The Stingers Get Stung

By Jane O'Reilly

A jury acquits De Lorean, criticizing his prosecutors instead

The plot was as convoluted as any on Dynasty. The tanned, silver-haired protagonist might have just walked off the set of Dallas. But the moment of melodrama at the federal courthouse in Los Angeles last week would have strained credulity on any prime-tune soap opera. Twenty-two months after he was arrested, and five months after his sensationally publicized trial began, renegade Auto Manufacturer John Zachary De Lorean, 59, his hands clasped in front of him as he leaned back in a beige swivel chair, heard a jury of six men and six women declare him not guilty of conspiring to possess and distribute cocaine. "Praise the Lord," proclaimed the born-again defendant.

Cristina Ferrare, De Lorean's fashion-model wife, who seemed to wear a different designer outfit on each of the trial's 62 days, ran to the phone to call 13-year-old Zachary De Lorean. "We won, we won," she sobbed. "Honey, it's all right, it's all fine. I'm crying because I'm happy." The jury had taken 29 hours over seven days, reading transcripts, talking and finally crying, to reach its verdict. They were split on whether De Lorean engaged in a criminal conspiracy, jurors later said, but unanimous in deciding that even if he had, he had been improperly entrapped by the Government's elaborate sting operation. They made their decision on the first ballots.

"I am shocked and surprised," said Federal Prosecutor Robert Perry. Certainly the Government had seemed to have a firm case going into the trial. De Lorean had been arrested in a hotel near the Los Angeles airport only minutes after gleefully poking a suitcase full of cocaine and proposing a toast to the success of the deal. "It's better than gold," he had gloated in a scene taped by Government agents that was replayed repeatedly in court and on nationwide television. It seemed to support the Government's contention that De Lorean was a willing participant in the drug deal, which involved 220 Ibs. of cocaine worth $24 million. Prosecutors had described him as a jet-setting profligate with "the conscience of a tomcat" who "shook hands with the devil."

De Lorean's shrewd and crafty defense attorneys, Howard Weitzman and Donald Ree, maintained a similar high pitch of righteous indignation throughout the trial. They portrayed their client as an embattled entrepreneur seeking to fulfill the American dream, a man himself the victim of a giant conspiracy: "Lured, lied to and pushed" into a trap set by Government agents who were "on a headlong rush to glory." The tactic was to put the Government on trial, and it worked. De Lorean never took the stand. Nor did his lawyers ever make a direct defense on the grounds of entrapment, which might have required an admission that De Lorean had committed a crime.

The tapes were compelling yet also confusing, full of implications but apparently not convincing to a jury skeptical about what went before and after each of the scenes. In one videotape, FBI Agent Benedict Tisa, masquerading as a banker, discussed laundering drug money with De Lorean. In another tape, De Lorean told his old acquaintance and neighbor James Timothy Hoffman, a convicted cocaine dealer, that he had backing for the drug deal from the Irish Republican Army. Unfortunately for the Government's case, the tapes lacked one critical element. Missing were the preliminary stages of the probe, thus leaving debatable the essential question of motivation and instigation: Who really set the deal in motion?

Furthermore, the prosecution failed to maintain the credibility of its undercover operatives and informants. Tisa admitted he had destroyed some of the notes from his investigation and had accepted and passed to his superiors false information from Hoffman that De Lorean had a prior history of drug involvements. The prosecution conceded that Hoffman was a paid informer and an admitted perjurer. His claim that he had been approached by De Lorean was undercut by testimony that he had boasted to the Feds as early as 1982, "I'm going to get John De Lorean for you guys ... The problems he's got, I can get him to do anything I want."

The prosecution tried to persuade the jury to overlook the witnesses' apparent character defects. Argued Attorney Perry: "For a plot hatched in hell, don't expect angels for witnesses." But the argument seemed to backfire. The jurors said afterward that they found themselves as disturbed by the Government's conduct as they were by De Lorean's. "Entrapment was a critical issue that had a lot of impact on us," Evelyn Dowell, a homemaker, told TIME. "I thought De Lorean's actions " could be questioned, but I think the Government acted in a questionable manner. Neither side behaved appropriately."

U.S. District Court Judge Robert Takasugi had carefully spelled out the law on this point to the jury. Said he in his instructions: "If you find John De Lorean committed the acts charged, but did so as a result of entrapment, you must find him not guilty." Entrapment results if the idea for the crime comes from Government agents or informants, if the defendant is induced to participate, and if the defendant was not predisposed to commit the crime. According to Clarence Berman, 56, a retired environmental health inspector for Los Angeles County, some of his fellow jurors thought De Lorean was innocent of the charges, but they all believed that he had been entrapped and was, therefore, not guilty.

"This was an attempt to send a message that this type of conduct in investigations and arrests will not be tolerated," Defense Attorney Weitzman declared of the decision. The jurors confirmed that for some of them at least, this was the case. "The whole thing makes me angry," said Juror Jo Ann Kerns, a department-store assistant manager. "What they did to De Lorean could happen to anyone. That's the message. People should understand that." Foreman William Lahr, an insurance claims adjuster, reported that the jury hoped the verdict "would indicate to the Government that they should re-evaluate their investigative techniques."

Attorney General William French Smith declared that the verdict would not deter the Government from conducting undercover operations in the future. Since 1977 the FBI budget for such investigative techniques has climbed from $1 million to $12 million. While Assistant FBI Director William Baker conceded that the agency's procedures for conducting a sting operation might need some "tuning up," he claimed that the verdict will not set a precedent. But Democratic Congressman Don Edwards of California announced that he will push for legislation for tighter control of such operations in the future; he proposes that in some types of undercover stings the Government should be required to get a judge's authorization, as is now the case for wiretaps. "The Government sending secret agents in to commit crimes is a kind of dirty business," said Edwards.

"Hopefully we can get the laws changed so that this type of conduct never happens again," said De Lorean after the verdict was announced. "Hopefully this terror and horror that me and my family have been through for the last two years won't be wasted." In 1975, 2 1/2 years after leaving as executive in charge of all North American car and truck manufacturing at General Motors, he set up his own dream-car company. It is now in receivership, though its gull-winged, stainless-steel sports cars are suddenly selling rapidly as collectors' items. He hopes to go back into the automobile business, said De Lorean last week, "the only thing I know how to do."

Yet the De Lorean saga is far from concluded. His legal expenses are reported to be close to $1 million, he faces suits from creditors seeking $25 million or more, and his once far-flung estates are tied up in legal wrangles. The British government, which put $156 million into financing his now bankrupt automobile factory in Northern Ireland, is demanding an accounting of $17.65 million that investigators say was apparently funneled into private bank accounts. And in Detroit, John De Lorean's home town, he is still the subject of a federal grand jury investigation paralleling the British probe into an apparent transfer of millions of dollars from the De Lorean Motor Co. or subsidiaries into a paper trail of foreign and domestic personal bank accounts. Indictments may be handed down this fall.

"Would you buy a used car from me?" asked De Lorean wryly after his acquittal. Almost certainly many people would. He is a master of the role of charming rascal. Even the jury, held hostage for five months to his trial, agreed after its emotional deliberations to a highly unusual request from the defense attorneys for a private meeting with the man they had just found not guilty. De Lorean, his wife and lawyers spent half an hour thanking the jurors, many of them well-paid professionals, for their verdict. --By Jane O'Reilly. Reported by Richard Woodbury/Los Angeles

With reporting by Richard Woodbury