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It gets even more surreal; there's the Boeing 727 Jet Limo. This is yours for $1 million.

"It's basically a plane with the wings chopped off," says Bob. There's a dance floor inside and a bedroom with a heart-shaped bed. We're also in the process of doing something using a Lear Jet."

With land and air taken care of, Bob is looking out to sea. "We've started converting a 50ft yacht. It's going to become a limo you can drive on land and in water. Basically, it'll be the world's biggest, most luxurious amphicar."

It wasn't always this off-the-wall. Bob started out driving conventional limos for his dad's business in Florida, albeit at the barely legal age of 15. By the time he was 19 he had his own, lucrative limo business in Chicago. That was when things first took a downturn.

"I'd brought a couple of guys back from Florida to help run the business, one who turned out to be pretty undesirable, giving the girls a hard time. So I got rid of him.

"Turns out he had connections with the mafia, so one by one, over a period of about two months, they blew up my limos."

Bob went back to Florida for a few years to lay low, before returning to Chicago and starting up his business all over again.

"I bought two blue limos from a junkyard in New York. One of them had rusty bullet holes down the side. I fixed them up, but because they weren't exactly high-class, my selling point was a promise that if I was ever late for an appointment, you got the whole thing for free."

By the late Eighties, flush on Regan-era success, he found himself portrayed as something of a local hero after offering free rides in his limos to folk at retirement homes.