[John DeLorean was so crooked they'll probably have to screw him into his coffin. The Guardian's obit does a pretty good job catching the essence of the guy:]
John DeLorean: American car-maker and conman whose victims included the UK and the US governments
By Christopher Reed Monday March 21, 2005
Almost everyone who had business dealings with car-maker 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, 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 $24m. His acquittal two years later, due to FBI entrapment, was one of several cases in which he eluded criminal conviction.
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 $1.5m, 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 his sports car venture in Belfast, 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 $9m New York apartment until 1992 and kept his $4m, 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. Even then, Weitzman never recovered $2m. His next defence lawyer, Mayer Morganroth of Michigan, who said he "got him off" in 40 different cases - including criminal embezzlement charges in Detroit - pursued DeLorean into the 21st century for over $4m 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 $9m 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. ...
<http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,12271,1442337,00.html>
Carl