Corporate Thriller

...A maze of interlocking corporations that somehow loses $18 million in a Swiss-based Panamanian company with a post office box and no discernible business similarly excites our sense of wonder...

...the man whose solid moral character was later to be certified in print pocketed the money...

...Still, confronted with two volumes from respectable publishers that promise to chronicle DeLorean's life and career, one can hardly be faulted for again posing a time-honored literary question: Who cares...

...The phenomenal sums DeLorean raised, and his cavalier spending (three sets of DMC corporate headquarters were outfitted before the first car was built) recall the 19th century, when railroad tycoons, unfettered by complex securities regulations or accounting requirements, were free to plunder to the best of their ability...

...Never mind that this vision-to build a gull-winged, stainless steel car for people "who dare to lead"-went into receivership a year after production began...

...15.95...

...Levin neatly harpoons the mythology that grew up around the man and took him so far...

...The major media are not by and large unfriendly to big business...

...Meanwhile, he pursued other investments with abandon, using vital funds illegally drawn from DMC...

...Erstwhile friends at GM dispute his role in the development of Pontiac's "wide-track look" and GTO car, two marketing gambits that were thought to have led to the division's increased market share in the early 1960s...

...He'd say, 'Can you imagine the impact of all those silver beauties with the gull-wings open lined up on the runway?' " Dream Maker and Grand Illusions must surely have been written under deadline pressure, yet neither smacks of haste...

...Had any one of them been previously contacted, and their charges borne out, DeLorean's dream would have been stillborn...

...His undeniable charisma notwithstanding, he was often kept away from potential investors by DeLorean Motor Company (DMC) aides who feared that his penchant for outrageous hyperbole would sour the prospective deals or provoke the wrath of the Securities and Exchange Commission...

...hehadadream...

...DeLorean was one of the few businessmen to have the same opportunity in this century, and history will record that he blew it...

...DeLorean's story is a psychological corporate thriller extraordinaire...

...Grand Illusions: The Cosmic Career of John DeLorean By Hillet Levin Viking...

...It is testimony to the effectiveness of two decades of incessant public relations that for many DeLorean admirers the dream has now turned into an odyssey, as armies of lawyers work to keep the hero out of the slammer...

...Yet once the factory was erected, hecould not summon the courage to go forward...

...Nevertheless, DeLorean's tendency in recent years to rail against the corporate structure (most notably in the conversations reproduced in J. Patrick Wright's 1979 best seller, On A Clear Day You Can See General Motors), did little to affect his own positive press treatment...

...Instead, trading on his image and an unfinished set of plans, he successfully played off the governments of Puerto Rico and Ulster against each other to extract an unprecedentedly generous package from the Irish, who sought jobs for the chronically unemployed of war-torn Belfast...

...Fallon, financial editor of Britain's Sunday Telegraph, and Srodes, a former UPI economics correspondent, Business Week staff writer and Forbes bureau chief, delineate in thorough, if occasionally windy, detail the complex mechanics of DeLorean's financial house of cards...

...The typical aficionado of the DeLorean saga is unlikely to find what he wants in these sober works...

...The authors uncover court papers citing DeLorean or his long-time partner, an unsavory ex-car salesman named Roy Nesseth, in an assortment of actions for mismanagement, swindling and embezzlement...

...His reputation as a master salesman does not stand up to Levin's examination either...

...Indeed, they seem authoritative, quite an accomplishment considering that, far from pasting together press clips, each undertakes a revisionist inquiry...

...Reviewed by Jamie Kitman Those who follow our nation's history through the pages of the National Enquirer no doubt devour every scrap of the latest information served upabout jet-set entrepreneur John Z. DeLorean, the former General Motors executive who for a brief period sold sportscars bearing his name...

...An astonishingly leveraged American holding company, building an Italian-styled, French-en-gined vehicle in Northern Ireland with $147 million in British grants, loansand loan guarantees-among other funding -tickles our curiosity, even before we find out that Johnny Carson's attorney, Henry Bushkin, sat on its board of directors...

...DeLorean is the thing...

...As Chevrolet's top manager at the time, he must also take credit for the hamfisted way GM conducted labor relations at the Lordstown, Ohio plant where the Vega was built...

...Even serious business publications like the Wall Street Journal rarely questioned DeLorean's assertions about himself or his "ethical" sportscar, whatever that was...

...Or that shortly afterward, the seer himself, once championed by the press as the kind of man who could give capitalism a good name, emerged in a pair of handcuffs on the business end of a $16 million Federal cocaine sting...

...Since his arrest a year ago, his allegations of entrapment and purported conversion to born-again Christianity have been afforded a much more thorough venting than was enjoyed, for instance, bymost of the Abscam stingees...

...One top DMC executive told Levin: "John would make the wildest claims...

...He] kept telling people he'd have a 25-year warranty on the body...

...And highbrows have presumably drunk their fill of the splashy affair...

...Durant died an impoverished bowling alley manager in Flint, Michigan...

...Were he merely rich, handsome and married to a top fashion model, this shameless self-promoter might have long ago entered the creases of the popular memory...

...Levin compares DeLorean to William Crapo Durant, the founder of General Motors and one of the industry's most illustrious burnouts...

...Fond of boasting about his 100-plus patents, he actually holds a third of that number...

...Less desperate by far, but persuaded to suspend their better judgment for a piece of this high-visibility investment, were prestigious financial houses like Oppenheimer, Smith Barney, Bache Halsey Stuart, and Rothschild AG, plus multinational banks such as Citicorp, Bankof America andCon-tinental Illinois...

...Heavoided the project with pathological intensity, abdicating major engineering decisions and never spending more than a few hours at the plant...

...Rather than the humane winner dutifully depicted over the years by the media, they portray a ruthless loser—unfocused, horrified by success and bent on self-destruction...

...In the process he finds that DeLorean is not the brilliant engineer he claims to be...

...Fallon/ Srodes and Levin explain how, and offer some clues as to why...

...Theday of his arrest, an agreement was left unsigned on his desk that would have infused $100 million into the company, at least temporarily saving it and the 5,000jobs it provided...

...Disgruntled former partners and investors cascade through the pages of the new biographies, too...

...At that point, we had no idea what our warranty program was going to be, but we could be sure it wouldn't be 25 years...

...None of us had any idea how he got those figures...

...On paper, DeLorean became fantastically wealthy, holding 80 per cent of the shares in a half billion dollar concern for a personal investment that Fallon and Srodes estimate at less than $750,000...

...On a somewhat lighter note, they also find that as an enterprising youth in Detroit DeLorean spent free time selling space in the Yellow Pages...

...Neither Ivan Fallon and James Srodes nor Hillel Levin concentrate on the drugs, sex and cabalistic ritual that sell mass-market biographies...

...When it looked like we'd build the car in Puerto Rico, one of his favorite pitches was how we'd fly the cars into the country...

...336 pp...

...But DeLorean hadmoregoingforhim...

...By the end, DeLorean seemed fully committed tolosingit all...

...For the real John Z. DeLorean left a hair-raising trail of failed investments, shady deals and alleged criminal acts...

...He'd talk about how many barrels of fuel we saved by not painting the cars...

...The books eschew platitudes, despite their grandiose titles, and although some overlap exists, they essentially complement each other...

...Unfortunately, Michigan Bell had never heard of him...

...After being forced out of GM, he formed the Durant Motor Company and then killed it in much the same way that DeLorean has done in the DMC...

...DeLorean was responsible, on the other hand, for the Chevrolet Vega, an experiment somewhat charitably identified by a recently convened Time-Life panel of experts as the second worst automobile ever built in America...

...Top-drawer law firms, including New York's Paul Weiss Rif-kind, lent their own form of assistance...

...A business writer who is currently the editor of Metropolitan Detroit, Levin then dismantles the facade bit by bit...

...Dream Maker and Grand Illusions probe their subject from the inside out...

...The narrative isn't diminished by the appearances of liberal media man William Haddad, retired football great Tom Harmon, Senator Jacob Javits' son Eric, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, or Sammy Davis Jr., yet they are not essential...

...While reading either book, the answer quickly becomes clear...

...It is, in fact, hard to close these two books without the impression that the reporters covering DeLorean throughout his career were reluctant to do the digging that might have ruined the image of an atypi-caliy colorful executive who was a source of such good copy...

...John went on about the most irrelevant things...