The "Griftfather" Demands An Extra Vacation Day At The End Of His Vacation

And other stories of autowriters who are remembered by PR long after they're forgotten by readers

There’s no easy way to say this, friends, so I’m just gonna say it: Jonny Lieberman isn’t “racing” Pikes Peak this year. He made the announcement to his fans, such as they are, on Instagram a few days ago. As with all major motorsports decisions, this will be bad news to some people — like the person who will have to be DFL in the “Cayman Cuck” class now that Jonny’s not there to give everyone else a comfortable two-minute margin or supremacy — and good news to others — like the drivers of the dead-stock Nissan LEAF who lost to Jonny’s 718 GT4 Clubsporty Heckin’ Burgerkingring-o-rino Edition by just under three seconds last year and who will now have a chance to advance at least one place in the overall standings.

It’s easy to be repelled by, or contemptuous of, the many odd freebies given to the Loserman and his cohort — but there’s at least a distant cousin of a business case behind it. Or at least there would be in a pre-2020 world where people didn’t have a near-Soviet sense of gratitude for being permitted to buy any car whatsoever. The rules are different today, and there’s arguably no need whatsoever for automotive PR unless you’re Jaguar Land Rover, A Division Of Tata Corp, where the showroom inventory is still plentiful.

But I digress. Porsche wasted fifty-plus grand on watching Lieberman crawl up Pikes Peak like a blind, terrified kitten trying to find its way to Mama’s nipple, yet there’s always the chance that somebody out there saw Jonny embarrassing himself and thought, hey, I could do better than THAT, I’m gonna buy a Clubsport GT4! Better yet, I’ll buy TWO of them! Porsche probably only needs to sell two Clubsports to make up the cost of the Pikes Peak fiasco. Maybe there was some sense behind it. Motor Trend gets a lot of eyeballs, and where the eyeballs are, the PR money follows.

Except, of course, when it doesn’t. There are probably four dozen “autowriters” on the regular freebie circuit whose eyeball count is far from those Motor Trend millions. More like thousands. Or hundreds. Or, in at least ten cases of which I am aware, none at all. These people have no readers. No viewers. No audience. Yet they keep soaking up six figures’ worth of benefits every year, rain or shine. They file no copy, produce no content. They’re just along for the ride. Literally.

And their king is a man I call “The Griftfather”. I’ll let him describe himself, because that’s the fairest thing to do:

Welcome to my literary world. Dubbed Kimatni by my father, the meaning derives from the Kemetic deity "Ma'at" who represented justice, truth, harmony, and balance. "Ki" is the body's lifeforce energy, and most notably acclaimed in Japan where my wife Misa originates. Thus, my name equates to "Strength Through Truth."

Graduating with a B.S. in Business from Georgia Tech in 1997, I am a father of two girls, a brother to four sisters, and a mentor to hundreds of youth. I am an author, journalist, and poet of conscious thought, enlightenment, and wellness. As a nomadic traveler, I've spent time in many indigenous lands building with the people and their cultures. From Lalibela, Ethiopia and Machu Picchu to Fukuoka, Japan and Kathmandu, I've been blessed with the gift of open-mindedness, which allows me to inherit a deeper understanding of the language, the cuisines, and the lifestyles of the region visited

Another way to look at it: After two years interning at Jaguar post-graduation, Kimatni Rawlins founded a group of mostly unvisited websites that claim to view cars and motorcycles from the Black perspective. These websites, and their associated YouTube video channels, had some early success during the Bush Administration, but they’ve long been running on fumes. Here’s the flagship of Kimatni’s empire, “Automotive Rhythms”, compared to my old website, jackbaruth.com. SimilarWeb thinks they’re in the same market. Keep in mind that I don’t have any of my own content on that site, and have not had any since July of last year; it’s entirely guest contributions, led by the inimitable Tom Klockau who posts twice a month or so on lovely, sentimental topics of somewhat arcane interest.

That’s right: Tom’s occasional musings on Cadillac Seville models and Seventies Pontiac Catalinas are stomping a company that claims to have multiple employees and seven figures of revenue. When it was me and Tom writing together, we did about three times the traffic we do now, just to put things in perspective, so it was even more lopsided.

Most of the videos Kimatni puts on YouTube nowadays get just a couple hundred views. His satellite sites appear to have gone years without any updates. And yet he has dedicated, non-network-sourced, banner-ad partnerships with several major automakers. If you’re not sure what I mean by that: Back when I had ads on Riverside Green, they came from Google and we got paid $100-300 a month to run them. Kimatni’s banner ads appear to come from the automakers directly, which means they’re paying him some sort of flat fee to run them. I guarantee you it’s more than $100 a month, because unlike me Kimatni is a savvy businessman who maximizes every opportunity.

And because he is an intelligent man, Kimatni knows that there’s no money to be made in the readers. Instead, the money — and the game — comes from the automakers, whom he soaks like one of those disturbingly named “Sponge Daddy” products until they yield barrels of cash to sponsor “Automotive Rhythms” events, travel, and parties. I attended one of his parties, in fact — it was held at the 40/40 Club in New York City, during the NY Auto Show, maybe back in 2010 or 2011. Jaguar had paid to rent the whole place out so Kimatni could pretend to be a Manhattan big wheel, and it was filled with bewildered autowriters who had never been inside an East Coast nightclub in their whole lives. There was even a VIP section, run by a fellow who is now a Very Senior Executive in European auto PR. Since I was a well-known degenerate at the time, he invited me in, handed me a double Ketel One, and sat a gorgeous Asian girl with extremely vague industry affiliations on my lap. The lady and I were just discussing what kinds of drugs we were going to finish the evening with, and in what combination, when my girlfriend, the infamous Vodka McBigbra, stormed past the velvet ropes and hit us both like Ronnie Lott in the backfield before upbraiding me in a voice so loud the doorman’s head turned in our direction.

The road not taken, and all that.

At some point, Kimatni achieved what he no doubt thinks of as satori, realizing that he could do whatever he wanted to the automakers, because most of their PR people were huge secret racists who were flat-out terrified of him. Which led to the “Candy Bar” incident:

For context: Autowriters love to have secret little groups on Facebook and elsewhere for the primary purpose of complaining about:

• first-class flights

• free cars

• Jack Baruth.

This group is from 2012 or thereabouts. Most people ignored the post, but I followed it because I knew what was coming next; another stage of the grift. Sure enough, Kimatni announced the “FitFathers” initiative shortly afterwards. If memory serves, it was some sort of program for autowriters to increase their fitness — and every manufacturer would need to pay Kimatni to be in the game.

God only knows how much money he made from it. Could be a grand, could be fifty, I don’t know. But he was perpetually doing that sort of thing, and everytime he put out his hand, the PR toads were too frightened to put him off.

In the decade since, Kimatni appears to have scored several more lucrative partnerships — again, for sites and channels that have few to no eyeballs. His shameless “Fitfather” grifting annoyed a few acquaintances of mine to the point that they created an imaginary African-American autowriter with a free Blogger site. I should add that one of the agitated creators was what they call a “PoC” nowadays; he felt that Kimatni made him and his fellow minority autowriters look bad. To no one’s surprise, the fake journo didn’t reach the thirty-day mark before the press-trip invites started rolling in. The people behind the identity discussed a few ways to take it further, including hiring an actor to portray “Dontavious” or whatever the offensively faux-Africentric fake name was, before deciding to let the whole thing slip into oblivion. “We were afraid we were going to become millionaires then maybe go to jail somehow,” one of them told me.

I have to confess that I kind of forgot about Kimatni a long time ago — but the automakers certainly didn’t forget. He and his “employees” are first-call attendees of each and every new-car event. They go overseas, they take Maybach press loaners, they enjoy $1500-a-night hotel rooms. Which is how he came back on my radar, via a post on yet another stupid Secret Autowriters Group of which I am a member under a completely false account in which I pretend to be a well-known newspaper journo who actually doesn’t have an FB account but nobody bothered to check.

Trigger Warnings: drooping nipples, small swim trunks, off-season travel

Take note PR Reps!

Don’t laugh, because this has the punch of a papal edict. After Fitfather’s rant regarding candy bars at press events, the poor saps who run these things had to start lining up an entirely separate “health group” of snacks at every drive stop and presentation. They couldn’t get rid of the existing stuff, because the 300-pounders would have raised hell. They just had to double their prep, a tradition that continues even today.

Even if they don’t give an extra Hawaii day to everyone in the future, they’ll definitely have to give it to the Fitfather, because he’s demanded it and everybody is too scared of him to ignore his demands. Besides being a reasonably imposing dude in person, he can also destroy the career of anyone in automotive PR just by implying that they are racist.

Basically, he’s the Clay Davis of autowriting. Someone has to be, I suppose. And who can blame him for working every angle? Don’t hate the player; hate the game.

He’s also far from the only, ah, necro-journo to be on the wagon. The attendance rosters of press events across the globe are thick with names of people whose only chance of getting 500 readers would be to buy an ad in a newspaper, and whose only chance of getting 1000 viewers would be to livestream themselves robbing Fort Knox in broad daylight. Most of them haven’t had a steady outlet in years, or they’re plodding along with some mostly-abandoned website that gets fewer likes than your cousin’s tenth round of baby pictures this week.

In fact, I’d say about fifty percent of the people on most new-car debuts, and seventy percent of people on press-vehicle rotations, have no meaningful ability whatsoever to reach the public. They’re still on the gravy train because they don’t make waves, they don’t cause much damage, and they’re absolutely willing to use the mandatory hashtags on social media, which helps the PR people justify their existence in an era where you don’t actually need to promote new cars in order to sell them.

Would you like to join them? Fine, I’ll tell you how. Start a WordPress blog and create social media accounts to go with it. Buy 50,000 followers, which will cost you two grand at most. Spend six months doing photographs with dealership cars, the cars of friends, Cars and Coffee. Then come back to me. I’ll give you some emails for PR people. You contact them and explain that you want to join their influencer waves.

Simple as that. It will help tremendously if you are not a straight white man, so if you are, try not to be too obvious about it. In fact, the more broken of a person you are, the better your chances will be. You would not believe the amount of adult sobbing I have seen on press trips. And if you can manage to claim some Fitfather-esque status as the official representative of your ethnic or sexual minority, the sky is the limit.

Want an example? I’ll close with a more recent, but highly illustrative, story: In September of 2020 I went to Austin, TX to drive the new-generation Rolls-Royce Ghost. Upon my arrival I went BMX riding with some friends, on a borrowed bike, and broke my right fibula at the famous “9th Street Trails”. Not wanting to be a pussy and skip the rest of the drive, I went to Robert Farago’s house, borrowed a cane, and drove the Ghost for two more days, including a great dinner at Ruth’s Chris with the author and First Principles member we all know and love here as “Spaniel Felson”, before going home to get four screws in the fib.

That broken bone would go on to have all sorts of odd consequences for me and two of my favorite people in the world, but that’s not the point. The point is that I was moving very slowly at all times during the rest of the event, so I inadvertently caught a bunch of interactions between PR and a pair of young Black men who represented some magazine focusing on Fashion For Gay Men Of Color. I regret that I can’t remember which one it was; a quick web search shows me that there are quite a few of them.

On Day One, as they were being shown their hotel accommodations, they had expressed their annoyance that there were no “Ghost droptops” available for them to take out on the town — so the PR reps hurriedly obtained a Dawn convertible from God knows where. Probably the local dealership. As I was limping back into the hotel that evening, the pair were leaving it in the Dawn, top down with the stereo up and two very loud friends in the back seat.

The next day, they skipped the drive route but did manage to make the lunch meetup. When it was time to ask questions of the chief engineer, they laid into this guy, and I mean they beat his ass for ten minutes, about the outdated, ridiculous infotainment setup in the “Ghost”. It took all of us more than a few bewildered moments to realize that:

0. These fellows hadn’t driven the new-for-2021 Ghost at all;

1. Instead, they’d been driving the Dawn, which was based on the 2009 Ghost, which in turn was based on the F01 2008 7-Series;

2. So they were evaluating the infotainment of a 12-year-old car;

3. But they didn’t know it, because this was the first time either of them had ever operated a Rolls-Royce of any kind, and also because they had refused a Ghost on the grounds that sedans didn’t have enough floss or rizz or whatever the fuck people who are not 51 years old say.

The obvious thing to do was to inform them that they weren’t driving the car that everyone else had driven, and wanted to discuss. But doing that would have been somewhere between worrisome and downright insulting, and would have destroyed all the goodwill that Rolls-Royce had sought to create by obtaining a Dawn convertible specifically for these two dudes to carouse in all night with a series of randos — which is not an assumption I made, it’s what they told me — so…

Faced with this situation, the PR people did the obvious thing: they had a deadpan, and deadly serious, discussion with the two young fellows in which they took blame for their decision to put such a bad system in a new car — and they promised that serious action would be taken as a result of this feedback, and that the next time they came to a Rolls-Royce event, they would see that all of their concerns had been thoroughly addressed.

“I want to thank you,” the German engineer said, “for bringing these concerns to light.” Everybody else in the room nodded.

“Y’all need to get your shit together. A Rolls-Royce shouldn’t be worse than a new Toyota on the screens.”

“Absolutely correct,” the engineer said, “and we’re aware of the problem.” Everybody else got up and left, but it took me a few minutes to get upright.

“You gonna fix the infotainment on the Ghost?” I asked. The engineer made a face.

“There is nothing to say about… that.” It occurred to me that there had been twenty people in the room who could have corrected the young writers, possibly in quite caustic and hilarious fashion — and yet nobody wanted to do it. Including me, because I was on my best behavior for my insurance-company director job. Nobody wanted to make waves.

In a world where nobody wants to make waves, forceful people tend to get their way. Which is why you can order up used cars at new-car press previews, and eat special snacks at events, and demand an extra vacation day on someone else’s dime — when you’re already on vacation! It makes me think more kindly of Jonny Lieberman, to be honest. At least he kind of wants to be: a car guy, a writer, a racer. If he doesn’t have the chops to do any of it well, maybe that’s God’s fault, not his.

At the end of “The Wire”, Clay Davis was alive and thriving when so many others were dead or discarded. There’s a lesson there. People like Kimatni are always going to succeed in the autowriting game, because it’s tailored to people like them. It’s a bizarre, broken, deranged bit of business, and it yields its treasure to people who can take full advantage without pity.

Leaving the hotel in Austin to catch a middle seat back to Columbus, Ohio, I saw my two pals in the Dawn going full-throttle down the avenue towards another night of adventures. Looking back, what strikes me isn’t that they were in an old Ghost and didn’t know it — but rather that I was an old ghost myself, just a year or two from disappearing, and I didn’t know it. No worries. I can live with it, the way I live with whatever occasional pain that fibula and its titanium screws serve up to me. Hail to the Griftfather and his many minions in PR, who outnumber his readers by proportion unimaginable. It no longer matters much to me. Like poor Jonny Lieberman half-throttling his nervous way up Pikes Peak on the way to a narrow victory over a dead stock Nissan LEAF, I am lost in the fog, immune to your credentialed contempt, solitary, living a quiet life in a place you can no longer touch.