Well, there’s something you don’t see every day. On the night of April 10th, a Ferrari California burst into a mall in Moscow and screamed through the halls, cooking off donuts while evading an army of security guards for roughly 15 minutes.
Even more bizarre: The driver of the red Ferrari turned out to be the former mayor of the Russian city of Arkhangelsk, Alexander Donskoy.
“I love to joke,” Donskoy told Russia’s 360º television. “This is a comic performance, a way to attract attention, but unfortunately, not everyone accepted it as a joke.”
Donskoy told the media that the act of indoor hoonage was designed as a work of “performance art,” like the work of famous avant-garde artist Marina Abramović.
“I looked up, where you can do it,” he said, adding that he planned the drive for when the complex would be largely empty. “Overall everything was planned so that no one [would be] hurt.”
Security workers at the mall said Donskoy drove the Ferrari into the mall through a loading dock around 10 minutes before the mall’s closing time.
Donskoy was reportedly the youngest mayor in Arkhangelsk when he was elected in 2005. One year later, he announced his intentions to run for the Russian presidency, only to be dogged by criminal allegations and arrested in 2007 for allegedly abusing his office and forging documents, according to media reports. He was released in 2008 to serve three years of probation.
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