Uncle John’s Fast-Acting Long-Lasting Bathroom Reader (71 page)

And that was just the beginning. Blinkers wouldn’t turn on, headlights wouldn’t turn off. Windows fell out of the gull-wing doors when drivers rolled them down. The “stainless” steel stained if you touched it or leaned against it wearing a pair of blue jeans. The roof leaked onto the floor mats, which bled permanent black ink onto shoes and clothing. The fuel gauges didn’t work, stranding motorists when they ran out of gas without warning. The door locks jammed too: at an auto show in Cleveland, a spectator was trapped inside a DeLorean for more than an hour until paramedics pried him out.

The company moved quickly to address these quality-control issues by setting up quality assurance centers in California, Michigan, and New Jersey. Mechanics spent as many as 200 hours—and $2,000 of the company’s rapidly dwindling cash—on each car, taking it apart and putting it back together again before it could be shipped to a dealer and sold to the public. This helped fix the quality problem, but the damage to the car’s reputation had been done: early word of mouth was devastating.

There is a 242-foot-high temple in Bangkok made entirely of broken dishes.

BAD BUSINESS

For all his experience at GM, DeLorean managed his senior executives terribly. He hired too many and paid them higher salaries than his company could afford, further draining its cash reserves. Then in the spring of 1981, he tried to restructure the corporation with a new stock offering that would have voided $22 million worth of executive stock options while increasing his own share to $120 million. The British government would have been shafted, too. It had poured nearly $150 million into DeLorean, but the restructuring would have dropped its stake to just $8.4 million.

Betrayed executives began to depart en masse just as the company was gearing up for production. Even DeLorean’s personal assistant, Marian Gibson, quit. But before she left, she photocopied as many incriminating documents as she could, then leaked them to a British newspaper and a member of Parliament. When DeLorean’s double-dealing became public in October 1981, his relations with the British government quickly soured.

BAD TIMING

If ever there was a time to
not
start a new car company, the fall of 1981 was it. The United States was sliding deeper into recession, interest rates were up, consumer spending was down, and bad weather was keeping potential customers away from auto showrooms. DeLorean sales peaked at a meager 720 cars in October, then began to drop. By December, dealers were telling the company to hold future shipments until further notice.

Hundreds of unsold DeLoreans began piling up at the factory loading dock and at auto dealerships all over the country. DeLorean’s response to the crisis? He doubled production to 80 cars a day, converting cash the company needed to pay its bills into cars it could not sell. Why did he do it? Because his stock offering—the one that enriched him at the expense of his top executives and the British government—was faltering. DeLorean figured if he kept his production numbers high, he could bluff Wall Street into believing the company was healthy enough to invest in. (It didn’t work: the stock offering was canceled due to lack of interest.)

Weigh this fact: All fish are born without scales.

OFF ROAD

By now the company was more than $65 million in debt and nearly out of cash. DeLorean had hoped to raise $27 million through the stock offering, and when that failed he turned to the British government (the one he’d just been caught ripping off) and told them he needed a $65 million line of credit to stay in business—otherwise he’d close the factory and they’d lose their entire investment. But the British had had enough. They not only refused to put any more money into the company, they hired an outside accounting firm to audit its books…and what they found wasn’t good. In February 1982, the DeLorean Motor Company was placed under receivership (the British equivalent of filing for reorganization under Chapter 11 of the bankruptcy code). In May the court shut down the assembly line.

DeLorean had precipitated the crisis by turning his company’s cash into cars; now he tried to dig himself out by turning the cars back into cash. He dumped 1,374 DeLoreans with a “bulk liquidator” for $12,500 each, less than half their $28,000 purchase price. That raised about $17 million, which went to pay off a delinquent bank loan that threatened to shut the company down for good.

Next, DeLorean sent urgent telegrams to the company’s 345 dealers, asking each of them to purchase six cars at rock-bottom prices to help save the company. “Please call or cable what you can do,” the telegram ended. “God bless you all.” Only one dealer even bothered to reply. “No thanks,” he cabled back.

(DRUG) DEAL OF THE CENTURY

In the fall of 1982, DeLorean came to an agreement with the British receivers: If he could come up with $10 million in cash by October 18, they’d let him reopen his factory. But where would he get the money?

From his neighbor, James Hoffman, that’s who. Hoffman’s young son was a friend of DeLorean’s son, Zachary. The Hoffmans lived down the street from DeLorean’s Southern California estate.

The villagers of Sao Miguel Island, off Portugal, heat their food over volcanic vents.

What happened next depends on whom you believe. According to DeLorean, Hoffman offered to put together a group of investors who would chip in $15 million to save the car company. All DeLorean had to do was pay Hoffman a $1.9 million “finder’s fee” up front. It wasn’t until later, DeLorean claimed, that he learned that the “investors” were actually drug dealers, and that the $1.9 million was going to finance the importation and distribution of 220 pounds of cocaine. When DeLorean learned the truth and tried to back out of the deal, Hoffman threatened to kill DeLorean’s wife and children.

That’s DeLorean’s side of the story; Hoffman says DeLorean knew it was a drug deal all along. What everyone agrees on is that DeLorean
didn’t
know Hoffman was a government informant and the drug deal was actually an FBI sting.

THE END

What’s ironic about the drug deal is that: 1) it happened on October 19, one day too late to meet the British government’s deadline, and 2) by that point DeLorean was so broke he couldn’t even come up with the $1.9 million in cash. So he was going to rip off the drug dealers just like he’d ripped off his executives and the British government, by giving them $1.9 million worth of shares in a worthless shell company instead of cash.

No matter. As far as the FBI is concerned, a drug deal is still a drug deal, even if you’re using phony stock to pay for your dope. On the same day the British receivers announced that the factory was closing for good, DeLorean was arrested in a Los Angeles hotel after he was videotaped handling a suitcase filled with cocaine. “This is as good as gold,” he told the undercover agents; it came just “in the nick of time.”

AFTERMATH

John DeLorean beat the rap…not once, but twice. In August 1984, he was acquitted in the drug trial after jurors concluded the government set him up. Then in December 1986, he was acquitted on embezzling and racketeering charges that the government filed against him after it lost the drug trial.

DeLorean never did time, but he never got over the collapse of his auto company, either. His third marriage (to supermodel Cristina Ferrare) ended in 1984, and his creditors hounded him for another 15 years after that. He filed for bankruptcy in 1999; the following year he was evicted from his New Jersey estate. The house and its contents were auctioned off to pay his creditors.

Well, he
is
the King: The Royal Canadian Mint once issued a silver coin featuring Elvis.

DeLorean made two more attempts to launch a new automobile company:

• In December 1986 he announced he’d raised $20 million to build a $100,000 exotic sports car designed by a West German designer he refused to name.

• In 1999 he announced he was starting an online retail watch company, DeLorean Time. Proceeds from the sale of the $3,495 stainless-steel watches ($1,750 down, with a 10-month wait for delivery of the watch) would be used to found a new car company that would build a “radical new car,” DeLorean claimed.

Neither auto company was ever founded; no new cars were built. And as far as anyone can tell, the watches weren’t either. DeLorean died from complications of a stroke in March 2005. He was 80 years old.

AFTER THE AFTERMATH

DeLorean cars fared a little better than their creator. What makes them different from other classic cars, a 1968 Chevy Camaro convertible for example, is that people knew from the beginning that DeLoreans would be collectible. So many people bought them and held onto them, in fact, that their value stagnated for years.

If you’re looking to pick up a DeLorean really cheap, though, you’re a few years too late. Values have finally started creeping up, as fans of the
Back to the Future
films, which featured a DeLorean time machine, hit their 20s and 30s and can finally afford the cars they’ve been dreaming about since they were kids.

In the late 1990s, you could have picked up a DeLorean in decent shape for about $17,000; today they can cost $30,000 or more. Take heart, though, there are still plenty to go around: of the 9,200 DeLoreans that were manufactured, it’s estimated that more than 7,000 of them are still on the road.

*        *        *

Yugoslav proverb:
“By the side of luck stands misfortune.”

In 1961, the town of Hamilton, Ohio, changed its name to Hamilton!, Ohio.

THE MAN WHO SAVED A BILLION LIVES

Ever heard of Norman Borlaug? Most people haven’t, yet he’s credited with a truly amazing accomplishment: saving more lives than anybody else in history
.

T
HE POPULATION BOMB
In his 1968 best seller,
The Population Bomb
, author and biologist Paul Ehrlich wrote that “the battle to feed all of humanity is over.” Ehrlich’s chilling book predicted that a rapidly growing world population would soon lead to massive worldwide food shortages, especially in third-world countries. World population was just over 3.5 billion at the time and was increasing at a faster rate than food production. “In the 1970s and 1980s,” Ehrlich wrote, “hundreds of millions of people will starve to death.” Most experts agreed with Ehrlich’s dire predictions…but they hadn’t anticipated Dr. Norman Borlaug.

FARM BOY

Borlaug was born in 1914 and grew up on a farm in Saude, Iowa. In 1942 he graduated from the University of Minnesota with PhDs in plant pathology and genetics. In 1944 he was invited by the Rockefeller Foundation, a global charitable organization, and the Mexican government to head a project aimed at improving wheat production in Mexico. His assignment: to develop a more productive strain of wheat that was also resistant to stem rust, a fungal disease that was becoming a major problem in Latin America.

Borlaug chose two locations with an 8,500-foot altitude difference for his testing. He grew and crossbred thousands of different strains of wheat, and worked with the latest fertilizers, looking for plants that could grow in both environments. Reason: they had to be able to grow anywhere.

Over the next several years Borlaug was able to develop hardy, highly productive strains, but he found that the tall wheats he was using would not support the weight of the added grain. So he crossed the tall wheats with dwarf varieties that were not only shorter but had thicker, stronger stems. And that was his breakthrough: a semi-dwarf, disease-resistant, high-output wheat. He worked incessantly to get the seeds distributed to small farmers throughout Mexico, and by 1963 Borlaug’s wheat varieties made up 95 percent of the nation’s total production, with a crop yield that was more than six times greater than when he’d arrived. Not only could Mexico stop importing wheat, they were now an exporter—a huge boost to any nation’s nutritional and economic health, but especially to an underdeveloped one. And now Borlaug wanted to take his high-yield farming global. He wanted, he said, to secure “a temporary success in man’s war against hunger and deprivation.”

Church Street? The main street of Barbotan, France, runs through the town’s church.

ANOTHER VICTORY

In 1963 the Rockefeller Foundation sent Borlaug to Pakistan and India, two nations with severe hunger and malnutrition problems. Borlaug’s help was resisted at first; there was cultural opposition to new farming methods. But when acute famine struck in 1965 (1.5 million people would die by 1967), the barriers came down. And the results were incredible: by 1968 Pakistan, which just a few years earlier relied on massive grain imports, was entirely self-sufficient. By 1970 India’s production had doubled and it too was getting close to self-sufficiency.

At four o’clock in the morning one day in 1970, Margaret Borlaug got a phone call. She raced out to the fields and informed her husband, already hard at work, that he had won the Nobel Peace Prize. “No, I haven’t,” he said. He thought it was a hoax. But he had indeed won it for having saved the lives of millions—perhaps hundreds of millions—of people in India and Pakistan and for the message it had sent to the world. “He has given us a well-founded hope,” the Nobel committee said, “an alternative of peace and of life—the green revolution.”

NOTHING ESCAPES CONTROVERSY

Borlaug had also been working on other grains, such as corn and rye, and in the 1980s began developing more productive strains of rice to increase production in China and Southeast Asia. He was setting up similar programs in Africa, but ran into a major hurdle: environmentalists opposed his methods. Among their charges: spreading the same few varieties of grains all over the planet is harming biodiversity; huge farms are benefiting from his techniques and killing off the small farmer; inorganic fertilizers used in the Borlaug method are harmful to the environment; and genetically engineered food is unnatural and potentially dangerous.