Myth & Mogul: John DeLorean (2021) s01e03 Episode Script
Busted
1
[John DeLorean] When do you
know what to do with it?
And what does that weigh?
[man 1] This is a good 50 pounds.
And, uh
between this and the other,
it'll generate, uh
about four and a half, uh
not less than four and a half mil.
[John] Better than gold.
[laughs] Gold weighs more than that,
for God's sakes.
Wonderful for everybody.
[man 1] Here's to
[John] To a lot of success for everybody.
And for all your phone calls
[laughs] Thank you.
[John sighs]
- [man 2] Good luck to everybody.
- [John] You bet.
- [chattering]
- [knocking at door]
[man 2] a lot of mistrust.
[man 1] But that's
what he was supposed to do.
- [man 3] Hi, John.
- [John] Hi.
I'm Jerry West from the FBI.
You're under arrest
for narcotics smuggling violations.
Could you stand up, please?
- [John] I don't understand it.
- [Jerry] Turn around.
[John] Yeah.
[theme music playing]
[dramatic music playing]
John DeLorean,
the flamboyant former GM executive
who gave the world a new sports car
bearing his name,
remains in custody tonight
on federal drug charges.
The sensational case involves
more than 200 pounds of cocaine,
an elaborate undercover investigation,
the end of the DeLorean car,
and much, much more.
[reporter] News has come
in the last half hour
that about 1,100 jobs are to go
at the DeLorean car plant near Belfast.
The news tonight came
after the company chairman, John DeLorean,
was told that no more money was available
to keep the plant going.
Now he's trying to raise cash privately.
[man] We've put £80 million
into that company,
we've lost a great deal of money,
and what I think would be quite wrong
would be to go on
putting more and more taxpayers' money
into a venture
which stood no chance of success.
We were told that the workforce was going
on a three-day week
and then a few weeks later, I think,
the company announced
that half the workforce would be going.
Everything was falling apart,
but John had said he'd find the money.
[John] You know, one way or another,
it's my opinion it's inevitable
that we're gonna survive.
Today, we've now talked
to literally dozens of important investors
who have a serious interest
in the company.
We have, actually, some quite
close-to-firm commitments from people.
[Gavin Esler] He made promises
he couldn't keep.
Here's a desperate guy trying to do
everything to keep this company afloat.
My only interest is in the workers
in Belfast.
I really don't care about anything else.
[reporter] The possibility he's trying to
raise private investment in the States
hadn't impressed a pessimistic workforce.
We don't know which way we are.
Nobody tells you nothin' in that place.
- [reporter] What's the feeling inside?
- Looks like the factory's shuttin'.
[Ivan Fallon] DeLorean kept producing
private investors from round the world.
There was an Arab that had come along,
"I want to buy this,
I've got plenty of money,
I'm going to put another $20 million in."
I'm optimistic. Yes.
Yes. We've worked too long
and too hard to let
a few little aberrations bother us.
[Ivan] There was a billionaire
in the south of France
who was going to buy it.
You know, there was a chain of them,
but they never stacked up.
And then there was a lady called Farnan,
who was an investment banker in New York,
and she had the money
at the very last moment.
He said, "I was suggested
that I could call you
because I need $10 million."
And that's how we started
the conversation.
I thought it was a very interesting car.
I looked at the plant.
I liked the plant setup.
And so I raised money for $10 million
and I notified the British government.
[Ivan] Farnan was lending the money
and putting some of it in as equity,
but she would take the stake
and take control, I guess.
And DeLorean said,
"No, no. I can't do that."
[Nick] John wanted to save the factory,
but he was very reluctant
to let go of the reins of the company.
[Ivan] Farnan's documents
were on John DeLorean's desk,
he was supposed to sign them.
And he left,
without signing them, for California,
and he went into this, you know,
room 501 in the Sheraton Hotel
at Los Angeles Airport,
where he met with four people.
- [Jerry] Hi, John.
- [John] Hi.
I'm Jerry West from the FBI.
You're under arrest
for narcotics smuggling violations.
- [Jerry] You want to sit back down?
- [John] Pretty hard.
- [Jerry] Why don't you sit on the edge?
- [John] All right.
[Jerry] Come on. Sit down on the edge.
My job is to advise you of your rights.
- You can read along if you want.
- [John] I can't see that far.
[Jerry] Okay. Before we ask any questions,
you must understand your rights.
You have the right to remain silent
[dramatic music playing]
Any moment now, John DeLorean
The millionaire automaker is charged,
of course, with trafficking in cocaine
in an attempt
to save his struggling automobile company.
[reporter] He was arrested by FBI agents
in a hotel near Los Angeles.
[Zach DeLorean] My mom got the phone call,
and honestly, I thought somebody had died.
That night in New York, I mean,
that changed my life forever.
[Cristina] I got off the phone,
I was in shock.
All I knew was that
I had to get to Los Angeles.
So I took the red-eye that night to L.A.,
and that's when everything started un
the sweater just started to unravel.
[reporter] DeLorean had been caught
in a classic sting-type trap
set up by the agents themselves
posing as dealers.
What DeLorean was after, the FBI say,
was a quick profit to save his company.
[Barrie Willis] I got a phone call,
"Barrie, it's Paul.
"Call the workforce together
at eight o'clock tomorrow morning,
and tell them it's all over.
It's liquidation."
[reporter] DeLorean looked tired
as he was taken to federal court
for arraignment.
[man] My boss, Morgan Hetrick,
was a cocaine transporter,
in fact,
the number one cocaine transporter
in the west coast of the United States.
And he ordered me to drive a car
across the United States, full of cocaine.
What I totally did not anticipate
is the cocaine in my car was
the cocaine was gonna wind up in the lap
of John Z. DeLorean in a hotel room,
and that I had just walked
into the drug trial of the century.
The John DeLorean drug trial.
[reporter] Auto executive John DeLorean,
free on $10 million bail,
today pleaded innocent
to charges of trafficking
in a $24 million
cocaine distribution deal.
I don't think
that when the truth comes out,
there's any way
that I can be convicted of anything.
I'm an absolutely innocent man.
[reporter] NBC News has learned
the FBI was able to make its case
against DeLorean
because one of DeLorean's own neighbors,
who once lived in this house,
was working as an informant
for the government.
James Timothy Hoffman.
[chattering on footage]
[Stephen Arrington]
James Timothy Hoffman was the informant,
and he had been running cases
for the FBI and the DEA for 20 years.
Hoffman lived
in the same community as John DeLorean.
[Cristina] I knew Jim very well.
I trusted him.
He had the house across the way from us.
John told him of what he was trying to do.
When he listened to John's story, he said,
"I could get you the money for this."
"I have the people that you need
to get the money for your company."
And at that time, John was desperate.
So, what Hoffman did is he went
to the FBI, and he said,
"I have a guy who wants
to make a drug deal."
"He's a high-profile guy."
[Hoffman] There aren't many people
that can pick up the phone
and get $30 million
in three, four days without hassle.
- [John] I can't think of anybody [laughs]
- [Hoffman] That's right.
James Hoffman told him
if he had some seed money,
if he got 1.8 million,
he could deliver $60 million
to John DeLorean.
[Hoffman] Nobody
wants you to do something,
you know, that
you're not comfortable with.
[John] Well, my
You know, I'm relying on you
saying that there's no way
to connect me to this at the end.
[Stephen] So, they come up with this idea
that John DeLorean
would deliver half of his stock
in the DeLorean Motor Car Company
as collateral for $1.8 million.
And that is used to pay Morgan Hetrick,
who's delivering 25 kilos of cocaine
that came out of my car.
[reporter] 12 weeks of prosecution,
the strongest case against John DeLorean
is still DeLorean himself.
- [man] Here's to
- [John] To a lot of success for everybody.
[man] Gentlemen
[John] And for all your phone calls
[laughs] Thank you.
This was a setup,
there's no doubt about it.
They sucked this guy in
and they're trying to make it look
like he did something he didn't do.
The first big sensational celebrity trial
was the DeLorean trial,
and then O.J. came later.
You know, the cameras in your face
and people yelling at you
and screaming bad things,
and it was very traumatic.
[reporter] It was the stuff of soap opera.
Adding to the glamour,
DeLorean's gorgeous wife,
fashion model Cristina Ferrare,
wearing designer clothes
that reporters dubbed,
"dressing for acquittal."
He is innocent. He [hesitates]
The whole thing is a massive frame-up.
Automobile manufacturer John DeLorean's
recent trouble with the law
came as a surprise
to most people in the press,
but not to Hillel Levin,
a reporter from Monthly Detroit Magazine.
For more than a year,
he has been investigating
DeLorean's business dealings.
Suddenly everyone was looking
for who had ever written anything
negative, or critical even,
of this individual.
In some ways it was
like the journalistic equivalent
of winning the lottery.
And I'm flown to New York City,
and I'm in a limousine
going to these studios
and I'm being interviewed
on the biggest morning show.
[man] First off, Hillel, why did you jump
on the trail of DeLorean?
There are a number of things.
First of all,
there were questions raised overseas
about the way
he was handling the car company.
And most important
of all the things I found
was a very suspicious number
in the annual report
for his private company.
The thing I focused on the most
was an $18 million payment
made in 1978,
shortly after
the British government decided
to give DeLorean $100 million
to build his car.
That payment was made to a company
that was supposedly Panama-registered
and Swiss-based, called "GPD."
Nobody has yet been able
to find a trace of employees at GPD,
or what they even did for the car company.
[Hillel] I didn't expect
to hear he was caught in a drug deal,
but I wasn't entirely surprised either,
because I knew he was capable
of doing something desperate and illegal
because he had so much to hide.
[reporter] Investigators say
GPD is a phony,
nothing more than a post office box
in a neighborhood branch
of the Geneva Post Office.
Post office box 33.
A phantom company set up
in Geneva by DeLorean
and the late British automaker
Colin Chapman,
allegedly just a device
to embezzle millions of dollars
from DeLorean's car company.
We were able to identify $17.5 million
of so-called DeLorean money
going into this company called GPD,
and we were able
to track then half of that coming out
into DeLorean's private account.
The other half of the money,
nobody's ever been able to track,
and shortly after, of course,
DeLorean was arrested, Colin Chapman died
and, uh, somewhere buried in his estate,
but no one's ever been able
to identify where that money went.
[Barrie] It was a criminal act.
Fred Bushell,
who was Chapman's finance director,
went to prison.
Chapman died,
and John never came back to the U.K.
So, Fred was the only one around.
Fred was the guy that took the, um
took the fall and went inside, so
And, of course,
the judge that found Fred guilty
said that,
had Mr. Chapman still been alive
and had John ever come back to the U.K.,
they would have served ten years. Each.
[reporter] Prosecutors replayed
for the jury video tapes
they called devastating to DeLorean.
[Hillel] The prosecution thought no way
it was possible that they would lose.
[reporter] After 47 days of testimony,
the government today rested its case
against John DeLorean.
[Hillel] So this was a man
who was truly trapped
and really did feel on his own.
Then out of the blue,
DeLorean acquires the most unlikely ally,
a notorious pornographer
named Larry Flynt,
who felt he, too,
was a victim of government persecution.
Somehow he acquired secret tapes
from the FBI sting
and then released them to the public.
Federal Appeals Court this afternoon
removed a lower-court injunction
and freed CBS News to broadcast
previously secret government tapes
to be used in the drug trial
of celebrated automaker John DeLorean.
[reporter] CBS News obtained the tapes
from the publisher of Hustler magazine,
Larry Flynt.
When I first seen the tape of the sting
it blew my mind because I said,
"You know, they set him up."
I felt compelled to make it public.
And I called 60 Minutes.
[reporter] Regardless
of how the tapes got out,
now that they've been broadcast,
both the prosecution and the defense say
that hurts DeLorean's chances
of getting a fair trial.
[Hillel] I mean, there was just
one more sideshow added to many others
that probably did get through to the jury
to make them think that DeLorean
was more a victim than a victimizer.
There were new videotapes Wednesday
in the DeLorean case.
They show the automaker taking
his first lie detector test.
[man] Did you ever propose to Hoffman
that he arrange a drug transaction
or drug investment for you?
No.
[man] Was it Hoffman
who first proposed to you
that you become involved
in a drug transaction or drug investment?
Yes.
[reporter] DeLorean's future
will be decided by a jury of six men
and six women.
Jurors
in the DeLorean cocaine trafficking trial
enter their sixth day of deliberations
this morning in Los Angeles.
You never really know
what they're thinking
or what they're interested in.
We hope they'll arrive at
what we believe to be
the just verdict in this case,
and that's an acquittal. It's up to them.
[Cristina] He did not do what they said.
He did not do that
[voice breaks] and it was so unfair
what happened to him,
even though he made bad choices [sniffs]
because it just destroyed lives.
[news jingle playing]
Good evening.
Almost two years to the day
after John DeLorean was arrested
on drugs charges,
a Los Angeles court
has found him not guilty.
[man] And we don't want John to get hurt
Um, John will make a statement.
We're not gonna entertain any questions
about anything but this particular case,
and that'll exclude any other venues
or any other pending matters
or any other lawsuits.
Number one, I, of course,
knew from day one that I was innocent.
I clearly felt
that the judgment would come out properly.
[reporter] Will you recover completely
from what you've gone through this year?
Well, outside of the fact that I've aged
about 600 years in the last two
and that, uh,
life as a hard-working industrialist
has been tattered and torn, I don't know.
- Would you buy a used car from me?
- [reporter laughing]
- [people chattering]
- [cameras clicking]
[Hillel] I think there is an argument
that it was entrapment,
but a good part of the entrapment defense
is that the individual, the defendant,
does not have criminal intent.
That, if not for this informant
pulling him into the deal,
he would've never done something illegal.
- Hi, John.
- Hi.
I'm Jerry West from the FBI.
[Hillel] And I think
criminal intent was there.
I mean, when you look
at the man's life in its totality
you see he had that bent.
I discovered that when I looked
into the businesses he ran
after he left GM ten years before.
DeLorean was a bad businessman.
Once he got involved with the business,
he just did not have the ability
or the desire to follow through.
Instead, he'd rushed for a quick buck.
In 1974, he creates a partnership
with this inventor in Phoenix,
Walter "Pete" Avrea,
who was a trucker,
but was an ingenious inventor.
And he proceeded
to tell me this very disturbing story
about John DeLorean.
[woman] My father would see
a problem that needed to be fixed.
He'd figure out a way to fix it.
And the coolant recovery system
made it so that
the cars didn't overheat anymore.
And the coolant recovery is on,
in one form or another,
essentially every vehicle made
in the world today.
It was huge.
So then his next step was to set up
the company called Saf Gard Products.
Ford had called me,
General Motors had called me, said,
"We have hot cars all over the country.
Can you cool 'em off?"
- Then what happened?
- Then they started making their own.
That's almost impossible, not to have
other people exploit your invention,
especially when it's
The components
are relatively cheap to make.
And my dad wrote to John DeLorean,
who was the big hotshot
from the auto industry.
[long beep]
This is John DeLorean in Detroit
calling in response to your letter.
Uh, I'm very much interested
and I'd like you to call me.
John DeLorean came in
like a prince on a white steed.
[Pete] His personal impression to me
was his understanding of the systems
I was working on.
And I think that probably made me think
this was the man I wanted.
So Dad and DeLorean came to an agreement
and Dad assigned his patents to DeLorean.
And then things started
to go so horribly bad.
DeLorean wanted some fast money.
There was no plan.
DeLorean was just sticking money
in his pocket.
DeLorean has shown himself incapable
of running this business,
which should've been a goldmine.
And as things were coming apart,
suddenly on the scene comes
a man called Roy Nesseth.
In many ways, you could say he was
something of an alter ego for DeLorean,
who was loud, who was rude, uncouth.
But as DeLorean would say,
"He's a guy who can get things done."
[Jeannie Avrea] Nesseth comes in
as president,
and he and DeLorean both
are taking money out of Saf Gard systems
until there's essentially none.
I told him I wanted my patents back
and I wanted him to get out of my life.
And he said, um, he would consider that
if I would pay him
a half a million dollars
for the ownership of the patents
that I had given him.
[woman] DeLorean, uh,
called us, wanting us to settle.
I told him that, uh,
Pete wasn't there
and he said Nesseth was a very mean man,
we'd better think about settling.
And I says,
"Mr. DeLorean, are you threatening us?"
And he says, "No, I'm not threatening you.
I'm telling you that he's a mean man."
Nesseth called up my father and said,
"You know,
I know where your daughter lives
and I know where that little granddaughter
of yours goes to school."
And he hung up.
And I think that phone call
is when my dad said,
"This is enough. This is I'm done."
Besides raping the company
and taking all the money out of it,
in the settlement, he walks away
with another half million dollars.
When I think of John DeLorean,
I think of the total disregard
for anyone else.
His lack of compassion,
his lack of honesty
or any sense of honor.
He doesn't care who he tramples on.
[ominous music playing]
[Jeannie] He didn't care.
He was a monster.
This is something
that affected his health.
Obviously the aggravation
that this brilliant invention
could be going down the drain.
All of that.
For all of his talk
about identifying with the little guys,
in his own private business deals,
DeLorean rode roughshod over little guys.
And when it came to the motor company,
nobody suffered the consequences more
than the little guys in Belfast,
and especially
all the workers on the assembly lines.
[emotional music playing]
[reporter] Walking out of the plant
for the last time, how do you feel?
- We're getting nothing.
- Pretty upset.
- What's the chance of getting another job?
- Not at all.
[man] Not very good at all.
[Ed Lapham] It's disappointing
that the government's money evaporated,
but the most disappointing stuff
is what it did
to the people of Belfast,
the people who'd counted on him,
depended on him.
[woman] It was hard
to get a job in Belfast anyway,
so everybody was just back
on the dole again.
People who had taken out mortgages
and had bought new cars,
it was sad times. Very sad times.
And if you bumped into somebody
in the supermarket, you'd say,
"Did you get a job yet?"
That was the norm.
It was hard, yeah. It was very hard.
[man] And I think, as any
working class man, he's entitled to a job,
instead of being thrown on the scrap heap.
The biggest majority of them
are still on the dole.
And up to now,
I can see nothing in the next ten years.
[Chris Hegedus] The people
were just so delighted
and so proud to be making money
and bringing it into the community.
You know,
it was a wonderful thing for Belfast,
and, you know,
the tragedy is that it failed for them.
[emotional music playing]
[music fading]
Just as the Belfast plant was closing,
I had one more piece of drama
with DeLorean.
At the time,
I was finishing a book about him.
And I started running all over the world.
But in the midst of all of that,
uh, I started to get calls
from someone who'd use a voice distorter.
He sounded like Darth Vader with asthma,
and he's telling me he wants the truth
to get out about DeLorean.
And he said, "I want you
to come and meet me at the airport."
"There are pay phones there,
and a phone will ring
once I'm sure you're alone."
I picked up the phone and he said,
"Well, if you feel under the phone,
you'll see there's a key taped there."
In those days, there were airport lockers.
"The key goes to one of those lockers,
and inside that locker
will be the documents you're looking for."
So I went and opened up the locker,
and there was a manila envelope,
and as I sat down to open up the envelope,
I'm surrounded by some burly guys
and he showed me his badge.
They then took me into a side room
and opened up the envelope,
and there was a packet of white powder
in there.
I was arraigned the next day
um, for possession of
with intent to distribute cocaine.
It turned out to be four grams,
and that could've put me in prison
for four years at that point.
So, um, the next ten days
was a very fraught period in my life
because here is someone writing
about DeLorean's cocaine bust
who has been busted
with the cocaine himself.
What I didn't know, the local prosecutor
found out a couple of things.
Someone sounding like Darth Vader
had called the wire services
to say I had been arrested
with four grams of cocaine.
And at that point, even the police
didn't know how much it weighed
or what exactly it was.
Ultimately, at the first hearing,
the prosecutor asked the judge
to withdraw the charges.
Obviously, I suspected it was DeLorean,
but I had no evidence it was,
at that stage.
A few decades later,
Cristina Ferrare would testify
in a lawsuit against him.
And her statement about Hillel Levin was,
he came out one night and said to her,
"Wouldn't it be great if Hillel Levin
was set up with cocaine like I was?"
And in many ways,
um, despite what he did to me,
I grew a little less vindictive
because I knew how important
his reputation was to him.
He was divorced.
He didn't have any supporters.
He was truly alone.
And I thought, you know,
this is punishment enough
because now he was truly the little guy,
as powerless and diminished
as his father had been,
which had always been his greatest fear.
[Zach DeLorean] I honestly
thought that the trial was done
and we were going home.
My mom asked me, you know,
how would I feel if they got divorced,
and I kind of freaked out about it.
It really wasn't a very good time for me,
you know.
In a lot of ways, that was almost worse
than my dad getting arrested, you know.
It was really the breakup of the family,
you know.
You know, that last two years was
I can't imagine any marriage surviving
the terror that we were put through.
And yet the whole situation
with her suddenly announcing
that the two of you
were not gonna be married.
Was it a total surprise?
Did you know nothing that was going on?
No. I had no idea
and it was a total surprise.
It was really shocking.
About the day after the trial was over,
she said she'd taken a house,
and she'd gotten a job
in L.A. as a TV host,
and that, uh, she was moving out
with the kids and I wasn't coming along.
It was really a shattering thing.
I'll tell you what the turning point was.
It was when I went to Terminal Island,
where he was incarcerated at the time.
And it was the day after the arraignment.
I was alone in the room with him.
He walks in with the orange jumpsuit,
and shackled, and the whole thing,
and I brought him
the cover of Time magazine,
which was his dream
to be on the cover of Time magazine.
And I I looked at it
and I threw it on the table.
I said,
"Well, there's your legacy right there."
I said,
"Are you proud now, of what happened?"
"Of what you've done?"
And I'll never forget this.
He looked he touched it with his hands.
He The whole cover,
cover to cover, from top to bottom.
He picked it up.
He looked at it and he smiled.
And I said, "What the"
[mouths silently] "are you smiling at?"
And he said, "You don't understand."
He said, "I have made millions
and lost millions in my life,
and half the fun is getting it all back."
And that's when I just went
It sh That shattered.
The glass just shattered.
I said, "There's something wrong
with this person."
And that was the turning point for me.
[reporter] The string
of DeLorean luxury properties,
like his $5 million
Fifth Avenue flat in New York,
is now the target of his creditors.
In a disputed court ruling,
his 50-acre avocado farm in California,
complete with sunken pool
and jacuzzi for eight,
was transferred to his latest lawyers,
who claim half a million dollars
in defense costs so far.
I hadn't really seen my dad
in probably a couple years
and I remember I was sitting up,
I'd seen him and I went upstairs
and I actually cried
because he looked so much older,
you know, he looked more hunched over,
and you could just see
the physical toll that it took on him.
But I think it was important
for him, and his ego, and his image
to say, "Hey," in public,
"I am working on something."
You know, "This is who I am."
[gentle music playing]
[John]
my life as an automotive engineer.
So I'm in the process now of trying
to put together another venture.
I've been working with a number of people.
We have, really, two cars planned,
which are logical successors
to the car that we built.
And this these cars, that car had a
[speech fades out]
[Chris] I guess it's such a human story
about, you know,
somebody's hopes and dreams
and, you know,
their past traumas haunting them
and trying to overcome them.
And it's the idea
of somebody doing their own self in
because of, you know,
their worst instincts and fears
come to haunt them.
[speech fades in]
[John] And we have several people
who have agreed to finance it at first.
Those things don't really work
until the money's in the bank.
We are also building a second car,
more as an attention-getter.
- This one's
- [speech fades out]
[Hillel] DeLorean is a complicated figure.
No doubt charismatic,
and that charisma remains,
but I don't think he ever had empathy.
I think that was truly
a missing part of him,
to see the damage he could
cause in other people's lives.
So, we look at him
for the good and the bad.
I think it's the complexity of the figure
that makes us fascinated by him,
and, for better or worse,
those are the people we remember.
[John] A cheaper car, which I hope to sell
for approximately $20,000,
will outperform
the million-dollar Ferrari,
the million-dollar McLaren,
the million-dollar Mercedes,
and the million-dollar Porsche.
- Of course, this giant
- [speech fades out]
[Cristina] "Malignant narcissist"
is what I would call John.
John never, ever realized the damage
that what happened
how it affected me, his wife of 11 years,
psychologically never, didn't care.
And the worst part of it, his children.
Again, it's not that he was a mean man.
He just doesn't
He doesn't have the chip in his brain
to think that way.
I have no regrets.
It was a great ride until it wasn't.
- [John] Yes, sir.
- [man] Is one of them a gullwing?
It is a gullwing. [chuckles]
Both of them are gullwing.
[applauding and whistling]
- This is a different kind of gullwing
- [speech fades]
[J. Patrick Wright ] John DeLorean
died in a walk-up condo
in Morristown, New Jersey,
um, selling watches on the internet.
Pretty much a broken man,
and planning a new car company.
Anyhow, thank you. I look forward to
spending more time with you tomorrow.
[crowd applauding]
[Zach] If my father had, you know,
just kind of done things more
on the straight and narrow
instead of maybe, you know,
cutting a little corner off,
he probably would've gone a lot farther
than he had in his lifetime.
You know, maybe you shouldn't have taken
the 20 million with Chapman.
So if you just kept that in the company,
you know,
maybe that would've saved the company.
And instead of cutting that corner
to get your money fast
But 15 years after my father's death,
I mean,
there's still this following of the car.
I think that's really
what should be acknowledged,
not necessarily the cocaine,
not necessarily the divorces,
and that he was a snake in the grass
in business.
I mean, he did something,
and he was trying
to make a difference, I think.
You know, that's really the legacy
that should that's left behind,
and I think that's
what that car should represent. For sure.
[emotional music playing]
[John DeLorean] When do you
know what to do with it?
And what does that weigh?
[man 1] This is a good 50 pounds.
And, uh
between this and the other,
it'll generate, uh
about four and a half, uh
not less than four and a half mil.
[John] Better than gold.
[laughs] Gold weighs more than that,
for God's sakes.
Wonderful for everybody.
[man 1] Here's to
[John] To a lot of success for everybody.
And for all your phone calls
[laughs] Thank you.
[John sighs]
- [man 2] Good luck to everybody.
- [John] You bet.
- [chattering]
- [knocking at door]
[man 2] a lot of mistrust.
[man 1] But that's
what he was supposed to do.
- [man 3] Hi, John.
- [John] Hi.
I'm Jerry West from the FBI.
You're under arrest
for narcotics smuggling violations.
Could you stand up, please?
- [John] I don't understand it.
- [Jerry] Turn around.
[John] Yeah.
[theme music playing]
[dramatic music playing]
John DeLorean,
the flamboyant former GM executive
who gave the world a new sports car
bearing his name,
remains in custody tonight
on federal drug charges.
The sensational case involves
more than 200 pounds of cocaine,
an elaborate undercover investigation,
the end of the DeLorean car,
and much, much more.
[reporter] News has come
in the last half hour
that about 1,100 jobs are to go
at the DeLorean car plant near Belfast.
The news tonight came
after the company chairman, John DeLorean,
was told that no more money was available
to keep the plant going.
Now he's trying to raise cash privately.
[man] We've put £80 million
into that company,
we've lost a great deal of money,
and what I think would be quite wrong
would be to go on
putting more and more taxpayers' money
into a venture
which stood no chance of success.
We were told that the workforce was going
on a three-day week
and then a few weeks later, I think,
the company announced
that half the workforce would be going.
Everything was falling apart,
but John had said he'd find the money.
[John] You know, one way or another,
it's my opinion it's inevitable
that we're gonna survive.
Today, we've now talked
to literally dozens of important investors
who have a serious interest
in the company.
We have, actually, some quite
close-to-firm commitments from people.
[Gavin Esler] He made promises
he couldn't keep.
Here's a desperate guy trying to do
everything to keep this company afloat.
My only interest is in the workers
in Belfast.
I really don't care about anything else.
[reporter] The possibility he's trying to
raise private investment in the States
hadn't impressed a pessimistic workforce.
We don't know which way we are.
Nobody tells you nothin' in that place.
- [reporter] What's the feeling inside?
- Looks like the factory's shuttin'.
[Ivan Fallon] DeLorean kept producing
private investors from round the world.
There was an Arab that had come along,
"I want to buy this,
I've got plenty of money,
I'm going to put another $20 million in."
I'm optimistic. Yes.
Yes. We've worked too long
and too hard to let
a few little aberrations bother us.
[Ivan] There was a billionaire
in the south of France
who was going to buy it.
You know, there was a chain of them,
but they never stacked up.
And then there was a lady called Farnan,
who was an investment banker in New York,
and she had the money
at the very last moment.
He said, "I was suggested
that I could call you
because I need $10 million."
And that's how we started
the conversation.
I thought it was a very interesting car.
I looked at the plant.
I liked the plant setup.
And so I raised money for $10 million
and I notified the British government.
[Ivan] Farnan was lending the money
and putting some of it in as equity,
but she would take the stake
and take control, I guess.
And DeLorean said,
"No, no. I can't do that."
[Nick] John wanted to save the factory,
but he was very reluctant
to let go of the reins of the company.
[Ivan] Farnan's documents
were on John DeLorean's desk,
he was supposed to sign them.
And he left,
without signing them, for California,
and he went into this, you know,
room 501 in the Sheraton Hotel
at Los Angeles Airport,
where he met with four people.
- [Jerry] Hi, John.
- [John] Hi.
I'm Jerry West from the FBI.
You're under arrest
for narcotics smuggling violations.
- [Jerry] You want to sit back down?
- [John] Pretty hard.
- [Jerry] Why don't you sit on the edge?
- [John] All right.
[Jerry] Come on. Sit down on the edge.
My job is to advise you of your rights.
- You can read along if you want.
- [John] I can't see that far.
[Jerry] Okay. Before we ask any questions,
you must understand your rights.
You have the right to remain silent
[dramatic music playing]
Any moment now, John DeLorean
The millionaire automaker is charged,
of course, with trafficking in cocaine
in an attempt
to save his struggling automobile company.
[reporter] He was arrested by FBI agents
in a hotel near Los Angeles.
[Zach DeLorean] My mom got the phone call,
and honestly, I thought somebody had died.
That night in New York, I mean,
that changed my life forever.
[Cristina] I got off the phone,
I was in shock.
All I knew was that
I had to get to Los Angeles.
So I took the red-eye that night to L.A.,
and that's when everything started un
the sweater just started to unravel.
[reporter] DeLorean had been caught
in a classic sting-type trap
set up by the agents themselves
posing as dealers.
What DeLorean was after, the FBI say,
was a quick profit to save his company.
[Barrie Willis] I got a phone call,
"Barrie, it's Paul.
"Call the workforce together
at eight o'clock tomorrow morning,
and tell them it's all over.
It's liquidation."
[reporter] DeLorean looked tired
as he was taken to federal court
for arraignment.
[man] My boss, Morgan Hetrick,
was a cocaine transporter,
in fact,
the number one cocaine transporter
in the west coast of the United States.
And he ordered me to drive a car
across the United States, full of cocaine.
What I totally did not anticipate
is the cocaine in my car was
the cocaine was gonna wind up in the lap
of John Z. DeLorean in a hotel room,
and that I had just walked
into the drug trial of the century.
The John DeLorean drug trial.
[reporter] Auto executive John DeLorean,
free on $10 million bail,
today pleaded innocent
to charges of trafficking
in a $24 million
cocaine distribution deal.
I don't think
that when the truth comes out,
there's any way
that I can be convicted of anything.
I'm an absolutely innocent man.
[reporter] NBC News has learned
the FBI was able to make its case
against DeLorean
because one of DeLorean's own neighbors,
who once lived in this house,
was working as an informant
for the government.
James Timothy Hoffman.
[chattering on footage]
[Stephen Arrington]
James Timothy Hoffman was the informant,
and he had been running cases
for the FBI and the DEA for 20 years.
Hoffman lived
in the same community as John DeLorean.
[Cristina] I knew Jim very well.
I trusted him.
He had the house across the way from us.
John told him of what he was trying to do.
When he listened to John's story, he said,
"I could get you the money for this."
"I have the people that you need
to get the money for your company."
And at that time, John was desperate.
So, what Hoffman did is he went
to the FBI, and he said,
"I have a guy who wants
to make a drug deal."
"He's a high-profile guy."
[Hoffman] There aren't many people
that can pick up the phone
and get $30 million
in three, four days without hassle.
- [John] I can't think of anybody [laughs]
- [Hoffman] That's right.
James Hoffman told him
if he had some seed money,
if he got 1.8 million,
he could deliver $60 million
to John DeLorean.
[Hoffman] Nobody
wants you to do something,
you know, that
you're not comfortable with.
[John] Well, my
You know, I'm relying on you
saying that there's no way
to connect me to this at the end.
[Stephen] So, they come up with this idea
that John DeLorean
would deliver half of his stock
in the DeLorean Motor Car Company
as collateral for $1.8 million.
And that is used to pay Morgan Hetrick,
who's delivering 25 kilos of cocaine
that came out of my car.
[reporter] 12 weeks of prosecution,
the strongest case against John DeLorean
is still DeLorean himself.
- [man] Here's to
- [John] To a lot of success for everybody.
[man] Gentlemen
[John] And for all your phone calls
[laughs] Thank you.
This was a setup,
there's no doubt about it.
They sucked this guy in
and they're trying to make it look
like he did something he didn't do.
The first big sensational celebrity trial
was the DeLorean trial,
and then O.J. came later.
You know, the cameras in your face
and people yelling at you
and screaming bad things,
and it was very traumatic.
[reporter] It was the stuff of soap opera.
Adding to the glamour,
DeLorean's gorgeous wife,
fashion model Cristina Ferrare,
wearing designer clothes
that reporters dubbed,
"dressing for acquittal."
He is innocent. He [hesitates]
The whole thing is a massive frame-up.
Automobile manufacturer John DeLorean's
recent trouble with the law
came as a surprise
to most people in the press,
but not to Hillel Levin,
a reporter from Monthly Detroit Magazine.
For more than a year,
he has been investigating
DeLorean's business dealings.
Suddenly everyone was looking
for who had ever written anything
negative, or critical even,
of this individual.
In some ways it was
like the journalistic equivalent
of winning the lottery.
And I'm flown to New York City,
and I'm in a limousine
going to these studios
and I'm being interviewed
on the biggest morning show.
[man] First off, Hillel, why did you jump
on the trail of DeLorean?
There are a number of things.
First of all,
there were questions raised overseas
about the way
he was handling the car company.
And most important
of all the things I found
was a very suspicious number
in the annual report
for his private company.
The thing I focused on the most
was an $18 million payment
made in 1978,
shortly after
the British government decided
to give DeLorean $100 million
to build his car.
That payment was made to a company
that was supposedly Panama-registered
and Swiss-based, called "GPD."
Nobody has yet been able
to find a trace of employees at GPD,
or what they even did for the car company.
[Hillel] I didn't expect
to hear he was caught in a drug deal,
but I wasn't entirely surprised either,
because I knew he was capable
of doing something desperate and illegal
because he had so much to hide.
[reporter] Investigators say
GPD is a phony,
nothing more than a post office box
in a neighborhood branch
of the Geneva Post Office.
Post office box 33.
A phantom company set up
in Geneva by DeLorean
and the late British automaker
Colin Chapman,
allegedly just a device
to embezzle millions of dollars
from DeLorean's car company.
We were able to identify $17.5 million
of so-called DeLorean money
going into this company called GPD,
and we were able
to track then half of that coming out
into DeLorean's private account.
The other half of the money,
nobody's ever been able to track,
and shortly after, of course,
DeLorean was arrested, Colin Chapman died
and, uh, somewhere buried in his estate,
but no one's ever been able
to identify where that money went.
[Barrie] It was a criminal act.
Fred Bushell,
who was Chapman's finance director,
went to prison.
Chapman died,
and John never came back to the U.K.
So, Fred was the only one around.
Fred was the guy that took the, um
took the fall and went inside, so
And, of course,
the judge that found Fred guilty
said that,
had Mr. Chapman still been alive
and had John ever come back to the U.K.,
they would have served ten years. Each.
[reporter] Prosecutors replayed
for the jury video tapes
they called devastating to DeLorean.
[Hillel] The prosecution thought no way
it was possible that they would lose.
[reporter] After 47 days of testimony,
the government today rested its case
against John DeLorean.
[Hillel] So this was a man
who was truly trapped
and really did feel on his own.
Then out of the blue,
DeLorean acquires the most unlikely ally,
a notorious pornographer
named Larry Flynt,
who felt he, too,
was a victim of government persecution.
Somehow he acquired secret tapes
from the FBI sting
and then released them to the public.
Federal Appeals Court this afternoon
removed a lower-court injunction
and freed CBS News to broadcast
previously secret government tapes
to be used in the drug trial
of celebrated automaker John DeLorean.
[reporter] CBS News obtained the tapes
from the publisher of Hustler magazine,
Larry Flynt.
When I first seen the tape of the sting
it blew my mind because I said,
"You know, they set him up."
I felt compelled to make it public.
And I called 60 Minutes.
[reporter] Regardless
of how the tapes got out,
now that they've been broadcast,
both the prosecution and the defense say
that hurts DeLorean's chances
of getting a fair trial.
[Hillel] I mean, there was just
one more sideshow added to many others
that probably did get through to the jury
to make them think that DeLorean
was more a victim than a victimizer.
There were new videotapes Wednesday
in the DeLorean case.
They show the automaker taking
his first lie detector test.
[man] Did you ever propose to Hoffman
that he arrange a drug transaction
or drug investment for you?
No.
[man] Was it Hoffman
who first proposed to you
that you become involved
in a drug transaction or drug investment?
Yes.
[reporter] DeLorean's future
will be decided by a jury of six men
and six women.
Jurors
in the DeLorean cocaine trafficking trial
enter their sixth day of deliberations
this morning in Los Angeles.
You never really know
what they're thinking
or what they're interested in.
We hope they'll arrive at
what we believe to be
the just verdict in this case,
and that's an acquittal. It's up to them.
[Cristina] He did not do what they said.
He did not do that
[voice breaks] and it was so unfair
what happened to him,
even though he made bad choices [sniffs]
because it just destroyed lives.
[news jingle playing]
Good evening.
Almost two years to the day
after John DeLorean was arrested
on drugs charges,
a Los Angeles court
has found him not guilty.
[man] And we don't want John to get hurt
Um, John will make a statement.
We're not gonna entertain any questions
about anything but this particular case,
and that'll exclude any other venues
or any other pending matters
or any other lawsuits.
Number one, I, of course,
knew from day one that I was innocent.
I clearly felt
that the judgment would come out properly.
[reporter] Will you recover completely
from what you've gone through this year?
Well, outside of the fact that I've aged
about 600 years in the last two
and that, uh,
life as a hard-working industrialist
has been tattered and torn, I don't know.
- Would you buy a used car from me?
- [reporter laughing]
- [people chattering]
- [cameras clicking]
[Hillel] I think there is an argument
that it was entrapment,
but a good part of the entrapment defense
is that the individual, the defendant,
does not have criminal intent.
That, if not for this informant
pulling him into the deal,
he would've never done something illegal.
- Hi, John.
- Hi.
I'm Jerry West from the FBI.
[Hillel] And I think
criminal intent was there.
I mean, when you look
at the man's life in its totality
you see he had that bent.
I discovered that when I looked
into the businesses he ran
after he left GM ten years before.
DeLorean was a bad businessman.
Once he got involved with the business,
he just did not have the ability
or the desire to follow through.
Instead, he'd rushed for a quick buck.
In 1974, he creates a partnership
with this inventor in Phoenix,
Walter "Pete" Avrea,
who was a trucker,
but was an ingenious inventor.
And he proceeded
to tell me this very disturbing story
about John DeLorean.
[woman] My father would see
a problem that needed to be fixed.
He'd figure out a way to fix it.
And the coolant recovery system
made it so that
the cars didn't overheat anymore.
And the coolant recovery is on,
in one form or another,
essentially every vehicle made
in the world today.
It was huge.
So then his next step was to set up
the company called Saf Gard Products.
Ford had called me,
General Motors had called me, said,
"We have hot cars all over the country.
Can you cool 'em off?"
- Then what happened?
- Then they started making their own.
That's almost impossible, not to have
other people exploit your invention,
especially when it's
The components
are relatively cheap to make.
And my dad wrote to John DeLorean,
who was the big hotshot
from the auto industry.
[long beep]
This is John DeLorean in Detroit
calling in response to your letter.
Uh, I'm very much interested
and I'd like you to call me.
John DeLorean came in
like a prince on a white steed.
[Pete] His personal impression to me
was his understanding of the systems
I was working on.
And I think that probably made me think
this was the man I wanted.
So Dad and DeLorean came to an agreement
and Dad assigned his patents to DeLorean.
And then things started
to go so horribly bad.
DeLorean wanted some fast money.
There was no plan.
DeLorean was just sticking money
in his pocket.
DeLorean has shown himself incapable
of running this business,
which should've been a goldmine.
And as things were coming apart,
suddenly on the scene comes
a man called Roy Nesseth.
In many ways, you could say he was
something of an alter ego for DeLorean,
who was loud, who was rude, uncouth.
But as DeLorean would say,
"He's a guy who can get things done."
[Jeannie Avrea] Nesseth comes in
as president,
and he and DeLorean both
are taking money out of Saf Gard systems
until there's essentially none.
I told him I wanted my patents back
and I wanted him to get out of my life.
And he said, um, he would consider that
if I would pay him
a half a million dollars
for the ownership of the patents
that I had given him.
[woman] DeLorean, uh,
called us, wanting us to settle.
I told him that, uh,
Pete wasn't there
and he said Nesseth was a very mean man,
we'd better think about settling.
And I says,
"Mr. DeLorean, are you threatening us?"
And he says, "No, I'm not threatening you.
I'm telling you that he's a mean man."
Nesseth called up my father and said,
"You know,
I know where your daughter lives
and I know where that little granddaughter
of yours goes to school."
And he hung up.
And I think that phone call
is when my dad said,
"This is enough. This is I'm done."
Besides raping the company
and taking all the money out of it,
in the settlement, he walks away
with another half million dollars.
When I think of John DeLorean,
I think of the total disregard
for anyone else.
His lack of compassion,
his lack of honesty
or any sense of honor.
He doesn't care who he tramples on.
[ominous music playing]
[Jeannie] He didn't care.
He was a monster.
This is something
that affected his health.
Obviously the aggravation
that this brilliant invention
could be going down the drain.
All of that.
For all of his talk
about identifying with the little guys,
in his own private business deals,
DeLorean rode roughshod over little guys.
And when it came to the motor company,
nobody suffered the consequences more
than the little guys in Belfast,
and especially
all the workers on the assembly lines.
[emotional music playing]
[reporter] Walking out of the plant
for the last time, how do you feel?
- We're getting nothing.
- Pretty upset.
- What's the chance of getting another job?
- Not at all.
[man] Not very good at all.
[Ed Lapham] It's disappointing
that the government's money evaporated,
but the most disappointing stuff
is what it did
to the people of Belfast,
the people who'd counted on him,
depended on him.
[woman] It was hard
to get a job in Belfast anyway,
so everybody was just back
on the dole again.
People who had taken out mortgages
and had bought new cars,
it was sad times. Very sad times.
And if you bumped into somebody
in the supermarket, you'd say,
"Did you get a job yet?"
That was the norm.
It was hard, yeah. It was very hard.
[man] And I think, as any
working class man, he's entitled to a job,
instead of being thrown on the scrap heap.
The biggest majority of them
are still on the dole.
And up to now,
I can see nothing in the next ten years.
[Chris Hegedus] The people
were just so delighted
and so proud to be making money
and bringing it into the community.
You know,
it was a wonderful thing for Belfast,
and, you know,
the tragedy is that it failed for them.
[emotional music playing]
[music fading]
Just as the Belfast plant was closing,
I had one more piece of drama
with DeLorean.
At the time,
I was finishing a book about him.
And I started running all over the world.
But in the midst of all of that,
uh, I started to get calls
from someone who'd use a voice distorter.
He sounded like Darth Vader with asthma,
and he's telling me he wants the truth
to get out about DeLorean.
And he said, "I want you
to come and meet me at the airport."
"There are pay phones there,
and a phone will ring
once I'm sure you're alone."
I picked up the phone and he said,
"Well, if you feel under the phone,
you'll see there's a key taped there."
In those days, there were airport lockers.
"The key goes to one of those lockers,
and inside that locker
will be the documents you're looking for."
So I went and opened up the locker,
and there was a manila envelope,
and as I sat down to open up the envelope,
I'm surrounded by some burly guys
and he showed me his badge.
They then took me into a side room
and opened up the envelope,
and there was a packet of white powder
in there.
I was arraigned the next day
um, for possession of
with intent to distribute cocaine.
It turned out to be four grams,
and that could've put me in prison
for four years at that point.
So, um, the next ten days
was a very fraught period in my life
because here is someone writing
about DeLorean's cocaine bust
who has been busted
with the cocaine himself.
What I didn't know, the local prosecutor
found out a couple of things.
Someone sounding like Darth Vader
had called the wire services
to say I had been arrested
with four grams of cocaine.
And at that point, even the police
didn't know how much it weighed
or what exactly it was.
Ultimately, at the first hearing,
the prosecutor asked the judge
to withdraw the charges.
Obviously, I suspected it was DeLorean,
but I had no evidence it was,
at that stage.
A few decades later,
Cristina Ferrare would testify
in a lawsuit against him.
And her statement about Hillel Levin was,
he came out one night and said to her,
"Wouldn't it be great if Hillel Levin
was set up with cocaine like I was?"
And in many ways,
um, despite what he did to me,
I grew a little less vindictive
because I knew how important
his reputation was to him.
He was divorced.
He didn't have any supporters.
He was truly alone.
And I thought, you know,
this is punishment enough
because now he was truly the little guy,
as powerless and diminished
as his father had been,
which had always been his greatest fear.
[Zach DeLorean] I honestly
thought that the trial was done
and we were going home.
My mom asked me, you know,
how would I feel if they got divorced,
and I kind of freaked out about it.
It really wasn't a very good time for me,
you know.
In a lot of ways, that was almost worse
than my dad getting arrested, you know.
It was really the breakup of the family,
you know.
You know, that last two years was
I can't imagine any marriage surviving
the terror that we were put through.
And yet the whole situation
with her suddenly announcing
that the two of you
were not gonna be married.
Was it a total surprise?
Did you know nothing that was going on?
No. I had no idea
and it was a total surprise.
It was really shocking.
About the day after the trial was over,
she said she'd taken a house,
and she'd gotten a job
in L.A. as a TV host,
and that, uh, she was moving out
with the kids and I wasn't coming along.
It was really a shattering thing.
I'll tell you what the turning point was.
It was when I went to Terminal Island,
where he was incarcerated at the time.
And it was the day after the arraignment.
I was alone in the room with him.
He walks in with the orange jumpsuit,
and shackled, and the whole thing,
and I brought him
the cover of Time magazine,
which was his dream
to be on the cover of Time magazine.
And I I looked at it
and I threw it on the table.
I said,
"Well, there's your legacy right there."
I said,
"Are you proud now, of what happened?"
"Of what you've done?"
And I'll never forget this.
He looked he touched it with his hands.
He The whole cover,
cover to cover, from top to bottom.
He picked it up.
He looked at it and he smiled.
And I said, "What the"
[mouths silently] "are you smiling at?"
And he said, "You don't understand."
He said, "I have made millions
and lost millions in my life,
and half the fun is getting it all back."
And that's when I just went
It sh That shattered.
The glass just shattered.
I said, "There's something wrong
with this person."
And that was the turning point for me.
[reporter] The string
of DeLorean luxury properties,
like his $5 million
Fifth Avenue flat in New York,
is now the target of his creditors.
In a disputed court ruling,
his 50-acre avocado farm in California,
complete with sunken pool
and jacuzzi for eight,
was transferred to his latest lawyers,
who claim half a million dollars
in defense costs so far.
I hadn't really seen my dad
in probably a couple years
and I remember I was sitting up,
I'd seen him and I went upstairs
and I actually cried
because he looked so much older,
you know, he looked more hunched over,
and you could just see
the physical toll that it took on him.
But I think it was important
for him, and his ego, and his image
to say, "Hey," in public,
"I am working on something."
You know, "This is who I am."
[gentle music playing]
[John]
my life as an automotive engineer.
So I'm in the process now of trying
to put together another venture.
I've been working with a number of people.
We have, really, two cars planned,
which are logical successors
to the car that we built.
And this these cars, that car had a
[speech fades out]
[Chris] I guess it's such a human story
about, you know,
somebody's hopes and dreams
and, you know,
their past traumas haunting them
and trying to overcome them.
And it's the idea
of somebody doing their own self in
because of, you know,
their worst instincts and fears
come to haunt them.
[speech fades in]
[John] And we have several people
who have agreed to finance it at first.
Those things don't really work
until the money's in the bank.
We are also building a second car,
more as an attention-getter.
- This one's
- [speech fades out]
[Hillel] DeLorean is a complicated figure.
No doubt charismatic,
and that charisma remains,
but I don't think he ever had empathy.
I think that was truly
a missing part of him,
to see the damage he could
cause in other people's lives.
So, we look at him
for the good and the bad.
I think it's the complexity of the figure
that makes us fascinated by him,
and, for better or worse,
those are the people we remember.
[John] A cheaper car, which I hope to sell
for approximately $20,000,
will outperform
the million-dollar Ferrari,
the million-dollar McLaren,
the million-dollar Mercedes,
and the million-dollar Porsche.
- Of course, this giant
- [speech fades out]
[Cristina] "Malignant narcissist"
is what I would call John.
John never, ever realized the damage
that what happened
how it affected me, his wife of 11 years,
psychologically never, didn't care.
And the worst part of it, his children.
Again, it's not that he was a mean man.
He just doesn't
He doesn't have the chip in his brain
to think that way.
I have no regrets.
It was a great ride until it wasn't.
- [John] Yes, sir.
- [man] Is one of them a gullwing?
It is a gullwing. [chuckles]
Both of them are gullwing.
[applauding and whistling]
- This is a different kind of gullwing
- [speech fades]
[J. Patrick Wright ] John DeLorean
died in a walk-up condo
in Morristown, New Jersey,
um, selling watches on the internet.
Pretty much a broken man,
and planning a new car company.
Anyhow, thank you. I look forward to
spending more time with you tomorrow.
[crowd applauding]
[Zach] If my father had, you know,
just kind of done things more
on the straight and narrow
instead of maybe, you know,
cutting a little corner off,
he probably would've gone a lot farther
than he had in his lifetime.
You know, maybe you shouldn't have taken
the 20 million with Chapman.
So if you just kept that in the company,
you know,
maybe that would've saved the company.
And instead of cutting that corner
to get your money fast
But 15 years after my father's death,
I mean,
there's still this following of the car.
I think that's really
what should be acknowledged,
not necessarily the cocaine,
not necessarily the divorces,
and that he was a snake in the grass
in business.
I mean, he did something,
and he was trying
to make a difference, I think.
You know, that's really the legacy
that should that's left behind,
and I think that's
what that car should represent. For sure.
[emotional music playing]