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.
Most of the money regained actually came via court cases against the international accounting firm, Arthur Andersen, which was sued by the British government for failing to spot fraudulence in the DeLorean Motor Company. The Labour government had agreed to fund it in 1978 for the 2,500 jobs it provided in Northern Ireland.
In 1999 Andersen settled out of court for $27.7m paid to the 260 creditors to avoid further litigation, in a case requiring testimony from the former prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, and several ex-Cabinet ministers. Two years earlier Andersen had also agreed to pay $35m to the UK government after admitting liability. The entire debacle earned Andersen a terrible press.
In the US, bankruptcy proceedings finally ended in May 2000 with creditors getting 91 cents to the dollar, more than they expected. But by this time many had either died or left the case. Then DeLorean started another venture. That summer he began selling "D=MC2" stainless steel watches for $3,495 each on the internet, offering as a contact an advertising firm in New York state. But as DeLorean's bankruptcy was still extant over the Morganroth debt, he was prohibited from pocketing any profits. Despite his shocking record of dishonesty, he retained a dedicated corps of American fans, mostly the 6,000-odd owners of the stainless steel cars from the 8,563 built in Belfast. They had become collectors' items.
DeLorean was born to a hard-drinking Romanian immigrant and Ford foundry worker and his Austrian-born wife, a factory worker, in Detroit. Tall and good-looking, John excelled at school and obtained an engineering degree from Lawrence Technical College. He later took his masters at the Chrysler Institute.
His career began with Packard, then an old-fashioned car maker facing extinction. But with a brilliant team of young engineers, DeLorean helped to revive it, and when he left in 1956 had registered 12 patents. He joined GM at their Pontiac division, also in trouble with a fusty image, and became well known in Detroit for creating the 1961 Tempest, a best-selling, fast, small car. In 1965 he launched the GTO for Pontiac, another speedy car with youth appeal and a hot seller, and at 40, DeLorean became the youngest vice-president in GM's history. He and his first wife, Elizabeth, lived in an English-style mansion and dined at the country club. By the late 1960s, he was in a mid-life crisis: he had plastic surgery to enhance his jaw.
DeLorean had become general manager of Chevrolet but had tired of corporate life. He then promised to stay out of the car business for a year in exchange for a lucrative Florida dealership but soon began investigating his stainless steel dream. The Italian designer Giorgetto Giugiaro offered a design, actually a discarded Porsche prototype. DeLorean assembled a team, formed a company, and the design became the vehicle that seduced the British government after DeLorean met with Northern Ireland officials in 1978. They signed an agreement 45 days later, DeLorean got $97m, and the government - and numerous others - spent over 20 years trying to retrieve it.
After his marriage to his first wife ended in 1969, he married 19-year-old Kelly Harmon. They divorced in 1972 and, after dating Ursula Andress and Tina Sinatra, he married a successful model, Cristina Ferrare, the following year. She split up with him shortly after the 1984 cocaine case.
· John Zachary DeLorean, engineer, car maker and conman, born January 6 1925; died March 19 2005
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