-MAN ON INTERCOM: John, can you hear me? -Yes, sir.
I'll be talking to you over this intercom when I'm out here.
I'm going to pump up that cuff now.
Okay.
The test is about to begin.
-Is your first name John? -Yes.
Now, during the first 53 years of your life,
did you ever do anything dishonest, illegal or immoral?
Uh, yes.
Before 1981, did you ever engage in an improper business practice
or put false information on an official form or document?
Uh, yes.
Before age 54, did you ever cheat someone
or take advantage of anyone in a business deal?
Yes, I would say.
Okay, John. How was it that time?
A little nervous.
Well, when you get into those general questions,
you start thinking back about bad used cars you sold people
or about maybe the time you committed a little adultery.
You know, those are...
-I must say that if you really... -Causes you to think back.
You go through your whole life.
DAVID: John DeLorean is one of the maverick rogues of his day.
And there are very few of those guys around today.
STEVE: He was a dreamer.
He wanted to push things beyond where other people had taken them
and in a way that's a marvelous and appealing characteristic,
but it's also extremely dangerous.
John DeLorean was a winner,
a loser,
a champion,
a relentless fool.
This guy was the quintessential leading man
that Hollywood producers dream of, and he was real.
I've always wondered why a feature film hasn't been made of John's life.
I think it'd be a great movie.
Obviously, I'd had this dream.
I wanted to build this automobile company.
Everybody said it's inconceivable
that any new automobile company could survive.
I'm always interested in the story of the quintessential outsider,
full of ambition and hope
and works his way up and ascends to the position he was in.
He had it all. His own auto empire,
a beautiful wife, children.
He was a golden boy.
DAVID: And of course his colossal fall is almost Shakespearean.
REPORTER: John DeLorean, who gave up a shot
at the presidency of General Motors
to build his own futuristic sports car, is in jail this morning.
The thing that's remarkable about DeLorean's story
is that it has all of these incredibly powerful elements.
It's got a marvelous celebrity couple.
It's got drugs.
It's got drug dealing.
It's got FBI guys.
It's got this incredible political backdrop.
It's the sort of story that if it hadn't happened,
you wouldn't dare to make it up.
The interesting thing is all of a sudden now,
a number of people have been back at me
wanting to do a movie of my life.
ADAM: It always seemed to be
a story that had been around Hollywood as early as probably the early '80s.
ALEX: Often good ideas produce several films at the same time.
With John DeLorean, it was taken to a new level.
NICK: Every single one of these movies had different people from John's life,
different family members, different underlying material,
which made it this fascinating race
to get the movie made,
because each one would have been a decidedly different story.
Still to this day, not one's been made yet.
BOB: Every so often you hear,
"Somebody's going to make a movie about DeLorean."
Knock on wood, it'll happen because I think it could be great.
ALEX: He was this chameleon-like figure,
who could appear one thing to one person
and another thing totally to a different person.
I think in a way that's why so many scripts have been written about him
because he is open to interpretation.
You get the impression that he's either a beleaguered man
who was discredited and manipulated by big business in this country
or he was the greatest conman to ever come down the pike.
We have an opportunity this morning to visit with him.
Would you welcome Mr. John DeLorean?
(APPLAUSE)
You shoot him for your purposes over the arc of how many years?
He ages a bit.
MAN: Mostly... early '70s...
-MAN: ...to early '80s. -WOMAN: To early '80s.
ALEC: So, there's a spread and he ages during that time.
And I wanna see how his behavior ages.
I need to see clips that are a range of that.
JOHN ON TV: But driving you all this time was this desperate need
to make this car thing go.
My pride was so intense that nothing in the world
would let me let this business, this car with my name on it, go down.
ALEC: That's the corner of his eye.
You draw a straight line up the brow, overlaps the corner of the eye.
-I think it's got to come in a bit. -It's got to come over?
EILEEN: The involvement with cocaine. Talk about that.
JOHN: Well, it's a peculiar thing
because, you know, in my life, I have never, ever seen cocaine,
touched cocaine, used cocaine or been in the presence of anybody...
ALEC: All the time I've looked at DeLorean,
before, I thought, where is he manipulating?
Where are the peeks behind the curtain of who he really is?
And then when you play the person,
you say to yourself, "Forget about me looking at DeLorean as a viewer
"on a TV show and saying, 'What's behind the curtain with him?'"
When you start to play him you go, "No, no, no, no, no.
"He's not guilty of anything. He didn't do anything."
In fact, it's the opposite. He's a hero, in his mind. He's a hero.
And you have to play that. You have to play who he thinks he is.
And you present him as who he thinks he is to the world.
And you let the audience make up their mind.
EILEEN: You suddenly thought you were involved with the mob
and you were frightened for your life and your children's lives.
JOHN: Really what happened...
ALEC: I showed my wife and she just thinks it's funny.
She said, "Alec, I can't believe this is what they pay you to do."
HILARIA: Oh, God. What are you doing? You're doing a movie?
We do re-enactment footage
of DeLorean's drama, his caper, his escapades
and shoot them as a movie
and cut re-enactment footage into documentary footage
of a movie about DeLorean
and what he did and what he went through.
And the good news is I don't have to bother with any of that. They do.
I'm gonna just go put the make-up on and go try to be DeLorean.
HILLEL: For John DeLorean, growing up in Detroit,
every kid's dream was to go into the auto industry.
The one thing you have to understand about John DeLorean
is he was a brilliant engineer.
And so to start with, he had some really good instincts
and he had great talent.
DON: DeLorean thrived in the car business first at Packard,
for a short while at Chrysler. And somebody sought him out
at General Motors and offered him his choice of five divisions.
He took on Pontiac, which was the old ladies' division at the time,
and it was really the place where he could shine the most.
ANNOUNCER: General manager, Mr. John Z. DeLorean.
(AUDIENCE WHISTLES)
BILL: In those days, the late '50s and early '60s at GM,
Pontiac particularly was exciting to be there
because they were almost ready to be dropped.
Of course that was the kind of thing that gave you the incentive
to come up with new ideas and make them happen.
JOHN: I started as a very unsophisticated young engineer
and I was given an opportunity to attain a success in a business world
far beyond anything I'd ever imagined I was capable of.
TAMIR: This was a special guy
who was gonna change the industry forever
and truly become a legend at the company.
CREW MEMBER: Scene two Alpha, take three. Marker.
BILL: The story on the GTO
is that we were about ready to do a brand-new line
and we had the '64 Tempest to-be
in the garage there, with John and a couple of other guys.
-JOHN: Hey, Bill. -John, you heading home?
Yeah, I was about to.
Wanted to stop by and see how you were coming along.
Well, I think she's about as good as we're gonna get her.
He would encourage everybody to do something new and different.
I was hoping maybe we'd have something, I don't know, sexier.
-You mean sportier? -Yeah.
More high performance, you know?
Well, our bigger 389 engine
has the exact same dimensions as the 326 in here,
so we could swap that out no problem.
How would the car handle the extra power?
That's the thing.
We'd have to fit the appropriate transmission and rear axle.
But we do that, it'd definitely be sexier, John.
Shoot, we could even run this in NASCAR.
I say we do it.
-Really? -Absolutely.
But then what? You think you can actually sell it?
You let me worry about that, Bill.
(TIRES SCREECH)
JOHN: I was just gonna drive it back and forth to work
and I had a marvelous time with it,
and I found that every time I lent it to somebody
to use for a day or two, I couldn't get it back.
I said, "Well, there may be a market for something like that."
What the hell is this?
That's a GTO.
It stands for Gran Turismo Omologato,
which I think is Italian for "fast as hell."
But it'll beat every car on a track or American street.
And it's still a Pontiac.
Hold on a second. Turn that off.
The 14th floor is never gonna go
for putting such a large engine in such a small frame.
Well, GM forbade putting a so-called big block
beyond, I believe, 350 cubic inches
in a medium-size car.
The guys upstairs approve this?
I don't need their approval.
It's a new product, John.
All new products need upper-management approval.
TAMIR: John was interesting.
He loved really just figuring out ways to bend the rules as much as possible.
But it's not a new product. It's an options package on the new Tempest.
And one that puts a real tiger under the hood.
-It's manipulative. -It's marketing.
Pontiac is primarily the division for older buyers.
What are they gonna want with a hot rod?
We're the division for older buyers because that's how we view ourselves.
We've got to anticipate what younger buyers want
before they even know what they want, and once they realize, give them this.
So, how many do you wanna produce?
You're the sales manager. You tell me. I was thinking about 30,000.
(LAUGHS)
-You're out of your damn mind! -John, be reasonable.
I can't imagine us selling even close to 5,000, but...
Let's start with that number
and let's hope that they don't rust on the lot.
At that time, the sales manager of Pontiac thought it was stupid
and he refused to schedule
more than I think about 4,000 or 5,000 for the year.
DON: It was an outlaw move.
DeLorean snuck it past the GM watchdogs
by a sort of sleight of hand.
It was just an options package.
Despite his feeling it wouldn't sell, I think we sold 45,000 in the first year.
HILLEL: What he figured out, before anyone figured it out,
was that this exploding youth movement
had interest in cars as something
that would represent the way they wanted to look to the world.
(ROARS)
It was the perfect moment in which John
was able to marry both his brilliant engineering
as well as his marketing prowess
to create the muscle car.
DON: The muscle car era really advanced Detroit.
It made money. It made Pontiac.
It made those three letters, GTO, legendary.
It was an odd parallel between the Pontiac GTO and John Z. DeLorean.
The GTO was a risk taken
and I think it convinced DeLorean
that taking a risk no one else was willing to step up to
and making it work at all costs was how you did it.
And after you do it once, why stop?
ALEC: What I see about DeLorean for me,
he took such risks.
And the problem with people who take risks like that
is that when they win, when they make their calculated risk,
they become emboldened and they take more risks
and then they take risks outside of their normal sphere.
Between this and the other, it'll generate
about 4.5, not less than 4.5 mil.
ALEC: Risk-taking in the automotive industry
and risk-taking with a bunch of drug dealers in a hotel
are two different things, but your confidence in yourself
is very, very high.
You don't make mistakes. You don't see them coming.
-Better than gold! -I'll say, "It's better than gold."
This stuff weighs more. Gold weighs more than this.
Gold weighs more than this, for God's sakes!
Better than gold!
Gold weighs more than this, for God's sakes!
-Hi, John. -Hi.
Jerry West. We're the FBI.
ALEC: But in the end, when he's arrested and he tilts his head back
and you have a shot, hopefully, looking down from the ceiling...
and his head should crane up
and look right up into a thing and look off camera,
and he's thinking... We should cut to what he's thinking.
He's worried about his family, he's worried about losing everything.
And there were, like, four or five things, if he just made a little adjustment here
and made this decision differently there,
all of it would have turned out completely differently.
DON: DeLorean was clearly a fast mover at GM in the early '70s.
TAMIR: Whoever makes the most money at GM is the most important person,
and everything he touched turned to gold.
So, by the time John reaches the 14th floor,
better known as the executive level, he's in his mid-40s.
If he just plays his cards right,
he's poised to be the next president of General Motors,
the largest corporation in the world.
DON: GM was very intentional on making executives colorless
and DeLorean was a highly Technicolor person.
He wore open collars. He wore sideburns.
He spent his weekends in California.
You know what an evil influence that is.
HILLEL: He gets significant plastic surgery on his face
to give himself a stronger jaw.
He starts weight-lifting and losing weight.
PATRICK: He and his first wife separated
and then he started dating actresses and models,
women that were a lot younger than him,
and who a lot of GM executives and their wives thought
were age-inappropriate.
I have a reasonably strong sex drive,
which I happen to think is an important part of any guy...
No man who ever accomplished something
didn't have that one characteristic.
TAMIR: He married a second wife, Kelly Harmon. Blonde bombshell.
She was 19 at the time.
DON: The General Motors PR department
added a couple of years to her age
when the press releases first went out about the marriage.
TAMIR: She lives there in Detroit for two or three years,
becomes disillusioned with the marriage and leaves him.
And within a year and a half, he's married to Cristina Ferrare,
the, at that point, world's top supermodel.
PATRICK: Then he ended up, of course, in the fashion magazines,
you know, that kind of thing,
and while that enhanced his image outside of the company,
it created problems for him within.
GM can't stand this. It's pissing them off.
And he goes back to them and says, "What are you guys worried about?
"Look at the sales numbers."
Tom, how do you feel about our retail sales job this past year?
How do I feel? John, I feel great.
PATRICK: Both at Pontiac and at Chevrolet,
he was making so much money for the company.
And all the executives that he reported to,
who were upset with his lifestyle,
upset with him, couldn't quite figure out how he was doing so well,
but they could see the numbers,
and they knew that showed up in their bonus checks.
That was the interesting dilemma for GM with John DeLorean.
NARRATOR: This is Boston Harbor
and those are Volkswagens.
They're coming in.
PATRICK: One of the tragic flaws of GM,
and again this is something he knew,
is that the company was all too willing to do what it was doing year after year
because it was working,
even though they were ignoring, for instance, the small-car market
and let it go a lot of time to foreigners.
He saw what was coming from a lot of these imports.
These smaller, more fuel-efficient, better-quality cars
and he knew the writing was on the wall.
Obviously, I saw the trends very clearly
and I wanted to react to them a little bit perhaps more aggressively
than other members of the industry management.
TAMIR: He had big aspirations. He wanted to stay at GM.
He wanted to be president. He wanted to do things,
take the company in directions they weren't willing to do
because they were so comfortable
being the fat cat at the time.
Being the number-one car company in the world
and that leads to his demise.
PATRICK: There were executives who resented him.
Probably the most prominent is a guy named Roger Kyes.
It was just a total difference of opinion.
I think he considered me capricious and superficial
and I considered him a pompous ass.
PATRICK: Those enemies in the company
slowly developed a cabal, if you will, against DeLorean.
In 1972, they tasked John with putting together a speech
to talk about GM's quality. The infamous Greenbrier speech.
They pre-read all the speeches weeks in advance.
They noticed that the speech not only criticizes the quality of the cars,
but it criticizes a lot of the executives that are currently there.
Some of his own bosses.
And they censored a lot of the stuff that he could say in the speech,
but, you know, he wasn't gonna let it just rest at that.
There's nothing. There's something you forgot.
That's the one I'm actually giving at Greenbrier on Saturday.
This is the speech I should be giving.
What I should be saying is in here somewhere, buried like Kyes wants.
-You think it's personal? -Oh, sure it's personal.
I wonder how much longer I can do this dance.
I mean, at this rate, it'll be ten years of me
pushing papers that I didn't write before I'm named president and that's...
That's not gonna work at all.
Any thoughts on how you might accelerate that?
As a matter of fact, I've got a few ideas, yeah.
If this original speech were to be leaked,
there would be some blowback, sure. But I'd be vindicated.
TAMIR: And in this particular situation,
what he wants is for the public and the press to sort of shame GM
and push them in the direction that he wanted the company to go in.
-Good to see you, Roy. -And you, John.
TAMIR: And he felt that by calling these people out,
that this was gonna somehow prop him up
and propel him even faster into the presidency.
PATRICK: His initial speech leaked to the press.
And it was all over the news
that John DeLorean was highly critical of General Motors' quality.
HILLEL: DeLorean claimed his enemies had leaked these speeches out.
It became apparent that people close to DeLorean
had leaked these speeches out.
TAMIR: You've got to remember this was a person who was only rewarded
for taking big risks, dangerous moves.
It didn't work.
HILLEL: No doubt DeLorean was booted by members of the board
and the corporate directors
and that forced him out very abruptly in 1973.
DeLorean is ejected from the company
in what should have been a very embarrassing event.
However, he finds a way of making it all heroic.
Being part or being one-seventh or one-tenth of some committee
is a very unappealing thing to me.
Obviously, it was very rewarding financially
and it would have been easy to sit there for another 17 years
collecting a half a million
or three quarters of a million dollars a year.
But that really didn't appeal to me very much.
A full career would have been another 15 years.
Well, what's he gonna do?
He's going to count beans with the other executives.
Compared to creating new, cool products like GTOs,
it's completely different.
There is no way DeLorean would have lasted to age 65.
Wow, I can't even imagine us selling even close to 5,000,
but let's start with that number.
I've got another car, a stainless-steel car
you're gonna be crazy about.
Yeah, okay. Good luck with that, John.
(LAUGHS)
No, that's what the line should be.
The bad version would be,
"Next thing, you're gonna tell us you want to build a stainless-steel car."
PATRICK: In the back of his mind, this concept car was always stirring.
What he called an ethical car.
JOHN: Well, we're doing a sports racing car here.
It's going to be designed to have an eternal life.
And, so we're using a non-corrosive material
so that it'll just stay together forever and ever.
So, it's going to be very beautiful aesthetically.
TAMIR: He wanted to build
a sophisticated contemporary-looking sports car for the masses.
That wasn't the norm.
If you were gonna get something that's that exotic and interesting,
you're gonna have to get a Ferrari or a Lamborghini,
where they only make a few hundred cars a year.
John was trying to make a mass-produced car.
He set out to compete with the big boys.
It's difficult, if not impossible, to start up a car company.
Really, the last one you could name was Chrysler in the 1920s
and even Chrysler went through bankruptcy.
There aren't many people who do that, who wanna risk it all.
PATRICK: When he left GM, and more or less was forced to leave,
that became the driving force in his motivation.
"I'm gonna show them."
And so, it was part dream and part revenge.
JOHN: There it is, what we always talked about.
What do you think about being named the head of the entire product program
for the first mass-produced car since Chrysler?
John, look, obviously, I'm flattered, but...
No buts, Bill, and I'm not flattering you.
This is what you and I were built for. This is real innovation.
Does innovation include a pension?
-(JOHN LAUGHS) Who's asking? -My wife.
Well, you tell Nina, the greater the risk, the greater the reward.
And besides, this finally puts you in the driver's seat.
Lemonade, boys?
-Bill. Honey. -Thank you.
Thank you.
And you've got the money for this?
Oh, yeah. We've got several sources of initial investment.
You two are... quite persuasive.
-(LAUGHS) -The lemonade was my idea.
-It's delicious. -You talk to your wife.
BILL: I probably thought about it
and my wife would say we should probably not have done it,
having been at GM where money was never a problem.
Yeah, you were sort of gambling
and you hoped this thing was gonna work out.
The company really has its founding in two people,
that's John DeLorean and Bill Collins.
DON: Collins never reached for glory.
He didn't have so much ego that he needed his name on the product.
He was always behind-the-scenes.
He was the guy who made DeLorean look good. Many times.
COLLEEN: Bill is a super, wonderful gentleman.
He is one of the world's finest men. He really is. He is a good man.
And, it was like his dream was to do this.
BILL: I think, from the beginning,
John's major concern always was fundraising.
So, my objective was to start out building the first prototype.
BOB: This was definitely Bill's baby.
I mean, if there was an issue that had anything to do with the car,
Bill Collins was the guy leading the charge.
That played out basically for the first three years of the project.
When we finished the first prototype,
it was a huge event because now we could say, you know,
"This isn't some, you know, dream-kind of fakery here.
"This is the real McCoy."
BILL: We hadn't solved all the engineering problems yet,
but it was exciting. It turned out to be a great car, in my opinion.
To be part of this thing that might grow into something
that who knows where it would go,
it was electrifying.
NARRATOR: This is a presentation of the DeLorean Motor Company.
Imagine how many of the men
who have headed each of the major automotive manufacturers
have wanted to create a product starting with a clean sheet of paper.
That is what the DeLorean Motor Company intends to do.
We were basically a company with no foundation.
And the less you have to secure an investment,
the more risky you are to an investor.
And we were pretty risky.
Our asset was John's background experience,
and so he really had to be what we initially were selling.
NARRATOR: John DeLorean wants to build a car...
JERRY: You have to portray him as being on the top of the mountain,
being adored by the world as a savior of the auto industry.
And we were the dog-and-pony show experts.
We'd do the setup, we'd do the show
and then at the precise moment, John DeLorean would come in.
They'd actually see the man and it'd look like he was levitating.
(MOUTHING) Smile.
Most of you have already seen my lovely wife, Cristina.
I know she's likely the real reason you're all here tonight.
(LAUGHTER)
But in all seriousness, I do have her to thank
along with many others.
In particular, I'd like to recognize the man I handpicked,
essentially stole from GM,
to head up the entire DeLorean Motor Company Product Program,
perhaps the finest automotive engineer I've ever met in my entire life.
Bill Collins.
(APPLAUSE)
I know that we may be the new boy on the block,
but I also know that on this,
the bicentennial of the American Revolution,
we can start making our version of the American dream a reality.
Allow me to introduce the first incarnation
in the evolution of my dream,
our first vehicle codenamed the DMC-12,
the DeLorean motor car.
(APPLAUSE)
(AUDIENCE GASPS)
JERRY: In the early stages, this was all but the Second Coming.
It was described in Detroit as significant as the invention of the Ford Model A,
that this was gonna change everything.
ZACH: I don't think I've sat in one of these
probably since my dad had one on the farm.
There's not much of a tie
for me to the car, as much as people would think.
I don't know if that makes sense.
Being young when this car was built,
you just don't understand the magnitude and the gravity of it.
You know, it's flying over your head at a thousand miles an hour
and, you know, it's like my dad built this car.
You know, it's got our name on it.
I mean, when I'm in it or I see it,
I see my father, I feel my dad.
But between me and this car, it's a...
I think it's a love-hate relationship, probably.
Half of the time I don't even know what to think of it,
you know, to be honest with you, so...
Probably the closest person I've ever been close to
my whole fucking life was my father.
He adopted me when I was, I mean, two weeks old.
As far as, like, DeLorean or DeLorean Motor Company,
you know, it was just Dad going to work, Dad's building a car.
I had no clue how famous he was,
I had no clue how famous my mother was.
I think we moved to New York, probably, I would say, in '74
because then my sister was born in '77.
Throughout my life I understood that there was this man, John DeLorean.
And with this man, John DeLorean, came this history
of all the things that are, again,
iconically encompassed by the car.
And, then there was my dad.
And I understood that they were two different people.
When I was little, my dad was at the peak of everything.
There are pictures of us and I used to say it's the royal family.
My mom was always so perfect and put-together
and my brother always in his perfect little suit.
We were so cute.
Like, seriously, we were just so cute.
My dad was my best friend.
He just... He taught me everything. He taught me how to fish.
He taught me how to drive. He taught me how to ride a motorcycle.
This is everything he had been working for.
This was his dream. I mean, being married to my mom, having a family,
having an apartment on Fifth Avenue.
Buying a farm out in New Jersey.
Having the car company.
That was probably the best time in his life.
ALEC: Can you see this well? Is this lit well enough for you?
Because, I mean, I'm a firm believer that that can't be faked.
And now, how happy she is, I don't know.
She seems pretty happy, but she's a kid.
They're always fairly happy as a rule.
But look at how happy he is. Himself. The subject of the film.
I don't think that can be... I think he's very happy.
And I have a picture of my family
and I'm a couple of years older than my wife than he is from his wife,
so I get this.
I get this.
And the problem is that he wanted both.
And when you want both, you can have both, but that's very tough to do.
INTERVIEWER: Cristina, you have been married to this man for seven years.
Tell me about John.
Well, unfortunately, for everyone else, all of our other friends,
they do not know John the way I do, and if they did...
-INTERVIEWER: Well, that may be better. -No, no. Let me be more specific.
Because most of the people know John as a businessman and an executive,
but I know him as a husband and a loving father
and he's a totally unselfish, gentle, giving human being.
I grew up and married Prince Charming.
-INTERVIEWER: Really? -That's exactly how I feel. Yes.
All right, John, describe her to me.
(LAUGHS)
Yeah, of course, it would take days,
but I never in my wildest dreams
ever believed that my life could be so complete and so happy.
And, when there's any kind of a family crisis,
she suddenly becomes the Rock of Gibraltar.
She really is the solid, stable part of our relationship, whether it's...
MORENA: She was very perky.
Peppy. Upbeat.
And she is that way in a lot of the footage that I've seen.
Do you want me to walk you to the elevator like I do every morning?
No?
Goodbye, sweetheart. Have a wonderful day. Goodbye, darling.
That's John. Anyway...
MORENA: But every woman who has it all and who works
and who has children and who is in love
and who has a loving family,
you cannot be a hundred percent at everything.
When I was watching footage, it was to sort of see
what was the public Cristina versus what was the personal.
Where the cracks were.
I just found out a few hours ago.
I know nothing. I caught a plane. I'm here.
MORENA: She's so composed.
It's amazing, right?
I mean, I feel like she was caught
in between what she wanted things to be like
and... And this is just me speculating, obviously,
but what she wanted things to be like and what the reality was.
Not yet.
We were just rehearsing. Sit down.
-What are you doing? -Sit down, you little...
MORENA: And obviously, with what happened in their lives,
with John being arrested, that's a huge... I think that's the culmination of it all.
And, along the way, I'm sure that in their relationship,
there were moments where she was
very much in love, but wondering...
You know, he's incredibly driven and ambitious,
and how does she fit into that picture?
Eventually, the car will get built,
but right now, I'm trying to build a brand.
Well, it concerns me where we're gonna raise the children.
Well, wherever we set up shop, we won't have to spend much time there.
All that matters is which government gives us the most money.
Well, it matters to me.
And it matters to the kids.
Don't worry.
It's gonna be great for all of us.
Trust me.
REPORTER: Northern Ireland is now experiencing rioting
on a scale not seen for many years.
Why pick Belfast, Ireland, to build your motor plant?
It's very simple. Nobody anywhere in the world
would come up with the financing we needed.
Now, nobody else would go to Belfast
because it's such a terrible, dangerous place to be.
BARRIE: I read in the newspapers that John DeLorean had secured
the investment he needed to establish his car project in Northern Ireland
against the background of the famous Troubles
that was rife at that time.
REPORTER: Prolonged civil unrest between Catholics and Protestants
scares off industrialists, depriving Northern Ireland of jobs,
which it needs more than any other area of Britain.
TAMIR: The unemployment was insane. It was 30, 40 percent.
And John had something to offer.
Jobs.
The Labour government in Britain at the time
was willing to put in subsidies, loans,
a piece of land.
But here's the catch.
It's got a population that has never built a car before.
There's no pre-existing structure to build a car company there
and you have to do it in two years.
(LAUGHS) I mean, are you kidding me?
And all they have at this point is a hand-built prototype.
So, there was a long list of things to accomplish,
to eventually be able to productionize the car.
It became clear to everyone
that they needed to have help to weed out all the problems
and actually engineer this car to be mass-produced.
Well, Colin Chapman comes into the picture.
Probably the finest automobile engineer I have ever met in my life.
Colin Chapman. I'll introduce Colin now.
(APPLAUSE)
TAMIR: Colin Chapman is the founder of Lotus Cars.
He was a pioneer in the racing industry.
He dominated Formula One.
BARRIE: A deal had been struck with Lotus Cars as a company
and Colin Chapman, as a named individual,
to engineer and develop DeLorean cars that could enter production.
Well, the idea of working with Lotus sounded like a good idea.
We would all get together and we'd become a joint organization
and go finish the production design work.
Well, when we first got to Lotus,
I mean, right out of the chute, it was kind of awkward.
Here, Bill and I and some others had spent years getting us to this point,
and then now, it was like, Bill Collins and Bob Manion
and whoever else was involved,
they can kind of, like, just, you know, watch us.
That, of course, isn't what I was gonna do
and it certainly wasn't gonna be what Bill was gonna do.
This is Bill. John in?
JOHN: Bill, how the hell are you?
Look, John, I got the contract you sent over.
And I have to say it raises some questions.
You've got a lot in here about Lotus, John, but nothing about me.
You don't have to worry about that, Bill. It's just a lot of paperwork.
-You know what you're doing. -I understand that, John,
but I thought this was supposed to be a collaboration on the re-design,
but Chapman is nowhere to be found.
Well, they're doing a lot of R&D, aren't they?
That's the other thing.
This... This company in here. This GPD.
I've never even heard of it.
You don't need to worry about that, Bill.
It's not going to affect you at all. Okay?
I don't see how that's possible.
They got a hefty line item in here on engineering.
But that's what we're supposed to be doing.
It just seems like you're paying twice for the same thing, John.
Well, it must be some kind of a tax shelter, Bill.
I don't know. I'm not a CPA. I'm sorry.
John, what am I doing here?
Why am I even here?
BARRIE: I liked Bill. I think he'd done a tremendous job.
But the moment I found him reading the contract,
it was quite clear that what he'd already decided
in his own mind was true, that he was out of a job.
Colin Chapman was not gonna have anybody
looking over Colin Chapman's shoulder.
INTERVIEWER: To do a business like this, don't you have to be pretty ruthless?
Um, I don't think you have to be ruthless.
I think you have to be prepared to make some unpalatable decisions at times
because frequently you're faced with making a decision between two evils
and you're gonna hurt somebody.
John DeLorean himself, he knew.
He'd arranged with Chapman that this is the way it's gonna be,
that nobody had told the guys from the U.S. team.
TAMIR: It becomes painfully clear that Bill and his engineering team
are out of a job.
And not only that, there's something very fishy going on
with the finances of this deal.
Colin Chapman was gonna be willing to do things
that Bill never would have been comfortable with.
And for John, I think that was an important aspect to this partnership.
And it was the type of thing that was so important to him at the time
that he was willing to sacrifice Bill.
BILL: "Dear John, after much deliberation on my part,
"I feel it is obvious to both of us
"that my participation in your venture is no longer the same as intended.
"Under the current circumstances,
"I feel the only alternative for me is to tender my resignation
"in all my present positions at this time.
"I wish you and the rest of the team the best of luck."
All these years later, it still looks great.
And it would be nice to have a brown interior.
Well, it had been a long, long time
that we had been working on the project,
and I felt that I was being totally undercut by John,
and he really owed me a hell of a lot more than to treat me the way he did.
And it just seemed like the time to move on.
INTERVIEWER: Do you remember having the conversation with John
-where you said, "I'm resigning"? -No, I don't remember. I just...
I think he was happy to see me go.
-INTERVIEWER: Do you really? -Yeah.
-He didn't try to stop you at all? -No.
We're all males, but there's something to be said about being the guy
that's sort of the guy that bore the baby, as it were,
with the DMC-12.
CHRIS: Before we started filming, we knew nothing
about John DeLorean, really.
We basically came to the project
because a British television station wanted to do something on Ireland.
I was thinking, "Oh, boy, we can do a wonderful piece on Yeats."
They said, "No, no. We want it to be about automobiles
"because everybody in England just loves automobiles."
CHRIS: Like most of our films,
you know, the idea was to watch somebody who wants to fulfill a life dream,
and, you know, that's who John was.
NARRATOR: John Zachary DeLorean certainly doesn't smile much.
The reason is simple.
The most important project in his life is yet to be accomplished.
PENNEBAKER: He was very guarded because he had so many things,
I guess, on his mind,
to get figured out all the time.
We've had some kind of criticism right from day one.
First, we were never gonna get the program together.
Then we'd never get the financing. Then we'd never build the plant.
I don't think the motorcar manufacturing industries,
whether it be America, UK, mainland,
actually ever thought that it could be done.
Now the critics are forecasting our failure two or three years from now.
I think, as long as you can always keep your failure
two or three years in the future, you're probably gonna do okay.
I think DeLorean's problem was at that time
he needed cars and he needed cars in a hurry.
JOHN: You've gotta pick the three or four big markets and go after them.
We can't wait 14 months to start selling.
JERRY: It was a constant panic of racing the clock
and it was damn the torpedoes and full speed ahead.
CHRIS: It was such a process of building the car
and seeing what was working and what wasn't working.
We've had problems on the upper control arm around the ball joint,
but we also had a torsion rod failure at 41,000 cycles.
Everybody knew that there were gonna be problems.
The view you took was, "Well, yeah, we expected this.
"Fine, let's get on and fix it."
It was crazy. Absolutely crazy.
But it was exciting.
If you were an operator on the floor seeing that lovely stainless-steel car
going together the way it should go,
that was very rewarding.
GEORGE: You felt part of a family when you went in there.
There was absolutely no trouble. No Protestant-Catholic divide.
One of the proudest achievements, I think, of DeLorean is that
it was a form of social experiment.
You had for the first time in Northern Ireland
Catholics and Protestants working alongside each other.
This social experiment was beginning to work.
You can have a mixed workforce and be successful.
In two years and 11 months,
we had built a factory,
we had designed a car,
the cars were built.
And, that was the best time I have ever had working in any company.
ALAN: When the first six cars came rolling out,
the news crews were all there.
John was the biggest hero in Northern Ireland that day.
It's incredible that he got 3,500 cars into the United States on a boat
and we actually sailed on the damn boat, too.
Because I just was so excited to see that happen
because I knew he showed them that he could do it.
REPORTER: Buyers are reported to be queuing up in the United States
for the company's futuristic Goldwing DMC-12.
TAMIR: DA and Chris, you watch their movie,
and the perception you get at the end is this is a success.
BARRIE: Everything was hunky dory and it was great, you know?
We'd succeeded in October '81.
ALEC: DeLorean is four or five little moves away from victory.
He's on the doorstep of that victory.
You know, in the music of it, it's like Bolero.
You know, John just says...
(HUMS BOLERO)
We don't migrate from that.
He's played a pretty high-stakes game
and he really, really stays calm and very contained.
And the drama is in him being contained,
while everything collapsed around him.
BARRIE: Things started to go sour very quickly.
Um, around the fall
of 1981,
there were a series of monumental cock-ups.
REPORTER: So, everything is going really smoothly.
Well, I wouldn't say smoothly.
I don't want to give the appearance
that, you know, everything is just absolutely perfect.
HILLEL: When those cars first came off the boat,
they were just a product-warranty nightmare.
DICK: The door won't close. The gaps are all wrong.
The window wiper won't work. The door mechanism won't work.
You know, that happened. It happened to me once, getting stuck in the car.
I couldn't open the door, you know?
DON: We reviewed the car.
It cost more than a Corvette.
It didn't handle that great. It was kind of slow.
It was not the car he promised.
This fuel-efficient, high-performance car.
It started to go south
when this happened
in the teeth of a diminishing economy.
NARRATOR: Now the dream seems to be fading.
Sales are way down in the United States,
perhaps for economic reasons,
perhaps because of some dissatisfaction with the car.
TAMIR: In a scenario where there's a few thousand cars coming to the U.S.,
there are these quality-control issues.
The lesson that should have been learned from this
is let's slow production down a little bit more.
Let's figure out a way to work out all these issues.
Unfortunately, that's the opposite of what John decided to do.
He pulled the trigger on basically doubling production.
DON: And what happened?
These cars were backing up like plague rats on the docks.
TAMIR: And it was just the wrong, wrong move.
So, the question has to be, well, why did he do this?
It was a typical John move
because he saw a little angle in the contract,
where if you upped the amount of people that were working there
and increased jobs,
then the government was supposed to be giving him an infusion of cash.
And so, he thought he was gonna take advantage of this little clause.
Anyone who deals with the government knows that that's a risk in itself.
What if the politics change? What if the administration changes?
Well, Margaret Thatcher happened.
BARRIE: We'd had a change of government by now.
The Conservatives were in power.
Margaret Thatcher, the arch-privateer, was Prime Minister.
Between Margaret Thatcher as Prime Minister and us,
there was a secretary of state for Northern Ireland, James Prior.
JAMES: Well, I suppose my role with DeLorean
was to keep him under control.
The Labour government had started off the DeLorean business.
The Conservative government took a tougher line
towards subsidies for Northern Ireland, for DeLorean.
REPORTER: DeLorean wanted another 76 million dollars from the British.
If not, he said, there would be layoffs.
I don't care about the British taxpayers' money or my own money.
I think the most important thing is we have some people there.
This is a very, very important part of their life
and nothing in the world should be permitted to interfere with it.
BARRIE: John overestimated the fact that we had created jobs
and that it was the jobs that would secure
even more money to keep us alive.
That was not the way Margaret Thatcher saw it.
JAMES: She genuinely took the view
that we couldn't go on pouring a lot of money after bad.
And in the end we had to say no.
BARRIE: The result? We ran out of cash.
Therefore we were heading for insolvency.
And that's at the point when things got very serious indeed.
MAN: We have a group right now
that has got the ability to come up with,
for sure 30 million and up.
You know, upwards of there.
TAMIR: During this whole process,
John's back was really up against the wall.
He had to figure out a way to pay some of the money
back to the British government as well as present to them a feasible way
to keep the company open and make it profitable.
Or else, they were threatening to come in, seize the factory,
liquidate the assets, and everyone was gonna be out of a job.
REPORTER: Today DeLorean said he is looking for outside financing.
JOHN: All I want to do is keep the factory open
so that people can work. Nothing else.
REPORTER: You last said you'd keep the factory open
if it was your last breath. Do you still stand by that?
JOHN: I'm still trying.
During the months of sort of August, September,
we'd had periodic contact with John DeLorean.
He, on a regular basis, was coming up with potential funders.
JOHN: It's been a lot of time and effort, but I think we're now just starting out
on a very successful relationship.
It just took a while to put it together, that's all.
The workers and the people closest to him at DMC were being told,
"Hey, listen, everything is gonna be fine.
"I definitely have the sources coming through."
And we were still at the stage
where we were hoping and hoping
that it would go all right.
JOHN: In terms of having, you know, the first 10 million,
that sounds like that's gotta be Tuesday, right?
MAN: I would say I should be able to get that going very quick.
BARRIE: The impression we got at that time
was that John had pretty well got the money
by the 17th of October, 1982.
(PHONE RINGS)
Hello?
What?
What are you talking about?
ZACH: We were in the city, in the apartment at 834.
Um, the phone rings.
Mom, who was that?
ZACH: And...
One phone call,
my life changed forever.
REPORTER 1: John DeLorean was arrested yesterday
after he met with undercover drug agents,
who DeLorean apparently thought were going to help him make
a huge profit in a cocaine deal,
involving more than 100 kilos of cocaine.
REPORTER 2: DeLorean's wife, Cristina Ferrare, an actress and model,
arrived in Los Angeles early this morning.
Wait a minute. Wait a minute.
I just found out a few hours ago. I know nothing.
I caught a plane. I'm here. I'm...
BARRIE: Everybody was in total shock.
Never in our wildest dreams did we think anything like this would occur.
REPORTER: John DeLorean may be the perfect proof of the old saying,
"The bigger they come, the harder they fall."
And we might add, the more people want to hear about it.
GEORGE: It was just disbelief.
And then, the news just progressively got worse and worse and worse.
He was expressing an interest in financing some type of operation
that would produce quickly large sums of money
on return from the investment.
I was shocked out of my socks.
To see him there in this position...
I'd never seen him in anything except being pretty much on top of the world.
The sensational case involves more than 200 pounds of cocaine,
an elaborate undercover investigation,
the end of the DeLorean car and much, much more.
ALAN: It's been said, it's a cliché now,
that the dream had turned into a nightmare.
Could you imagine how we felt seeing John DeLorean,
our angel, if you like...
There he was going away and everybody was downtrodden
because we felt sure that,
he had done so much, he'd come through again.
But this time, unfortunately, he didn't.
REPORTER: Well, you're walking out of the plant for the last time today.
-How do you feel about it? -We got nothing.
Pretty upset.
REPORTER: What are your chances of getting another job?
-None at all. -MAN 2: Not very good at all.
BARRIE: I had to go into the plant that morning, call the people together.
They'd all heard the same thing, of course.
And it really was the end.
DICK: I was going around with the auctioneer,
and he was putting tags on every piece of equipment.
That was my last day.
COLIN: The expectation of everybody working their hearts out over there
to get these cars built to a good standard,
and they felt it was gonna be their life.
And it all fell apart and it was incredibly sad.
I meet up with people now and then
that... either they worked there
or their dad worked there or their granddad worked there.
And you get the same questions. "What was it really like?"
It was the best job we ever had.
And it was the worst day of their lives when it finally closed.
REPORTER: After entering a plea of not guilty
to all nine drug charges against him,
John DeLorean came out of the federal courthouse in Los Angeles
with his wife, model Cristina Ferrare,
and the four lawyers who are now putting together his defense.
DeLorean said nothing today,
but he is reported to have told his lawyers
he was desperate to save his company.
DeLorean's lawyers are preparing to argue the government entrapped DeLorean.
MAN: Give him some room, guys. Give him some room.
HOWARD: It was the case of the century for that year.
Because every year has a case of the century, trial of the century, so.
We were the trial of the century for 1984.
REPORTER: The sidewalks in front of the court will be jammed
with reporters and camera crews from all over the world.
Unless you were there and you lived it, you don't know
how captivating it was for the nation.
REPORTER: A young entrepreneur started hanging around the courthouse steps today
hawking buttons that say,
"John Z. DeLorean Cocaine Trafficking Trial, Los Angeles, '84."
Our public views these as if it's a bad guy, get him,
and if it's not a bad guy, get the government.
It's all really kind of entertainment to the public.
John DeLorean had some bad news today.
(EXCLAIMING IN GRIEF)
The Automobile Association named him Dealer of the Year.
(LAUGHTER)
A businessman down on his luck tries to make money in a dope deal.
I mean, that's the John DeLorean that I knew.
The case was of overwhelming strength.
Here's the cocaine and here's your target
and he's holding up a glass of champagne toasting.
JOHN: To a lot of success for everybody.
And says that, "This is better than..." What was it?
Better than something.
It's better than gold. (LAUGHS)
Gold weighs more than that, for God's sakes!
HOWARD: Everybody believed that the events were showing John DeLorean
in the middle of a drug deal.
One of the things I asked the jurors very early on was,
would it surprise you if I told you you weren't seeing a drug deal?
And just hang on and watch the whole movie,
and at the end you're gonna see it isn't what it appeared to be.
A real thriller.
Of course, which it turned out to be.
ROBERT: The case starts with a guy named James Hoffman.
He was the informant.
He was somebody who had been a major narcotics trafficker
who had the bad luck of being caught
and he decided to cooperate.
MAN OVER THE PHONE: Valestra.
Mr. Valestra. It's Jim Hoffman, your favorite CI.
Uh-huh.
You're not gonna believe who I had a call with.
John DeLorean.
When I got the call from the CI,
who is a neighbor of his...
We were neighbors out here in California.
I was across from his ranch in Pauma Valley...
VALESTRA: He says to me, CI, that John needs some money.
And the inference of drugs was right there.
JAMES: You've seen the kind of dire straits
-his company is in right now. -Uh-huh.
He needs cash bad.
And he doesn't care where it comes from.
He's gonna be back in Pauma Valley at his ranch next week.
He wants to meet me. We've already set it up.
Seriously, Jim? You're kidding me?
My hand to God. This is happening.
I said, "Well, see what he's got to say."
Go ahead. See what he has to say.
Have I ever done you guys wrong before?
I'll be in touch.
TAMIR: So, at this point, it's 1982.
Reagan has just announced the War on Drugs.
A comprehensive attack on drug trafficking and organized crime.
TAMIR: In this period,
a confidential informant like James Hoffman,
can actually make a living by introducing the DEA to high-level criminals.
JAMES: John.
John, great to see you.
You too, Jim. Been a while.
TAMIR: And in this case, it's the perfect storm for John DeLorean.
When Jim first approached John,
it seemed like a very far-fetched idea
that he'd actually be able to help John out.
These investors...
TAMIR: But Jim was throwing out some numbers
that seemed very alluring to John.
Ten, twenty, fifty million.
I thought your investors might like to see these brochures
that we have made up that really can show you how we're all set.
Yeah. There's no need.
They're not exactly the kind of guys that get hung up on paperwork, you know?
They're Colombian.
-They in the coffee business? -You might say that.
HOWARD: They met and the first conversation was not recorded.
So, we don't really know what was said.
ROBERT: And it was when Hoffman then met with DeLorean,
at that point, Hoffman comes back to Valestra
and says, "Yeah, he wants to talk dope."
I say, "Really? I mean, well, if he said that, we'd better...
"have him say it again somewhere." Which we did.
JOHN: How you doing? What am I doing, interrupting your lunch?
VALESTRA: And on September 4th,
the meeting at the L'Enfant Plaza takes place.
That's a one-on-one meeting with the CI and John.
JAMES: There aren't many people that can pick up the phone
and get 30 million dollars in three or four days without a lot of hassle.
JOHN: I can't think of any to be honest with you.
VALESTRA: That video,
that's pretty explicit stuff.
CI writes it all out.
And the scenarios are right there on the paper.
JAMES: So we can take 34 kilos.
When you initially asked me what it would take
and I said 1.75 to 2.
Here, this would be coming.
So, you're really going to receive
-40 million... -VALESTRA: During this period of time,
John now is supposed to come up with the 1.8 mil.
That was where it was left.
So, he'd have to put some skin in the game.
JAMES: Nobody wants you to do something
that you are uncomfortable with.
JOHN: I'm relying on you saying that there is no way
to connect me to this at the end.
JAMES: Well, you're not gonna be handling the product.
REPORTER: Government attorneys in the John DeLorean trial
today introduced a videotape,
that is perhaps the most damaging evidence against the auto executive.
The tape was played as part of the testimony of James Hoffman,
a paid undercover informer
who was the government's key witness against DeLorean.
Defense attorneys described the meeting in Washington, D.C.
between John DeLorean and the undercover informant
as a clever lure.
And as for DeLorean's participation in that discussion,
the defense team says there's no harm in listening to someone else
talk about a drug deal.
ZACH: For three months during the trial,
we moved to my grandmother's, grandfather's house in Brentwood.
You know, I'd play it all out in my head all the time.
Something will come up and I'll start thinking about stuff
and it'll spark a memory or trigger something.
Guys, no matter what happens, hey, we're gonna be fine.
Everything is gonna be fine.
ZACH: My father was looking at hard-core time.
And to my parents' credit, they did what they could
to make it as best a situation as they could.
How the fuck do you tell your kid that shit ain't okay?
He just asked me if we're both coming back from court or...
I am not going away for this.
The jury will see how asinine this whole thing is
and how they've set up an innocent man, for God's sakes!
Now, what do you think about this tie?
It's fine.
You sure the brown works?
I mean, I had a blue one on when they snapped this picture.
But they can't tell 'cause it's in black and white.
-Either... Either way. -I don't want it to read black.
I mean, I don't wanna send the wrong message.
-To who? The judge? -To everyone.
Next time they snap my picture, it could be a magazine cover.
John, either one works fine.
'Cause, it'll be in color if it's a magazine.
Hey.
You have to talk to the children.
JOHN: Kathryn, come and give Mommy a hug, sweetie.
She seems pretty upset.
Zach, I know you're worried,
but I need you pulling for your old man to win this thing, all right?
I just wanna go back to New Jersey.
So do I, and we will as soon as this thing is over, all right?
Zach, look at me.
Your dad is a winner, right?
ZACH: For me, it's a double-edged sword that I walk all the time.
The evidence is there that they set him up.
But common sense and reality tells me that he's not a fucking idiot,
that he must have known something was fucked up at some time.
-Come here, sweetheart. -JOHN: I'm gonna wear the blue tie, okay?
ZACH: So, it's like, you know, how the fuck could you put
our family in jeopardy like that?
REPORTER: Twenty-one days into the John DeLorean cocaine trial,
defense attorney Howard Weitzman says there's no question that John DeLorean
can be seen and heard on tape talking about narcotics.
But he says the question is, how far can the government go
in dangling a lure in front of a desperate man?
HOWARD: When I look back at this case,
Hoffman had said, "If you give me, you know, a million and a half,
"two million dollars, three million dollars,
"I can get you 10, 15, 20 million dollars back."
John didn't have the money.
And logic would tell you that that's the end of the investigation.
Are you sure he can't put any cash in?
At this point, I don't think DeLorean can scrounge 20 Gs,
let alone 2 million dollars.
(JERRY SIGHS)
Listen, I've been poring through these tapes,
and I just don't think we have him yet.
I think he's got it in collateral.
Okay, but if collateral is all we get,
then it's got to equal at least that much.
Listen to me. We have got to get it on tape.
This isn't my first rodeo, Jerry. I know how it works.
I'm just saying.
Until now he's been real careful about how he parses all his words, so...
Well, it's different than a phone call now.
He's about to walk into a real bank.
He knows your IC is legit,
so he won't for one second think that I'm not.
Still, the more drug references you can slip in, the better.
We got this, Jerry.
(LAUGHS)
(CLEARS THROAT)
TAMIR: Throughout the entire thing, they had to continue changing the script.
It wasn't gonna be, "Here's the 2 million dollars.
"Here's the drug money back. Boom, you're arrested."
So, then it turned into James Hoffman, the CI,
convincing them, "Hey, I know this crooked banker."
-Hey, John. -Hi, Jim.
-Great to see you. -You too.
You been in this area before?
JOHN: I've been in San Jose. And, of course, San Francisco.
The DeLorean case was just one of other cases that I was involved in
from the standpoint of being an undercover operator working at a bank.
So, the bank provided the perfect undercover front.
We finally, shall we say, got together after all this time.
Yeah, after so many conversations, right?
Can I get you a cup of coffee?
TAMIR: At this point of the story,
John is not gonna put in any actual money into the game.
He can potentially put up collateral.
Ben Tisa is the one
that's supposed to now set up an alternative situation for John.
BEN: Let me give you a little background on what I intend now.
The background on the individual I have in mind
and how I think it may help you and this other transaction.
BEN: We had a particular suspect.
His name was Hetrick, who was a pilot,
who flew cocaine in from Colombia.
This particular individual has been very successful in his business, okay?
BEN: So, the idea came in, well, maybe the dope dealer
would invest in John DeLorean's company,
John DeLorean being told the money was going to come from sale of cocaine.
BEN: Just so the cards are on the table and you know what's going on
he's very successful in bringing in cocaine and putting it out.
Would it be possible, um, to allow this gentleman to have, say...
Say, some stock options? Here's what I have in mind.
JOHN: Sure. I don't think we can do that in our public company.
But I see no reason why I couldn't do it from my private company.
Great. That's great. That works.
TAMIR: In John's mind, once again, the genius at bending the rules,
finding the little loophole.
Hey, I'll take this money, even if it comes from drug folks,
but it's coming through a legitimate bank.
BEN: Hello, John DeLorean. This is Morgan Hetrick.
Hi, Morgan. How are you doing? Nice to meet you.
TAMIR: Enter Morgan Hetrick.
He was somebody that was flying in
hundreds and hundreds of pounds of cocaine from South America.
So, the government felt that at that point
that was the best opportunity to bring both John and Hetrick down
is to merge the cases.
The government told Hetrick that John had put in 2 million dollars,
and that he wanted to do this drug deal with Hetrick.
'Cause he's already given me, I've mentioned, I've told him.
I have 1.8 and I'm sitting on it.
And it's cash in hand. I have it.
So, there's no problem there.
And he was given an opportunity to stay in the deal
without putting money in and he took it.
BEN: You can't go wrong with something you make a lot of money at.
HETRICK: Yeah, you can, too. Why not?
BEN: A little bit of common sense and don't get too greedy.
There's a risk-reward ratio and that's what you're playing.
That's what life is.
JOHN: I think it's a great opportunity for me.
TAMIR: So, in terms of the drug case,
you've got hours of phone conversations,
hours of videotape,
showing John with these drug dealers and crooked bankers.
Is the feed secure?
You sure he's not gonna be able to hear anything through this wall?
TAMIR: John still hasn't given the government anything.
So, they have to introduce this new character,
this sort of mob drug-dealer guy.
Showtime.
TAMIR: He's really gonna crank the pressure up on John.
VALESTRA: Thanks again for coming here.
It's my pleasure.
-You got some food coming? -It's coming, Jim. It's coming.
VALESTRA: When I meet him at the hotel room,
I would be the one that would be handling the drugs.
All Jim had to do was put it together.
Get a finder's fee, whatever.
And me and my network would be going out to...
quadruple our investment.
We are ready to consummate the end of the deal
where the turnover is for your purposes within 48 hours.
Great.
I'm asking for, what are you putting up?
There's no more money from you.
There's no free lunch, either.
You know, there's no free lunches.
Basically, I wanna know what's in it for me.
TAMIR: At this point in the story, each participant in this deal
is trying to outsmart and outmaneuver the other person for their own gain.
John wants to get money to save his company.
You've got Jim Hoffman, who's leeching off of the government.
He begins to enjoy this lifestyle of working with the Feds.
And then the Feds, they're trying to have that big, big case for Reagan
to tout his War on Drugs.
So, everyone is hungry for that one thing that they want out of this.
HOWARD: When you analyze a case like this,
you realize, wait, the informant kind of created this,
with the government working with him, and it didn't work.
So, they went to a savings and loan, a legitimate bank,
got them to let them use the premises, you know, like a set in a movie.
Phase three, they put John together with Morgan Hetrick.
A legitimate, by legitimate, I mean a real smuggler.
Then they bring in the DEA.
And John Valestra becomes kind of a mafioso.
And what they finally came up with,
so John would get his 10, 15, 20 million dollars,
is they got him to put up stock certificates.
The stock certificates should be in
Eureka Federal Savings and Loan in a trust account.
Then eventually, I would see us being 50-50 partners.
John, with his lawyers, corporate lawyer,
gives them worthless DeLorean stock
in a defunct company that had no assets.
Worthless paper.
And the con was reversed in John's mind.
So, he's putting up zero.
Mr. Hetrick, the smuggler, goes and gets the cocaine,
and then they call DeLorean...
Are you still on the East Coast?
JOHN: I'm on the East Coast and I can do anything you want.
It might be conducive, um...
to you being close by when this thing goes down.
And they say to him, "Come to Los Angeles.
"We have 10 million dollars for you. Come get your money."
Maybe we'll pop a...
A bottle of champagne someplace.
-JOHN: That would be wonderful. -And sit back and relax.
HOWARD: And DeLorean, who can only think about,
"I got to get the money to the company," comes to L.A.
And the government picked him up, took him to a hotel room,
opened a bottle of champagne,
toasted to their success.
Here's to a lot of success for everybody.
HOWARD: And one of the agents said,
"Now, John, here's the fruits of our efforts."
So, John, what we're talking about...
It's gonna be...
It's gonna be like a magic act, John.
HOWARD: And went to the closet, brought out the suitcase of cocaine
and opened it up.
Between this and the other half,
it's gonna generate about 4.5, not less than 4.5 mil.
(CHUCKLES) This is better than gold.
Gold weighs more than that, for God's sakes!
HOWARD: That's when DeLorean said,
"This is like gold. This is better than gold."
JOHN: This is better than gold!
Gold weighs more than that, for God's sakes!
Classic line on that tape.
Hi, John. Jerry West.
I'm with the FBI.
HOWARD: And then he was arrested.
So, he wasn't gonna take the drugs.
-He didn't get the 10 million dollars. -Will you stand up, sir?
HOWARD: And he never was supposed to take the drugs.
He was only supposed to get the money.
-I don't understand it. -Please, turn around.
HOWARD: So, why would they bring the drugs out and show them to him?
And the answer is pretty simple.
Well, if you're dealing with 12 laypeople in a jury box,
you're gonna make them think this was all part of the deal.
REPORTER: John DeLorean says, "It's all in God's hands."
That was his reaction today when six men and six women
began deliberating his case.
REPORTER: The jurors, who appeared relaxed when they arrived for court today,
began their deliberations shortly before 10:00 a.m. Los Angeles time.
Outside court, John DeLorean's attorney, Howard Weitzman,
expressed the mood on the defense side.
This is a very difficult time, when a case goes to the jury
'cause you never really know what they're thinking
or what they're interested in.
HOWARD: These are very hard cases and it requires a unanimous verdict.
If he got convicted, he would have received
a pretty stiff prison sentence, for sure.
And the government was very confident in their case.
REPORTER: Throughout the case, the DeLorean defense has hammered away
at the tactics used by federal agents
in their undercover investigation of John DeLorean.
Weitzman asked for acquittal saying,
"The government is, in a sense, on trial here."
We did not believe
there was an entrapment defense in this case.
That was a throw-away defense.
REPORTER: After the long trial, DeLorean's lawyer said
he'll be stunned whichever way the jury votes.
John DeLorean put it more simply.
-REPORTER: John, how do you feel? -It's in the hands of the Lord.
In the matter of the United States versus John Z. DeLorean,
the jury finds the defendant...
not guilty on all eight counts.
(HUSHED CHATTER)
Praise the Lord!
Howard.
Well done, Howard.
-Thank you. -(CRISTINA SIGHS)
(FOOTSTEPS)
(BANGING)
(DOGS BARK)
Come on, boys. Back up.
Back up. We got a guest.
Yeah!
What's up, buddy? Oh, fucker!
Water everywhere.
Sit. Are you guys gonna chill? Sit.
Yeah, this is my, uh...
This is where I live.
(LAUGHING) You know, so...
It's just a shitty little apartment.
(LAUGHS) The paint is fucking peeling.
And if you find my housekeeper, tell her she's fired
'cause she doesn't do a good job of cleaning the fucking place.
So, it's kind of, you know, like, uh...
You guys, I don't know if you've seen the apartment or any of that stuff,
but when people know who I am and who my family is
and then they come over, they're like, "What the fuck?"
You know, even today, I'll see the car going down the street
and I'm just, like... it's just fucking weird, man.
For me, there's a lot behind the meaning of that car.
Not just my family name on it,
but what that fucking car did to our family.
INTERVIEWER: Are you surprised that a feature film
hasn't been made about your dad and his life?
Yeah. Yeah.
I mean, it's got all the good shit in it.
It's got cocaine. It's got fucking hot chicks. It's got sports cars.
It's got fucking, you know, war-torn, you know, bombed-out buildings overseas.
It's got fucking Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, the War on Drugs.
You got FBI agents. You got, you know, fucking hard-core drug dealers.
But...
my fear with Hollywood
is they're gonna end it with him
coming out of the courthouse with Cristina.
Whoo-hoo! Fucking acquittal! Yeah, yeah! Fucking credits. You know?
While that coming out of the courthouse, you know,
ticker-tape parade shit is real,
look at what it cost him.
The sting operation fell through. You were acquitted.
Um, your wife Cristina stood by you throughout the entire trial,
and then, not but several weeks later, left you.
-Several days later. -Ah.
You claim to have been shocked that your wife Cristina
announced her intentions to divorce you shortly after the trial.
She appeared on this program,
spoke of you in the most wifely of terms.
Here's what she said.
I can't make a judgment right now. It's not fair.
It's not fair for John and it's not fair for you either,
because if you were in a situation like this
or any one of your loved ones,
you will find yourself defending them as ardently as I'm doing with John.
That must make you feel at the very least mixed to see that.
-It makes you cry, does it? -Yeah. It's pretty... Pretty painful.
At the time, if I was my mom,
the carpet just got pulled out from underneath me.
She's 31 years old, man.
She's still got another eight, nine, ten, twelve years of being top dog.
And that whole fucking career pulled out from underneath you.
Your whole career has fallen apart.
I was at the top of my modeling profession.
I had been doing it for 20 years.
The last 15 years I've been at the very top of it,
commanding top money.
And this is July, and since January, I've had one booking
and I've made 105 dollars.
No one will have anything to do with me or my name. Not at all.
KATHRYN: I try not to ask my mom about my dad,
not because I think that she doesn't have any good memories,
more because, again,
I don't want to draw up any painful ones.
It was terrible and tragic what she had to go through.
So, she had to do something different with her life.
She had to leave all that behind.
Shortly after all of that, she had her show, A.M. L.A.
She defined who she was.
She rebuilt her life and she rebuilt it in a fantastic way.
ZACH: And credit to her. I get it. I understand it.
That, you know, you're trying to keep a roof
and keep a normal, stable household for your kids.
Guess what. It's fucking gone.
Stability and sanity left the fucking house
two years ago when he got arrested.
I had to do an art project for school
and we had to do appropriation.
So, I appropriated this painting.
And on this side, there's photographs of everything perfect
and as it goes on,
I started to put in the articles
from this perfect life to this destroyed life.
And on the bumper it says, "Destroy my childhood" for DMC.
-MAN 1: All right, man. You good? -MAN 2: Yes.
MAN 1: We got any last looks on Alec?
-MAN 2: We're ready to go. -That's fine. Let's go. Let's shoot it.
I'd love to figure out, what's the actual turning point?
When does DeLorean get to a point where he could have turned back,
and maybe avoided everything?
And whether he went on to complete the car project or not,
he would have lived to fight another battle,
or try another iteration of all that.
And probably succeeded because he was a very clever guy.
What's that moment where you sit there and go, "Too late"?
Is it the cocaine deal itself? Is it before that?
Is it a series of things?
Is it a period of time where he's doing a few things?
When does John put all the chips on the table and he loses?
HILLEL: I saw the drug trial as a sideshow.
To me, much more substantial
was how DeLorean was handling the money
that he'd gotten to build the car in Northern Ireland.
JAY: Every piece of paper tells a story of what people were doing
and how they were doing it.
This transaction happened before this transaction
and that led to this transaction.
I was brought in to analyze the affairs of DeLorean Motor Company
and go deep into its affairs, its activities and its transactions.
We didn't really understand that at first,
but it turned out to be the critical moment
in untangling the affairs of John DeLorean.
And as it became clear,
you start to see, yet again, another side of John.
When the company was developing in those heady days
of excitement and energy around the company, around John,
investors all wanted to get a piece of it.
TAMIR: You know, in trying to raise all the capital,
John was really selling himself. He was selling his image.
You know the slogan, "Live the dream."
That's what people were supposedly buying into
when they invested in his company.
JAY: John sensing that interest
and wanting to raise money, if it was available,
was able to raise 17.5 million dollars for the development of the vehicle.
But as it turns out, the British government
had also put up enough money by then,
that their funds were actually being used
to pay for the development of the vehicle.
Therefore, this money wasn't needed so much at that point.
And John, seeing this pot of money, couldn't resist.
REPORTER: Federal investigators and bankruptcy lawyers
say they have uncovered another secret DeLorean deal.
This one arranged at a hotel in Geneva, Switzerland,
long before the alleged drug deal.
BARRIE: A deal had been struck in Switzerland
with Colin Chapman, the chairman of Lotus,
and a mysterious organization called GPD Services.
TAMIR: And what's interesting, it becomes very clear that Bill Collins
was onto something several years earlier
when he was analyzing the DeLorean-Lotus agreement.
BILL: When I looked at the numbers that they put together, I said to John,
"What's the deal?"
GPD? I've never even heard of it.
It just seems like you're paying twice for the same thing, John.
BILL: Obviously, looking back on it now,
there were things going on behind the scene.
John and Chapman were trying to figure out the game they were playing with GPD
and trying to get various arrangements put together.
ALEC: In the scene we shot yesterday, he hangs up with Collins
and everybody who is good, they've all got to go, you know,
because their goodness becomes useless to John.
They just don't do me any good.
REPORTER: Apart from denying that he had any of the GPD money,
John DeLorean is reluctant to discuss GPD.
INTERVIEWER: Can you give an answer now
to those allegations about the missing 17 million dollars?
So now, we fast-forward into the investigation
and we start peeling back the layers, GPD.
HILLEL: GPD is supposedly this middle-man company
to deliver certain other engineering services.
In truth, it had no other engineers.
It had no facilities to deliver these engineering services.
GPD was a mailbox.
REPORTER: GPD is a phony, a shell company.
Nothing more than a post office box
in a neighborhood branch of the Geneva post office.
Post office box 33.
JAY: It turns out John made a deal with Colin Chapman at Lotus Cars
that he would send this 17.5 million dollars from investors into GPD,
and then Colin took the money from there,
funneled it into European bank accounts, split it with John.
John then maneuvered that money back to his own accounts
in the United States,
therefore converting the investor money into his own money.
I think there's a real fascinating allegory here.
You did sell your soul, John DeLorean.
You sold it for the greater glory of John DeLorean
who was going to whip General Motors and all these multibillion dollar,
multinational companies with your own dream car.
And in that vision,
not only did you jeopardize the well-being of your family,
you risked yourself for a jail term,
got off because the government blew it.
Now we have other indictments,
which indicate that it's possible
that your fatigue and your egomania
forced you to use money for your own purpose,
rather than the original intent of the investors.
That's what seems to be most apparent to anybody
who gives a cursory review of the evidence in this case.
Well, as I said early on, I think that we will prove conclusively
that every single cent was legitimately and honestly come by
and that all these charges are totally false.
TAMIR: So, as these questions are being brought up
and John is preparing to have to answer these questions,
he needed to show some sort of proof that made the deal not look shady.
And that proof was actually a loan letter from GPD Services
and a paper trail that GPD Services was a loan to him
and that he still had several years before he had to pay back that loan.
He puts together these documents
that only he and one other person would be privy to,
and that being Colin Chapman from Lotus.
Well, several years earlier, Colin Chapman dropped dead of a heart attack
and the only other person in this little transaction was John.
So, while I was busy studying the records and looking at financial transactions,
the lawyers were busy talking to Cristina Ferrare.
Cristina testified under oath
that she saw John working in a large closet
with latex gloves on,
signing documents, backdating them
and then aging the documents under a sun lamp.
So, when the documents would be forensically-examined later on,
his fingerprints wouldn't be on it.
His skin oil wouldn't be on it.
And, of course, the paper would have aged under the sun lamp.
And she testified that she saw him do that.
So, John was very busy creating a set of documents in the dark of night,
but his wife was watching him.
After reviewing the records,
there came a time when the trial started to recover this money
that John had taken from the company.
And I started to really get a good look at John as a person
and the true nature of his character.
So, he walks in court one day and then he looks at me and he says,
"I was on the radio this morning. I was talking about you
"and your testimony."
He goes, "But I'm not sure I got your name right."
He said, "Is there one H in 'shithead' or two?"
And I said, "Wow."
But by then, I also realized we had him.
In other words, he was acting out because he knew we had him.
Between us having the financial evidence
and Cristina would testify
that John had been forging documents and aging documents,
John needed to settle that case,
actually cough up the money that had been stolen
from the investors in the DeLorean partnership.
INTERVIEWER: Would you deny that you had any of that 17 million dollars?
Excuse me a minute. I have to get a drink.
REPORTER: John DeLorean was not prepared to answer any further questions
about the missing 17.6 million dollars.
In the drug trial, John really could grasp on to that idea of,
"I was the victim here, you know.
"I got sucked into a situation
"of overzealous people, overzealous government
"that was trying to take me down as a legitimate business owner."
In the case of the money trials,
it's very hard to take the approach that he was the victim,
because all of it was his own doing.
JAY: You start to see, you know, this real true character,
this underlying nature of John,
not the public persona that he had worked so hard to cultivate for years.
HILLEL: He had built this giant bubble of an image,
making him believe he could kind of get away with anything.
This was not the little guy fighting the Goliath like GM.
This instead was someone in his business dealings
who acted like the Goliath,
and trampled on other people's dreams
and really hurt some individuals very badly.
I'm not a psychiatrist, but I think that he was okay in the beginning,
and I think he just got carried away.
I think that he could have saved it, if he'd had the right attitude.
But I think he thought it was more important to make a buck
than to be successful.
TAMIR: That is part of the real tragedy
in going back to the what-ifs.
You know, what if John and Colin hadn't embezzled that money,
and he had still had 17.5 million dollars at the time
when he needed desperately cash to keep the company open?
By stealing that money,
John really painted himself into a corner
and he had to find the money somewhere else.
And to think if he could have only held on for a few more years.
Doc!
Marty! You made it!
-Yeah! -Welcome to my latest experiment.
This is the big one! The one I've been waiting for all my life!
Uh, well, it's a DeLorean.
Bear with me. All your questions will be answered. Roll tape.
BOB: When Bob Zemeckis and I first wrote Back to the Future
the time machine was a refrigerator.
And Bob Zemeckis, the director, said,
"Wouldn't it be simpler if Doc actually built
"the time machine into a car?"
And then he says, "And what if the car was a DeLorean?"
You know, it wasn't my idea,
but I know a damn good idea when I hear one.
This was a damn good idea. So I said, "Yeah, that's great."
When this baby hits 88 miles per hour, you're gonna see some serious shit.
-(CLICKS) -(BEEPING)
(TIRES SCREECH)
BOB: We, I think, did a great job
in making the DeLorean glamorous
and endearing it to generations of movie fans and car fans.
Eighty-eight miles per hour!
BARRIE: If only we'd stayed alive
and we'd continued for another two years.
You can't buy that publicity now, can you?
BOB: Back to the Future makes the car and the man truly immortal.
A hundred years from now, people will watch that movie.
And the last running DeLorean may have consumed its last drop of fuel
and eaten its last piston, but that movie will carry on.
After the movie came out, about two or three weeks later,
we got one of the best fan letters we ever got.
It was from John DeLorean.
He said that he'd just seen the movie.
He thought it was brilliant.
And he said, "Thank you for keeping my dream alive."
Back in a time when I was led to believe
films about him were...
percolating, you know?
There were a couple of them to my recollection
that people were gonna make,
I get a phone call,
and it was DeLorean.
And I have to imagine he was probably out of the house,
the big house, living in this apartment.
The scene that we're gonna shoot today.
Yeah, I was on the phone with him and he was like,
"Alec, this is John DeLorean calling."
He was very old. He sounded older.
He said, "I understand they're making this motion picture about me,
"and, uh, I would be very flattered
"if you were to portray me in the movie."
I thought, "Wow."
I mean, to have the guy who's the real guy pick you.
And, um... And then it went away.
(LAUGHS) I never heard from him again!
But, uh, I mean, to me, DeLorean is a lot of things.
Every day I think about who is he, I have a different answer.
You know, today my attitude about DeLorean,
you watch historical footage and you get kind of inflamed
'cause you see that he did a lot of bad things to some people,
and he hurt a lot of people and he stole from people.
And at the same time, uh...
I feel like he was somebody who...
Like a lot of great American stories, he just perverted some dream that he had.
You remember the DMC, don't you? Yeah?
How could you forget it? It was one of a kind.
It really was one of a kind.
TAMIR: As full as John's life was those first 60 years,
the last 20 years are actually more simple.
This is one of John's Bibles,
which he actually gave to his nephew, Mark.
TAMIR: He became a born-again Christian.
It was a very important part of his life.
He dated several women throughout the years,
and then ended up remarrying late in life.
And then, in 2000, had to declare bankruptcy
in which he lost his Bedminster estate
and lived the last five years of his life in a one-bedroom apartment.
ZACH: His whole fucking life, his whole dream,
everything that he worked for,
from the time they broke ground till the time of the arrest, gone.
INTERVIEWER: Was it a blow to your pride to you trying to shape your life again?
Well, I felt terrible about it for a long time.
I felt terrible for my children who've had a...
This has been an extremely difficult thing for them.
But, you know, life is life. It goes on.
Your father is shamed and goes to jail.
Your family loses all their money. Your parents get divorced.
Everything in your world changes.
And for the next 15 years of your life, you get chased by,
"Is your father in jail?" and cocaine jokes,
and all of these things that just followed along with it.
My entire life, I had to live it down.
It followed me for a very long time.
It followed me around
until I started to get involved into the DeLorean community.
People used to invite my dad to all these car shows all the time.
And I asked him, I said, "Dad, Dad, let's go.
"You have to experience this."
Knowing how much he was still loved
would definitely make a difference in his life.
-Thank you. -Thank you.
KATHRYN: It was an amazing experience.
It was everything I hoped it would be and then some.
I just met John DeLorean for the third time. Document that.
The man is unbelievable.
KATHRYN: He really did get to bask in his glory
a little bit again.
Do you consider the whole DeLorean dream to have been a failure?
No, I think that I showed a lot of people,
whether you survive or not,
the key is, it's like Shakespeare said,
"It's better to have loved and lost than not to have loved at all."
I gave it the best shot I had. I tried as hard as I could.
And I think that I did reasonably well.
HILLEL: I think DeLorean was very much alone.
Part of the fallout from compartmentalizing his life
the way he did,
is that he really didn't have anybody
who knew him through and through.
This is not a man who's looking at his family life
or his friends to qualify his reason for living.
It's, "What have I accomplished, what have I done,
"what am I doing next?"
That in his mind, this is what really reflects on him as a human being.
When we come around here, what I'd like to do is repeat this action
and just put this down here and then look up at the car.
And I want to say something very specific to him about the car.
BOB: No film can tell the definitive story of anybody's life.
Anyone's life is just too vast and complex for one film.
But a film could certainly create the legend of John DeLorean
and we print the legend.
The legend is what we love.
That's what we should have.
ZACH: Let's just hypothetically say
that when he went into the hotel that night,
he knew he was walking out with a suitcase full of cocaine.
I can't necessarily blame him.
How far would you be willing to go
to save something you worked your whole life for?
Your life's dream?
What would you do to see that succeed no matter what?
KATHRYN: He always kept trying. He never gave up the dream.
He never quit believing that there was a potential for him to recover,
that he was going to invent the next great thing,
that he was going to be able to reclaim his former glory.
He was John DeLorean and he was John DeLorean until the day he died.
ZACH: You know, I think he was still trying to make fucking deals
on that DMC-2 when he got the heart attack.
And I think that would be a good way to end the movie.
You could have him on the phone, eating some breakfast,
with an open notebook thing that you would show investors
with, you know, all the nice little pictures and stuff.
Talking on the phone, then it just fades to black
because then that last image
would just be him working to get that deal done.
And he just fucking...
God pulled the plug on his ass, man.
"You're out of here, buddy," you know.
Then, you know, it just goes black
and then John DeLorean died in Morristown, New Jersey,
at fucking 80 years old on this date, you know,
never to have fulfilled, you know, another car company,
built another car company.
And, you know, I'd be okay with that.
-MAN 1: Slate. Good. -MAN 2: Scene 28 Alpha, take two.
Great. Thank you.
DIRECTOR: Action.
If we can't get the money to distribute this movie,
what if we sell cocaine to try to get this movie distributed?
-SHEENA: Sure. -We don't wanna lose, either.
-SHEENA: No. -I'm counting on you, Sheena.