Word: loreans
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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...
...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...
...Lorean's shrewd and crafty defense attorneys, Howard Weitzman and Donald Rée, 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...
...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...
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...