DeLorean shop steels itself against time
May 22, 2005 | CHICAGO TRIBUNE | by Steven Kurutz, New York Times News Service [su_quote]In the dim half-light of a Long Island garage, a handful of DeLoreans stand in corners or suspended on hydraulic lifts, their gull-wing doors ajar more than two decades after the DeLorean Motor Co. went bust. Visible through a dusty window to the parking lot, perhaps 20 more DeLoreans, lined up and identical, sit waiting. This is P.J. Grady’s, a modest gray automotive garage tucked behind a used-car lot in West Sayville, N.Y. As the sign on its roof—DeLorean Motor Cars—indicates, the shop specializes in the repair and restoration of DeLoreans. It is estimated that around 9,200 DeLoreans were built in the car’s three years of production, 1981-83, and that about 7,000 are left. Of those, a good number have passed through the hands of Rob Grady, P.J. Grady’s owner, who has spent 20 years as one of the world’s few DeLorean experts. DeLorean owners from Maine to Florida send him their cars. For many years, P.J. Grady’s was about as profitable as an Edsel dealership, but that has changed. The teenagers who saw “Back to the Future” 20 years ago and were fascinated by the film’s time-traveling DeLorean are grown and seeking the low-sweeping coupe. At the same time, the car is approaching its 25th birthday. Where once values hovered around $17,000, a restored DeLorean now runs close to $30,000. “In the last five or six years, the values have gone way up,” said James Espey, vice president of the DeLorean Motor Co. in Houston, which bought the rights to the brand and sells restored models. It was long believed that DeLorean parts could not be found, so many cars were garaged, but Espey’s firm bought the DMC parts inventory. Espey estimates that the company has enough gull-wing doors to last 120 years at the current rate of use, and enough interior carpet to cover a football field twice over. The company opened a second branch near Tampa. And two shops near Los Angeles, DeLorean Motor Center and DeLorean One, serve the West Coast as P.J. Grady’s serves the East. Of the handful of DeLorean specialists, P.J. Grady’s is the oldest, going back to 1979, when Grady became one of the original DeLorean dealers. For $25,000 he received the right to sell the DMC-12, and a poster of the car autographed by DeLorean, which still decorates his office. Like many dealers, Grady signed up based on the reputation of DeLorean, who had been an engineering and marketing star at General Motors—in the early 1960s he created the Pontiac GTO. But from the start, his company was besieged with problems, starting with too little capital and the fact that the car, priced at $25,000, made its debut in 1981 in one of the worst economies in recent memory. “The cars were never hot sellers,” Grady said. Topping it off was DeLorean’s arrest in 1982 for conspiracy to distribute cocaine, still a sore spot with DeLorean enthusiasts. (DeLorean was acquitted after claiming entrapment.) When the company filed for bankruptcy protection that year, Grady continued to honor his customers’ warranties. He found himself doing more and more repair work on DeLoreans, until that was all he did. Not surprisingly, he has developed an affection for the car, though it is tempered by years of daily involvement. “It’s a good car,” he said. DeLorean enthusiast Mike Deluca, hovering nearby, said: “Rob is being modest. He’s completely dedicated. I was driving by once, and it was Easter Sunday. It was freezing. Rob was out in the parking lot testing temperature sensors.” In a far corner of the garage, the P.J. Grady’s mechanic, Pat Tomasetti, stood in blue coveralls beneath a DeLorean on a lift, draining oil. Tomasetti has been repairing and restoring DeLoreans at P.J. Grady’s for 13 years and is accustomed to overzealous fans of the car. He laughed as he recalled the time a Japanese man showed up with his family, saying he had flown to America to visit Disney World and P.J. Grady’s. The DeLorean Tomasetti was working on had come from Pennsylvania and was set to have its fender replaced, among other repairs. Another DeLorean, its door crunched, needed extensive body work. Outside, dozens more waited, a daunting workload for two men. –I’d like another mechanic, but it’s hard keeping them,” Grady said. “Most guys don’t like doing restoration work. It’s dirty, and there’s also the repetition.” People who spend time around garages tend to acquire a detailed know-how of car design and mechanics, but DeLorean experts have refined that. Because of its unpainted stainless-steel body, the DMC-12 was available in only one color, silver. Its interior was black leather or gray leather, and the car changed little over its brief production run. So while the Corvette aficionado has a half-century of paint schemes, body types and options to ponder, the DeLorean lover must be content with trivial changes—the radio antenna on the ’81 models is in the windshield, for example, while on the ’82 it is on the left rear quarter. Pointing to a model whose license plate read BK2DFUTR, Grady made the indistinguishable cars distinguishable. “We just got this one out of mothballs,” he said. “It sat for four years. The owner decided to sell it. It only has 11,000 miles.” He continued: “That one over there was in a wreck. Needs a new door.” Then he walked over to a car covered in dust. The passenger window was stuck halfway down, and the seat was given over to orphaned parts. “This is the 530,” he said reverently. “It’s a Legend prototype, Twin Turbo. They only made three of these.” The 530 is going to be restored as his DeLorean, Grady said, just as soon as he finds the time. “Sometimes you get a little burned out,” he mused, reflecting on the vagaries of being a DeLorean expert. “Then something rejuvenates you.”[/su_quote]
DELOREAN LAWYERS SEEK A GRAND JURY TRANSCRIPT
By JUDITH CUMMINGS | June 8, 1984 | New York Times [su_quote]LOS ANGELES, June 7— Lawyers for John Z. DeLorean today asked Federal District Judge Robert M. Takasugi to ban prosecutors from discussing testimony with James Timothy Hoffman, the Government’s star witness, before he returned to the witness stand Friday. Judge Takasugi rejected the request. But the judge agreed to consider a defense request for the transcript of the grand jury proceedings leading up to a new indictment of Mr. DeLorean in June 1983 on a charge of conspiracy to import and distribute cocaine. The defense made the request after Mr. Hoffman testified under cross- examination that he talked with the prosecutor, James P. Walsh Jr., as early as January 1983 about several unrecorded telephone calls he had made to Mr. DeLorean in the investigation of the case. Lawyer Challenges Prosecutor Howard L. Weitzman, Mr. DeLorean’s chief lawyer, in talking to reporters, accused the prosecutors of concealing this information from the defense in violation of the law. He said Mr. Walsh had previously said at a hearing before Judge Takasugi in September 1983 that the prosecution, at that time, was learning about the unrecorded calls. Much of the Government’s case has relied on secretly recorded telephone calls and videotapes. Mr. Walsh did not return a telephone call requesting a response to to Mr. Weizman’s charge. However, concerning Mr. Hoffman’s testimony about the unrecorded calls, he told a reporter, ”I don’t recall it that way – there was a good deal of slop in that answer.” This apparently meant he thought Mr. Hoffman’s testimony might not have been accurate. The indictment of Mr. DeLorean on June 29 superseded the original indictment in October 1982 after Mr. DeLorean’s two co-defendants, William Morgan Hetrick and Steven Arrington, both pleaded guilty to drug trafficking charges. All three were charged in connection with a scheme to import and distribute 55 pounds of cocaine. Donald M. Re, an attorney for Mr. DeLorean, said outside the court that the defense had asked for the grand jury transcript ”because it appears there were discrepancies in testimony” the defense had just learned about. The unrecorded telephone calls have been a major issue at Mr. DeLorean’s trial. Mr. Hoffman, a Government informer, testified in October 1982 to the grand jury that indicted the 59-year-old Mr. DeLorean that he had recorded all the telephone calls he made to Mr. DeLorean after July 11, 1982. The recordings, he said, were part of the undercover investigation he was conducting against the automobile maker. It was later revealed through telephone toll records turned over to the defense that at least four, and possibly more, telephone talks between Mr. Hoffman and Mr. DeLorean had not been recorded. The defense maintains that Mr. Hoffman used these calls to threatened Mr. DeLorean’s family if he tried to back out of a narcotics transaction. The defense also asserts that Mr. Hoffman was double-dealing Mr. DeLorean, leading the automobile maker to believe he was going to obtain a legitimate investment for the failing DeLorean Motor Company and doing that through unrecorded calls that have not been made part of the record of the investigation. Mr. Hoffman testified that there had been five meetings with Federal investigators at which he had discussed the unrecorded phone calls. He said he discussed them with Mr. Walsh and John Valestra, one of his control agents in the Drug Enforcement Administration, and that the earliest of these discussions was in January 1983 after his testimony to the grand jury.[/su_quote] from http://www.nytimes.com/1984/06/08/us/delorean-lawyers-seek-a-grand-jury-transcript.html
Receivership Declared at DeLorean
February 20, 1982 | by STEVEN RATTNER, Special to the New York Times www.nytimes.com/1982/02/20/business/receivership-declared-at-delorean.html LONDON, Feb. 19— John Z. DeLorean, the flamboyant American entrepreneur, in a move that amounted to a declaration of bankruptcy, called in receivers today for his Belfast auto maker in a last-ditch effort to keep a slimmed-down version of the company operating. In the face of a weak car market -the $25,000 stainless-steel two-seat sports car is sold exclusively in the United States – and what it viewed as overambitious plans, the British Government, which has already invested $150 million in the project, refused to grant any more aid, ending Mr. DeLorean’s role in car production. Mr. DeLorean, an engineer who had been a rising star in the General American Motors lost $47.2 million in the fourth quarter and $136.6 million in 1981. Page 36. Motors executive suite until he stunned Detroit by quitting his $650,000 job in 1973, had tried to start the world’s first major new auto maker in decades in a strife-torn region of Northern Ireland, where the previous Labor Government had given generous assistance in the hope of providing jobs in an area of 20 percent unemployment and resuscitating the economy. Today’s development threw into doubt the fate of that effort. Not since the Chrysler Corporation was begun in 1920 has a major new American car maker met long-term success. Nevertheless, when he began producing his low-slung, high-performance, safety-oriented car last spring, Mr. DeLorean predicted that the DeLorean would revolutionize the industry. But after an encouraging start, sales slumped badly, and only half the 7,500 cars shipped to America have been sold, even discounted. Nevertheless, Mr. DeLorean said at Claridges Hotel, shortly before departing for New York by Concorde: ”I am delighted at the outcome.” (”We came out largely unscathed,” Mr. DeLorean said in an interview late Friday in New York. ”The Government has the problem, and we have the fun end of the business.” He said that the American parent company, the DeLorean Motor Company, was not affected by the agreement restructuring DeLorean Motor Cars Ltd. Mr. DeLorean, who owns about 80 percent of the shares, said that the American company, which controls the sale and licenses the manufacturing of the cars, would also be relieved of a $70 million obligation to guarantee notes used to build the plant if he put up $5 million, which, he said, he planned to do by next week.) Today, the two receivers, from the firm of W.H. Cork, Gully & Company, estimated that they would have to put together financing of between $75 million and $95 million in the next five weeks, to keep the plant operating. The goal is to sell 8,000 cars a year, instead of the 20,000 envisioned by the 56-year-old Mr. DeLorean. Charges of Mistakes In denying further assistance, James Prior, who as Northern Ireland Secretary effectively governs the troubled province, said bluntly that ”very considerable management and marketing mistakes have been made over the estimate of sales.” ”The time had come when the Government just had to say no,” Mr. Prior, a Conservative, told the House of Commons this morning. ”I do not think there would have been any credibility left in a whole range of matters in which one is seeking to try to help in Northern Ireland if we had taken any other course,” he said. Sir Kenneth Cork, who was joined as receiver by Paul Shewell, said that a number of expressions of interest had been received from businessmen hoping for ”a clean new company not loaded with an overweight debt.” ”There was a dichotomy of management,” Sir Kenneth said. ”I think it was too extravagant a setup for the size of the business.” But he added: ”The receivers believe that there is a market for these motorcars, and it would be a great pity if the skills which have been learned in Belfast were lost.” He said that he would apply to the Government for a short-term working grant. Lien to Government The receivership means that the British Government has effectively written off its investment. However, as the principal creditor, the Government would have a lien on the assets that could be sold or leased to the operating company. Until a rescuer comes forward or the receivers give up, the plant will continue at its current reduced level of output, and the 1,500 remaining jobs will be temporarily preserved. Even before the collapse in sales, Mr. DeLorean had been seeking further British Government aid to develop a second, larger model automobile. The Government had come under considerable pressure not to grant the request because of disclosures that DeLorean Motor Cars Ltd., had just $1 million of private investment, none of it from Mr. DeLorean. In Belfast today, the reaction was almost relief among a work force that had been expecting a complete shutdown. ”It is an encouraging sign at least for the company that Sir Kenneth has given a commitment to maintain it,” said George Clarke, the Transport Workers Union shop steward. —- Statement by DeLorean Mr. DeLorean said in a news conference at the company’s New York headquarters yesterday, that the decision gave the auto maker ”a new foundation” and that it was now ”in significantly better financial shape.” He said he did not intended to sell the company but to get money from American investors to help the company in Belfast. He called ”the continuity of production, sales and service for the DeLorean car” insured.