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The owner of a former Pleasanton specialty car dealership is out of jail as of last week after being granted bail, which was set at $4 million, amid outcry from his alleged victims in court.
Ken Mattson, the owner of the now-shuttered Specialty Sales Classics in downtown Pleasanton, spent almost a week in jail for allegedly defrauding investors.
He was taken into custody May 22 and released Wednesday (May 28) to his home in Sonoma. He is currently under GPS monitoring, and is being required to forfeit ownership of firearms, report all financial transactions exceeding $5,000, surrender his passports, and refrain from new investments. He has pleaded not guilty to all counts.
Those stipulations – which also prohibit Mattson from harassing witnesses, victims, or anyone else related to the case – are aimed at protecting victims and preventing further wrongdoing, with Mattson being accused of running a Ponzi scheme that involved using funds from new investors for personal expenses and to pay back earlier investors in his role as president of the real estate investment firm LaFever Mattson from 2007 to 2024.
Prior to the dissolution of LaFever Mattson last year – with partner Tim LaFever alleging that Mattson sought to sell and profit from non-existent real estate – LaFever and Mattson were hit with a class action lawsuit alleging that they used a “complex web of corporate entities” in a pattern of defrauding elderly investors, sometimes out of their entire life savings, which came to a head in the spring of 2024 when the two partners sued each other and stopped regular distributions to investors.
Operations halted at Specialty Classic Cars that same year, shuttering in 2024 after its sales license was placed on probation by the DMV in 2022 for failure to pay people selling their cars within the required timeframe. That marked the end of more than a decade of operation for the business, which opened at 4321 First St. in 2011. Mattson filed for bankruptcy later that same year.
Mattson is due to return to court next Friday (June 6) at 9:30 a.m. for a continued hearing.
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