The infamous car, the drug bust, the controversy - John DeLorean leaves an indelible mark on life, writes Seán O'Driscoll
I was sitting in the passenger seat of John DeLorean's SUV last year as he drove through narrow county roads in northern New Jersey. There were toddlers' toys scattered around our feet and children's books thrown on the backseat. Well into his 70s, DeLorean was a father again, as animated by his love of fatherhood as he was his hatred of the American government.
As we passed a horse farm near his home, I asked him the one question I had neglected to ask in dozens of conversations. "John, do you actually own a DeLorean car?" He looked at me, grimaced and whispered: "No." He gave a boyish grin, as if he had just stolen a toffee apple.
Somehow it summed up John DeLorean and the DeLorean fiasco in Belfast.
A Howard Hughes biographer once said that his subject seemed to be entirely innocent of his own recklessness. It was an observation that could have applied to John DeLorean. Thousands of people lost their jobs in Belfast and tens of millions of pounds in British taxpayers' money disappeared, but John DeLorean genuinely seemed to lack any sense of self-examination.
As we trundled along in his car, he said that US drug enforcement agents were involved in smuggling cocaine into America to make a quick profit. "What do they care?" he said quickly. "There's still going to be lots of drugs out there whether they do or don't."
There was an awkward silence. It was as close as DeLorean would come to admitting his own rationale for bringing a suitcase with more than $20million (€15.4million) in cocaine to a hotel room in Los Angeles airport. He pleaded government entrapment and was later acquitted.
Despite, or because of, his legal difficulties, he had a conspiracy theory on everything. His business partner was murdered by British intelligence, he claimed. They also tried to run over a businessman who wanted to buy the distinctive metallic car paints after the Belfast plant closed. The FBI set him up on the cocaine charge at the behest of the British government, which wanted to close the DeLorean plant because the IRA was extracting taxes from the factory workers.
The lawyer who defended him on the cocaine charges also became a sworn enemy. DeLorean referred in a court document to the lawyer, Jewish by background, as a "Shylock".
Of his third, and ex wife Christina Ferrare, a former supermodel, he said she had grown "nicer and fatter" over the years and they were able now to hold a civil conversation.
But lawyers and ex-wives were low down the list compared with his burning hatred of Margaret Thatcher and the British government. Most people in Northern Ireland would dance with delight if the British withdrew, he claimed over lunch in New Jersey.
He wistfully remembered the H-Block hunger striker Bobby Sands and the riots that followed his death. The petrol bombs flew at the police and "unfortunately" burnt down the financial records of the DeLorean car plant. The cars, luckily, remained intact.
Despite his advanced age, DeLorean never missed a beat. When I paid for a buffet lunch at a hotel near his home, he made sure to stock up on apples and small apple tarts to bring home, carrying them in two arms as he walked out the door.
Dressed in jeans, boots and large sunglasses, he looked much more the suburban cowboy than the white-suited, boardroom Adonis of his earlier years. He still had those piercing pale eyes, the lean, hungry face, the jovial, gravelly voice. And he was still talking about making a big comeback on the car scene. He was working with an aeronautical engineer to build a car whose steel could automatically bend back into shape, even if dropped from a height.
When I asked if he was working on a pig that could fly backwards, he stared back heavily.
Later, I hired a documentary crew to film a DeLorean biography. We travelled to a DeLorean car convention in Tennessee, but John pulled out of the event, despite impassioned pleadings from his family. At the convention, I met Kathryn DeLorean, John's daughter, who had suffered under the weight of the DeLorean name for years.
With a line of DeLorean cars in the background and the camera rolling, she explained how much she hated being a DeLorean as a teenager. There were the cruel cocaine jokes in school about "white lines in the middle of the road" and snide remarks about the business collapse.
Sporting a large Born to Be Wild tattoo on her back, Kathryn explained how she learnt to embrace her father's legacy in the last few years by attending DeLorean conventions and speaking to the fans, who still adored the wacky cars.
Back in New York, I contacted John again to tell him that it was time to put his face on camera and that, as I didn't want to spring any surprises, there would have to be some tough questions about the collapse of the empire. He laughed and said that he was going to need a few months to sort it all out in his head.
Within those "few months", John DeLorean was dead. He had escaped yet again, leaving me with a financial headache. He wouldn't have wanted it any other way.