John DeLorean: Almost everyone who had business dealings with carmaker John DeLorean, who has died aged 80, suffered either money losses in the millions, public vilification for the vanished cash, or both.
Through all this turbulence, DeLorean remained unscathed: even if he did lose a fortune, he had not been entitled to it in the first place.
An English judge said in 1992 that he would have liked to sentence the creator of the famous, Belfast-built, gull-winged sports car that bore the DeLorean name to 10 years in prison for "barefaced, outrageous and massive fraud" over stolen UK government money.
He could not because DeLorean had wriggled out of an extradition request to the US. All he ever spent behind bars was 10 days while he raised bail after his arrest in Los Angeles in 1982 on charges of smuggling cocaine worth $24 million. His acquittal two years later, due to FBI entrapment, was one of several cases in which he eluded criminal conviction.
Even at the time there was some muttering about the speed of the Belfast car deal struck with the British government in 1978. Northern Ireland trade officials were so desperate for the DeLorean venture that they elbowed past Dublin officials already leaving the arena looking puzzled but relieved not to have signed up for a plant in the Republic. British Government audits have since censured the slapdash oversight, or lack of it, that missed early signs of financial irregularity and allowed DeLorean siphon off so much.
Northern Secretary Roy Mason was an impatient man, whose answer to the Troubles was to combine the firm smack of plainclothes army operations against the IRA with spending, more lavish than any British budget, on leisure centres in inner-city districts. He believed he could defeat the IRA. The republican and security assessment is that he almost succeeded, at a cost to the record of British security forces and the legal system.
The DeLorean project was announced with much fanfare, the site trumpeted as accessible to the spread of Catholic west Belfast and fronting on to a Protestant district. But there was concern from the outset about the quality of training and the small number of Catholic recruits compared to the number of managers drafted in from mainly Protestant workplaces like Shorts and the shipyard.
John DeLorean and his then wife Christina Ferrare photographed well and figured in sizeable articles on the homes they enjoyed elsewhere and the houses they examined in Northern Ireland. Social columns praised their clothes and style: difficult questions were swatted aside, with visible irritation on DeLorean's part.
Concern was not dispelled through the preliminary months of set-up, and the showy launch of cars which commanded attention but obviously needed much prepping and maintenance to keep their looks. Journalists who arrived early for the ceremony found anxious workmen trying to brush out multiple scratches on the steel bodies.
Even those who wanted to believe the car plant could bring major employment to the black spot of west Belfast failed to muster enthusiasm: the collapse came fast and comprehensively, leaving many saying "I told you so" with little satisfaction as several hundred men went back on the dole.
DeLorean was a world-class conman, despite a brilliant early engineering career at General Motors. Among his victims of fraud, embezzlement, tax evasion or defaulted loans were the governments of Britain, the US and Switzerland (which also failed to extradite him); Hollywood stars such as talk-show host Johnny Carson, who lost $1.5 million; lawyers; and a California automotive inventor forced to pay him nearly $500,000 to buy back his own invention.
Millions of pounds disappeared in the 1982 collapse of the Belfast car venture, but DeLorean also looked after the pennies. While promoting it as the "ethical car", he changed a lunch receipt from the Beverly Wilshire hotel from $17 to $191.50, one court heard. Another court recorded testimony that DeLorean practised forging the signatures of Colin Chapman, the late founder of the Lotus car company and a partner in the DeLorean vehicle, and the late Sir Kenneth Cork, an accountant and his official receiver in Britain.
After his 1982 fall, DeLorean clung on to his $9 million New York apartment until 1992 and kept his $4 million, 434-acre New Jersey estate until March 2000. He did forfeit his southern Californian ranch to Howard Weitzman, his cocaine case defence counsel, who insisted on the deeds in advance. His next defence lawyer, Mayer Morganroth of Michigan, who said he "got him off" in 40 different cases, pursued DeLorean into the 21st century for over $4 million unpaid fees, despite winning two court cases against his own client for the money.
A typical DeLorean touch was his conversion to fundamentalist Christianity in 1982 when he experienced the full-immersion baptism - in his exquisitely tiled swimming pool. He also changed the name of a semi-secret $9 million company he owned in Utah from Logan Manufacturing to "Ecclesiastes 9: 10-11-12", a switch that added to the delay before hundreds of creditors in Britain, America and France (from where he got the Renault engine for his car) could claim it.
Most of the money regained actually came via court cases against the international accounting firm, Arthur Andersen, which was sued by the British government for failing to spot fraudulence in the DeLorean Motor Company.
In 1999 Andersen settled out of court for $27.7 million paid to the 260 creditors to avoid further litigation, in a case requiring testimony from the former prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, and several ex-cabinet ministers. Two years earlier Andersen had also agreed to pay $35 million to the UK government after admitting liability.
In the US, bankruptcy proceedings finally ended in May 2000 with creditors getting 91 cents to the dollar, more than they expected. By this time many had either died or left the case. Then DeLorean began selling "D=MC2" stainless steel watches for $3,495 each on the internet, offering as a contact an advertising firm in New York state. But as DeLorean's bankruptcy was still extant over the Morganroth debt, he was prohibited from pocketing any profits.
Despite his shocking record of dishonesty, he retained a dedicated corps of American fans, mostly the 6,000-odd owners of the stainless steel cars from the 8,563 built in Belfast, now collectors' items.
DeLorean was born to a hard-drinking Romanian immigrant and Ford foundry worker and his Austrian-born wife, a factory worker, in Detroit. Tall and good-looking, John excelled at school and obtained an engineering degree from Lawrence Technical College. He later took his master's at the Chrysler Institute.
His career began with Packard, then an old-fashioned carmaker facing extinction. But with a brilliant team of young engineers DeLorean helped to revive it, and when he left in 1956 had registered 12 patents. He joined GM at its Pontiac division, also in trouble with a fusty image, and became well known in Detroit for creating the 1961 Tempest, a best-selling, fast small car.
In 1965 he launched the GTO for Pontiac, another speedy car with youth appeal and a hot seller, and at 40 DeLorean became the youngest vice-president in GM's history. He and his first wife, Elizabeth, lived in an English-style mansion and dined at the country club. By the late 1960s he was in a mid-life crisis: he had plastic surgery to enhance his jaw.
DeLorean had become general manager of Chevrolet but had tired of corporate life. He then promised to stay out of the car business for a year in exchange for a lucrative Florida dealership, but soon began investigating his stainless steel dream.
The Italian designer Giorgetto Giugiaro offered a design, actually a discarded Porsche prototype. DeLorean assembled a team and formed a company, and the design became the vehicle that seduced the British government after DeLorean met Northern Ireland officials in 1978. They signed an agreement 45 days later, DeLorean got $97 million, and the government - and numerous others - spent over 20 years trying to retrieve it.
After his marriage to his first wife ended in 1969, he married 19-year-old Kelly Harmon. They divorced in 1972 and, after dating Ursula Andress and Tina Sinatra, he married a successful model, Cristina Ferrare, the following year. She split up with him shortly after the 1984 cocaine case.
John Zachary DeLorean: born January 6th, 1925; died March 19th, 2005