Uncle John’s Fast-Acting Long-Lasting Bathroom Reader

by Michael Brunsfeld

  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.

  THE POPULATION BOMB

  In his 1968 best seller, The Population Bomb, author and biologist Paul Ehrlich wrote that “the battle to feed all o
f 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.

  Forgotten fad: Ancient Greek women wore cicadas on golden threads in their hair.

  “Some of the environmental lobbyists are the salt of the earth,” Borlaug said, “but many of them are elitists. If they lived just one month amid the misery of the developing world, as I have for fifty years, they’d be crying out for tractors and fertilizer and irrigation canals and be outraged that fashionable elitists back home were trying to deny them these things.” He admitted that he would rather his work benefited small farmers, but added, “Wheat isn’t political. It doesn’t know that it’s supposed to be producing more for poor farmers than for rich farmers.” Supporters argue that Borlaug’s high-yield method has actually been a boon for the environment, saving hundreds of millions of acres of wild land from being turned into farms. The controversy continues, but none of it has stopped Borlaug from his mission.

  KEEP ON PLANTING

  In 1984, with the help of Japanese philanthropist Ryoichi Sasakawa, Borlaug set up the Sasakawa Africa Association (SAA), training more than a million farmers throughout Africa. Result: using Borlaug seed and methods, cereal grain yields have increased from two-to four-fold.

  As of 2005—at the age of 91—Norman Borlaug is still at it. He continues to work with Mexico’s International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center, still heads the SAA, runs research programs, teaches young scientists, gives lectures, and, of course, still works in the field. Over his 50-plus-year career he has been credited with saving as many as a billion people from starvation, and has received numerous international awards. In May 2004, he was presented with another: at St. Mark’s Episcopal Cathedral in Borlaug’s college town of Minneapolis, he was shown their new “Window of Peace.” The Minneapolis Star Tribune described the event: “He gazed upward to see the sun shining through a 30-foot-tall stained glass window. There—along with depictions of Mother Teresa, Mahatma Gandhi, and other modern-day peacemakers—was a life-size likeness of Borlaug, holding a fistful of wheat.”

  In 1876 every building in Jaipur, India, was painted pink for a visit by the Prince of Wales.

  IT’S A CONSPIRACY!

  If you know anybody who believes any of these theories, please send them our way. (We’re trying to sell an invisible bridge.)

  CONSPIRACY THEORY:

  John F. Kennedy wasn’t assassinated—he’s still alive.

  DETAILS: In early 1963, President Kennedy became convinced his enemies (the Mafia, Cuban dictator Fidel Castro, and elements within the CIA) were out to kill him. So he enlisted a group of friends and government agents to fake his death and then hide him overseas, should an attempt on his life be made. On November 22, 1963, Kennedy was shot in Dallas by Lee Harvey Oswald, a pawn in a murder plot hatched by Castro, the CIA, the Mafia, FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover, and Robert Kennedy (who had presidential aspirations and wanted his brother out of the picture). Contrary to news reports, Oswald’s bullets didn’t actually kill Kennedy—they left him in a coma. The president was secretly flown to a hospital in Poland. When he finally emerged from the coma in the late 1960s, he was crippled, frail, and mildly brain-damaged. Ever since, Kennedy has lived on the Greek island Skorpios in a hospital owned by Greek tycoon Aristotle Onassis (who also aided in the cover-up by pretending to be Jackie Kennedy’s second husband). Proof? In 1971 the European tabloid Midnight ran a photo supposedly picturing Kennedy, Jackie, and Kennedy’s two nurses going for a walk on Skorpios.

  TRUTH: Midnight faked the photos and the story. American author Truman Capote gave the tale a wider audience when he presented it as his own idea in a 1971 newspaper article. (In Capote’s version, Kennedy never emerged from his coma and lived in Switzerland, not Greece.) Capote later retracted the story, admitting that he had intended it as a silly piece of fiction. Nevertheless, the theory persists to this day.

  CONSPIRACY THEORY: Cabbage Patch Kids weren’t innocent dolls—they were actually made to prepare Americans for what post-apocalyptic humans will look like.

  DETAILS: In the early 1980s, President Ronald Reagan feared that a nuclear war with the Soviet Union was inevitable. Survivors,
if any, would likely be horribly physically deformed; the offspring of nuclear victims would be even more gruesome. So Reagan assigned government scientists to determine what post-apocalyptic humans would look like and to come up with a way to accustom Americans to their appearance. The scientists exposed human test subjects to high levels of radiation, then took samples of their altered DNA, and bred babies. Result: infants with tiny, beady eyes, chubby limbs with undifferentiated fingers and toes, and mashed-in faces. The government then hired Coleco Toys to make dolls based on the infants. Coleco gave the dolls an innocuous name, explained their odd appearance with a fairy tale about the children growing in the ground, and released them to toy stores. The toys were a huge success. Mission accomplished.

  TRUTH: Cabbage Patch Kids first appeared in the 1901 novel Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch, about a woman widowed with five children in Cabbage Patch, Louisiana. Georgia doll maker Xavier Roberts began handmaking dolls based on the characters in the novel in 1978—three years before Reagan took office. Coleco bought the rights to mass-produce the dolls in 1983. Richard Joltes, a college student who worked in a West Virginia Sears store in the early 1980s, claims to be the source of the “mutant” theory. Joltes says he hated the dolls, and whenever he sold one he’d tell the customer, “I heard these things were designed to get people used to what mutants might look like after a nuclear war.” Soon, other cashiers started doing it, too. Then Joltes told the tale in political science classes during discussions about President Reagan’s far-reaching nuclear policy. The legend spread…and mutated.