Let's Talk About John DeLorean

John DeLorean: visionary, car maker extraordinaire, buyer of large amounts of cocaine, provider of time machine chassis. There is a lot to understand about John DeLorean so let’s get busy.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you should know, a production of I
Heart Radio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh,
there's Chuck Jerry's here, and this is stuff you should broom.
Stuff you should know. Everybody calmed out. Stuff you should

(00:23):
know about his specific car Carmaker a legend and uh
possibly a real jackass. Who did this for us? Was
this Olivia? Yeah? Olivia helps us with this one? Can
we read that? How she titled it? Sure? John Delorian
Colin celebrity weirdo Carmaker. She pretty much nailed it in

(00:48):
the title. It's true like he was a celebrity. It
was very weird, and he was a car maker as
a matter of fact, that's where he started to get
his celebrity was in car making. But she likens it
um and I think quite correctly, to the rise of
or he he prefigured the rise of the worshiped tech
god like Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberger. These people who

(01:12):
have been held up um to these amazing standards and
like you just think they can do anything. They're doing
all this amazing stuff when it really turns out that
there you know, they just want to party with some starlets,
you know, and that's that's a lot what John Delorrian's
life was like. He was like, Okay, I got here,
and now I want to do everything that's fun and

(01:34):
has nothing to do with how I got here, and
that inevitably leads to the downfall or as I saw
it really aptly put in one of the articles, um,
he succumbed to that most American of maladies. He believed
in his own myth. You never want to do that, everybody.
Have you seen either one of the documentaries I haven't

(01:56):
yet know. Okay, there's two. There's one I watched couple
of years ago called Framing John de Lorean, which is
a sort of a weird mix of documentary and narrative film,
and that they do these very like high quality like
it's a movie recrease recreations for those of you not
in the viz, with Alec Baldwin as John de Lorian.

(02:19):
And then there was another one that there's a three
part on Netflix called Myth and Mogul John DeLorean. I
think it's I don't know why they split these up,
because it ends up being like two hours and fifteen
minutes long with the three parts put together. But they're
both really good and I watch both of them before

(02:39):
this was even an idea because I was a little
fascinated with a guy because I'm a child of the
eighties and I remember, as you probably do, on the
rare occasion when you would see a DeLorean or be
in a neighborhood where the kids like, there's a DeLorean
in our neighborhood, like and So's dad has one. Uh.

(03:02):
They were that rare, that cool, that different. Uh. And
I also lived in Bernardsville, New Jersey after college, which
was just about three or four miles from where John
Delian lived, and I remember when I moved there and
they're like, yeah, John de Lorian lives like right down
the road. Was that when he lived in as a
state or a condo? Yeah, that was when he lived
in Bedminster And we'll get to the history there and

(03:25):
whose hands that ended up in. But uh do Lorian
was just a person who really I was at the
right age I think when it all came crumbling down
and of course back to the future. Like, he was
just someone I was fascinated with and I loved watching
these ducks and I loved like doing this research. Well,
I mean, he isn't an astoundingly fascinating person. Yeah, I'm

(03:47):
saying I hold him up to some like great human
but just fascinated by him. Like you said, there there
are people out there who do who consider him a
visionary and he was image he was, sure, but he
was also like a straight up grifter and a con
man and a lot of really really important ways. He
was also what I would call a proto douche as

(04:08):
it will become a parent later on. Sure, but he
was all these things and more. He was also a
great self promoter. But what's amazing about it is if
you step back and look at his background and where
he came from and how he became famous, it was
through his own smarts. It was through his own uh
great education that his parents made sure he got. It

(04:30):
was he was an engineer. He was a car engineer,
and that's how he made his name by doing really good,
amazing work. And then eventually he kind of Peter principals
himself out of that work and into that's when he
started to get into trouble. Yeah. I think when I
was younger, when I was a teenager and knew that
sort of the lore, I thought that he was just
some rich guy who had this vanity project of a

(04:54):
car company. Um. I did not know until much much
later that he was a really great, sort of brilliant
engineer and like put so many great cars on the
map at GM as a as a young executive, and
I think I appreciated him a lot more. It's like, Okay,
this guy like he knew what he was doing. He uh,

(05:14):
he had certainly tons of faults, like you said, but
he wasn't. I just thought he was a rich guy
who's like, I want to a cool different car. No. No,
he definitely knew what he was talking about. And apparently
when he was coming up with the Delirian d m
C twelve, the Dolrian the only model he ever came
out with. Um, god, I hope that's correct, because they're

(05:35):
gonna get so many emails if it's not. But there
are a few versions of that one, okay, but they
were all d m C twelves, Right God, I think so, now, okay,
we're just gonna move forward. Chocolate's just soldier on right. Um.
He wanted that to be like a valuable car. It
was named the d m C twelve because he wanted
to to the starting price to be twelve thousand dollars

(05:56):
an affordable, you know, at the time, expensive but still
not out of the reach of somebody who wanted to
really get one of these. It wasn't just for the
rich and wealthy and famous. He wanted to be reliable.
The prototype had air bags, it had an onboard computer,
it had anti theft system. This is like in the
early eighties. This is long before anybody was doing stuff

(06:19):
like that, and so he really did want to make
a really good car. It just didn't quite work out
that way because he got into his own way. I
would say he had a emergency handbrake on the left
of the driver so some angry friend in the passenger
seat couldn't yank it up and kill you. Is that true. Well,

(06:39):
I don't know if that's why I did it, but
it makes sense put it on the left so no
one else can. That makes sense. I wonder if it's
because most people are right handed, or more people are
right handed. I don't know. I say we can start
back at the beginning, chuck, because we're getting in our
own way now, that's right. He was born John Zachary
do Lorian in Detroit, No surprise, in ninety Uh. He

(07:02):
was born to not a lot of money. Um. In
one of the documentaries they described his neighborhood is fairly
run down. His parents were immigrants. His dad was from
He was Romanian and his mom was Hungarian. She was
a line worker at GE and his dad was UM,
a foundry worker and a union guy, union organizer, but

(07:25):
not a good dude. Um drank a lot, was abusive
and he did not see him again after his about
sixteenth or seventeenth birthday. I think when his mom divorced him. Right, Um.
And like I said, he was he got a really
good education, but he was also a really great student. UM.
And he went to technical school. He went to cast

(07:46):
Technical High School, he went to Lawrence Institute of Technology,
and he was basically set up to become a car
engineer from a very early age. UM. He fought in
the army during World War Two and then came back
can got a degree from the Chrysler Institute, and then
finally in nineteen fifty six, became a full fledged auto engineer,

(08:07):
starting with Packard and then he moved to General Motors.
And with General Motors that's where he would um start
to make his name. Yeah, he was married a few times,
and we'll kind of touch on the various wives. It
sounds like he wasn't the best husband in the world. UM,
but I don't think he well, I don't know. I
don't want to go there, because when you're not in

(08:28):
a marriage, how can you comment and how it really is,
you know. Uh. In nineteen fifty four, though, he married
Elizabeth Higgins, who was his first wife. Uh. They were
married for about a decade, never had kids. UM. And
that's when he like kind of first got his career
going at GM with Pontiac, and he I think in
this documentary described himself um early on at least as

(08:52):
the squarest guy at General Motors UM, which is just
noteworthy because of what he became, which was certain not
a square guy at all. Right. He also had a
bunch of patents to his name, like the recessed windshield wiper,
the hidden radio antenna's stacked headlights, I mean, stuff that

(09:13):
you still see on cars today, where it certainly did
for many many years after he invented him UM, and
he he ran into a problem really quickly. Though. He
had a really good eye for design, and he also
realized that youth culture was starting to become a thing,
like teenagers were suddenly invented, and teenagers liked cars. But

(09:37):
the problem was Detroit was putting out a certain type
of car, and that was a big giant boat. Um
that you you couldn't even feel any movement whatsoever, and
you were just floating down the road. And that's what
GM thought everyone would want, because that's what the old
execs that GM wanted. Uh and and DeLorean saw very

(09:58):
early on that this is wrong. There's a whole sector
out there that we're not even touching, and he really
kind of focused on that. Yeah, and this was also
a time too. I want to point out that, um,
the car industry. If you're a certain age, you might
remember this a little bit, but if you're younger, you know,
you know, foreign cars, imported cars, there's all kind of

(10:19):
cars out there in American cars. Sure, some are fine,
but it's just the American car industry. Back then, the
American car industry was These were the biggest corporations in
the world and they were rock stars. We talked a
little bit about it in the Pinto episode, I guess,
but these were huge, huge corporations and they were the biggest,

(10:43):
baddest executives in the world worked for these car companies
in Detroit, so, like you said, they sort of like
the big boats. He came along said, let's make cars
that are cooler. I think there were some people in
the management that we're um. You know a lot of
them weren't on board, but somewhere on board because they

(11:03):
were taking these kind of cooler prototypes out apparently in
the evenings and like drag racing in Detroit against teenagers. Yeah,
he went to work specifically for Bunkie Knudson, who made
an appearance in the Pinto app I believe, I think
so Ya and Bunky Knudson was running Pontiac at the time,
and back then Pontiac was just considered the lamest um

(11:25):
old person's um medallion. That there wasn't any car company
at all, not just in GM. Pontiac was just a snooze.
And so the idea that Bunky Knudson and um John
DeLorean were kind of tapped into the same vibe that
wait a minute, whether there's a there's younger kids that
that want cars and we're not making them for him.

(11:47):
Bunky Knutson apparently said, um, you can never sell a
young man in old band's car, but you can always
sell an old man a young man's car. And they
actually changed the car industry based on that premise. And um,
the way that Dolorean did it was by taking the
Pontiac Tempest, which was a pretty cool looking mid sized

(12:08):
Pontiac and putting a Bonneville engine, which was a large
sized Pontiac, a Bonneville engine into the Tempest and making
it go room really fast, which the teenagers just loved. Yeah,
it was a huge hit. Apparently GM even had a
rule that said you can't put that big of an
engine in a car this size, but they did it

(12:29):
anyway as a special option on the sixty four Tempest,
and Delirian named this, of course, the g t O.
It was the g t O package initially UH and
he named it after the UH. It was a Ferrari,
but there were sort of road racing cars in Italy
were Grand treism I'm sorry and Tarismos very nice, and

(12:51):
that's where GTO comes from. And it was a huge
hit out of the gate. UH and Pontiac. All of
a sudden it from snooze too. Boy, I wish I
had something that rhymed that wasn't lose cruise. Yeah, towards
the top. Oh boy, that was perfect stuff. You should

(13:14):
know material that was the best I could come up with. No,
that's right. Pontiac was just hottest fire all of a sudden. Yeah,
So Delrian created the first muscle car. The g t
O is widely considered the first muscle car, and it
kicked off this huge trend of muscle cars and you
can thank John Delrian for that. Um. The g t
O also was hugely successful because DeLorean and Knudson and

(13:37):
the Pantiac gang um figured out that you really wanted
to market these things a certain way too, so they
marketed the g t O specifically towards young people. I
think one of their ads said, the Pontiac GTO by
one before you're too old to understand. I'm not kidding
like that was that was an advertisement. There was g

(13:57):
t O cologne. Tom McCann came out with some GTO
driving shoes and the soul was Yeah. This the soul
was designed to fit right into the pedal of a
g t O so you could push the pedal to
the metal faster and go balls out. Oh that's right.
This all reminded me of my dad, who, even though

(14:20):
he was an elementary school principal, um went out without
asking my mom at all and he bought a Porsche
nine eleven, which we could not afford. And he immediately
had the Porsche sunglasses, the Porsche jacket, the Porsche hat,
baseball cap, and I think, like one other Porsche thing.

(14:40):
He was not to be disturbed. He's eating his Porsche
breakfast cereal. At the time, I thought, you know, you know,
your dad brings some a portion nine eleven. It was
beautiful and he had all this stuff, and I was like,
how cool. And then I got a little older and
I was like, what a what a terrible thing to
do in a here, I know, without asking, good lutle
if I nancial stress it caused. And then all this

(15:02):
do she side stuff he was wearing. I was scanning him.
We'll get in all that. So back to back to
John DeLorean. Because of that G t O thing, Um,
he was promoted to the head of Pontiac. I'm not
sure where Bunky Newtson went. Maybe this is when Newson
went over to Ford to work with the Pinto. But
he was forty at the time and there was a

(15:25):
great article on this if it's the longest long form ever.
It's called Demon Underneath was by Alex Popademus. It's on
the outline, and he basically says that UM that Dolrian
was the youngest general manager at GM. He was forty
and that at the time that made him basically pre
pubescent by Detroit standards, being forty, So it was a

(15:46):
really big deal that he was made general manager of
Pontiac UH. That that's how big of a breakthrough the
g t O was. And then as if that weren't enough,
he followed it up with the Firebird and then the
Grand Prix. So in three three years he invented no
I'm sorry, In about five years he invented the g

(16:08):
t O of the Firebird in the Grand Prix. I
mean legend man, total legend. He could have retired then
and made his name in car history and not for
a bad cocaine deal execut He didn't though. He decided
to go a different way. And I saw it explained
as such, Chuck. I don't remember who said it like this,

(16:28):
but I think one of his UM, one of his
UH fellow travelers from the time and in that circle.
So that had he come up in sales, he would
have known very quickly that partying with Hollywood types is
kind of a snooze, that they're not actually good people.
They're not that much fun to be around. It's kind
of high stress. But he wasn't exposed to that until

(16:50):
much later on when he became an executive. But he
didn't come up from the sales side. He came up
from the engineering side, so he had no point of
reference for that. So to him, partying with Hall What
Stars was the coolest thing you could do, and it
was the first thing he started doing the first chance
he got. All right, I think it's a great cliffhanger
for our first break. Okay, Chuck, now we've reached the

(17:30):
point where John Delorian transforms into Dan Ackroyd as a
wild and crazy guy. I thought you canna see Dr
Detroit for a second. That kind of works too, But
I think I think wild and crazy guys even more accurate. Yeah,
very much, he um. And you know, this is sort
of evidence of the fact that these were the biggest

(17:51):
corporations in the world, because ask any American like who
the top executives for GM are today and you unless
you're in you know, in the know or like a
big gear head. You probably and even then you might
not even know. But back then, like he was, he
made himself into a celebrity. He started dyeing his hair,

(18:12):
he went gray pretty early, and was a admittedly very
handsome man, but he he just was sort of this
idealized in the Magnum p I era of of this
is kind of pre Magnum, but just sort of that
era of that mackeismo. He was tall, and he had
this hair coming out of his shirt, like this hairy chest,

(18:33):
and he had a button his shirt and he had
this cool hair, and he you know, he he made
himself the like he said he were, Like I said,
he said he was a squarest guy, and I think
he just really wanted to change that. So all of
a sudden, he's dating, like literally dating Roquel Welch and Urson,
La Andrews and these you know, bombshell Hollywood actresses, and

(18:57):
of course divorces his first wife in eight uh and
we should mention that she sued him for cruelty. Uh
So he probably wasn't a great husband. But he immediately
gets married. This is sort of his m O is, like,
let me marry someone about half my age. He married
it's twenty year old named Kelly Harmon when he was
forty years old, and uh, they adopted their son, Zachary. Um.

(19:20):
Do you remember those weird tic tech ads from the
eighties where it was a real close up of a
blonde lady like talking about how much she enjoys just
one tic tech. Sure that's Kelly Harmon. Was that her? Yeah?
And it's Mark Harmon's sister, by the way. Oh. Another
fun thing from the documentary is um this came from
his own mouth. He was talking about his sex drive

(19:42):
and how like, you know, he has a pretty substantial
sex drive. And he said, you know what, what man
in history, No man in history has ever accomplished anything
that didn't have that trade. So I was like, oh wait,
old podcasting comes around, my friend, now old it, Chuck
think about that though, he's the guy. He's the kind

(20:04):
of guy who would say that to a reporter and
then hope that the reporter kept that in the interview
when it was published. It's kind of Ron Burgundy esque, yeah,
but way more self aware, way more self aware Ron
Burgundy was or still is. I guess he's he has
a podcast himself. It just kind of aloof about himself.

(20:27):
John Delian was very tuned into himself. He just thought
that what he was doing was the coolest thing ever
and didn't realize that it actually wasn't super cool at all. Yeah,
he got facial reconstructive surgery. Uh and not throwing shade
of people want to do that kind of thing. But
he he went through a big midlife crisis. Is how

(20:49):
this one woman in the documentary who wrote a book, Um,
not about him, but she interviewed him for the book,
and I think he even kind of admitted it. When
he hit his forties, he lost a bunch of weight,
grew out of sideburns, started dyeing his hair, got chin
and jawline implants to make him look more masculine and rugged,

(21:09):
and started dressing. I think it was that guy that
wrote the article of Papa Demus said, Uh, he starts
showing up to manage a division of the most conservative
corporation in America, like he manages the Partridge family just
like Ruben Kincaid. Yeah so he um he but he
kept like bringing the goods, like even while he's having

(21:30):
this really embarrassing midlife crisis, Um, he's still he's still
creating like great cars, like he came out with them
the Monte Carlo. In nineteen sixty nine, he was the
head of the ship. He became head of Chevy, so
he moved from head of Pontiac the head of Chevy.
That's a big deal at that time. Um. And then

(21:51):
he even advanced all the way up to what they
called the fourteenth floor at GM. So even from Pontiac
to Chevy to now he's one of the main executives
running one of the biggest corporations in the country. And
he's walking around with like his chest hair sticking out,
making like finger guns at people, like like on his

(22:13):
way to meeting. But the thing is he did not
fit into that world at all. He did not. He
he bristled at that kind of stuff, and they didn't
like him anymore than he liked them. Yeah, he um.
I think in seventy two he was the chief of
GM's truck and car division, which he said was about

(22:33):
of what they produced. And this was the first I
think he was rumored to be in line for president.
And this was when over these couple of years in
the early seventies, was when the first whispers of like
how is this guy, like he makes good money, but
how is he living this kind of lifestyle and is
he grifting the company at all? And there were rumors

(22:53):
that he was taking kickbacks from parts people like suppliers,
and you know, the sort of rumors of impropriety started
cropping up around this time. What's crazy is this would
plague him for the rest of his life basically, and
yet any time like like something was formally done to
investigate him, to bring him up on charges, it just

(23:16):
it wouldn't stick. They just wouldn't stick. They could They
never got him on anything that he did, and he
did plenty of it. Some of the stuff he probably
didn't do. But he had that kind of reputation that
was so bad that that you know, somebody might still
try to sue you based on how bad your reputation is.
And yet none of them were successful as far as

(23:36):
I could tell. Yeah, I didn't see anything that stuck. Uh.
I think it was followed seventy two, um was when
he finally departed. There was a text of a speech
about quality control that he was going to give to
a private audience at GM and it got leaked out
to the press. Rumors he did it himself and leaked it. Uh.
And there was a lot of negative press. Uh. And

(23:59):
these these companies not only were there huge, they were
very private and you didn't hear rumors and leaks in
the press. Uh. He didn't talk about one another in
the press. It was all very just sort of tightly controlled.
And and they were of course super ticked off about it.
And in April of seventy three, depending on who you asked,

(24:19):
he quit working there, either by resignation or by being fired.
But GM just kept mute about the departure between the two,
and so um Delirian was able to say I'm the
man who fired GM because he he was in charge
of the If GM wasn't speaking up, Delirian could say
basically whatever he wanted, and so he portrayed it. As

(24:42):
he got tired of GM, he said something like, even
if you're making six fifty grand a year, if you
hate the job, it's just not worth it, which I mean,
on the one hand, that's absolutely true, and I get
the impression that he really felt that way. On the
other hand, it's probably true that GM fired him into
kept mom about it. Yeah, Well, it's that whole like

(25:03):
keeping it quiet thing, which he didn't care about at
that point. No, but he had been living chuck largely
on GM's dimes. He expensed everything he could, including stuff
that never should have even been remotely expensed, but he
was living on GM. And suddenly he wasn't able to
expense everything. He's still got his I think his bonuses.

(25:24):
It was part of his his departure package, but he
wasn't able to expense anything. And now all of a sudden,
his lavish lifestyle is not being underwritten by anybody. Yeah.
He um, after this separation from GM, he gets, uh, divorce.
I guess he looked at Harmon and said, you know,
enough of the tic TACs. You're you're getting a little

(25:47):
long in the tooth. Uh. And so he started dating
a twenty two year old when he was forty eight
named Christina Ferrar and she was a very uh, you know,
sort of semi famous model. I guess he was pretty
famous because I remember like seeing pictures o her at
the time even and saying like, I'll know who that is. Uh.
And they had four homes. They had the apartment in

(26:10):
Manhattan and the aforementioned mansion on four and thirty four
acres in Bedminster, New Jersey, which is right down the
street from where I lived. And they had a daughter
in seventy seven named Katherine. Yeah. So, by all accounts
and in all appearances, he suddenly was in a new

(26:31):
phase of life, free from the shackles of GM's button
down corporate culture. New wife, new baby, new house, new houses,
and uh, it's time for him to reinvent himself even further.
And he's going to do that, he decides by coming
up with the most amazing car America has ever seen. Right,

(26:52):
But he had a noncompete and GM was like, hey,
part of the severance package, if you want to keep
this money coming your way, you can't just jump over
and start working for another car company. So he sort
of on the download started working on the Dolrian car
or the Dolrian Motor Company. And I think he thought,

(27:14):
I don't know, I think he definitely thought, well, this
little sort of um small production run of this weird
sports car, I'm not working with another car company, so
that probably is okay with GM. And then once he
started working, because you know, he couldn't do it all
by himself, so he had to kind of contract out

(27:34):
and work with other car companies and they said, all right,
you're now cut off. But that's also pretty rich that
he's like, oh, we're just too dinky to be considered
a competitor. And one of the one of the reasons
he wanted to found Delian Motor Company was to show Detroit,
to stick it in their eye, to show them how
to make it a real car, in very much the
same way that Ellen Musk saw it to show Detroit

(27:58):
how to make an electric car and was actually successful
in that sense. You can say what you want about him,
but he's basically single handedly the reason why we have
electric cars now. Um. Delirian tried to do kind of
the same thing to make a really cool, um, really reliable,
really um responsive car. Yeah he talking about the car. Yeah, yeah,

(28:20):
let's let's talk about it, because it is a very
cool car by by any standard. Uh. He came along
when gas mileage started to become literally for the first
time sort of on Americans minds, sort of the beginning
of the gas crunch. So he was like, I wanted
to get to be fuel efficient. Uh. I certainly wanted
to be cool, but like you said, sort of affordable, Uh,

(28:42):
something that was reliable, which is pretty funny considering how
the Delirian turned out. I think it was most known
for being completely unreliable. And the thing I remember most
about it. Uh. I know you love those gull wing doors,
But the thing I remembered most was the fact that
it was stainless steel. Sure. Uh. And I remember being
a kid and going he made a stainless steel car

(29:05):
so it would never rust. That's genius. Yeah. It never
occurred to me that it would never rust. I just
thought it was to look cool. No, that's why he
did it. I knew that when I was twelve. I
don't know how. I was a very dumb kid. Well
you were younger, so um. One of the things about
the car is that if you if you look at
it's just a very striking design. And that's because Um

(29:26):
DeLorean hired like one of the premier car designers in
the world, Georgetto. H'm sorry, Chuck, please take it, uh,
Georgetto Geo Giaio very nice. Yeah, he's the guy who
who designed the underwater car in The Spy who loved
me that James Bond drove. He also designed the Lotus

(29:48):
of Spree, which was what the car was. I think
it was a lotus of Spree that James Bond car,
and then he basically redesigned the lotus of Spree for
the d M to you twelve. Yeah, they look alike
very much so, but um Delorean's goal was to create

(30:08):
an American car that Americans had never seen before. So
it's still kind of help water. Sure. Absolutely, he needed
a lot of money to do it, and so he said,
all right, I think I can get this thing up
and run in for ninety million bucks, which is close
to four million today. And he set up a deal

(30:28):
with Puerto Rico uh to manufacture there and exchange uh
in exchange for sixty million bucks and guaranteed loans. And
then Britain stepped in and said, oh no, no, no,
said my tea. Yeah, we'll give you. Oh that was good. Uh,
we'll give you a lot more money than that, my friend.

(30:50):
If we have some troubles going on, are we here
so much so that they're literally called the troubles. I
don't know if you've heard about all the bad things
going down here between Catholics in the Protestants, uh, And
there's a lot of turmoil, and we've talked about the
stuff on our podcast They didn't say that because they
didn't have a podcast. They said, if you bring your
factory to Belfast, of all places, we'll give you, will

(31:13):
guarantee you a hundred and six million dollars in investments
and loans and grants. Yeah, and anyone who listened to
our Bobby Sands episode will remember that Belfast was like
kind of ground zero for the troubles of Northern Ireland.
And this spot that they selected, an old cow pasture,
was actually right between a Protestant housing development and a

(31:35):
Catholic housing development, and they wanted to build the factory
right between them. And they're lower at least the eighty
percent unemployment in the area. Eighty percent. Eight people out
of ten in this area were unemployed at the time.
And John Delory was going to come in build the
state of the art factory and higher thousands of these

(31:56):
people um Protestant and Catholic. And he was sensible. They
built separate entrances for each group for real um nuts.
But he came to town and in a lot of ways,
and it created this sense of pride that had been
missing among the workers that he hired. Yeah, he uh,
certainly the money was the biggest part of it. I'm

(32:17):
sure Britain was like, this is great, we can put
these folks to work. But he just wanted that hundred
and six mil. I think he got another thirty one
million from investments in the US private investment, including Johnny Carson.
I think he went in for half a million bucks,
a ton of money, especially back then. And our old
friends Sammy Davis Jr. How did he accept? He said,

(32:41):
where I really dick those doors. I'm in. I'm in
for one fifty. So he invested as well, and he's
got his money, he's got his separate entrances. And on
October two they broke ground on the plant to great protest. Yeah,

(33:02):
there were plenty of protests. Again, there are a lot
of people who are like, this is awesome. We're gonna
have good jobs. These are highly skilled technical jobs that
were that are being created out of thin air here.
But there are plenty of people who are like, this
is a British project that they're building in Belfast. Brits
go home, Yanks go home. UM. So not everybody was
on board. And as as a matter of fact, throughout

(33:22):
the time that the Belfast um factory was operating, DeLorean
spent as little time there as possible because he was
really worried about being murdered or kidnapped. UM, so he
did not hang around there um and probably rightfully so.
I'm sure he would have been a pretty good target
for UM I RA or the Ulster Liberation Force. Yeah, um,

(33:44):
who knows. And I'm sure anybody would have liked to
have kidnapped him at the time. He was extremely famous
and well known to be super rich. Um. But there
was another um kind of bad sign aside from the
protesters that some people still to this day say, is
what cursed Delirian Motor Company and maybe even John Delorrian himself.
Was this the ferry tree? Yes? Yeah, there was a

(34:07):
special plant there on the place where they were going
to build this factory. It was it was a Hawthorne
bush and they they called it like a ferry tree.
That these workers there said, We're not gonna cut this
thing down. I'm not gonna do my bad Irish accent
and try and say it that way. But they did.
Eventually someone removed it. And some people say, like that

(34:29):
was you know the the ferry tree that was Scottish. Yeah,
it was pretty Scottish. It was depending on where you
are in Ireland though that that can pass. It sounds
like groundskeeper Willie. Yeah it did so. Um the factory
did open um and again Delirian wasn't there very often.
He spent his time in Park Avenue UM. But his

(34:51):
cars were suddenly being assembled. The thing is um. During
the design phase he hired Lotus um to to build
these cars. Lotus was making cars that were assembled by hand.
Now Delirian was asking them to build cars on an
assembly line, and Lotus is like, Okay, we're gonna have
to make some compromises here, and so little by little,
the Delirian DMC twelve, the production version, became less and

(35:15):
less like the dream version, the prototype that Delirian had
come up with, and some of the compromises he made
basically sunk the car. Like it wasn't just Delirian and
his coke deal that will get to in a minute,
that sunk the company. The company was already sinking because
it was making pretty bad cars that were really cool,
but they did not go very well. No, it was

(35:35):
a bit of a disaster from the beginning. Uh. And
these documentaries really kind of dive into just the problems
with the car. Um. The first thing is it more
than doubled in the cost that he wanted to sell
it at. He wanted to sell it for twelve It
cost grand which a Corvette at the time, a brand
new Corvette was about sixteen. So all of a sudden,

(35:56):
the Delirian is a super luxury or not luxury, but
just a sports car for super rich people. Uh. It
weighed nine thousand pounds more than they thought it was
gonna weigh, not nine thousand pounds, nine thousand extra pounds. Uh.
It had trouble meeting the mileage requirements. It was supposed

(36:18):
to be super fuel efficient. It was very famously clunky,
hard to drive slow, and this is sports supposed to
be a sports car because it was. It was super
heavy at this rear mounted Renault engine that was a
V six, and it just it drove more like a
a bad stick shift station wagon than anything sporty. Yeah.

(36:42):
How how long did it take to go from zero
to sixty? It took And I don't know anything about
fast cars, but ten seconds seems like a long time
to me. It's a really long time. I think some
Teslas and some Ferraris and cars like that UM are
in like the three and a half second range. This
is ten seconds, like a minivan can probably get from

(37:02):
zero to sixty in in ten seconds and not even
a new one. So that was not good at all.
And then they also had some really bad publicity problems too,
like the windows stuck apparently the dye they used for them.
The floor mats didn't hold fast and it would run
and stay in your shoes, even your your Tomcca and
g t O shoes that you're wearing. Uh. And the

(37:24):
goal wing doors would get stuck and just would not open,
and very embarrassingly that happened at the Cleveland Auto Show.
Somebody who was looking at the car got stuck inside
for an hour because they could not get the doors open. Yeah.
I watched uh YouTube today of a Delirian drive like
road test and these two guys, you know it's a

(37:45):
modern you know sort of thing because they're wearing cargo shorts. Um.
But one of the guys says, Delirian lets his friend
drive it and they have a camera in there, and
you know, it just looked like it was hard to drive.
It didn't break super well. The reverse was this uh.
And I had an early VW batle where he had
to push down on the thing and then left and back.
But this you had to pull the stick shift up

(38:07):
and kind of over and up, and he had trouble
kind of doing that, but he finally got the hang
of it. But it it He described it as fast.
I think he said it had a lot of torque.
But when he like got it, I think starting in
like second gear, it seemed like, UM was when it
picked up because he was like, oh man, this thing
has got some real speed. UM. But I don't think

(38:28):
like off the line it was that fast. Is maybe
the deal I got you? Yeah, not if it took
ten seconds to get to sixty for sure. So there
was another thing that was going on at the time,
like like John Dolorian was earnestly trying to make these cars,
but at the same time he was also robbing his
own company blind. The first thing he did with that

(38:49):
um British investment money of I think about a hundred
and thirty million dollars was to set up a Swiss
bank accounts that he transferred the money through and then
apparent and I don't believe this has ever been proven,
but it's basically like just open your eyes people, UM,
a lot, if not most of that money made its

(39:09):
way from Switzerland to his personal accounts to finance his life.
So basically, he said, thanks for all the money, Brits,
your chumps, I'm stealing this for my own personal gain.
And that's what he did right out of the gate.
And that's why I say he was a genuine grifter.
He grifted the British government, he grifted some guy who
owned a Wichita Cadillac um uh dealership, like, he grifted

(39:32):
a lot of people. And and in addition to all
of the amazing stuff that he did, he also became
like a genuine serious died in the wool grifter. He
grifted Sammy Davis Jr. Yeah, I mean for that alone,
That's that's pretty infamous if you ask me. All Right,
it just occurred to me, we haven't taken our second break,
so let's take a late break. Well, par went out

(39:55):
for Shammy's hundred and fifty and we'll be right back. Okay.

(40:20):
So where we left off was John delian is kind
of siphoning money to fund his lavish lifestyle, which it
sounds like he kind of always did at GM as well.
And he got about a hundred and fifty million bucks,
which is about four and sixty two million dollars out
of the British government. Um, saying like you know, he

(40:42):
kind of kept it going, seeing he was gonna shut
down production, which would be bad news, you know for
everyone concerned. But eventually someone, the Iron Lady would come around,
uh in two and as we all know Thatcher didn't
take any s from anyone, and she was like enough enough, Um,
I'm getting conned by this American. We are getting conned

(41:04):
and basically said, you know what, We're not gonna be
your bank account anymore. They had to lay off about uh,
not quite half of about eleven hundred of their twenty
six workers in Belfast and DeLorean DMC went into receivership,
uh pretty quickly. Um. They planned to sell about thirty
thousand cars every year. They they didn't sell quite nine

(41:29):
thousand cars total. And he needed to get about seventeen
million dollars really fast if he wanted to keep this
insolvency from happening. So his back was up against the wall.
He needed seventeen million fast, and where else can you
do that but in the drug trade. Right. What's interesting

(41:51):
is his plight and his travails were so famous that
he was approached with an idea to sell drugs to
get money to to save his company. Like everybody knew
that this was going on, right, That's how bad oppressed
the d m C twelve got, And so he was approached.
There was a coke dealer named James Hoffman who'd been

(42:14):
smuggling drugs for Pablo Escobar's medine cartel for years. He
was also a paid informant for the FBI. And apparently, uh,
some people say that that James Hoffman said I'm going
to deliver uh John DeLorean to you guys just watch,
and that he was the one who's hatched this whole
scheme to basically entrap John Delorrian into selling a bunch

(42:38):
of cocaine in order to save delrian Motor company. That's right. Uh.
The deal was specifically almost sixty pounds of coke for
six and a half million bucks that Dolrian or you know,
through his channels with then quickly turn around and sell
for twenty four million dollars, which would um in theory

(42:59):
I guess, solve his financial problem with shutting the company down,
or at least that's how he saw it. But like
you said, he was a paid in Hoffman was a
paid informant. There was another guy on the scene who
was a real undercover FBI agent named John Ballestra, who
DeLorean thought was a mob guy. And these famous videos

(43:20):
came out. If you grew up in that era, you
saw these videos with your own eyeballs. Um, we'll get
to the twist on how that happened in a minute,
But uh, there were these famous videos of this deal
that went down in I think it was like a
hotel room where it's all very clearly laid out. And
Hoffman even gives Delrian a chance to back out, and

(43:41):
Delirian says, I want to proceed. He tries to coke.
He says, this stuff is like better than gold. Um.
But what it came down to, and we'll get to
the court case in a minute, is whether or not
they entrapped Delirian and came to him with this idea,
or whether or not he hatched the idea, and whether
or not DeLorean you know, was right in saying that, like, hey,

(44:04):
this guy was threatening my family. Uh. He said, I'm
gonna send your baby's daughter's head home in a shopping
bag and that's kind of where everything hinged in the trial, right,
And it would turn out that the jury basically said, like, yes, dude,
this guy was totally set up, ensnared, entrapped, um if

(44:24):
you want to just look at it. Most basically, John
DeLorean wasn't the one who came up with this drug scheme.
He was approached by an FBI informant to to who
proposed the drug scheme DeLorean. That in and of itself
is entrapment. But there was also mauthfeasance by the FBI
agents working the case. They would backdate like reports and

(44:45):
stuff like that and alter reports like it was just
shady from the get go. And and James Hoffman didn't
come off as a particularly trustworthy person on the stand either.
So in typical John DeLorean fashion, the jury acquitted him
on all counts in August. So he went from being
caught with twenty four kilos of cocaine to walking on

(45:09):
all counts. Um. And And that's just John Deloran. That's
the John Delorrian story. With the press covering this breathlessly
every step of the way. Yeah, and here's a couple
of addendums, one of which and I don't know if
this is true, but there are rumors that the British
government held off on closing down that plant in cahoots

(45:30):
with the American government long enough to get him set
up and captured. So what's funny is apparently Delirian was
working on his own grift where he was supposed to
put up two million dollars of the money to buy
this cocaine initially, and he didn't have it. So he said,
you know what, I'm gonna give you guys, controlling stakes

(45:51):
of my company. And what he did was give these
people that he thought were mobsters in bed with Pablo
Escobar control of a shell company that had his name
on it, that was dormant, that didn't have any assets whatsoever,
that was now owned by the British government. So he
was going to handcuff mobsters to the British government and

(46:12):
take their money, uh in the form of the cocaine
profits that he was going to share and walk away
with it. About that part, that's why he was planning
on doing. Uh. The little twist that I mentioned about
how America saw this video so readily was that Larry
flint Um, publisher of Hustler magazine, Um he got ahold

(46:34):
of those tapes, and he's the one that handed them
up for two bbs. And that's why everyone got to
see it, and they had a hard time getting a
trial off the ground because it was, you know, on
the evening news and like I was a teenager and
I saw this stuff, right, so like everybody saw it.
So eventually, you know, like like you said that they
managed to scrape a jury together that said, uh, I

(46:57):
think some of the quotes where they thought he was
a shabby or no, Hoffman was a shabby creep and
was not believable at all. But they also thought a
Dorians not innocent here, but it was entrapped meant so
we have to say not guilty, right, and they did
again he walked. But the thing is is like he's
like his finances are a mess, Like he's stolen tens,

(47:21):
if not hundreds of millions of dollars from the British government. Um.
His I don't know what he was doing with the
money because he wasn't paying the mortgage on his a
state in New Jersey. UM. So he ends up losing that. Um.
There's another frog case that was brought against him in Detroit. UM.
And he he was accused of stealing seventeen and a

(47:41):
half million dollars in regards to the to Dolirian Motor
Company and it's funding, and he managed to get away
with that one too, and his his UM attorney, Howard Whitzman,
later said that he he was unfairly accused and entrapped
in the cocaine case, but that the acquittalent of Troit
was a miracle, Like he was totally guilty and he

(48:04):
still got off um. But although he wasn't ever put
in prison, his life was just becoming more and more
ruined because he liked to live a certain way, but
he had less and less money to pay for it,
and fewer and fewer people he could scam. Yeah, his
that same attorney also said, and this is kind of
nails it on the head. I think he said, I've
represented many people over the years, but John de Lorean

(48:26):
had one of the most warped views of right and
wrong and uh. In the documentaries with the footage, you
can really get a sense that he really justified a
lot of what he did. Um, you know, do you
keep the car company going to keep that plan open?
And that those are the things that people who have
been drifting and are and are entitled, like you'll often

(48:46):
hear someone describing them as not really having an understanding
of what's truly right and wrong. That Bedminster estate eventually
would wind up being sold to Donald Trump. Uh, and
that's when you hear about the Bedminster golf Club. That's
the one they're talking about. That was Delorean's estate. Yeah,
the one that you lived by, the one that the

(49:09):
other reason. Uh. He got divorced to for Our just
a couple of months after the verdict. And although like
modern day for Our really kind of gushes about him.
She was like, oh, John was just the best and
we had so much fun, and but she got the
heck out of Dodge. He got married to Sally Baldwin
in two thousand two. They had a daughter. He had

(49:31):
plans to hatch a new car company. I think for
a while he wanted to make a watch, um that
was gonna be powered by your movement, which I think
is a real thing now, right. I not that one,
but they there are watches that are powered by that
your movement, right. I I went to look up and
see if any of these watches were ever made, and

(49:52):
when I stumbled upon was a very limited edition watch.
There were four and fifty of them. This is not company,
but someone got ahold of his original Dolorean and made
watches out of them. And I'm not a watch guy,
but I saw this watch and I was like, oh, man,
I think it's a nice looking Oh yeah, but it's
two grands. So watch guy, that's not happening. Speaking of

(50:16):
collector stuff, apparently in the nine American Express Christmas catalog
they were offering gold twenty four gold plated Doloreans and
two of them sold. So two gold plated Dolorians exist
in the world. One of them is at like Peterson
Auto Museum in Los Angeles, I think, but for a
while it was in the lobby of Snyder National Bank

(50:39):
of Snyder, Texas. Some Snyder oil man, I'm sure, scraped
up one of the two from the American Express Christmas
pocket in the lobby, and I want I don't know
about that one either. I don't want something to go
by unmarked. He had a daughter, another like you said,
another daughter, Sheila. He was seventy seven at the time.

(51:03):
He died three years later. After he had a daughter.
He died three years later at a j d And
that nuts. Yeah, he died of a stroke. But how
was he buried. He was buried in a black motorcycle jacket, jeans,
denim shirt, and sunglasses tucked into the jacket. Yeah, probably

(51:23):
de Lorian sunglasses, I would guess probably. And there's ae. Yeah,
it's got a d M C twelve with the doors open. Yeah,
I looked it up. I'm probably gonna get the same thing. Yeah,
the same headstone. Yeah, I'll be like, I just make
his again, but put my name on. Uh. So we

(51:43):
can't not talk about back to the Future a little
bit here at the end um Obviously, that's where the
car got so much notoriety was from that huge, huge
movie that was turned into a time machine, and it
was supposed to be a Mustang. They had a deal
with the producers with Mustang where they were gonna, you know,
it's a product placement thing, and apparently Bob Gayle, who

(52:06):
had been working on the script with Zamka, said, uh,
Doc doesn't drive effing Mustang. Even though I never I
know this is nipicky, but I never thought the DeLorean
was Doc's car. I figured he just sourced it for
this project, right, Yeah, I never gave it that much
thought either. But I mean Bob Gales like the he's
like the writer of the script, you know, of course,

(52:29):
But because the Dolorean was very undependable, much like Bruce
the Shark and Jaws, this car did not work well
at all, and the apparently the prop guys and the
FX guys were always being called on set just to
get this thing like running, and they had a really
hard time filming that sequence in the parking lot. Yeah,
I mean, like the car broke down. That's how bad

(52:52):
those things were. And this was just a couple of
years after it was built. This wasn't like years and
years later, like this car should have been running just fine.
So I find that hilarious. But there's one other thing
about that movie too, to those of us to to
like my my cohort and beyond, that movie completely rehabilitated
and changed the opinion of the DeLorean and John Delorian himself.

(53:17):
Had that movie not come along, he would have been
known as like a coke dealer who got off, a grifter,
a scam artist, and somehow being associated with Back to
the Future in his car being chosen as a time
machine just changed the way that people see him. I
think in history. Yeah, I mean if you've gotta I
don't know how much they are, but if you've got
a lot of money, you can get one of those

(53:38):
tricked out like uh like Doc Brown's that that dude
from uh that wrote Ready Player one has got one
famously with the you know, the little rocket boosters on
the back and all that fun stuff that flex capacitor.
So he's got like the time machine version while oh yeah,
that's what I'm saying. You can you can buy those

(53:58):
like fully kidded out, look like the Back to the
Future car. That's pretty cool. I want to drive one
one day. If someone's got one, I'll fly to you
and have dinner with you and your family if you'll
let me drive it. You should look at George. Look
up George rr Martin. He has one and he's in
New Merco, which you love now, so go visit him.

(54:20):
All the all the famous rich geeks have him. So
that's it hunh forre Delrian. Yeah, that's a fun one
that I love these episodes. Good story, good story, Good job, Chuck. Uh.
And since Chuck said good story, I said, good job.
You put those two together. Carry the one you've got.
Listener mail uh, oh boy, I should read this one,

(54:44):
but it's super long, so we'll save that. Our old
friend put together a best tangents list again from the
year great. But well, we'll read that one later because
this one. I'm gonna call this Chuck's a vacation. Hey, guys.
Over the New Year's holiday, my husband, kids, errands of
my sister's family rented a big condo in northern Michigan.
The first morning, over breakfast, I asked my sister how

(55:06):
she slept. Actually, pretty terrible. We must be right over
the furnace. It was really loud, kept banging on and
off all night. Maybe I need some white noise. And
I said, you know, Charles W. Chuck Bryant prefers brown noise,
and I have to say I agree with them and
find brown noise superior to white noise. And yes, I
said the full name, mimicking Josh introducing him. You put

(55:27):
you play a part two. Chuck likes brown noise. I've
never heard of that. Then we promptly went through the
various noises and the colors, and all of us found brown,
all of us to be the most soothing. The backstory
here is my sister is the one who introduced me
to your show. You both love it. We all love
the random topics. Thank you too are a hoot. When
we're wrapping up a phone call or text exchange, are

(55:49):
running jokes. Is to say, we're really busy because we
need to listen to an episode now if excuse me,
I need to get back to understanding how circus families work.
That's a good one. That is a good one. Then
half the time we start talking about what we found
fascinating about the last episode. Circling back, my sister tried
the brown noise, slept like a baby for the rest
of the vacation, and so Chuck really saved the day.

(56:11):
And that is from Hillary. Are uh ved? NL And
uh she didn't mention her sister's name, which is really selfish.
Well thanks a lot, Hillary, Uh and you're unnamed sister.
I'm kidding, of course, no, of course. Um. If you
want to be like Hillary and not be selfish, you

(56:31):
can send us an email to Stuff podcast at iHeart
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