Inside the 501 room at the Sheraton Plaza La Reina hotel near Lax, the trap was waiting for John Delorean.
It was in October 1982, and the automaker at the Maverick was hemorrharged money. Ten years earlier, he had left a job of $ 600,000 per year at General Motors to continue the bold ambition to start his own automotive business. The result was a sports steel sports car with a futuristic appearance with seagull doors, intended to compete with the corvette.
But it was assaulted by quality control problems and, at $ 25,000, too high a price. His dream was about to collapse, his business rushing towards bankruptcy.
He had avoided Los Angeles for this clandestine meeting. He entered the hotel room and sat among the men who had talked about their underground ties and had promised to help him.
Delorean seemed in a good mood. One of the men opened a suitcase filled with cocaine and Delorean looked inside.
Delorean was an American original, the rare automotive executive that reduced a large public profile. He radiated glamor. As a businessman, he was skillful during the personal brand image before Donald Trump, a visionary automobile of the years before Elon Musk. Profile writers frequently described him as “dashing”, “flamboyant” and “dapper”, a “jet-set” and “swingers”.
Son of a Ford Foundry Worker, he grew up in a working class district in Detroit and quickly got up with Chrysler, Packard and General Motors. In 1961, he became chief engineer of the Pontiac division of GM and presented two popular “muscle cars”, the GTO and the Firebird. In 1972, he was vice-president of GM and spoke as a probable candidate for the president's work.
Delorean cars are lined up in Santa Ana Get facilities for the company.
(Cliff Otto / Los Angeles Times)
But his disproportionate personality and his flamboyant lifestyle clashed with the buttoned culture of the company. He wore scarves and flared pants and open shirts. He had increased his chin surgically. He grew long. He came out with starlets.
At 48, he married his third wife, the 22 -year -old model, Cristina Ferrare. They lived in an opulent way in an apartment in the fifth avenue in New York and on an area of 430 acres in Bedminster, NJ, her needle pillow said: “New is better than not at all rich.
In 1973, he left GM and aimed to do what no one had done successfully since Walter Chrysler in the 1920s: launch his own automotive business. His vision was to build an “ethical” – safe, practical, rusty sports car and also “very beautiful aesthetically”. He convinced the British government to pay more than $ 140 million into its project and opened a factory in Northern Ireland, which produced around 9,000 DMC-12 from 1980 to 1982.
Assaillie by electrical disorders, the car collapsed on the market. The British government withdrew funding and, in early 1982, said the insolvent of Delorean Motor Co.
The men gathered with Delorean in Sheraton that day were federal agents and an informant. In grainy images captured by a hidden FBI camera, Delorean inspected the suitcase full of cocaine and said: “It's better than gold.”
Toasting with a glass of champagne, he added: “This is a lot of success for everyone.”
Federal agents entered to arrest him. The FBI allegedly alleged that it was part of a plan to buy and resell 220 pounds of cocaine in Colombia in a desperate attempt to save its business. The accusations, which would lead to a sentence of 67 years in prison if he was sentenced, attracted massive advertising.
A hidden FBI camera captured John Delorean examining a suitcase full of cocaine and pronouncing it “better than gold”.
“He was a very famous guy. He had what looked like the magic world,” said Donald Re, one of his defense lawyers, in Times in a recent interview. “It would seem incredible that this guy volunteers to go through this kind of transaction.” Okay, I guess wealthy people can do this kind of thing “do people think.”
Talk-show host Phil Donahue gave an idea of the call of the case. “We love this kind of story,” he said. “The powerful fell.”
Central of the Delorean trial, which began in April 1984, was the credibility of the government's star witness, James Hoffman, a drug addict and perjure condemned who was on the stand for 18 days. He had lived in front of the home of Delorean in the county of San Diego and had become an informant in the hope of Clémence. He said Delorean had proposed a drug agreement to save his business.
For defense, government collaborators were difficult to overcome. In a conversation captured by federal agents, Hoffman told Dellorean: “No one wants you to do with which you are uncomfortable.”
John Delorean leaves the FBI office in Westwood after passing a lie detection test.
(Joe Kennedy / Los Angeles Times)
Delorean said he wanted to continue. He said to Hoffman, “I count on you saying that there is no way to connect to this thing.”
“You are not going to manage products,” said Hoffman.
In a defense of Bravura, the lawyers of Delorean, Re and Howard Weitzman, judged the government. They portrayed Delorean as the victim of a manipulative violin who had attracted him with the prospect of legitimate investments in his business, later introducing the concept of drug transaction.
“I'm going to get John Delorean for you guys,” said Hoffman, according to the testimony of a former agent of the drug application. “The problems he has, I can make him do whatever I want.”
When Delorean said he had no money for the agreement, the agents should have abandoned the investigation, the defense said. Instead, they have concocted a financing system developed to keep it involved and managed by the scene the images of bite.
Yes, Delorean had used bad judgment, said defense, but he had simply sought investment money and had not committed any crime. Even if the jury decided that he had done it, it was a case of trapping.
“Delorean has been manipulated,” said Reve to the jurors. “Delorean was maneuvered. Delorean was deceived. John Delorean in this case was a victim, victim of the people who were to protect him from criminal activities. “
In the recent interview, REL said that Delorean had been deceived in the medication program and feared physical damage to the figures of hell if he tried to get out. Delorean did not contribute liquidity to the agreement, added, but rather proposed participation in his business.
“This company was the highest point of his life,” said Re. “There is no way that he would have done it unless he feels obliged to do it, unless he thinks that something horrible was going to happen to him.”
Federal agents display cocaine seized during the arrest of John Delorean in Los Angeles in October 1982.
(Doug Pizac / Associated Press)
Delorean, 59, never took a position during the five -month trial. After 29 hours of deliberation, the jury acquitted him on all the counts.
“The way government agents acted in this case was not appropriate,” said a juror. Others said Hoffman was a crevilia without credibility. Some said that Delorean was morally to blame, even if it was not legally: “I do not believe that it was” innocent “. … it was “not guilty”. »»
Federal authorities have recognized a major strategic error: not to ensure that Delorean had put his own money.
Delorean said he had aged 600 years in the last two. “My life as a worker industry was in tatters and torn,” he told the media. “Do you want to buy me a used car?”
The wife of Delorean, who had been faithfully by his side through the ordeal, quickly left him. In an interview a few years later, she said: “I believe that John is a sociopath.”
Delorean became a Christian born again and told Playboy that he had been the victim of his own “insatiable pride … An arrogance that was beyond that of another living human being”.
The test was fresh in memory when the DMC -12 – equipped with the mysterious “flow capacitor” – served as a time to go back in the 1985 success “Back to the future”, devoting it to pop culture. Delorean sent a gushing letter to the filmmakers, who were happy not to have opted for the original idea, a time travel refrigerator.
John Delorean after his acquittal on drug accusations in August 1984.
(Lori Shepler / Los Angeles Times)
In 1986, Delorean beat another federal case, this time in Detroit, on accusations that he stole $ 17.5 million to his investors. But he was struggling with legal invoices and creditors were running.
He tried to market watches. He spoke of building a “new radical car”. His plans moved away and in 2000, the vans arrived in his sleeping field to transport his antiques. He lived in an apartment in the New Jersey at the time of his death in 2005, at 80 years old.
The appellant “the last of the savages automobiles”, the automotive columnist of the time, Dan Neil, wrote: “Delorean enters history not as a visionary but as an arrogant and amoral hipster, victim of his own toxic vanity.” Weitzman, the lawyer who defended Delorean successfully, said that of his many customers: “John Delorean had one of the most distorted views of good and evil.”
Tamir Ardon, a documentary filmmaker, approached the Delorean family in the 15 years that he spent bringing the 2019 documentary “Framing John Delorean” on the screen. He called the case of cocaine “trapping 101”, playing in the context of Ronald Reagan's war against drugs.
“Morally, John was corrupt. Legally, he did nothing wrong,” said Ardon to Times in a recent interview. “He did not do drug trafficking. It just happened to be that they structured the case, so it would seem super harmful and it would be super splashing for Reagan. … They thought, as long as they would get this splashing video of John in a room with cocaine, it was going to be sufficiently condemned to a group of 12 regular jurors.”
Ardon said there were still about 6,000 DMC-12 on the road and that the virgins can recover six digits. Depending on their age, people associate the car with a “back to future” franchise or drug tests. The division line is about 50 years old.
“The most common remark that any owner of Delorean will get is:” Where is your flow capacitor? “,” Said Ardon. “And the other is:” Where is cocaine hidden in your car? ” »»
