IN MEMORIAM: Life the 60's Lane John Z. DeLorean, 1925-2005
Srodes, James
IN MEMORIAM JAMES SRODES Life in the '60s Lane John Z. DeLorean, 1925-2005 HAT WAS SURPRISING about the recent death of John Z. DeLorean was the level of genuine sadness to be...
...The families of the 2,500 DMC workers...
...The irony is that when the fall came it was because he had wandered into a trap set by authorities for another equally correct celebrity, his great friend and television saint Johnny Carson...
...The DeLorean story offers an instructive tale of how easy it is to draw people into myths and how hard it is to confront the truth even when the wreckage is strewn about in plain sight...
...Sliding into the early'70s, DeLorean morphed into the crusader for the "ethical car" that Detroit refused to build...
...But the man and, to a degree, the car too were dangerous frauds...
...Even so, Wall Street was not so credulous and avoided any involvement in financing the DMC-12 project like the plague...
...DMC went into bankruptcy receivership in 1982 but he still was able to talk the government into continuing production even though cars were stacking up in make-ready yards in New Jersey where a second labor force was busy refitting key components...
...Weitzman won DeLorean three acquittals, one each on criminal drug and criminal fraud charges and a third on a civil fraud suit...
...So he was off to California, he told me, and was going to get the money and I would be the first to know...
...million out of the British government—this time on Margaret Thatcher's watch...
...Once again John benefited from the naivete of others...
...His jaw line was lengthened by silicon implants and his hair went coal black for a second time...
...DeLorean was a skilled car designer who held a number of patents for the recessed windshield wiper and the overhead cam engine...
...By 1973 the press loyally reported that DeLorean, now in line to be the next CEO of General Motors, had walked away to build his "ethical car...
...Howard Weitzman, DeLorean's defense lawyer, found a way to distract the jury from the famous video of an exultant John holding a kilo of cocaine in his lap...
...So he wasn't all bad...
...He partied with Sammy Davis Jr...
...And, of course, the faithful owners of that decaying "asthmatic bank bean tin on wheels," the gull wing dream ear DMC-12...
...While Carson and the automotive press corps applauded, behind the scenes, GM executives were gathering evidence that he was giving free cars to friends in unacceptable volumes, that he was taking kickbacks from television producers, and that there were sexual escapades that had driven Kelly away in divorce...
...A current car-buff website calls it "an asthmatic baked bean tin on wheels...
...This was the wonder vehicle for the average American...
...Except for the gull wing doors and the fiberglass chassis, nothing MAY 2005 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 45 N M E M O R I A M of the "ethical car" concept remained in the design...
...The government's witnesses were too seedy to believe so even though most of the jury thought John was guilty of something, they acquitted...
...The fall had its comic moments and DeLorean almost got away with it...
...THE FINAL ITERATION of DeLorean was the inter-national impresario...
...He had secured a 90-day loan of $10 million from New Jersey crime boss Anthony Provenzano...
...There are three stories here...
...Putnam's Sons...
...At speeds over 60 mph there are handling problems, and the electrical system never worked right and still doesn't...
...Owners who treated the DMC-12 as an investment have seen their very expensive $28,000 car fetch $7,000 or less on Internet auction sites today...
...Two successive British governments who were far sloppier investigators than those of the Republic of Ireland, the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, and most of Wall Street...
...He swapped lie detector tests with the FBI and then convinced the judge into entering them both into evidence so the jury could think about other matters...
...Quickly he covered over the tough-talking, ribald, ever-so-slightly racist Detroit boss and emerged as the corporate executive with a social conscience...
...The exclusive story of DeLorean's amazing revival of fortunes would be mine alone...
...I'm going to get my company back and you're lames Srodes was the co-author of Dreammaker: The going to get the Pulitzer Prize...
...Their silence was his price...
...People who got involved with either were used and damaged by the experience...
...When he was promoted to the far larger Chevrolet division he was less successful but by then DeLorean was busy reinventing himself...
...True to form, DeLorean tried to stiff Weitzman out of his million-dollar fees and did the same to each lawyer foolish enough to represent him during the next 20 years spent in and out of courts in Britain and America...
...He put one beefed-up engine version into a lady-like Pontiac Tempest, renamed it the GTO, and the "muscle car" era was born...
...In financial trouble from the start, DeLorean nonetheless talked another $35 H W AT HE DIDN'T KNOW was that while he was wandering through the jungles of organized crime trying to make deals he blundered into an ongoing federal probe that was originally focused on rumors (never confirmed) that Johnny Carson was mobbed up...
...The feds had relied too long on "sting" operations to catch crooked Arab investors and erring congressmen...
...He was the dream CEO, with enough style, zip, social conscience to cover over a dodgy balance sheet...
...ostensibly to oversee Chevrolet's massive television advertising program budget...
...The man...
...One key to his long run of fraud and deception was his skill in seducing the politically correct community of celebrities and the mainstream news media and how they protected his image well after his seamy actions became undeniable...
...its celebrity secured in the Back to the Future film series...
...At $12,000, it would be a car the average buyer could keep for more than a decade without repairs...
...Only one investment house risked a modest $18 million from its "A" venture capital list and DeLorean promptly whisked it off to a Swiss currency launderette where it vanished...
...Only the British government fell for the project...
...He also talked the receiver into letting him have one last chance to raise a new investment package and regain control of the company...
...So desperate was the Labour government of Jim Callaghan to bring industry (and peace) to Northern Ireland that it shelled out $130 million in today's money to build a state of the art computerized factory to hire an equally divided Protestant and Catholic workforce of 2,500 and to give DeLorean an export bonus for each $28,000 car shipped to the United States...
...Gone was the pudgy, black-suited corporate striver...
...The base for this regret was rooted in the durable fondness out there for his creature, the DMC-12, the sports car with the gull-wing doors and stainless steel skin...
...In financial trouble from the start, DeLorean nonetheless talked another S35 million out of the British government...
...The marvel is that he made the sale stick for as long as he did...
...But he had been their mole inside GM and fed them a steady diet of information about development programs (others', of course) gone sour and of execs caught in scan-dal...
...Hip DeLorean soon became Rebel DeLorean...
...They thought wiretaps and videotapes made other evidence gathering unnecessary, but juries were getting turned off...
...He dumped Detroit for Hollywood...
...The new late '60s model DeLorean wore shirts open to his waist, jeans, and boots...
...46 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 2005...
...This was the graying John Kerry look-alike...
...The points of his shirt collars were long, his suits double-breasted and, when photographed with his latest wife, ex-movie starlet Christina Ferrare, the image was one part James Bond, one part Richard Branson, stirred lightly with a dash of Dean Martin...
...The mainstream media—including Fortune, Business Week, the New York Times—from the networks to the car magazines, could not get enough of him...
...and became a fixture on Carson's dominant late night television show...
...But there were victims: Individual investors who arguably should have known better except that the general media buzz was so enthusiastic...
...Both man and car reflected images of each other: they were flashy in the devalued sense that all female pop singers today are "divas," and restaurants seem filled with mature adults who dress as if they were teen gang members...
...You're my friend," he Rise and Fall of John Z. DeLorean published in 1983 by told me...
...Despite a price two and a half times the aver-age car price the project was doomed since it cost more than $30,000 per car to build and John intended, as the joke says, to make up the difference with volume...
...DeLorean was a classic villain whose genius lay in his ability to sense the dreams of his victims and sell them back...
...He needed another $10 million to meet the demand of the Thatcher government's receiver if he wanted to get control of a new $100 mil-lion capital infusion and regain the factory...
...The accounting firm of Arthur Andersen, which was banned from Britain for a dozen years for allegedly cooking DMC's books...
...Instead of engineers he became pals with the Las Vegas-Beverly Hills set...
...His fall...
...He started lifting weights, quoting Big Sur poetry, and, along the way, dumped Liz his longtime wife for Kelly Harmon, a honey-blonde daughter of football hero-sportscaster Tommy Harmon...
...Much later, after the DMC-12 factory had gone into bankruptcy oblivion and DeLorean was caught up in 20 years of litigation, a car magazine writer confessed to me that he and his friends had known about all of John's peccadilloes from the first...
...He got most of his money and property back...
...And the car...
...Most of the 9,200 cars manufactured between 1981 and 1983 have been cannibalized for parts for the few thousand still hidden away in garages...
...TO EXAMINE John DeLorean the man it is essential to understand that Detroit in the 1960s and '70s still was a rough and tumble culture that rewarded men who grabbed success with both hands...
...If the DeLorean storywere a simple case of cultural self-delusion it would be easy to ignore...
...44 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 2005 And the car—the famous DMC-12 with its gull wing door, its stainless steel outer shell...
...During our last interview in early October 1982, DeLorean was ebullient...
...The engine was an off-the-shelf product from Renault, a 2.8 litre V6 meant for a Volvo and capable of generating a sedate 130 horsepower...
...Just as the GTO shook up the J A M E S S R O D E S new car market, DeLorean's Ralph Nader impersonation was an instant hit with the hiplibs of Tinseltown...
...Since the two had business offices in the same commercial building (owned by Carson) DeLorean's meeting with inform-ants working for the FBI was perhaps inevitable...
...I N M E M O R I A M J A M E S S R O D E S Life in the '60s Lane John Z. DeLorean, 1925-2005 HAT WAS SURPRISING about the recent death of John Z. DeLorean was the level of genuine sadness to be found on the blog-sites devoted to car enthusiasts...
...It could be built with a crash resistant fiberglass body, a stainless steel shell, with high performance, low gas mileage, and more effective pollution controls...
...Dreams die hard.* The fall had its comic moments and DeLorean almost got away with it...
Vol. 38 • May 2005 • No. 4
