R.D. Copper’s pickup was puttering down a rural highway on a Sunday morning in the Shenandoah Valley when a showroom’s worth of luxury sports cars roared out of nowhere and made a beeline for him, police said.
The 15 or so customized BMW M3s, Lexuses and a McLaren zoomed closer and closer at speeds of up to 100 mph. They weren’t going to stop. Copper had no choice — he veered to get out of the way.
The wild scene got even stranger: Using handheld cameras, the D.C. area drivers filmed the moment the pickup lurched onto the shoulder and they blew past.
They’d messed with the wrong man. Copper is a retired lawman, and he was not amused. He called for backup.
His reports sparked a furious 20-mile chase across two counties, pitting officers from four rural law enforcement agencies against the drivers, some of whom they would later learn were part of an underground crew of drivers known simply as Mischief.
Once the chase ended, authorities determined that the incident was the highest-profile occurrence involving Mischief, which has created a series of gritty, controversial and Billboard-charting DVDs that have documented white-knuckle street racing, stunts and crashes on the Capital Beltway and roads across the Washington area. They are a real-life counterpart to the Hollywood pyrotechnics of the “The Fast and the Furious” franchise.
Mischief is part of the “import tuner” scene, which has gained popularity in recent decades with the rise of imported cars on American roads and has been described as “new age hot-rodding.”
In the old days of muscle cars, a driver might customize a car’s parts to increase power. Import tuners also often tweak the computer system that controls the engine to maximize performance — a sort of hacking meets hot-rodding. Cars that come from the factory with 200-horsepower engines can be retuned to have three or four times more power.
Mischief stands out for having the hottest cars and producing the slickest videos — in an area that’s not particularly known for this kind of daredevil driving.
Those associated with the group have had numerous run-ins with the law. Their videos have drawn the ire of police, who say they glorify dangerous driving and could entice young drivers to emulate what they see.
“They are a tragedy waiting to happen,” said Capt. Susan Culin, commander of the Fairfax County police traffic division. “When you have racing or aggressive driving on public streets, you can expect a dangerous, life-threatening outcome.”
The impresario of the group is Charles County resident Dustin Worles, who plays a “Jackass”-style joker in the tapes and has hair gelled up as if he were perpetually driving a convertible.
And this being a street-racing crew in the uber-achieving D.C. area, Worles’s associates include a band of drivers, according to Mischief’s Web site, who work in button-down Washington during the week and burn rubber on weekends: a CEO of a Maryland tech company, an executive at a Manassas car dealership and a computer engineer, among others.
The CEO and the engineer were not involved in the Shenandoah incident.
Authorities said the crew’s driving that morning was reckless enough to warrant jail time, but to put Mischief out of action, they would have to catch the members first.
The call
Augusta County Sheriff’s Deputy Trevor Ross said his radio crackled about 10:40 a.m. Nov. 11. It was a quiet Sunday, and he was out on patrol in the area of Staunton, the county seat about three hours southwest of Washington.
“Any units in the area of 262 and Lee Highway,” he recalled the dispatcher saying. “Report of vehicles driving recklessly.”
Ross was off. Soon after, the dispatcher reported that the drivers got off on Highway 250. Ross said he thought, “I can catch them.” He flipped on his lights and sirens and picked up the pace.
Highway 250 runs up Shenandoah Mountain, where the road bunches into sharp curves. Ross said he would need to reach them by the mountain’s 3,000-foot crest or risk the drivers escaping into neighboring Highland County. It would be close.
Somewhere up ahead, police say, Worles was speeding along in a black BMW M3, while Arash Dashtaray, the executive at Dash Motors in Manassas, was in another vehicle in the pack. Neither would comment for this article.
The type of driving seen that Sunday is common in the Mischief Web videos and DVDs, which they claim have sold hundreds of thousands of copies since the series launched in 2002.
In one, a BMW M3 careers off a road — in what is identified as Montgomery County — at a high rate of speed.
In another, a sports car is seen weaving through traffic on the Beltway at a high rate of speed, as if in a video game. In a third, Mischief records two motorcyclists involved in a 130-mph police chase on an Arizona highway.
Loading...
Comments