John Zachary De Lorean said not long ago that he is a devout Roman Catholic who, when in New York City, goes every day to St. Patrick's Cathedral. He said that he is a believer in prayer, and a "firm believer" in the Ten Commandments. He also, as improbable as it seems, detected parallels between his life and that of Jesus Christ. "In many ways," De Lorean said in 1980, "Jesus was an outsider. Some of the really big things in life are achieved by those who refuse to conform. I stood up for what I believed. I'm an outsider, and in my own small way I'm trying to do something."
No one ever accused De Lorean of lacking hubris. But from all the evidence, his life has been less devoted to piety than to speed and gutter. "I live on adrenaline," De Lorean said flatly 13 years ago, when he was a golden boy at General Motors. He was still grabbing for gusto last year: "A guy's gotta do what he's gotta do. We only pass this way but once." A few months ago, just when the FBI says he began planning his drug-dealing scheme in earnest, De Lorean told a group of sports car dealers: "We will do anything to keep this company alive." But what he really seemed committed to keeping alive was an image of himself: John De Lorean, the smart and plucky maverick businessman, the high-stakes gambler who makes his own rules and always wins.
For a classic American success story, De Lorean's beginnings were appropriately humble. A Depression boyhood on the working-class east side of Detroit.
An Austrian mother he adored. An Alsatian father who drank and brawled when not working his shift at a Ford foundry.
The parents separated more than once when John was a boy. He started working nights and weekends, sometimes stacking groceries; later, he played the saxophone in black nightclubs. "I remember the feeling of doing a good day's work, and that's one hell of a feeling," he told TIME'S Alf McCreary two years ago. "I am still driven by that work ethic. Money is not important."
During his freshman year as a scholarship student at Detroit's Lawrence Institute of Technology, his parents divorced. John De Lorean was drafted into the Army a year later, but never served overseas. After his discharge, his engineering degree in hand, he became a company man in his company town: he took an engineering job with Chrysler. At 27, armed with a night-school master's degree in engineering from the Chrysler Institute, he switched companies to design transmissions for the Packard Motor Car Co. Shortly he was in charge of all research and development for Packard. He picked up a second night-school master's, this one in business from the University of Michigan, and moved to GM as the director of Pontiac's new "advanced engineering" department.