February 17, 2011
By Staff Reporter
DeLorean was possibly the most brilliant auto engineer of his generation. He was without doubt the most charismatic.
During his glory years, his lavish lifestyle, which included two mansions, a fleet of 22 vehicles and a succession of beautiful female companions, had more in common with the stars of Hollywood than with the conservative bosses of the big Motown car companies.
The problem, for DeLorean and all those who got involved with him, was that the severity of his flaws matched the immensity of his talents.
DeLorean’s ideas were groundbreaking: he led the teams that created two iconic sports cars of the 1960s, the Pontiac GTO and the Firebird; he was fiercely creative, eventually holding over 200 patents; and many of his concepts, including a focus on developing more compact, fuel-efficient cars, were decades ahead of their time.
Yet, for all that, DeLorean ended up bankrupt and disgraced. An English judge once said that he wished he could have sentenced the Detroit-born businessman for “barefaced, outrageous and massive fraud.” The judge’s frustration had been engendered by DeLorean’s successful battle against extradition to the UK.
DeLorean beat a number of other charges in controversial circumstances. Most infamously, he was acquitted of conspiring to sell cocaine in 1984, despite evidence that included a surveillance tape in which he was presented with a suitcase full of the drug, and declared it “better than gold.”
The engineer’s Irish connection might have represented the apex of his career. Instead, it marked the nadir.
DeLorean, the son of poor Romanian immigrants, left General Motors in 1973 to found his own company. He planned to produce a revolutionary sports car whose appearance would be defined by its stainless steel body and gull-wing doors. DeLorean proposed building the car in Belfast.
The British government of the time was enthralled by the idea, in part because it believed that the creation of over 2,000 jobs in West Belfast would drain support away from the IRA.
Then-Northern Ireland Secretary Roy Mason said that the factory would be “a great psychological boost for Ulster,” and that it would deliver a “hammer blow” to armed republicanism.
In 1978, the Labor government of which Mason was a member gave DeLorean