Hi, Lou:
You wrote, about the Centurion brand:
The owner of Western States Imports was Mitch Weiner. An Austrian couple b y the name of Seidler escaped the religious prosecution of the Nazi's and cam e to the USA. They founded a company called United Import and initially imported Steyr, Capo, Clubman, & Peugeot. Mr Rudy Seidler had worked at Puch/Steyr in Austria. Mitch Weiner married the Seidler's daughter. He broke away from United and founded Western Imports. I haven't found the details about the transition from the Centurion to Diamondback name, but it may have occurred when Mitch Weiner died. Anyone with additional information, chime in.
Lou, I don't have the reference with me here at work, but the second editio n of the Dancing Chain has an anecdote about the genesis of Centurion. An American (Weiner?) was middleman between Raleigh and a Japanese maker for a deal to make Japanese-built clones of a middle-of-the-lineup Raleigh for sale in the U.S. Raleigh balked after the bikes had already been built and the middleman, in a desperate move to save his shirt, re-branded the bikes as Centurions and either set up a distribution network or issued them through an existing network.
Frank Berto was asserting a point that Raleigh, by mercilessly cutting cost s and doing deals like this, ultimately planted the seeds of its own dramatic downturn.
A friend bought a Centurion LeMans in about 1981. It was quite a nice sport tourer for the period, and today i-bobers seek them out.
I'm told that Lotus bikes (not the record-breakers associated with the car maker, but the Japanese brand) also started as crude Raleigh copies in the late 1970s.
Kris Green
Olympia WA