Let's Talk About John DeLorean

Colin celebrity weirdo Carmaker. She pretty much nailed it in 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 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 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 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.

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 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.

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

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 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 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 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 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, 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

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 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 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, 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 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

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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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

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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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, 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, 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 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. 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 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 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. 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 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,

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 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 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

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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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, 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, 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 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 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, 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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, 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, 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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. 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 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 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

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 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 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 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 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 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 for Shammy's hundred and fifty and we'll be right back. Okay. 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 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 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

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 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 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

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 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 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 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,

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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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

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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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.

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 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 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 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, 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

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.

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 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 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. 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, 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 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 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

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.

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 can send us an email to Stuff podcast at iHeart radio dot com. Stuff you Should Know is a production

of iHeart Radio. For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows,