At Slick 50 Inc., sneakiness is company policy.
The handful of employees privy to the secret formula for the fancy engine treatment, which has nearly $80 million in annual sales, must swear a notarized oath of silence. Only those few who need to know are in possession of the combination to the fireproof vault with 8-inch-thick walls in which the sole printed copy of the Slick 50 recipe is housed. They alone are entrusted with the multiple passwords to the specially encoded database where the computer version is filed.When ingredients are shipped to hired blenders around the country, they are dispatched in odd allotments of containers identified only by numbered codes and mixing instructions. So-called masking-chemicals are included in every batch to make it virtually impossible for chemical analysis to determine exactly what it takes to concoct the stuff. The product, which is supposed to be added to the crankcase every 50,000 miles, has never been patented, either, as a patent would not only imperil security but also, after 20 years, expire.
All this for an additive that has a suggested retail price of $24.95 a quart? Absolutely, says David Dillingham, president of Slick 50, which was acquired in July by Quaker State Corp. He himself is not among the elect five employees (in a company of roughly 100) who have access to the recipe. "We guard our formula as closely as Coca-Cola does," he says.
So it was with some alarm that Dillingham took a phone call in his Houston office one Tuesday in August. The caller, identifying himself only as "Tommy," declared that he had in his clutches the formula for Slick 50 Advanced Formula Engine Treatment. Unless he was paid $850,000 in cash, he would sell it to the highest-bidding corporate rival. He reiterated the demand via fax.
He evidently thought he could easily find a customer if extortion didn't work. After all, Slick 50 claims to have spent millions of dollars on scientific studies attesting to the product's unique ability to protect an engine from wear for more than 50,000 miles of high-stress driving. For some years after it was introduced in 1981, Slick 50 was something of a cult phenomenon, sold mostly through mail order and known mainly through word of mouth.
Dozens of other engine treatments are on the market of course, including brands made by STP, T-Plus and Duralube, to name a few. "Everybody and their mother makes it," says Raul Gonzalez, a management trainee at a NAPA auto-supply store in Houston. "Slick 50 sells the most, but they all basically have the same main ingredients." Most of them do contain polytetrafluoroethylene, known to all the world as Teflon, DuPont Co.'s trademarked version of the petrochemical.
But only Slick 50, its boosters claim, has the right stuff to really make an engine purr, and loyalists won't use anything else. Says John Hunt, the former owner of an auto-parts store in Angel Fire, N.M., who started using Slick 50 before it became available in retail outlets: "If the secret got out, everybody would be making it."
Which is precisely why the extortionist's phone call gave Dillingham such a jolt. "We couldn't imagine how he could have gotten his hands on" the formula, Dillingham recalls.
But the Federal Bureau of Investigation, called in by Slick 50's lawyer, pounced on the case and found it about as easy to crack as a can of motor oil.
Tommy, it seems, had violated a cardinal rule of the communications-age scofflaw: When attempting extortion by fax machine, never use a cover sheet - especially not one sporting in bold script the address of the shop where you rent a mailbox. "I think to call him bumbling would be polite," says Doug Ross, a Slick 50 vice president.
FBI agents believe they tracked their "Tommy" down at the Post and Parcel Center in Pembroke Pines, Fla., where he was a regular customer, frequently riding over on a bicycle from his apartment nearby. As the demands-by-fax escalated - ultimately to $2.5 million - the FBI intensified its surveillance. And late last month, agents arrested the alleged perpetrator, Azzad Ali Hosein, in the lobby of a Hilton Hotel in Fort Lauderdale, where, they claim, he thought he was to meet a Slick 50 courier bearing ransom money.
Extradited to Houston, he was indicted on one count of interstate extortion, for which he could go to prison for two years. Hosein pleaded not guilty last month in U.S. District Court. Hosein's lawyer, public defender George Murphy, says his client isn't interested in discussing the case. Meanwhile, the 35-year-old construction worker is trying to raise $50,000 bond.
Whoever Tommy is, he wasn't the slickest of crooks, but he also wasn't a complete idiot. The 30-page document the FBI says it seized at the Hilton was enough to make Slick 50 chemists flinch, for, the company says, it was a frighteningly precise rendition of the formula invented in 1981 by two scientists working in a modest laboratory in the English county of Essex.
Could it have been that Slick 50, after years of fanatical secrecy, had finally let down its guard?
When Bill Jeter, who retired in 1994, was president of the company, he kept the Slick 50 formula in a locked briefcase to which only he had the key. And a senior vice president was the only holder of the combination to the safe where the briefcase was kept. "We're not quite so cloak-and-dagger as we were," Ross says. "But we're still extremely careful."
It turns out, however, that Hosein lived in the Cayman Islands when, in the early 1980s, Slick 50 had a processing plant there. Company and law-enforcement officials say they have evidence that a relative of his worked there at the time. That would seem to explain how Hosein might have come to know so much about the formulation.