225BatonRouge.com

Brooks Newell settles his fit, 43-year-old frame comfortably into the backseat and, ever so slowly, inhales.

“Mm hm,” he says absently as his eyes scan the ceiling liner, and he inhales again. “Yep. Mm hm.”

His eyes close slightly as he discerns and isolates each subtle scent. In less than 10 seconds his professional assessment is pretty much complete.

“OK, you’ve got two smells going on here,” he says flatly. “One is dog hair and dander, it smells sort of like dirt, you smell it? OK. The other is more a nauseating smell. That’s dried dog slobber.”

And so begins another four-hour gig for Brooks Newell of M&M Automotive Specialist. When he’s done, every odor in this 6-year-old vehicle will be gone. Dead. Finito. Wiped away by carefully chosen enzyme cleaners and deodorizing agents.

“It’s hard to explain to people what I do,” Newell says. “I tell them, ‘You remember Pulp Fiction, the guy who cleaned up the car? That’s me.’”

Newell is The Wolf. If he can smell it, he can kill it.

Ever bought a used car from a dealership and wondered how it smelled so clean, almost like a new car? It didn’t get that way by accident. Newell probably put a hurting on it, stripping it down to bare metal, wiping its surfaces with various chemicals, vacuuming every strand of hair and speck of dirt with a heavy-duty vacuum and a detailer’s toothbrush.

Once spotless, he would have plugged in a bulky metal machine that produces ozone, attaching a tiny electrical charge to and capturing every airborne particle. He would have turned the car on, blasted the heater on high “to open up the pores of all the plastic,” and run that machine for a couple of hours, literally sucking every odor-causing particle right out of the air.

With potent tools and thorough skills like that, he’s been called on to smite some astonishing smells.

One woman spilled shrimp juice from a roadside purchase in her new $60,000 Lexus, but didn’t tell him how extensive the spill was. When he yanked the putrid carpet out he was splattered in the face with cooked, fermented shrimp juice. “I threw up from that one,” he says. “And it cost her another couple hundred dollars.”

He once cleaned a car in which a motorist was killed in a violent crash, with human tissue still in the upholstery. The smells were inert until he moistened things with his cleaning agents, at which point, needless to say, it was hanky time.

And he once fried one of his ozone machines cleaning a car in which gasoline had spilled from a plastic jug in the trunk. His ionizer’s ceramic plates turned black with tar because he missed one little patch of gasoline hidden beneath an electric motor in the trunk.

De-stinking cars is crucial in the car business, and local car dealers are his main clients, including Clark Sandau, general sales manager of Brian Harris Porsche-Audi.

“You can’t go through the phone book to find a lot of vendors that do what Brooks does,” Sandau says. “He’s definitely the most thorough.” (And the only way to reach Newell is his cell, 202-1572).

Ridding a used car of any odor is critical to selling it, Sandau says, especially for the all-important first impression.

Newell’s nose is not the perfect instrument, but when he’s working, he’s as focused as a bloodhound, removing seats, tray tables and center consoles. He breaks occasionally for a quick smoke and sips a Mountain Dew, then he’s right back at it. Alone, it can take him three to four hours to clean a car thoroughly.

“I’ve always been anal about my job,” says Newell, a ponytail tucked up under his LSU cap. “I’m pretty laid back away from work.”

He didn’t bring a particularly savvy nose into the business. He’s taught himself to remember smells. “I take note of what organic matter is causing a smell, and I put that in my memory bank and remember it from here on out.”

That’s one big, stinking memory bank—he figures he’s done 10,000 cars in just five years in the business.

His minvan is packed with industrial chemicals, spray bottles and a commercial carpet vacuum. “If I ever get pulled over by the police, they’ll think I’m a rolling meth lab,” he jokes.

Killing funky smells is no simple business. For example, he uses one solution to wipe away cigarette residue, a stronger one for cigar smoke.

As well as working for car dealers, Newell cleans cars for individuals. Smokers are some of his best customers. “They’ll quit, have me do their car, then they’ll start smoking, quit again, and have me do their car again,” he says. “I always put smokers in my cell phone address book because I know they’ll call again.”