Stuff You Should Know - Let's Talk About John DeLorean

Episode Date: January 24, 2023

John DeLorean: visionary, car maker extraordinaire, buyer of large amounts of cocaine, provider of time machine chassis. There is a lot to understand about John DeLorean so let’s get busy.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Listen to Let's Start a Coup on the iHeartRadio App, Apple Podcast or wherever you find your favorite shows. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh. There's Chuck. Jerry's here. And this is Stuff You Should Vroom.

Stuff You Should Know, everybody. Calm down. Stuff You Should Know about a specific car, car maker, a legend and possibly a real jackass. Who did this for us? Was this Libya? Yeah, Libya helps us with this one. Can we read how she titled it? Sure.

John DeLorean, Colin, celebrity weirdo car maker. She pretty much nailed it in the title. It's true. Like, he was a celebrity. He was very weird, and he was a car maker. As a matter of fact, that's where he started to get his celebrity, was in car making. But she likens it, and I think quite correctly to the rise of, or he prefigured the rise of the worshiped tech god, like Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg, these people who have

been held up to these amazing standards and like you just think they can do anything. They're doing all this amazing stuff when it really turns out that they're, you know, they just want to party with some starlets, you know? And that's a lot what John DeLorean's life was like. He was like, okay, I got here, and now I want to do everything that's fun and has nothing to do with how I got here. And that inevitably leads to the downfall. Or as I saw it really aptly put in one of the articles, he succumbed to that most American

of maladies. He believed in his own myth. You never want to do that, everybody. Have you seen either one of the documentaries? I haven't yet, no. Okay, there's two. There's one I watched a couple of years ago called Framing John DeLorean, which is a sort of a weird mix of documentary and narrative film in that they do these very like high

quality, like it's a movie, recreation, recreations for those of you, not in the biz. With Alec Baldwin as John DeLorean, and then there was another one that there's a three part on Netflix called Myth and Mogul, John DeLorean. I think it's, I don't know why they split these up, because it ends up being like two hours and 15 minutes long with the three parts put together. But they're both really good. And I watched both of them before this was even an idea, because I was a little fascinated with the guy, because I'm a child of the 80s.

And I remember, as you probably do, on the rare occasion when you would see a DeLorean, or be in a neighborhood where the kid's like, there's a DeLorean in our neighborhood. So-and-so's dad has one. They were that rare, that cool, that different. And I also lived in Burnardsville, New Jersey after college, which was just about three or four miles from where John DeLorean lived. And I remember when I moved there, they were like, yeah, John DeLorean lives like right down the road.

Oh, is that when he lived in his estate or his condo? Yeah, that was when he lived in Bedminster, and we'll get to the history there and whose hands that ended up in. But DeLorean was just a person who really, I was at the right age, I think, when it all came crumbling down. And of course, back to the future, like he was just someone I was fascinated with. And I loved watching these docs, and I loved doing this research. Well, I mean, he is an astoundingly fascinating person.

Yeah, I'm not saying I hold him up to some great human, but just fascinated by him, like you said. There are people out there who do, who consider him a visionary in his image. He was, sure, but he was also like a straight up grifter and a con man in a lot of really important ways. He was also what I would call a proto douche, as it will become apparent later on. Sure. But he was all these things and more, he was also a great self-promoter, but what's amazing

about it is if you step back and look at his background and where he came from and how he became famous, it was through his own smarts, it was through his own great education that his parents made sure he got, he was an engineer, he was a car engineer, and that's how he made his name by doing really good, amazing work. And then eventually, he kind of, Peter principled himself out of that work and into, that's when he started to get into trouble. Yeah, I think when I was younger, when I was a teenager and knew sort of the lore, I thought that he was just some rich guy who had this vanity project of a car company.

I did not know until much, much later that he was a really great, sort of brilliant engineer and put so many great cars on the map at GM as a young executive. And I think I appreciated him a lot more and was like, okay, this guy, he knew what he was doing. He had certainly tons of faults, like you said, but he wasn't, I just thought he was a rich guy. He was like, I want a cool, different car. No, no, he definitely knew what he was talking about.

And apparently, when he was coming up with the DeLorean DMC-12, the DeLorean, the only model he ever came out with, God, I hope that's correct because we're going to get some many emails if it's not. But I'm positive. There are a few versions of that one. Okay. But they were all DMC-12s. Right?

God, I think so. Now I'm nervous. Okay. We're just going to move forward, Chuck. Let's just soldier on. Right? All right. He wanted that to be like a valuable car.

It was named the DMC-12 because he wanted the starting price to be $12,000. An affordable, at the time, expensive, but still not out of the reach of somebody who wanted to really get one of these. It wasn't just for the rich and wealthy and famous. He wanted it to be reliable. The prototype had airbags. It had an onboard computer. It had an anti-theft system.

This is like in the early 80s. This is long before anybody was doing stuff like that. And so he really did want to make a really good car. It just didn't quite work out that way because he got into his own way, I would say. He had an emergency handbrake on the left of the driver. So some angry friend in the passenger seat couldn't yank it up and kill you. Is that true? Well, I don't know if that's why he did it, but it makes sense, put it on the left so

no one else can get to it. It really was on the left. Huh. That makes sense. I wonder if it's because most people are right-handed or more people are right-handed. I don't know. I'd say we can start back at the beginning, Chuck, because we're getting in our own way now.

That's right. He was born John Zachary DeLorean in Detroit, no surprise, in 1925. He was born to not a lot of money. In one of the documentaries, they described his neighborhood as fairly rundown. His parents were immigrants. His dad was from, he was Romanian and his mom was Hungarian. He was a line worker at GE and his dad was a foundry worker and a union guy, union organizer, but not a good dude.

Drancolot was abusive and he did not see him again after his about 16th or 17th birthday, I think, when his mom divorced him. Right. Like I said, he got a really good education, but he was also a really great student and he went to technical school. He went to Cass Technical High School. He went to Lawrence Institute of Technology and he was basically set up to become a car engineer from a very early age.

He fought in the Army during World War II and then came back and got a degree from the Chrysler Institute and then finally in 1956 became a full-fledged auto engineer starting with Packard and then he moved to General Motors. In General Motors, that's where he would start to make his name. Yeah. He was married a few times and we'll kind of touch on the various wives. It sounds like he wasn't the best husband in the world, but I don't think he, well, I don't know.

I don't want to go there because when you're not in a marriage, how can you comment on how it really is? Sure. You know? In 1954, though, he married Elizabeth Higgins, who was his first wife. They were married for about a decade, never had kids, and that's when he first got his career going at GM with Pontiac. He, I think in this documentary, described himself early on at least as the squarist

guy at General Motors, which is just noteworthy because of what he became, which was certainly not a square guy at all. Right. He had a bunch of patents to his name, like the recessed windshield wiper, the hidden radio antenna, stacked headlights, stuff that you still see on cars today, or it certainly did for many, many years after he invented them. He ran into a problem really quickly, though. He had a really good eye for design, and he also realized that youth culture was starting

to become a thing, like teenagers were suddenly invented, and teenagers liked cars. The problem was Detroit was putting out a certain type of car, and that was a big giant boat that you couldn't even feel any movement whatsoever in. You were just floating down the road, and that's what GM thought everyone would want, because that's what the old execs at GM wanted, and DeLorean saw very early on that this is wrong. There's a whole sector out there that we're not even touching, and he really kind of focused on that.

Yeah, and this was also a time, too, I want to point out that the car industry, if you're a certain age, you might remember this a little bit, but if you're younger, you know, foreign cars, imported cars, there's all kinds of cars out there, and American cars, sure, some are fine, but it's just the American car industry. Back then, the American car industry was, these were the biggest corporations in the world, and they were rock stars. We talked a little bit about it in the Pinto episode, I guess, but these were huge, huge corporations, and they were the biggest, baddest executives in the world worked for these car

companies in Detroit. So like you said, they sort of like the big boats. He came along and said, let's make cars that are cooler. I think there were some people in the management that were, you know, a lot of them weren't on board, but some were on board because they were taking these kind of cooler prototypes out, apparently, in the evenings, and like drag racing in Detroit against teenagers. Yeah, he went to work specifically for Bunky Knudsen, who made an appearance in the Pinto app, I believe.

I think so, yeah. And Bunky Knudsen was running Pontiac at the time, and back then Pontiac was just considered the lamest old person's medallion that there was in any car company at all, not just in GM. Pontiac was just a snooze. And so the idea that Bunky Knudsen and John DeLorean were kind of tapped into the same vibe that, wait a minute, there's younger kids that want cars and we're not making them for them.

And Bunky Knudsen apparently said, you can never sell a young man an old man's car, but you can always sell an old man a young man's car. And they actually changed the car industry based on that premise. And the way that DeLorean did it was by taking the Pontiac Tempest, which was a pretty cool-looking mid-sized Pontiac, and putting a Bonneville engine, which was a large-sized Pontiac, a Bonneville engine into the Tempest and making it go room really fast, which the teenagers just loved. Yeah.

It was a huge hit. Apparently GM even had a rule that said, you can't put that big of an engine in a car this size. But they did it anyway as a special option on the 64 Tempest. And DeLorean named this, of course, the GTO, it was the GTO package initially, and he named it after the, it was a Ferrari, but there were sort of road racing cars in Italy. Were Gran Turismo, I'm sorry, Gran Turismo Omolagatos. Very nice.

And that's where GTO comes from, and it was a huge hit out of the gate. And Pontiac all of a sudden went from snooze to, boy, I wish it had something that rhymed that wasn't loose. Cruise. Yeah. Toward the top. Oh, boy, that was perfect stuff you should know material. That was the best I could come up with.

No, that's right. Pontiac was just hottest fire all of a sudden. Yeah. So DeLorean created the first muscle car, the GTO is widely considered the first muscle car, and it kicked off this huge trend of muscle cars. And you can thank John DeLorean for that. The GTO also was hugely successful because DeLorean and Newton and the Pontiac gang figured out that you really wanted to market these things a certain way too.

So they marketed the GTO specifically toward young people. I think one of their ads said the Pontiac GTO buy one before you're too old to understand. I'm not kidding. Like that was an advertisement. There was GTO Cologne, Tom McCann came out with some GTO driving shoes and the sole was, yeah, the sole was designed to fit right into the pedal of a GTO so you could push the pedal to the metal faster and go balls out. Oh, that's right.

This all reminded me of my dad who, even though he was an elementary school principal, went out without asking my mom at all, and he bought a Porsche 911, which we could not afford. And he immediately had the Porsche sunglasses, the Porsche jacket, the Porsche hat, baseball cap, and I think like one other Porsche thing. He was not to be disturbed by his eating his Porsche breakfast cereal. At the time, I thought, you know, your dad brings home a Porsche 911. It was beautiful. And he had all the stuff.

It was so cool. And then I got a little older and I was like, what a terrible thing to do in a marriage. I know. Without asking, good Lord. All the financial stress it caused and then all this douchey side stuff he was wearing. I was like, no, no, no, we won't get into all that. So back to John DeLorean. Because of that GTO thing, he was promoted to the head of Pontiac.

I'm not sure we're bunking Newton. Maybe this is when Newton went over to Ford to work with the Pinto. But he was 40 at the time. And there is a great article on this. It's the longest long form ever. It's called Demon Underneath. It's by Alex Papademos. It's on the outline.

And he basically says that DeLorean was the youngest general manager at GM. He was 40. And at the time, that made him basically prepubescent by Detroit standards being 40. It was a really big deal that he was made general manager of Pontiac. That's how big of a breakthrough the GTO was. And then as if that weren't enough, he followed it up with the Firebird and then the Grand Prix. Crazy.

So in three years, he invented, no, I'm sorry, in about five years he invented the GTO, the Firebird and the Grand Prix. I mean, legend man, total legend. He could have retired then and made his name in car history and not for a bad cocaine deal. He didn't though. He decided to go a different way. And I saw it explained as such, Chuck. I don't remember who said it like this, but I think one of his fellow travelers from the

time and in that circle said that had he come up in sales, he would have known very quickly that partying with Hollywood types is kind of a snooze, that they're not actually good people, they're not that much fun to be around, it's kind of high stress. But he wasn't exposed to that until much later on when he became an executive, but he didn't come up from the sales side. He came up from the engineering side, so he had no point of reference for that. So to him, partying with Hollywood stars was the coolest thing you could do. And it was the first thing he started doing, the first chance he got.

All right. So it's a great cliffhanger for a first break. What would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told you, hey, let's start a coup? Back in the 1930s, a Marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the US and fascism. I'm Ben Bullitt. And I'm Alex French.

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Okay, Chuck, now we've reached the point where John DeLorean transforms into Dan Ackroyd as a wild and crazy guy. I thought you were going to say Dr. Detroit for a second. That kind of works too, but I think wild and crazy guy is even more accurate. Yeah, very much. This is sort of evidence of the fact that these were the biggest corporations in the world because ask any American who the top executives for GM are today. And unless you're in the know or a big gearhead, even then you might not even know.

But back then, he made himself into a celebrity. He started dyeing his hair. He went gray pretty early and was admittedly a very handsome man. But he just was sort of this idealized and the magnum P.I. era of, or this is kind of pre-magnum, but just sort of that era of that machismo. He was tall and he had this hair coming out of his shirt like this hairy chest. He had a button in his shirt and he had this cool hair. He made himself the, like he said, or like I said, he said he was a square guy and I

think he just really wanted to change that. So all of a sudden he's dating like literally dating Raquel Welch and Ursula Andrus and these bombshell Hollywood actresses and of course divorces his first wife in 1968. And we should mention that she sued him for cruelty. So he probably wasn't a great husband, but he immediately gets married. This is sort of his MO is like, let me marry someone about half my age. He married a 20 year old named Kelly Harmon when he was 40 years old and they adopted their son Zachary.

Do you remember those weird tic-tac ads from the 80s where it was a real close up of a blonde lady like talking about how much she enjoys just one tic-tac? Sure. That's Kelly Harmon. Was that her? Yeah. And it's Mark Harmon's sister, by the way. Oh, another fun thing from the documentary is this came from his own mouth.

He was talking about his sex drive and how like, you know, he has a pretty substantial sex drive and he said, you know, what, what man in history, no man in history has ever accomplished anything that didn't have that trait. So, yeah. I was like, oh, wait, old podcasting comes around, my friend. Nailed it. Chuck, think about that though. He's the guy, he's the kind of guy who would say that to a reporter and then hope that

the reporter kept that in the interview when it was published. It's kind of Ron Burgundy-esque. Yeah, but way more self-aware. Way more self-aware. Ron Burgundy was, or still is, I guess, he has a podcast himself, just kind of a loof about himself. John DeLorean was very tuned into himself. He just thought that what he was doing was the coolest thing ever and didn't realize

that it actually wasn't super cool at all. Yeah. He got facial reconstructive surgery and not throwing shade of people want to do that kind of thing, but he went through a big midlife crisis is how this one woman in the documentary who wrote a book, not about him, but she interviewed him for the book and I think he even kind of admitted it when he hit his 40s, he lost a bunch of weight, grew out of sideburns, started dyeing his hair, got chin and jawline implants to make him look more masculine and rugged and started dressing.

I think it was that guy that wrote the article, Papademos, said he starts showing up to manage a division of the most conservative corporation in America like he manages the Partridge family. Yeah, just like Reuben Kincaid. Yeah. But he kept bringing the goods, even while he's having this really embarrassing midlife crisis, he's still creating great cars. He came out with the Monte Carlo in 1969, he became head of Chevy, so he moved from head of Pontiac to head of Chevy.

That's a big deal at that time and then he even advanced all the way up to what they call the 14th floor at GM. So he went from Pontiac to Chevy to now he's one of the main executives running one of the biggest corporations in the country and he's walking around with his chest hair sticking out, making finger guns at people on his way to a meeting. But the thing is, he did not fit into that world at all, he bristled at that kind of stuff and they didn't like him any more than he liked them. Yeah, I think in 72 he was the chief of GM's truck and car division, which he said was

about 92% of what they produced. And this was the first, I think he was rumored to be in line for president and this was when over these couple of years in the early 70s was when the first whispers of like, how is this guy like, he makes good money, but how is he living this kind of lifestyle? And is he grifting the company at all? And there were rumors that he was taking kickbacks from parts people like suppliers and the sort of rumors of impropriety started cropping up around this time. What's crazy is this would plague him for the rest of his life basically and yet any

time like something was formally done to investigate him, to bring him up on charges. It just, it wouldn't stick. They just wouldn't stick. They never got him on anything that he did and he did plenty of it. Some of the stuff he probably didn't do, but he had that kind of reputation that was so bad that somebody might still try to sue you based on how bad your reputation is. And yet none of them were successful as far as I could tell. Yeah, I didn't see anything that stuck.

I think it was fall of 72 was when he finally departed, there was a text of a speech about quality control that he was going to give to a private audience at GM and it got leaked out to the press rumors, he did it himself and leaked it. And there was a lot of negative press and these companies, not only were they huge, they were very private and you didn't hear rumors and leaks in the press. You didn't talk about one another in the press. It was all very just sort of tightly controlled and they were, of course, super ticked off about it.

And in April of 73, depending on who you asked, he quit working there either by resignation or by being fired. But GM just kept mute about the departure between the two. And so DeLorean was able to say, I'm the man who fired GM because he was in charge of that. If GM wasn't speaking up, DeLorean could say basically whatever he wanted. And so he portrayed it as he got tired of GM. He said something like, even if you're making 650 grand a year, if you hate the job, it's just not worth it.

Which I mean, on the one hand, that's absolutely true. And I get the impression that he really felt that way. On the other hand, it's probably true that GM fired him and just kept mom about it. Yeah. Well, it's that whole like keeping it quiet thing, which he didn't care about at that point. I know, but he had been living Chuck largely on GM's dime as he expensed everything he could, including stuff that never should have even been remotely expense.

But he was living on GM and suddenly he wasn't able to expense everything. He still got his, I think his bonuses, it was part of his departure package. But he wasn't able to expense anything. And now all of a sudden his lavish lifestyle is not being underwritten by anybody. Yeah, he, after this separation from GM, he gets divorced. I guess he looked at Harman and said, you know, enough of the tic-tacs, you're 25, you're getting a little long in the tooth. And so he started dating a 22 year old when he was 48, named Christina Farrar.

And she was a very sort of semi-famous model, I guess she was pretty famous because I remember like seeing pictures of her at the time even and saying like, oh, I don't know who that is. And they had four homes, they had the apartment in Manhattan and the aforementioned mansion on 434 acres in Bedminster, New Jersey, which is right down the street from where I lived. And they had a daughter in 77 named Catherine. Yeah. Also by all accounts and in all appearances, he suddenly was in a new phase of life, free

from the shackles of GM's button down corporate culture, new wife, new baby, new house, new houses. And it's time for him to reinvent himself even further and he's going to do that. He decides by coming up with the most amazing car America has ever seen. Right. But he had a non-compete and GM was like, hey, part of the severance package, if you want to keep this money coming your way, you can't just jump over and start working for another car company.

So he sort of on the down low started working on the DeLorean car or the DeLorean motor company. And I think he thought, I don't know, I think he definitely thought, well, this little sort of small production run of this weird sports car, I'm not working with another car company. So that probably is okay with GM. And then once he started working, because he couldn't do it all by himself. So he had to kind of contract out and work with other car companies. Right.

And they said, all right, you're now cut off. But that's also pretty rich that he's like, oh, we're just too dinky to be considered a competitor. But when one of the reasons he wanted to found DeLorean Motor Company was to show Detroit, to stick it in their eye, to show them how to make it a real car, in very much the same way that Elon Musk sought to show Detroit how to make an electric car and was actually successful in that sense. You can say what you want about him, but he's basically single-handedly the reason why we

have electric cars now. He tried to do kind of the same thing to make a really cool, really reliable, really responsive car. Yeah. Did we talk about the car? Yeah. Yeah. Let's talk about it, because it is a very cool car by any standard.

He came along when gas mileage started to become literally for the first time sort of on American's minds, sort of the beginning of the gas crunch. So he was like, I want it to get to be fuel efficient, certainly want it to be cool. But like you said, sort of affordable, something that was reliable, which is pretty funny considering how the DeLorean turned out. I think it was most known for being completely unreliable. And the thing I remember most about it, I know you love those gull-wing doors, but the thing I remembered most was the fact that it was stainless steel, and I remember being

a kid and going, he made a stainless steel car, so it never rust. That's genius. Yeah. It never occurred to me that it would never rust. I just thought it was to look cool. No, that's why I did it. I knew that when I was 12. I don't know how.

I was a very dumb kid. Well, you were younger. So one of the things about the car is that if you look at it, it's just a very striking design. And that's because DeLorean hired like one of the premier car designers in the world, Giorgetto, oh, I'm sorry, Chuck, please take it. Giorgetto Giorgiario. Very nice.

Is that right? Yeah. He's the guy who designed the underwater car in The Spy Who Loved Me that James Bond drove. He also designed the Lotus Esprit, which was what the car was. I think it was a Lotus Esprit that James Bond car. And then he basically redesigned the Lotus Esprit for the DMC-12. Yeah, they look alike.

Very much so. And DeLorean's goal was to create an American car that Americans had never seen before. So it still kind of helped water. Sure. Absolutely. He needed a lot of money to do it. And so he said, all right, I think I can get this thing up and running for 90 million bucks, which is close to 400 million today.

And he set up a deal with Puerto Rico to manufacture there and exchange for 60 million bucks in guaranteed loans. And then Britain stepped in and said, oh, no, no, no, no. He said, hold my tea. Yeah, we'll give you. Oh, that was good. We'll give you a lot more money than that, my friend, if we have some troubles going on over here, so much so that they're literally called the Troubles.

I don't know if you've heard about all the bad things going down here between the Catholics and the Protestants, and there's a lot of turmoil, and we've talked about this stuff on our podcast. They didn't say that because they didn't have a podcast. If you bring your factory to Belfast of all places, we'll guarantee you $106 million in investments and loans and grants. Yeah, and anyone who listened to our Bobby Sands episode will remember that Belfast was like kind of ground zero for the troubles of Northern Ireland, and this spot that they

selected, a cow pasture, was actually right between a Protestant housing development and a Catholic housing development, and they wanted to build the factory right between them, and lower at least the 80% unemployment in the area, 80%, eight people out of 10 in this area were unemployed at the time. And John DeLorean was going to come in, build the state-of-the-art factory, and hire thousands of these people, Protestant and Catholic, and he was sensible. They built separate entrances for each group, for real, but he came to town, and in a lot of ways it created this sense of pride that had been missing among the workers that he

hired. Yeah, certainly the money was the biggest part of it. I'm sure Britain was like, this is great, we can put these folks to work, but he just wanted that 106 mil. I think he got another 31 million from investments in the U.S., private investment, including Johnny Carson, I think he went in for half a million bucks, a ton of money, especially back then, and our old friend Sammy Davis Jr. How did he accept?

He said, I really dig those doors, I'm in for 150. So he invested as well, and he's got his money, he's got his separate entrances, and on October 2nd, 1978, they broke ground on the plant to great protest. Yeah, there were plenty of protests. Again, there were a lot of people who were like, this is awesome, we're going to have good jobs, these are highly skilled technical jobs that are being created out of thin air here. But there were plenty of people who were like, this is a British project that they're building

in Belfast, Brits go home, Yanks go home. So not everybody was on board, and as a matter of fact, throughout the time that the Belfast factory was operating, DeLorean spent as little time there as possible because he was really worried about being murdered or kidnapped. So he did not hang around there, and probably rightfully so, I'm sure he would have been a pretty good target for IRA or the Ulster Liberation Force. Who knows? I'm sure anybody would have liked to have kidnapped him at the time, he was extremely

famous and well known to be super rich, but there is another kind of bad sign aside from the protesters that some people still to this day say is what cursed DeLorean Motor Company and maybe even John DeLorean himself. Was this the fairy tree? Yes. Yeah, there was a special plant there on the place where they were going to build this factory, there was a Hawthorne bush, and they called it like a fairy tree. These workers there said, we're not going to cut this thing down, I'm not going to do

my bad Irish accent and try and say it that way. But they did, eventually someone removed it, and some people say like that was the curse of the fairy tree. That was Scottish. Yeah, it was pretty Scottish, depending on where you are in Ireland though, that can pass. That sounds like Groundskeeper Willie. Yeah, it did.

So the factory did open, and again DeLorean wasn't there very often, he spent his time in Park Avenue, but his cars were suddenly being assembled. The thing is, during the design phase, he hired Lotus to build these cars. Lotus was making cars that were assembled by hand, now DeLorean was asking them to build cars on an assembly line, and Lotus was like, okay, we're going to have to make some compromises here. So, by little, the DeLorean DMC-12, the production version, became less and less like the dream version, the prototype that DeLorean had come up with, and some of the compromises he made

basically sunk the car. It wasn't just DeLorean and his Coke deal that we'll get to in a minute that sunk the company. The company was already sinking because it was making pretty bad cars. They were really cool, but they did not go very well. No, it was a bit of a disaster from the beginning, and these documentaries really kind of dive into just the problems with the car. The first thing is, it more than doubled in the cost that he wanted to sell it at.

He wanted to sell it for 12. It cost 25 grand, which a Corvette at the time, a brand new Corvette, was about 16,000. So all of a sudden, the DeLorean is a super luxury, or not luxury, but just a sports car for super rich people. It weighed 9,000 pounds more than they thought it was going to weigh, not 9,000 pounds, 9,000 extra pounds. It had trouble meeting mileage requirements. It was supposed to be super fuel efficient.

It was very famously clunky, hard to drive, slow, and this is supposed to be a sports car because it was super heavy. We had this rear-mounted Renault engine that was a V6, and it drove more like a bad shift station wagon than anything sporty. Yeah. How long did it take to go from zero to 60? I don't know anything about fast cars, but 10 seconds seems like a long time to me. It's a really long time.

I think some Teslas and some Ferraris and cars like that are in the three and a half second range. This is 10 seconds, like a minivan can probably get from zero to 60 in 10 seconds, and not even a new one. That was not good at all, and then they also had some really bad publicity problems, too. The windows stuck, apparently the dye they used for the floor mats didn't hold fast and it would run and stain your shoes, even your Tom McCann GTO shoes that you're wearing. The Gullwing doors would get stuck and just would not open, and very embarrassingly that

happened at the Cleveland Auto Show, somebody who was looking at the car got stuck inside for an hour because they could not get the doors open. Yeah. I watched a YouTube today of a DeLorean drive like road test, and these two guys, it's a modern sort of thing because they're wearing cargo shorts, but one of the guys has a DeLorean, once his friend drive it and they have a camera in there, and it just looked like it was hard to drive. It didn't break super well.

The reverse was this, and I had an early VW Beetle where you had to push down on the thing and then left and back, but this you had to pull the stick shift up and kind of over and up, and he had trouble kind of doing that, but he finally got the hang of it, but he described it as fast. I think he said it had a lot of torque, but when he got it, I think starting in second gear it seemed like was when it picked up because he was like, oh man, this thing has got some real speed, but I don't think off the line it was that fast is maybe the deal. I got you.

Yeah. Not if it took 10 seconds to get to 60 for sure. There was another thing that was going on at the time, like John DeLorean was earnestly trying to make these cars, but at the same time he was also robbing his own company blind. The first thing he did with that British investment money of I think about $130 million was to set up a Swiss bank accounts that he transferred the money through and then apparently, and I don't believe this has ever been proven, but it's basically like just open your eyes people, a lot if not most of that money made its way from Switzerland to his personal accounts

to finance his life. So basically he said, thanks for all the money, Brits, your chumps, I'm stealing this for my own personal gain. And that's what he did right out of the gate. And that's why I say he was a genuine grifter. He grifted the British government. He grifted some guy who owned a Wichita Cadillac dealership. Like he grifted a lot of people and in addition to all of the amazing stuff that he did, he

also became like a genuine serious died in the wool grifter. He grifted Sammy Davis Jr. Yeah. I mean, for that alone, that's pretty infamous if you ask me. All right, it just occurred to me we haven't taken our second break, so let's take a late break. We'll part one out for Sammy's 150 and we'll be right back. What would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told

you, hey, let's start a coup? Back in the 1930s, a Marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the U.S. and fascism. I'm Ben Bullock. And I'm Alex French. In our newest show, we take a darkly comedic and occasionally ridiculous deep dive into a story that has been buried for nearly a century. We've tracked down exclusive historical records. We've interviewed the world's foremost experts.

We're also bringing you cinematic historical recreations of moments left out of your history books. I'm Smedley Butler, and I got a lot to say. For one, my personal history is raw, inspiring and mind blowing. And for another, do we get the mattresses after we do the ads or do we just have to do the ads? From iHeart Podcast and School of Humans, this is Let's Start a Coup. On the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you find your favorite shows.

MySpace was the first major social media company. They made the internet, which up until then had been kind of like a nerdy space, feel like a nightclub, and also slightly dangerous. And it was the first major social media company to collapse. Rupert Murdoch lost lots and lots of money on MySpace because it turned out it was actually not a good business. My name is Joanne McNeil. On my new podcast, Main Accounts, The Story of MySpace, I'm revisiting the early days

of social media through the people who lived it, the users. Because what happened in the MySpace era would have sweeping implications for all the platforms to follow. Listen to Main Accounts, The Story of MySpace on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you find your favorite shows. I'm Dr. Romany, and I am back with season two of my podcast, Navigating Narcissism. Narcissists are everywhere, and their toxic behavior and words can cause serious harm to your mental health.

In our first season, we heard from Eileen Charlotte, who was love-bombed by the Tinder swindler. The worst part is that he can only be guilty for stealing the money from me, but he cannot be guilty for the mental part he did. And that's even way worse than the money you took. But I am here to help. As a licensed psychologist and survivor of narcissistic abuse myself, I know how to identify the narcissist in your life.

Each week, you will hear stories from survivors who have navigated through toxic relationships, gaslighting, love-bombing, and the process of their healing from these relationships. According to Navigating Narcissism on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Okay, so where we left off was John DeLorean is kind of siphoning money to fund his lavish lifestyle, which it sounds like he kind of always did at GM as well. And he got about $150 million, which is about $462 million, out of the British government, saying like, you know, he kind of kept it going, saying he was going to shut down production,

which would be bad news, you know, for everyone concerned. But eventually, someone, the Iron Lady, would come around in 1982. And as we all know, Thatcher didn't take any S from anyone. And she was like, enough's enough, I'm getting conned by this American, we are getting conned. And basically said, you know what, we're not going to be your bank account anymore. They had to lay off about, not quite half, about 1,100 of their 26 workers in Belfast. And DeLorean, DMC, went into receivership pretty quickly. They planned to sell about 30,000 cars every year.

They didn't sell quite 9,000 cars total. And he needed to get about $17 million really fast if he wanted to keep this insolvency from happening. So his back was up against the wall. He needed 17 million fast. And where else can you do that, but in the drug trade? Like, what's interesting is his plight and his travails were so famous that he was approached with an idea to sell drugs to get money to save his company.

Like everybody knew that this was going on, right? That's how bad a press the DMC 12 got. And so he was approached. There was a Coke dealer named James Hoffman, who'd been smuggling drugs for Pablo Escobar's Medellin cartel for years. He was also a paid informant for the FBI. And apparently, some people say that James Hoffman said, I'm going to deliver John DeLorean to you guys.

Just watch. And that he was the one who's hatched this whole scheme to basically entrap John DeLorean into selling a bunch of cocaine in order to save DeLorean Motor Company. That's right. So DeLorean was specifically almost 60 pounds of Coke for six and a half million bucks that DeLorean or through his channels would then quickly turn around and sell for $24 million, which would, in theory, I guess, solve his financial problem with shutting the company down.

Or at least that's how he saw it. But like you said, Hoffman was a paid informant. There was another guy on the scene who was a real undercover FBI agent named John Valestra, who DeLorean thought was a mob guy. And these famous videos came out. If you grew up in that era, you saw these videos with your own eyeballs. We'll get to the twist on how that happened in a minute. But there were these famous videos of this deal that went down in, I think it was like

a hotel room where it's all very clearly laid out and Hoffman even gives DeLorean a chance to back out and DeLorean says, I want to proceed. He tries the Coke. He says this stuff is like better than gold. But what it came down to, and we'll get to the court case in a minute, is whether or not they entrapped DeLorean and came to him with this idea or whether or not he hatched the idea and whether or not DeLorean was right in saying that like, hey, this guy was threatening my family.

He said, I'm going to send your baby's daughter's head home in a shopping bag. And that's kind of where everything hinged in the trial. Right. And it would turn out that the jury basically said like, yes, dude, this guy was totally set up, ensnared, entrapped. If you want to just look at it most basically, John DeLorean wasn't the one who came out with this drug scheme. He was approached by an FBI informant who proposed the drug scheme to DeLorean.

That in and of itself is entrapment, but there was also malfeasance by the FBI agents working the case. They would backdate like reports and stuff like that and alter reports. Like it was just shady from the get-go and James Hoffman didn't come off as a particularly trustworthy person on the stand either. So in typical John DeLorean fashion, the jury acquitted him on all counts in August of 1984. So he went from being caught with 24 kilos of cocaine to walking on all counts. And that's just John DeLorean.

That's the John DeLorean story with the press covering this breathlessly every step of the way. Yeah. And here's a couple of addendums, one of which, and I don't know if this is true, but there are rumors that the British government held off on closing down that plant in cahoots with the American government long enough to get him set up and captured. So what's funny is apparently DeLorean was working on his own grift where he was supposed to put up $2 million of the money to buy this cocaine initially and he didn't have it.

So he said, you know what, I'm going to give you guys controlling stakes of my company. And what he did was give these people that he thought were mobsters in bed with Pablo Escobar control of a shell company that had his name on it, that was dormant, that didn't have any assets whatsoever, that was now owned by the British government. So he was going to handcuff mobsters to the British government and take their money in the form of the cocaine profits that he was going to share and walk away with it. I forgot about that part. That's what he was planning on doing.

The little twist that I mentioned about how America saw this video so readily was that Larry Flint, publisher of Hustler Magazine, he got ahold of those tapes and he's the one that handed them over to PBS. And that's why everyone got to see it and they had a hard time getting a trial off the ground because it was on the evening news and I was a teenager and I saw this stuff. So everybody saw it, so eventually, like you said, they managed to scrape a jury together that said, I think some of the quotes where they thought he was a shabby, or no, Hoffman was a shabby creep and was not believable at all, but they also thought, hey, DeLorean's

not innocent here, but it was entrapment, so we have to say not guilty. Right. And they did. Again, he walked. What he is, is like his finances are a mess. Like he's stolen tens, if not hundreds of millions of dollars from the British government. I don't know what he was doing with the money because he wasn't paying the mortgage on his estate in New Jersey, so he ends up losing that.

There's another fraud case that was brought against him in Detroit and he was accused of stealing $17.5 million in regards to DeLorean Motor Company and its funding, and he managed to get away with that one too, and his attorney, Howard Weitzman, later said that he was unfairly accused and entrapped in the cocaine case, but that the acquittal in Detroit was a miracle. Like he was totally guilty and he still got off, but although he wasn't ever put in prison, his life was just becoming more and more ruined because he liked to live a certain way, but he had less and less money to pay for it, and fewer and fewer people he could scam. Yeah, that same attorney also said, and this kind of nails it on the head, I think.

He said, I've represented many people over the years, but John DeLorean had one of the most warped views of right and wrong, and in the documentaries with the footage, you can really get a sense that he really justified a lot of what he did to keep the car company going, to keep that plan open. Those are the things that people who have been grifting and are entitled, like you'll often hear someone describing them as not really having an understanding of what's truly right and wrong. That Bedminster estate eventually would wind up being sold to Donald Trump, and that's

when you hear about the Bedminster Golf Club, that's the one they're talking about. That was DeLorean's estate. Yeah, the one that you lived by. The one that I lived by. The other reason is famous. He got divorced to Farrar just a couple of months after the verdict, and although like modern day Farrar really kind of gushes about him, she was like, oh, John was just the best, and we had so much fun, but she got the heck out of dodge.

He got married to Sally Baldwin in 2002. They had a daughter. He had plans to hatch a new car company. I think for a while he wanted to make a watch that was going to be powered by your movement, which I think is a real thing now, right? Yeah. Not that one, but there are watches that are powered by your movement, right? I believe so, yes.

I went to look up and see if any of these watches were ever made, and what I stumbled upon was a very limited edition watch. There were 450 of them. This is not that company, but someone got a hold of his original DeLorean and made watches out of them. Oh, wow. I'm not a watch guy, but I saw this watch and I was like, oh man, I think it's nice looking. Oh, yeah?

But it's two grand, so for a watch guy, that's not happening. Speaking of collector stuff, apparently in the 1980 American Express Christmas catalog, they were offering 24 gold-plated DeLoreans, and two of them sold. Two gold-plated DeLoreans exist in the world. One of them is at Peterson Auto Museum in Los Angeles, I think, but for a while it was in the lobby of Snyder National Bank of Snyder, Texas, some Snyder oil man, I'm sure, scraped up one of the two from the American Express Christmas catalog. That's great.

Pocket in the lobby. I don't know about that one either. I don't want something to go by unmarked. He had a daughter, like you said, another daughter, Sheila, he was 77 at the time. He died three years later after he had a daughter. He died three years later at age 80. Isn't that nuts? Yeah, he died of a stroke, but how was he buried?

He was buried in a black motorcycle jacket, jeans, denim shirt, and sunglasses tucked in to the jacket. Yeah, probably DeLorean sunglasses, I would guess. Probably. And there's a cool tombstone. Yeah, it's got a DMC12 with the doors open. Yeah, I looked it up. Looks awesome.

I'm probably going to get the same thing. Yeah, the same headstone? Yeah, I'll be like, just make his again, but put my name on it. So we can't not talk about Back to the Future a little bit here at the end. Obviously, that's where the car got so much notoriety was from that huge, huge movie that was turned into a time machine, and it was supposed to be a Mustang. They had a deal with the producers with a Mustang where they were going to, you know, it was a product placement thing.

And apparently Bob Gale, who had been working on the script with Zemeckis said, Doc doesn't drive an effing Mustang, even though I never, I know this isn't it picky, but I never thought the DeLorean was Doc's car. I figured he just sourced it for this project, right? Yeah, I never gave it that much thought either. But I mean, Bob Gale's like the, he's like the writer of the script, you know? Of course. But because the DeLorean was very undependable, much like Bruce, the shark, and Jaws, this

car did not work well at all. And apparently the prop guys and the FX guys were always being called on set just to get this thing like running, and they had a really hard time filming that sequence in the parking lot. Yeah. I mean, like the car broke down. That's how bad those things were. Yeah.

And this was just a couple of years after it was built. This wasn't like years and years later, like this car should have been running just fine. So I find that hilarious. But there's one other thing about that movie too, those of us to like my cohort and beyond, that movie completely rehabilitated and changed the opinion of the DeLorean and John DeLorean himself. Had that movie not come along, he would have been known as like a coke dealer who got off, a grifter, a scam artist, and somehow being associated with Back to the Future, and his

car being chosen as a time machine, just changed the way that people see him, I think, in history. Yeah. I mean, if you got a... I don't know how much they are, but if you got a lot of money, you can get one of those tricked out like Doc Browns, that dude from... That wrote Ready Player One has got one, famously, with the little rocket boosters on the back and all that fun stuff, the flux capacitor, canister.

Oh, he's got like the time machine version? Wow. Yeah, that's what I'm saying. You can buy those like fully kitted out to look like the Back to the Future car. That's pretty cool. I want to drive one one day. If someone's got one, I'll fly to you and have dinner with you and your family if you let me drive it.

That's the deal. Look up George R.R. Martin, he has one, and he's in New Mexico, which you love now, so go visit him. All the famous rich geeks have him. So that's it for DeLorean. Yeah, that's a fun one. I love these episodes. Good story.

Good story. Good job, Chuck. And since Chuck said good story, I said good job. You put those two together, carry the one, you've got listener mail. Oh boy, I should read this one, but it's super long, so we'll save that. My old friend put together a best tangents list again from the year, but we'll read that one later because this one went wrong. I'm going to call this Chuck's Day vacation.

Hey guys, over the New Year's holiday, my husband, kids, parents, and my sister's family rented a big condo in Northern Michigan. The first morning over breakfast, I asked my sister how she slept. Actually pretty terrible. We must be right over the furnace. It was really loud, kept banging on and off all night. Maybe I need some white noise. And I said, you know, Charles W. Chuck Bryant prefers brown noise and I have to say I agree

with them and find brown noise superior to white noise. And yes, I said the full name mimicking Josh introducing him. Nice. You play a part too. Chuck likes brown noise. I've never heard of that. Then we promptly went through the various noises and the colors and all of us found brown, all of us, to be the most soothing.

The backstory here is my sister's the one who introduced me to your show. We both love it, we all love the random topics. I think you two are a hoot. When we're wrapping up a phone call or text exchange, our running joke is to say we're really busy because we need to listen to an episode. Now if you excuse me, I need to get back to understanding how Circus' family's work. That's a good one. That is a good one.

And then half the time we start talking about what we found fascinating about the last episode. Circling back, my sister tried the brown noise, slept like a baby for the rest of the vacation and so Chuck really saved the day. And that is from Hilary R. Vadnal and she didn't mention her sister's name, which is really selfish. Well, thanks a lot Hilary and your unnamed sister. You're not selfish. I'm kidding, of course.

No, of course. If you want to be like Hilary and not be selfish, you can send us an email to stuffpodcast.iheartradio.com. What you should know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts, my heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. What's up y'all? This is Questlove and you know, at QLS I get to hang out with my friends, Sugar Steve, Laia, Fontigolo, Umpink, Bill, and we, you know, at Questlove Supreme like the nerd out

and do deep dives with musicians and actors and politicians and creatives. People that we feel really deserve that attention. We learn, we laugh, we fall down rabbit holes. Listen to Questlove Supreme on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What would you do if the secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told you, hey, let's start a coup? Back in the 1930s, a marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the US and

fascism. I'm Ben Bolland, I'm Alex French, and I'm Smedley Butler. Join us for this sordid tale of ambition, treason, and what happens when evil tycoons have too much time on their hands. Listen to Let's Start a Coup on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you find your favorite shows. I'm Dr. Romany, and I am back with season two of my podcast, Navigating Narcissism. This season, we dive deeper into highlighting red flags and spotting a narcissist before

they spot you. Each week, you'll hear stories from survivors who have navigated through toxic relationships, gaslighting, love bombing, and their process of healing. Listen to Navigating Narcissism on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.