John DeLorean, who died Saturday at age 80, was the car design prodigy from General Motors who developed the Pontiac GTO and revived the fortunes of Chevrolet before setting off to found his own firm producing the stainless-steel, gull-winged DeLorean sports car.

The venture collapsed within three years, and the same day that DeLorean’s factory was shuttered in 1982, he was arrested in an FBI sting operation at a Los Angeles hotel room with a suitcase full of cocaine. The government alleged that he was trying to save the company with funds from selling drugs.

In 1984, DeLorean was acquitted after mounting an entrapment defense, this despite appearing in a surveillance video referring to the cache of powder as “as good as gold.”

The trial, a press spectacle in its day, and the 1985 film “Back to the Future,” in which a DMC-12 had a featured role as a time-machine, ironically served to bring the DeLorean into the public’s mind at precisely the moment when it was unavailable for purchase.

DeLorean’s legal problems were far from over. A further attempt at prosecution awaited him for embezzlement from his company – he beat that charge, too. But the IRS continued to hound him, and DeLorean spent his last two decades pursuing chimerical business ventures – a watch company, a new car business – while dodging lawsuits, taxmen, and process servers. In 2000, he was evicted from his Bedminster, N.J., estate; his sole remaining significant asset was a warehouse of spare parts for his cars, in Columbus, Ohio.

Long-divorced from his supermodel wife (though remarried), DeLorean had, by the end, apparently lost almost everything. He blamed his problems on Prime Minister Thatcher whom, he claimed, canceled his company’s government-backed financing because she suspected that his Belfast, Northern Ireland, workers were tithing to the Irish Republican Army.

Yet DeLorean remained optimistic, and a few years ago insisted to Ward’s Auto World magazine, “I’m still working on my legend.” It was the same supercharged optimism that had fueled his rise to the upper echelons of GM, and the kind everybody expected of a man about which one biographer wrote, “They used to say, long before John got into all his trouble, that he could fall out of a 40-story building and land on top of a beautiful blonde.”

DeLorean was practically born into the car business. His father was an hourly wage-earner at Ford Motor Company’s foundry in Detroit, and John attended the nearby Lawrence Institute of Technology. Despite graduating with a degree in mechanical engineering, DeLorean managed to attend the school on a music scholarship. He earned spending money playing the saxophone in jazz clubs.

In 1948, DeLorean joined the engineering staff at Chrysler. He had an intense drive to succeed, attending night school to obtain first a masters in industrial engineering, and later an MBA. Meanwhile, he decided Chrysler was too big a pond, and moved on to be chief of research and development at Packard.

DeLorean quickly developed a reputation for innovative design work. Eventually, he would hold about 200 patents for such inventions as the overhead cam engine, concealed windshield wipers, and windshield-encased radio antennas.

Notoriously impatient with bureaucracy and shoddy organization, DeLorean became unhappy at Packard, where he described the company’s administration as “similar to Czechoslovakia’s.” In 1956, shortly before the company’s demise, DeLorean moved from Packard to GM.

At first constituting a one-man department of “advanced design,” De-Lorean eventually conceived of the bold Catalinas and Bonnevilles that graced Pontiac’s lines of the late 1950s and early 1960s. By 1961, Pontiac had become the third-largest car manufacturer in America, and DeLorean was made chief engineer.

With the GTO, introduced in 1963, DeLorean broke a long-standing corporate rule against producing racing cars. The car had flashy good looks, and was unveiled in a blaze of publicity that included a jingle that became a hit song, for Ronny & the Daytonas. The car was a tremendous seller, and DeLorean became general manager of the Pontiac division. He maintained the emphasis on styling and racing, with a revamped Firebird, as well as the compact Tempest. He was as much of a manipulator of pop culture as cam shafts. “These rock stations, the things they say, what they discuss, that’s what counts,” he told Newsweek magazine in 1968. “It’s the cheapest education you can get.”

Forever chafing at meetings and strait-laced business culture, DeLorean welcomed the sartorial excesses of the 1960s. He became known for sporting outrageous clothes and affecting long sideburns. He had a face-lift and a chin implant. He trolled the streets of Detroit in gaudy European racers like Lamborghinis and Maseratis, breaking every norm of Detroit’s staid business culture.

DeLorean’s dandified appearance fit in well with the outrageous modifications offered on one of his finest creations, “The Judge,” a version of the GTO. Named for a Flip Wilson/Pigmeat Markham comedy routine that featured the tagline “here comes da judge!” the GTO version featured, according to the Los Angeles Times, “flame-orange paint with swirling body graphics and ‘The Judge’ written in modish script on the front GTO fenders and rear deck. The Judge also featured hood scoops, a rear-deck spoiler, and a 400-cubic-inch Ram Air III engine, four speed Hurst shifter, Rally II wheels and rally gauges. The Judge was to fuel economy what carpet-bombing was to shuttle diplomacy.”

His first marriage ended after his wife found him “living with a Las Vegas show girl,” and DeLorean became known for squiring a large number of highly-visible women, including Ursula Andress, Nancy Sinatra, Raquel Welch, and Candice Bergen. He married at least three more times, including to Vogue model Christina Ferrare.

In 1969, DeLorean was given the assignment of turning around the fortunes of GM’s flagging Chevrolet division. He introduced the compact Vega a year later. Through cost savings and attention to quality control, DeLorean managed to bring Chevrolet back to record-setting profitability. In 1971, Chevrolet became the first Detroit automobile division to sell more than three million cars in a year, and DeLorean was made head of GM’s North American operations.

It was here that DeLorean’s dissatisfaction with bureaucracy and tradition finally undermined him. When a series of his initiatives failed to be undertaken, including introducing catalytic converters ahead of schedule and speeding up the design cycle, DeLorean abruptly resigned, in May of 1973.

He immediately took a year-long appointment as head of the National Alliance of Businessmen, where he worked on developing employment programs for ex-prisoners and American Indians, a rather unexpected, but long-held, interest of DeLorean’s. He then formed his own company, with a variety of automotive-related business interests, including the development of campers and trailers. He also invested in the San Diego Chargers, the Yankees, and a string of miniature race tracks. It was around this time that he seriously began contemplating developing his own car.

Before the Northern Ireland venture imploded amid lawsuits and international recriminations, nearly 9,000 De-Lorean DMC-12s were snapped up drivers who became so loyal to the cars that, according to an owner’s group, over 6,000 of them are still on the road today, and they sell for several times their original purchase price of $25,000.The fanaticism has led to various rumors, such as that, after the plants were shuttered, the body molds were dumped in the middle of the Irish Sea. This rumor apparently has a grain of truth to it, for the molds were said to have been sold as scrap and broken up and used as weights for commercial fishing nets.

DeLorean remained a trenchant critic of the automotive industry, and especially of the executives who followed him at GM. He said chairman Roger Smith had fumbled badly by opening Saturn as a new car company. “What should have been done when they wanted to show the world GM could build a quality car is start with Chevy, or Olds, or Buick,” he said in the interview with Ward’s Auto World. “If I had suggested in my time that GM sales would drop from 50% in the 1970s to less than 30% of the market as they have today, I would have been considered insane.”

DeLorean drove an Acura.