My Visit To The Realm of the Accused…

From Which There Is No Escape

The stain left by a notorious arrest never quite washes away.

The most formative experience of my life as a journalist came the night before Easter 1983 as I paced in a holding cell of the Detroit Police Department’s narcotics division. My memory of my surroundings is hazy because, along with my belt and shoes, the officers had me remove my glasses, which left me enveloped in a dark cloud and very alone with my thoughts. My bed was a cold metal slab with a few sheets of toilet paper for a pillow, but I was mostly on my feet, taking the few steps I could before I hit the wall or the toilet.

I believe my regrets were quite different from the cubby hole’s previous occupants. I had not made the mistake of committing a crime. Instead, I had been set up with a substance that I later learned could have put me in a bigger cell for four years. But my innocence gave me no peace of mind. Instead, during the hours before my editor bailed me out, I agonized over all the gullible things I had done to fall into this trap. My motivation was to protect a source, and in previous months, I had already gone to great lengths to do so, but these experiences had only made me more reckless and I was paying the price for that. I had the callow confidence I would never go to trial, let alone be convicted, but that was the least of my concerns. I most feared the book that got me into this predicament might never be published if I could be portrayed as some kind of drug addict or dealer.

Never for a minute did I doubt the identity of the man behind my arrest. His name was John Z. DeLorean and we had already tangled in ways that should have warned me this was coming. A year and a half earlier, I had written the most extensively negative article that had been published about the auto executive. With his charm and hip affectations, he had become a darling of the reporters who covered Detroit’s big three car companies. Although he was expected to run General Motors, he was ejected instead from the executive suite for reasons neither he nor the company clarified. But then he burnished his enfant-terrible credentials by writing a book deeply critical of GM and the American auto industry. His fame then rocketed into the stratosphere when he raised the money to start his own “ethical” car company. A sleek sports car with a stainless steel body and gull-wing doors would be the inaugural and ultimately only vehicle to roll off his assembly line. It later gained posthumous fame as the car in the Back to the Future films.

When DeLorean decided to take his motor company public, which would have put tens of millions of dollars in his pocket, one of his executives told me to take a second look at his prospectus and a suspicious $14 million payment to GPD, a subcontractor that, I discovered, was no more than a P.O. Box in Switzerland. The timing dovetailed neatly with his purchase of a Utah company that made snow grooming equipment. At this time, I was in Detroit working for Monthly Detroit, a tiny city magazine. I suggested to my editor, Kirk Cheyfitz, that I report on the private business ventures DeLorean started after he left GM. I soon learned they uniformly ended in lawsuits and bankruptcy, not only revealing his unethical behavior but his ineptitude as an entrepreneur outside the cozy confines of a major corporation. In these private deals, DeLorean associated himself with a motley crew of shady characters, none more so than a former car salesman and convicted felon who had to sneak out of the back door of his home to avoid the process servers camped on his front lawn. With this kind of record, I asked how the British government could have entrusted DeLorean with $150 million to build his car in Belfast, Northern Ireland.

After I completed my reporting, I made a formal request to discuss what I found with the man dubbed by Fleet Street as the Maverick Mogul. His communications director had requested a list of my questions for them to review first. Unused to queries about his lawsuits and business failures, DeLorean acted like my story was a personal vendetta. When he got on the speakerphone, he barked, “Why are you out to get me? What did I do to you?” We proceeded through a contentious review of what I found when suddenly, his tone turned congenial, and I sensed something was coming that I needed to get on tape. I scrambled with that era’s clunky suction cup recording device—just in time to catch him inviting me to Manhattan, where he would give me exclusive access to a portfolio revealing an international conspiracy against him. I suspected it was a ploy to offer me a bribe, and he confirmed my suspicion when I told him I would gladly hear him out if the information had a bearing on my story, but there was no way we would stop publication. He pivoted back to bellicose. “You’re doing tremendous injury to the people there in Belfast,” he snarled. “You can’t do anything to hurt me. Whatever you can say has already been said.”

Given the reverence auto reporters still showed DeLorean in Detroit, I was not surprised when the city’s two daily newspapers ignored my story. The only media attention came a month later when he went on a local radio show. In response to a question about my piece, he replied, “I was told at the time that if I would make certain payments to other people, then those things wouldn’t appear.”

It was a statement neither I nor the magazine could let stand. In a man-bites-dog turn of events, our libel attorney threatened DeLorean with a lawsuit if he didn’t retract what he said. To our surprise, his lawyer quickly replied to negotiate a satisfactory retraction. A few days later, I received a letter from DeLorean that read: “I did not say that anyone from The Monthly Detroit (sic) sought a bribe from me. I certainly am grieved if my statements, after being inaccurately reported by the news media, have caused you or your magazine embarrassment.” Although DeLorean’s PR department characterized his letter as a “clarification,” the Detroit Free Press headline declared: “John Z. apologizes to Monthly Detroit.”

Prior to this exchange, I had been hiding my notepads in the suspended ceiling above my desk. But after the apology, I wore DeLorean’s letter like an amulet around my neck with a false sense of security that it would ward off his future meddling. Only months later, our imbroglio took on more significance when DeLorean was arrested with $16 million of cocaine. A video showed him holding up a brick, crowing, “This is as good as gold.” He was surrounded by a coterie of undercover agents who then took out the handcuffs to arrest him. Suddenly, all types of media were in the market for any reporter who ever reported anything negative about DeLorean. Contrary to what he claimed during our interview, what I wrote in Monthly Detroit had not “already been said.”

Soon, Kirk was on the phone negotiating with Nightline and The Today Show to see who would have me on first. An auction then ensued for a book deal. For a lowly reporter like me, it was like winning the lottery. From the start of my reporting, I had sources demanding absolute confidentiality in return for their information. One had been an executive at the DeLorean Motor Company who copied signed memos and letters from JZD that he believed revealed illicit behavior. I had to meet him at a beach house, and I could only leave at night after he checked to make sure no one nearby could see me. Another informant had been part of a DEA sting like DeLorean’s and wanted to share scuttlebutt about the agents and prosecutors they had in common. He had me meet with him in an airport hospitality lounge and waited awhile before introducing himself to make sure no one followed me.

As a result of these two experiences, my guard was down when I started to get calls from someone using a voice distorter. To me, he sounded like an asthmatic Darth Vader, but the magazine’s receptionist used to say, “It’s your obscene phone caller again.” Unfortunately, by sheer coincidence, he first got in touch after I tried to contact a very big Gulf Coast auto dealer. I had been told he felt defrauded by a limited stock offering at an earlier stage of the car company. I assumed Darth Vader was the dealer’s lawyer, and he had seen All the President’s Men one too many times. Those thoughts were confirmed when he told me he represented a client from the southwest, but he next requested we meet in Mexico, which was out of the question. I explained that I was working on a tight deadline with travel already booked. At best, we could meet somewhere I planned to visit. We agreed on Phoenix, and he had me stay in a fancy resort where guests had their own bungalow. The meeting never happened, and after paying an exorbitant room rate, I decided my dealings with Darth were done. But my voicemail soon had his abject apology. I called him back from the airport, and he begged for a makeup meeting on a street corner in downtown Phoenix. I told him to forget it. If his client were so anxious to see me, he had to come to Detroit. I expected that to be the last time I would hear the distorted voice.

But months later, as I was almost done with the book and Easter weekend approached, Darth Vader called again. His client could not let me finish my reporting without sharing his evidence of DeLorean’s stock violations, so he decided to bring the evidence to me personally. He would be arriving at Detroit’s Metropolitan Airport on Saturday. I suggested the hospitality suite introduction I learned from the sting guy, but that wasn’t good enough for Darth. He directed me to a concourse with a bank of payphones. After he was sure I wasn’t followed, one of them would ring, and he would provide further instructions for our meeting. For me, it was comically paranoid. I called Kirk to laugh about it, but he didn’t find it so funny and warned me not to go. “What could happen In the middle of an airport?” I replied.

As instructed, I went to the concourse, and one of the payphones started ringing. Darth Vader was on the line. He told me to reach under the phone, where he had taped a key to a nearby locker. “I only put some of the documents in there,” he said, “because I want you to pay me for the rest.” I told him that wasn’t happening. At most I’d reimburse the cost of his plane ticket. When I opened the locker, I found a large manila envelope that was even skinnier than I thought. What could possibly be inside that would convince me he had something of such great value? Since it was early evening, the concourse was mostly deserted. I walked over to an empty gate to open the envelope and read what was there, but before I could sit down, I was surrounded by a group of burly men in parkas and flannel shirts. One held out a badge that read: “Detroit Police Department Narcotics Division.” He asked, “What’s in that envelope?” There’s a certain innocence about being innocent, and I replied, “If you’re from Narcotics, it’s probably drugs.”

They took me to a side room with an unmarked door. I watched as they opened the envelope and pulled out a plastic baggie with a white powder inside. They practically doubled over with laughter when I explained I was writing an article about John DeLorean. Since his arrest, he had become the butt of late-night comics, and his name was practically synonymous with cocaine. But they stopped laughing when I pulled the Monthly Detroit article from my briefcase. I told the officers someone was out to ruin my reputation, and I wouldn’t be surprised if a photographer were outside waiting to take my picture in handcuffs. To their credit, they were willing to give me the benefit of the doubt. I walked out of the airport and into their squad car with my hands unbound.

At the police station, my first call was to Kirk with the sad acknowledgment he had been right. Once the narcotics squad handed the baggie over to their evidence technicians, they found it contained twenty-seven grams of cocaine. For the next few hours, as I paced in my cell, Kirk and a lawyer friend scrambled to find a Jewish judge who wouldn’t be inconvenienced by issuing a writ of habeas corpus for my release in the early hours of Easter Sunday.

On Monday, as the people who set me up wished, the national press had a field day with my arrest. The lede for one newspaper read, “John DeLorean’s tale has taken a strange Detroit twist.” For TV and newspaper managing editors, it was Schadenfreude they couldn’t resist: the writer investigating executive for dealing cocaine is arrested with cocaine.

For the next few fraught days, I decided to stay ahead of the story by proclaiming as loudly as possible that I had been set up, and we held multiple press conferences. My lawyer had defended real drug dealers, and the police had often challenged him to have his clients take lie detector tests if he truly believed them to be innocent. He then gladly let me be the first to accept their dare. Although I passed, the polygraph was an ordeal I’d never suggest to anyone else.

As it turned out, the prosecuting attorney did not need a lie detector to vouch for my innocence. Darth Vader not only used the voice distorter to tip off the police about the airport locker. He also called the two main news wire services of the time – AP and UPI—to tell them of my arrest, what was in the baggie, and how much it weighed. These details were imparted before the police found out for themselves. At the first pre-trial hearing, eleven days after my arrest, the prosecuting attorney moved to dismiss my case without prejudice, explaining that “additional information lends more credence to the theory of the defendant [that I had been set up] than any theory warranting prosecution.”

I could not have hoped for a better resolution. However, while my arrest made the front page of the local newspapers, my exoneration was buried inside. As for the national press and TV, there was no mention of it at all. Such is the fate of the wrongly accused. No matter what, the stain left by a notorious arrest never quite washes away. For me, it popped up in unexpected places. When Kirk and I were part of a team raising money for another Detroit publication, a wealthy industrialist balked, telling Kirk, “Your partner is a jailbird.” Eventually, our group did start that publication and we next purchased Chicago magazine. When it was announced that I’d be the editor, a Chicago columnist claimed Detroit sources told him I had set myself up as a publicity stunt for my DeLorean book. Of course that would have meant I still broke the law. Besides, rather than exploit the arrest, my risk-averse publisher insisted I say nothing about it unless asked.

Although the Detroit prosecutor agreed I had been set up, to my knowledge, no effort was made to find out who did it. Apart from my speculation, I never thought the incident would be definitively tied to DeLorean. Then, in 1997, fourteen years after my arrest, a lawyer friend directed me to a decision by a U.S. Court of Appeals that had a section titled “Statement About Hillel Levin.” By this time, DeLorean’s life had descended into an endless round of civil lawsuits which he consistently lost, unlike his two more famous criminal cases. In appealing his most damaging verdict, which awarded plaintiffs $5 million, he charged the jury was prejudiced by, among other things, the testimony of his very estranged ex-wife, former model and TV host Cristina Ferrare Thomopoulos, who told the court that DeLorean said to her before my arrest, “Wouldn't it be interesting if [Hillel Levin] was caught with some cocaine and he got set up just like I got set up.” She also suggested the name of the private investigator he might have used to do it before her lawyer asked her to say no more. She has repeated her charge on camera for the Netflix documentary Myth and Mogul: John DeLorean.

While I am grateful for Cristina’s admissions, it is more for my children’s sake than anything else. I’m resigned to the fact that most people who know about my Easter Eve bust believe I did something bad and have no idea the prosecutor dropped the charges. I cannot say this has altered my life in any material way, but I don’t know for sure. While it made me a more careful editor, I still wish it didn’t happen, and it still rankles that DeLorean’s revenge succeeded, even if in some small measure. Our justice system seldom addresses the lingering echo of wrongful arrest unless the wrongfully arrested person has the resources to sue.

However, my experience does not begin to compare with those people with wrongful convictions. While we focus on the incarceration that comes with the unjust verdict, we should pay more attention to the demonization of the defendant that takes place before the trial even starts. For Jason Tibbs, this may have influenced his jurors. It may also explain why Michigan City police did not come forward when they learned the identity of the State’s star witness, whom they knew to be—in the words of the witness’s sister—a “pathological liar.” I do not doubt that Jason will be exonerated, but I’m not so sure he can restore his good name. That injustice troubles me on a deeply personal level.