How a garbage man traded up to an RWB Porsche 993

“Being a garbage man is great, and I love my job, but this is who I am,” says Joe Aime about his RWB 1995 Porsche 911. [CARISMA is our show exploring car culture through the eyes of everyday enthusiasts and their cars. See the full playlist: ] RWB founder Akira Nakai has always been controversial among enthusiasts for his… shall we say casual approach to chopping up vintage Porsche 911s. Some call it art, others say it’s a hack job. For Joe, RWB’s iconoclastic nature lines up perfectly with how he sees cars: the ultimate form of self-expression. “I never wanted to fall in line with the norm. Some people are very comfortable with walking that line and then there's people that like to fall outside of that line,” he says. “It's your way of bringing your own imagination to life, right? We are blessed with creativity and also being able to be different. As human beings, we should take advantage of that.” It’s hard to argue with what that attitude has done for Joe. While his job as a garbage man in New York City supports his family, he knew it would never afford him the opportunity to buy cars he loved. So he started flipping on the side, buying and reselling BMW E30s and E46 M3s before the huge recent spike in values. After years of this, he finally worked his way up to building his own very own RWB with Nakai. “I've always admired Nakai's whole outlook on cars,” Joe says. “And to also blend Japanese culture and cars with the Euro culture, I don't think there's anything else out there that blends it as much as this does. I was like, I have to have one.” The experience of owning a highly modified Porsche has been everything Joe hoped for. What he wasn’t expecting was becoming part of the RWB family, as he puts it. The supportive, welcoming community he found among other RWB owners and obsessives changed his entire perspective on the role cars play in his life after playing it “safe” for so long to provide for his wife and kids. “It's taken me places that I never even assumed, like I've been able to knock out bucket list items. Being able to get into SEMA, being in magazines, getting features done on the car, like all this stuff is things that I dreamed of and it's all happening in immediate succession of each other,” he says. “I wanna capitalize on that. Being able to transition into being in the car space full time, that's my ultimate goal now.” Follow Joe on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/joe_aime/ Produced, shot, and edited by → https://www.instagram.com/tomgorelik/ Previous episode → https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xPmvN_h8PZw The Drive is the chronicle of car culture. We write stories you actually want to read. → https://www.thedrive.com/ FOLLOW US! Instagram → https://www.instagram.com/thedrive/ Facebook → https://www.facebook.com/thedrive TikTok → https://www.tiktok.com/@thedrive_official X → https://x.com/thedrive Threads → https://www.threads.net/@thedrive WORK WITH US → [email protected]