John DeLorean dies
I've cut about half of this out as it was massive.
John DeLorean Obituary (from the Telegraph)
John DeLorean, who died on Saturday aged 80, was best known in Britain for his disastrous scheme to build his famous stainless steel gull-wing sports car, the DeLorean DMC-12; brilliant at self-promotion, he was less assiduous when it came to other people's money, and he did nothing to enhance the reputations of car salesmen anywhere.
<script src="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/core/NetGravity/mpu.js" language="javascript"></script> <script language=\"\"\"JavaScript\"\"\" src="http://ads.telegraph.co.uk/js.ng/site=news&spaceid=mpu&logstatus=t&transactionID=1111499488292&Section=news/obituaries&view=details&gender=Male&postcode=FY2_0RH&birthyear=1973&ag=31&status=Married&city=Blackpool&country=GB&xml=/news/2005/03/22/db2202.xml"></script> Surface glamour was DeLorean's forte. He was 6 ft 4 ins tall and had matinee idol looks (embellished, it is said, by a chin implant). He loved the Hollywood lifestyle, and had squired Tina Sinatra and Ursula Andress before taking as his third wife Christina Ferrare, a striking model and actress.
This was the man who came to the British Government in 1978 with the plan to build a revolutionary motor car at a factory in Northern Ireland. He also came with a reputation as a first-class innovator and marketing man who had once been tipped to be president of General Motors, although this was a somewhat selective interpretation of his CV.
DeLorean succeeded in extracting millions of pounds of taxpayers' money for his venture, before his company collapsed in 1982 with the loss of 2,700 jobs. Although his vehicle attained a starring role as a time-machine in the Spielberg-produced film Back to the Future (1985), it suffered severe quality control problems and failed to sell in any numbers.
Successive Labour and Conservative governments, however, had seen the project as a symbol of Westminster's commitment to a prosperous Northern Ireland, and had continued to back the venture despite well-aired doubts about its viability. In 1978 Roy Mason, the Northern Ireland Secretary, had told the cabinet that the project was "of the utmost political, social and psychological importance" and that it would be "a hammer blow to the IRA".
By the time it was over, the British taxpayer had contributed £78 million in subsidies to produce a mere 8,500 cars. The British government then spent more than 10 years trying to sue DeLorean's auditors, but its claim was thrown out by an American judge, and it eventually settled out of court for £18 million.
There were allegations of fraud after an associate claimed that he had conspired with DeLorean to defraud the government, but DeLorean escaped unscathed, acquitted by a court in Detroit in 1986. In 1982 he was arrested for importing £14.7 million worth of coca1ne into the United States, but despite videotaped evidence of him taking delivery of a suitcase full of the drug, he was cleared when an American jury decided that he had been a victim of entrapment by the FBI.
DeLorean was never to recover his former lustre. In 1989 a court ruled that he must pay $53 million restitution over the collapse of his car company; and four months after he had set up, in May 1999, a new enterprise to build a lightweight plastic sports car, he was forced to declare himself bankrupt.
In 2000, a federal court seized DeLorean's 434-acre estate in New Jersey, which he had bought in 1981 and used as security against his business ventures. After his arrest on drugs charges, DeLorean had become a born-again Christian, and had thrown a picnic on his estate for 200 like-minded individuals; when one guest thanked him for his lavish hospitality, DeLorean replied: "Nothing is too good for Jesus" - and went off to be baptised in his solar-heated swimming pool.
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Originally Posted by Tasseltine
Losing Gracefully Since September 2010
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