The Man Behind the DeLorean Was Arrested Trying to Save It With $24 Million in Cocaine

John DeLorean started the DeLorean Motor Company in Northern Ireland in 1978 with financial backing that included the British government and celebrity investors like Johnny Carson and Sammy Davis Jr. The DMC-12 — stainless steel body, gullwing doors, the only model the company ever built — went into production in January 1981 and sold poorly enough that the Belfast plant closed less than two years later, in December 1982.

By mid-1982, DeLorean needed roughly $17 million to keep the company from collapsing entirely and spent much of that year chasing investors who could bail him out. On June 28, a man named James Hoffman approached him claiming to have a business opportunity. Hoffman was, in reality, a convicted drug smuggler working as a federal informant, and the opportunity he was offering wasn't real financing — it was the setup for a sting.

On October 19, 1982, DeLorean was arrested and charged with conspiracy to obtain and distribute 55 pounds of cocaine, worth an estimated $24 million, after a hotel-room meeting where an undercover agent opened a suitcase in front of him. It was, by any measure, a spectacular fall for a man who'd been one of General Motors' most prominent executives before striking out on his own.

DeLorean's defense argued entrapment, and it worked. A former DEA agent testified that Hoffman had read about DeLorean's financial troubles and specifically bragged about luring him in with a fake way out of them. On August 16, 1984, DeLorean was acquitted on grounds of government entrapment — legally exonerated, company already gone. The DMC-12 outlived the scandal by becoming Back to the Future's time machine three years later, which is the version of this story most people actually know, with the FBI sting as the stranger true story running underneath it.