Will Delorean Deliver Hollywood?

"If John De Lorean had come to me and asked what he should do, I swear I would've told him to stay out of it, don't mess with it."

Mike, the studio dealer, is talking about the latest media event brought to you by cocaine, celebs and the Los Angeles connection. "The only way to survive as a dealer," says Mike, "is to make coke a social drug. You deal only with people you really know. Friends, in other words. You buy it from friends and you sell it to friends, and you don't walk into strange hotel rooms and start talking prices with people you don't really know. Above all, you don't touch the product yourself. You have people fronting for you. You have two or three levels--at a minimum--between you and the business, especially if you're dealing big volume. The bottom line is that it's a tough business and there's no room for amateurs. A lot of amateurs try it, of course, but they don't last. Just ask De Lorean. He was in deep shit and he didn't even know it."

The professionals in the West Coast cocaine trade--the dealers who are still functioning, the ones who haven't been busted, with their pictures on page one--those dealers can't understand De Lorean's naïveté and stupidity and self destructiveness. To them, he is a fool who ran unnecessary risks, ignored the principal rules of survival, was ignorant of the most basic surveillance techniques and--perhaps most important of all--may bring everybody else down as a result.

"The reason people are nervous in this town," says Mike, "is that we know what they're asking De Lorean and his buddies. Two basic questions: Where did the coke come from? Who were you going to sell it to? So, you see, if De Lorean talks, they'll be able to draw the whole tree: branches and twigs, dealers and consumers. To get that much coke together, there had to be several dealers involved before it got to the guys De Lorean was buying from. And for him to think he could unload it, he must have known a lot of executives and people who wanted to take it off his hands. If he turns state's evidence, watch out. There could be an inquisition in this town. That's the reason this is such a hot one. The narcs know where that coke came from. And they probably have a good idea of where it was going."

"Surveillance today is high tech," says Mel, the man who calls himself a mover, not a dealer. "De Lorean walked into an operation that had to be number one on the narcs' computer profile. An airline in the desert with that type of aircraft? And those people? You think that kind of operation isn't closely watched? I'm telling you, they run computer profiles with special parameters before they decide who to watch, and Morgan Aviation had to be right up there as one of their favorites."

"The coke business is like the film business," Mike says. "There's a technical side to both. You have to know what you're doing on a movie set when it's costing you $20,000 per minute to film. The same for cocaine. There are cuts now that cost $1500 an ounce. Do you get what I'm saying? You can stretch one ounce to two with those cuts and no test can catch it; not even an experienced person can tell that you've diluted your product. How's De Lorean going to survive in this particular world with all the scams we've got? Another example: We do a gig on some people and tell them that once a year, there's a special shipment of coke coming in: Peruvian Pink, Pineapple, we give it names like that. We build it up as special, talk about how it comes from the best plants at the highest altitudes and all that bullshit. But it's nothing more than regular street coke mixed with a little red dye. And people are willing to pay extra for it. Maybe that's one of the scams De Lorean fell for. Maybe that's why he was willing to pay so much for it up front.

"But so what?" Mike continues, laughing. "He spent 11 days in jail, he'll plead entrapment, he'll write a book and sell the movie rights and make a lot of money."

Mel faults that famous De Lorean flair. "What's all this theater, anyway?" he says. "You know--pilots in the desert, meetings in hotel rooms, that kind of crap. That might be good for a TV series, but the narcs were playing to De Lorean's sense of drama, if you ask me. The big dealers out here, the really big ones, they work very quietly. There's not a lot of money changing hands at the drop. This is a business that works on trust, and no jerk is going to show up with a big load of cash for the pickup. You send the money later, in separate shipments. Money takes up volume, and you really don't want it around when you're hauling away a trunk full of coke. If you're not trusted enough to get credit, you don't get the business."

"My bet," Mike concludes, "is that De Lorean used the product, knew some high-powered people who used it, too, and he thought he could play with us, come in and make a big deal and go out and unload it in the executive suites of America. But he didn't have the knowledge and he didn't have the training. He didn't have his M.D.A.--master's in dealing administration. They don't teach that in business schools yet. Maybe one day soon, but not yet. So he flunked, and he deserved to. He broke every rule in the book."