than this one does.’ So he said to me, ‘Do you want a job here?’ That’s how I got started in the car business. When I first went to De Massi, I was selling used cars. You can make a used-car salesman out of a new-car salesman, but you can’t make a new-car salesman out of a used-car salesman. The new-car guys aren’t used to dealing with the nicks and the chips.”
By any measure, Tony A is a master salesman of Cadillacs. No, let’s amend that: He’s a master according to the ultimate arbiter, the executive offices at Cadillac itself. On his finger is a heavy gold ring circled by 20 diamonds. You earn one diamond a year, but you can’t cash them in until all 20 are set in the gold. They symbolically declare that you’ve sold 100 new Cadillacs annually for 20 years in a row. That’s 2,000 cars. The ring is Cadillac’s highest recognition for its sales force. While Tony A was still selling new Cadillacs, he and Tony T were already getting very familiar with dealing classics, through trips to Hershey, Carlisle and more. One time in the mid-1970s, Tony A took an “up” (greeting a walk-in customer) at De Massi, who wanted to look at the new Cadillac Seville. As his trade-in, the buyer had a 1967 Bentley Mulliner Park Ward coupe. The customer went home with two new Sevilles, plus some cash. Tony got to wholesale the Bentley to another dealer. That was his start in the world of classics.
Meanwhile, Tony T had been buying new Cadillacs from Tony A–who, by now, had moved to Feldner Cadillac in Hackensack–to sell on his lot. They went into business together, founding Troby’s in 1988. The shop has space for 21 cars, and has remained mostly true to classic Cadillacs despite trends such as the muscle boom. On a recent day, three of the cars in their inventory were wildly complicated stainless-roofed 1957 Eldorado Brougham sedans. But a spectacular 1956 Chevrolet Nomad and a spotless 1963 Pontiac Grand Prix were also inside.
“One of those Broughams was out of Texas, the other was out of Pennsylvania, and the black one of out of New York, where the guy had had it for something like 30 years,” Tony A told us. “We try to get history on the cars. It makes them easier to sell. The more history you can provide to the customer, the better off you are.”
The remaining Cadillacs are models reflecting what the Tonys are confident is the market’s direction. Examples from before 1955 dominate Troby’s. That said, an extremely fetching 1964 Eldorado convertible and a 1957 de Ville convertible are also inside to grab your attention. About 70 cars are sold annually out of the shop, or off the sidewalk in front of it as soon as the car arrives in South Hackensack. Tony has some pointed advice about Cadillacs to buy, either on the grounds of value or coolness.
“Right now, Eldorados of the Fifties are what to buy. The 1959s are forever; the Sixties are catching up. Any low-production cars that are really good are investment quality,” he predicted. “I just bought a 1953 Eldorado, a white one. They only made 532 of them, and there’s about 100 cars left. I think the 1967 and 1968 Eldorados are coming up, slow, because a lot of people don’t really understand them, but from a design point of view, the cars are phenomenal.
“To me, a 1949 Coupe de Ville with an overhead-valve V-8 is a great car. The Fleetwood’s a pretty car, but when someone calls me and says they’re looking to sell a Coupe de Ville, I get excited. I want to go down to Newark, get on a plane and fly off to look at it. Cars of the Fifties? I used to ride down the Parkway to my father’s house at the Shore and you could look at cars, enjoy them, tell what they were. Today, and I hate to say it, everything looks like afterbirth.”
