DeLorean--’Every Person Has His Price’

WASHINGTON —  The picture captured by the hidden camera is still disturbingly clear in the mind: silver-haired John Z. DeLorean, the tall, tan maverick, sitting in a room with government agents and a suitcase full of cocaine.

Why?

Why was this man who had everything --wealth, talent, vision, a stunning wife, beautiful children--risking it all in the middle of a make-believe drug deal?

“You know,” DeLorean said, peering pleasantly through luminescent blue-green eyes, “every person has his price.”

DeLorean was acquitted of those cocaine trafficking charges just over a year ago and now faces a 15-count criminal indictment in Detroit, charging that he defrauded his DeLorean Motor Co. investors of $18 million. The indictment alleges, among other things, that he filtered $8.5 million of it into his personal accounts for expenditures such as $28,000 worth of jewelry.

Although DeLorean considers both cases “government harassment” and expects to prove his innocence at trial after trial “for the rest of my life,” DeLorean does not find himself completely innocent.

“Every person has a price, whether it’s the life of a child, or money or something,” DeLorean said. “And they found my price.”

It was “egomania” that started him on the trail to that room in an effort to save the failing car company that finally went under in 1982. By the time DeLorean walked into the room and saw what was happening, it was too late to back out, he said, because “they said they were going to kill my kids and send heads home in shopping bags” if he didn’t go through with the deal. They had found his price.

On a 13-city tour promoting his book “DeLorean” (Hilsinger Mendleson: $17.95), the 60-year-old auto magnate looked tanned and rested, and was in an upbeat mood. DeLorean arrives in Los Angeles today to continue telling his story, to offer endless details of his legal problems, his marital problems, his religious rebirth and, ever the eye of this hurricane of chaos, his ego.

At every stop, DeLorean expresses indignant condemnation of the government for chasing him with the cocaine deal, claiming he didn’t know the deal involved drugs until he saw the suitcase and uttered the unforgettable words, “Good as gold.”

Now, DeLorean says he is essentially broke and his marriage and car company are gone and his children are suffering serious psychological problems. Is any of the fault his own?

“It’s all my fault,” he said.

Once considered the heir apparent to the presidency of General Motors, DeLorean waved away his future at GM to walk into a dream: to make the perfect car and name it after himself, to become even more unimaginably rich and even cure social ills by sticking the factory in strife-torn West Belfast, where formerly unemployed Catholics and Protestants would work side by side.

But when the Conservatives took power in the British government and made it clear they would no longer provide the funding that had been supporting the DeLorean Motor Co., it sank into a financial abyss.

At this point, “any rational human being,” DeLorean said, oddly chuckling, “would have said, ‘Hey, you put all the money in it, Great Britain, and if you don’t want it to be there, there’s no point in me trying to survive.’ ”

Ego in the Way

He would have done the only sensible thing and folded the company right then, DeLorean reflected, “except for my ego.

“My name was on it. It was my dream. I’d worked so many years on it.”

This was the egomania that led him to unfathomable depths: to drug use, to dependence on a palm reader for business and spiritual advice, and to a frenzied, futile search for investors, seeking out every rich, phony or crazy man anywhere in the world who would talk to him about investing money in his dying dream.

“I was screwed up, there’s no two ways about it,” DeLorean said. “I spent seven years of my life, my dream, everything was involved in this and you want to do anything and everything to keep that thing going.

“It’s such a gross injustice for men to come to you in this horrible period, when you haven’t done anything wrong, and offer you the financial support necessary to accomplish all these things.”

It was a temptation he couldn’t resist.

Intense Competitive Sense

Trying to analyze what sort of person is driven to do the things he did, DeLorean said he was brought up to be totally dedicated to his work, and has “an intense sense of competition,” so intense that he had given up playing both bridge and golf because “I was so competitive about it that it wasn’t recreation.

“That’s wrong when that happens,” he said. “Your life isn’t balanced. You’re really all fouled up.”

DeLorean became so out of touch with reality that he began to rely on the services of a palm reader named Sonja, whom his wife, model Cristina Ferrare, had gone to when she was having trouble getting pregnant. One day, DeLorean wrote, Sonja put a glass of water under Ferrare’s chair and the water turned to blood, which meant she would get pregnant. And she did.

So DeLorean began consulting Sonja on details large and small in the business.

“I wound up discussing everything with her,” he said. “That’s how insane it was. And thinking about it today, I can’t believe that’s me. How could a presumably well-educated, rational human being be asking some little palmist . . . but that was who I was. It was really incredible.”

The book offers voluminous details of events leading up to his acquittal, starting with his career at General Motors. During the period when he was frantically pursuing investors, DeLorean wrote, he was using a daily combination of Seconal sleeping pills, a codeine pain pill, 222, sold over the counter in Canada, and 15 cups of coffee to keep himself functioning. But DeLorean said in an interview that he had never used cocaine and never saw it until the day of the arrest.

‘Proud, Arrogant Phony’

His drug use ended, he said, when he was in jail. There he also discovered that he was, he wrote, “a proud and arrogant phony . . . a broken man, struck down, a humbled man with no place to turn.”

It was also at this time that he began reading the Bible and opened himself to the Lord, he wrote. He was standing at his bunk, and “I felt His presence. A powerful warming embrace engulfed my body from the soles of my feet to the top of my head.”

From that point on, his headaches and sleeping problems abated and he was able to withstand the rigors of the trial.

There is “not a chance” DeLorean could have made it without his faith, he said. “I would have been dead a year ago.

“The pressure is beyond anything. I’d rather have lost both arms and legs. It would have been much easier than what I’ve gone through.”

Suicide Contemplated

During the trial, DeLorean wrote, Ferrare had an affair with another man, “modeled the fall line” of a fashion designer’s clothes in the courtroom and faked fainting at a dramatic juncture. DeLorean also wrote that when he contemplated suicide, Ferrare and her mother became very concerned that his life insurance policy would not pay off for a suicide.

DeLorean said he disclosed such details because “what I tried to do was to be totally candid.” The book strongly implies that he felt Ferrare should have stood by him.

“I think I had that feeling initially,” DeLorean said, when asked about it. “Of course, I have a different attitude now. I don’t think any marriage could have survived the horror of what the government put our family through.”

The divorce (which was followed by Ferrare’s remarriage to Tony Thomopoulos) was the hardest thing for DeLorean to endure, he said.

“I was very depressed and lost about 35 pounds,” he said.

Another case of a loyalist turning against DeLorean is found in former DeLorean Motor Co. employee William Haddad, who has written his own book, “Hard Driving. My Years With John DeLorean,” accusing DeLorean of many of the charges in the Detroit indictment.

Incredible Accusations

In a venomous battle of the book tours, Haddad and DeLorean are exchanging incredible accusations as they crisscross the land, DeLorean telling a reporter that Haddad “clearly belongs to the first circle (of hell),” Haddad hissing back to another reporter that “he was cruel. He was vindictive.”

Haddad, whose background is in politics and journalism, was brought into the company partly because of what Haddad described as his close relationship with the Kennedys. He had worked for Sen. Robert Kennedy, but DeLorean said a Kennedy family member told him that “the Kennedys hardly knew Haddad.” DeLorean says in the book that Haddad had poor hygiene, among other faults.

Haddad also had a large role as an informant in the case that DeLorean has just been indicted for, DeLorean said.

“When we’re all through (with the case),” DeLorean said, “we will have proved absolutely unequivacably that absolutely not one cent ever came to me that wasn’t honestly mine on an absolute straight legitimate basis.”

$4-Million Defense Costs

DeLorean is also involved in civil bankruptcy litigation, which he says has put a hold on his current assets, including an apartment in Manhattan and a farm in New Jersey. He says he expects eventually to sell those and all his other assets to pay off his legal bills. DeLorean estimates the defense costs of his first trial at approximately $4 million.

Now DeLorean is living in a Beverly Hills home, between book promotions. His advance on the book was “almost $1 million. The portions I’ve already gotten are long gone, and, of course,” he said, chuckling again, “I’m back in deep debt to everybody in the world.”

DeLorean said he is exploring a deal for a movie on his book with the Castle Group of Newport Beach, Calif. He is also involved with some church projects, a home for the homeless in San Diego, and a program called “Adopt a Family” in which a rich family would “adopt” a poor ghetto family, giving it advice and assistance.

And then there is the dream. Always the dream.

DeLorean may be broke. He may be alone. He may be endlessly ensnared in legal entanglements. He may be a Christian who has shed his ego like a snakeskin. But he has not lost his dream. He hopes to start up another car company in Columbus, Ohio, to begin reproducing the DeLorean, “with updated styling and a much bigger engine.”

He already has the investors, he said.