Bal Harbour

BAL HARBOUR 57 BALHARBOURSHOPS.COM like order," Larry Kosilla tells me. "I take two showers a day. I get my hair cut every two weeks at the exact same time. I like things to be clean and I like order." Kosilla also likes cars, and the combination of clean and cars has led to a multimillion-dollar business known as Ammo N YC. Originally a native of Rye, New York, Kosilla went to the trading floor on Wall Street right out of college. After a few years of doing reconciliations for a gas trader ("the worst job in the world," he says) Kosilla bought a car wash in Harrison, New York, and started something called the Motor Club of New York. "A lot of people with sports cars need an excuse to do something with them," he tells me. He charged them a thousand a pop to hang out at the detail shop, watch him clean their cars, go for long drives out to Long Island, and participate in track days with other club members around the Tri-State area. Kosilla built cars in high school and has the combined sensibilities of an automotive fiend, a finan- cial whiz and a neat freak. A childhood friend, Matt Farah (of The Smoking Tire, one of the most popular automotive podcasts), be- came an early adopter on YouTube, and was hosting several car channels. Early on, he encouraged Kosilla to go on camera and narrate his cleaning jobs on the /Drive Channel. "I hated being on camera," Kosilla says. "The first time I did it, I tried to describe an air intake on a Cobra. I was a mush-mouth di- saster." But with practice he improved, and started building a fol- lowing. What few understood at the time, more than 10 years ago, is that people were more than w illing to watch someone strap a GoPro to a lawnmower and spend 15 minutes in their front yard cut ting the lawn. The retention—how long viewers spend with a video—is high for this kind of content, especially for cleaning vid- eos. Kosilla had walked himself into the middle of the 21st century platform with the biggest hit of the 20th century: the automobile. (Plus soap and steam.) "Before and after videos are everything now," Kosilla says. On his Ammo N YC channel, Kosilla is a fast-talking yet calm presence with a special taste for detail. If you don't learn enough from the main videos, there is also a schooling channel, where Kosilla will spend up to three hours on a single cleaning strateg y, like lifting dirt oœ an older paint job without doing any damage. Now a retail brand of cleaning products in 73 countries, and a YouTube channel with more than two million subscribers, Ammo N YC is an amazing vector of luxur y, OCD compulsion and that new kind of content that soothes and distracts with small, discrete tasks that, unlike much of life's problems, can be quickly identified and dispatched. A dirty truck in 1985? A dirty truck. A dirty truck in 2023? A half-hour filmic masterpiece. When I first found Larry's channel, I doubted how much a New Yorker with no real attachment to cars would be drawn in. Several hours and three cars later, I realized that my own need to clean (fairly pronounced) found a perfect match in his videos. All my time during the pandemic watching pool-cleaning videos (sublime) and Tibetan cooking (can't miss) put me in the perfect headspace to wit- ness an old red Mercedes make its return to the stage after 40 years in the garage. When I see Kosilla and his a ssistant , Jordan, in Danbur y, Connecticut, they are working on a Lamborghini Countach, one of only 321 in the world. His garage is a fully equipped TV studio, com- plete with bright white lights (designed to inspect car paint) and advanced wireless broadcast gear—a truly dual-purpose space. To an amateur like me, the Lamborghini is a bright red wedge that ful- fills the idea of a "sports car" that I had when I was, say, eight. This is but one of dozens of abandoned luxury cars Kosilla finds in barns. "People ask me how I find those places," Kosilla says, laughing. I ask if he tells them. He laughs more. Right next to the Lamborghini is a 2009 Audi R8, also known as " the car from Iron Man." This isn't a commercial investment—it's Kosilla's own car, or one of them. (He also has a blue Porsche Taycan Cross Turismo outside that came with a "deliver y experience," meaning that it was under a big black cloth and unveiled to him at the Porsche Experience center in Atlanta.) Fastidious and persnickety car owners make Kosilla money, and his detailing schedule is booked out months in advance. This doesn't mean any thing goes, though. The guys who buy a yellow Lambo with suicide doors and do donuts in the local parking lot for atten- tion need not inquire. "Those guys make us look bad," he says. "They're buying a car for status and ego reasons. Honestly, I really don't care what kind of car it is, as long as you are super into it. That's the type of car guy I love." When I ask how his R8 is diœerent, he explains the position of the engine (in the middle of the car) and the beauty of the gated shifter (it's clicky). But it's something slightly harder to define that makes Kosilla happy. "When I go get the groceries in this, I'm driving around in a work of art," he says. "It's a truly great car, and when you clean it yourself, it just drives so much better. I can't explain why, but it does." What exactly does a five-figure car detailing look like? Larry Kosilla can show you—if you can get on his list. BY SASHA FRERE-JONES PHOTOGRAPHY BY GEORGE ETHEREDGE METHOD MAN I ''

• Cover