ATHERTON – A sunken yacht. Made-up mobsters. A history of murder. A neighbor who complained about “all that excavating.”
Police swarmed the grounds of a $15 million Atherton mansion on Friday where a landscaping crew dug up a buried Mercedes a day earlier and cadaver dogs hit on “possible human remains.” And as an investigation began to unfold, intriguing details of the home’s past owner were unearthed as well — but how it all fit together, no one could say.
Johnny Lew, who neighbors say built the 12,000 square-foot French-style estate in the early 1990s on Stockbridge Avenue and died years ago, had a history of violence and skullduggery. In the 1960s, he was locked up on a second-degree murder conviction in Los Angeles that was overturned on a technicality and served time in the 1970s for two counts of attempted murder. In the late 1990s, he was arrested on insurance fraud after hiring what turned out to be undercover agents to sink his $1.2 million yacht off the Golden Gate that he said was an order from “his people” in an Asian mob, according to a Mercury News article in 1999.
Atherton Police said Friday that the car — buried four to six feet deep — was a convertible Mercedes Benz. It had been stolen from Palo Alto in 1992 and likely was buried not long after that. “The possible owner of the vehicle is believed to be deceased,” the police said in a news release Friday, without further explanation.
When the car was buried, the convertible top had been down, Atherton Police Commander Dan Larsen told reporters Friday afternoon. Dirt and unopened bags of concrete filled the vehicle, police said. On Friday morning, crews were seen in drone footage scooping out handfuls of dirt from the car. By noon, most of the passenger compartment had been emptied, and no human remains had been found. Still, “the cadaver dog again made a slight notification of possible human remains,” police said.
“It could be human remains. They could be reacting to blood. They could be reacting to old bones. They could be reacting to human vomit,” Larsen said of the cadaver dogs. “It could be any one of those combinations of things that the dogs are reacting to.”
Police are waiting to remove the vehicle from the pit and look under it before determining whether they are dealing with a crime scene.
They are also looking into the history of Lew but said they were reluctant to make any connection.
The mystery shocked neighbors in this tony Peninsula community, home to wealthy tech executives, developers and professional athletes, including Warriors great Stephen Curry and his family, who live two minutes away. In a bizarre coincidence, the estate on Stockbridge Avenue is just a block from another home connected to a notorious case involving another buried vehicle — the Chowchilla school bus hijacking. Two brothers who grew up on Stockbridge, the sons of a podiatrist, were convicted of kidnapping 25 Chowchilla schoolchildren and their bus driver in 1976 and burying them alive in a tractor trailer in Livermore before escaping. They were in prison during the 1990s and released on parole over the last 10 years.
One neighbor, who lives nearly next door to the Stockbridge estate that’s on a flag lot, is Gary Dillabough, a former eBay executive whose ambitious plans to transform downtown San Jose with numerous commercial and residential projects are under way. He was in New York when the vehicle was unearthed Thursday, and his phone lit up with “50 text messages from my kids asking what’s going on.”
“It’s just such a weird, out-of-the-box thing,” he said. “It’s just hard to get your arms around. It’s like, maybe you bury people, but bury a car? It’s so stupid.”
Dillabough and his family haven’t lived on Stockbridge long enough to know Lew, but he remembers the house was on the market for an extra long time before the Lew family sold it in 2014 for $7.35 million. “We just heard whispers of people saying, ‘I think (he was) involved in some kind of illicit activities, offshore somewhere,’ ” Dillabough said.
Yet another family bought the house in 2020 for $15 million.
One neighbor, who has lived near the Stockbridge estate since the 1970s, said the property where the car was unearthed had been nothing but open land and a stable atop a small hill back then. Lew built the new home with a tennis court and swimming pool, she said, and shaved down the hilltop. She and her husband had complained about “all the digging up” but couldn’t say for sure if it was during the time the vehicle was buried.
The neighbor, who didn’t want to be identified, said that she and her husband didn’t know Lew well but said, “He was a crook.”
He had a huge staff that helped run the estate, she said, and continued to live there for years. Lew moved to Washington state until his death at 77 in 2015.
The neighbor said a nice family now lives in the house and have been building a granny unit where the old stable once stood, either for grandparents or as an office. Landscaping contractors doing work next to the gently sloping property found the car on Thursday.
Others walking through the hilly neighborhood Friday morning wondered what might be buried with that Mercedes.
“There’s a lot of stuff that was kept secret back then,” said Rich Hartnett, who lives nearby. “It was different, neighbors didn’t have cameras. You could do pretty much what you wanted and nobody would know.”
Cathy Consani, who lives several blocks away, “thought it was a joke” at first.
“I’m probably more shocked about the background of the guy who used to live there,” she said.
She’s not convinced a body will be found, but she has another hunch that brings full circle the mysterious motives of her former neighbor. “Personally,” she said, “I think he probably buried his Mercedes for the insurance money.”
Staff Writer Jason Green and researcher Veronica Martinez contributed to this story.
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