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Back in 2004, Tom Brady, then the quarterback for the New England Patriots, donated a Cadillac XLR Roadster to his former high school.
The high school, Junipero Serra in San Mateo, California, ended up selling raffle tickets, $25 per ticket or $100 for five tickets, for a chance to win the Cadillac as part of fundraiser.
Tom Brady also offered three tiers of prizes for students based on how many tickets they sold. Students who sold $500 worth a tickets earned a Brady-signed football. Those that sold $1,500 worth of tickets got a Brady-signed Patriots helmet. Students who sold $2,500 in tickets won a signed jersey.
It worked. In fact, it worked so well that the high school had to set up a phone bank with 15 people working on it and ended up selling over 14,000 tickets.
“They just went bonkers,” Tom Brady Sr. recalled to SFGate.com earlier this year, referring to the rush to buy raffle tickets.
“We were on the telephones for almost 12 hours straight without getting off,” said Robin Jensen, wife of the school’s football coach and who was working in the school’s development office at the time of the raffle.
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Brady had won the car, worth around $76,000, after being named Super Bowl MVP for the second time in 2004, so it was a very popular item with raffle tickets being sold to people from as far away as New England. The school ended up raising a whopping $367,000.
The person who ended up winning the car was a local man named Charlie Affrunti, who had two sons that were students at the high school at the same time Tom Brady attended.
So, where is the car now?
No one knows.
More than one media outlet reached out to Charlie Affrunti multiple times on the 20th anniversary of the raffle to ask where the Cadillac is these days and he did not respond.
Junipero Serra football coach Patrick Walsh and Tom Brady’s baseball coach during his senior year of high school, Pete Jensen, both think Affrunti may have ended up selling the car. After all, the Internal Revenue Service would have come calling for 25 percent of the fair market value of the Cadillac, or around $19,000, in taxes.
Perhaps, if someone did buy the car from Affrunti after the raffle, they will read about the mystery that so many are curious to see solved will come forward.