I said, “I don’t know. Talk to Michael Amir.”
Couple days later, Mr. Jackson called me himself and said, “Bill, where are you guys? Why aren’t you in L.A.?”
It made me feel incompetent, but I didn’t know what to tell him besides the truth. I said, “Sir, I didn’t know you were in L.A. Nobody told me.”
“Oh. I thought they told you. Just speak to Michael Amir—and see if you can find out when I’m coming back to Vegas.”
Huh? Find out when you’re coming back? I wanted to say, “Why don’t you tell me when you’re coming back? How do you not know? How are you not the person who decides that?” But he wasn’t. He had no control over what was going on around him.
There were a couple more times that he disappeared to L.A. without me knowing. I found out later via Peter Lopez that whenever Mr. Jackson was asking for me and Javon, people were telling him that he couldn’t reach us. But I wasn’t getting any missed calls. Michael Amir had my number. He knew exactly where I was. He just didn’t call. Pretty soon, it reached the point where I didn’t have Mr. Jackson’s direct number anymore. The iPhones that I’d set up for him and his mother in my name? The bill on those was never paid. The charges had run up close to two thousand dollars, and they got disconnected. Mrs. Jackson called me because she couldn’t get in touch with him anymore. I had to give her Michael Amir’s number because that was the only way I had of reaching him.
Sometimes I would call Michael Amir myself and say, “Listen, I need to talk to the boss.”
He’d say, “Sure, I can give him a message for you.” And there’d be that tone in his voice, that tone you use when you’re just trying to get somebody off the phone.
I’d just say, “Fine. Have him call me.” But I’m sure he wasn’t putting any of my messages through.
It was weird. Michael Amir had taken on that same possessive attitude that Feldman had. Much as I was happy to let go of that gatekeeper role, I felt uneasy about not knowing everything that was happening. Things started to get fishy to me. I wanted to know what was going on. Maybe I was feeling a little jealous myself, but I knew that Mr. Jackson was easily influenced. I knew that somebody had his ear.
This had all started back at the Palms, because that’s when the money showed up. Right after Christmas, he’d made this deal. It was one of the last things I handled back when all the communication was still going through me. This huge transfer of cash came in. At the time, I thought it was maybe an advance on doing a concert or part of the Thriller 25 deal. I found out later it was a loan. That big loan consolidation that Raymone and Greg Cross had been fighting about? That deal had finally gone through. That was the money that got him moved into the Palomino house. That’s what allowed me and Javon to finally get paid a little something. Not all of our money, but about three months’ worth. Enough for us to have some faith.
But even with this new loan, regular paychecks never came back. Two months would go by, and you’d get some of your money. Another month, a little more. There was still no organized management. I pushed it as far as I could with Londell and Michael Amir. It was like listening to Raymone all over again. They’d say, “Man, things are just so messed up. We’re trying to work on some things. We’re trying to get everyone paid.”
Whatever. I didn’t press it because I’d learned not to expect any different. But I don’t think they knew that I knew just how much money was going through the mill. One of the last documents I handled for Mr. Jackson as we were leaving the Palms was a fax he needed to sign, authorizing some wire transfers after this loan came through. This document was five pages long, just page after page of names—attorneys, managers, creditors, banks. Seemed like everybody that Mr. Jackson owed money to was on that form, and they were all lining up to get paid.
The biggest chunks went to make back payments on his loans. There was a $5 million wire transfer for Transitional Investors, $1.3 million for Signal Hill Capital. A lot of it was for lawyer fees. There was $1.35 million for Greg Cross’s firm. Londell’s firm, Dewey & LeBoeuf, they got $1.5 million, plus there was a transfer of $276,000 for Londell himself. Raymone’s consulting firm took $413,700, and Raymone personally got a lump payment of $487,570; that was the money she got to walk away. There was even a $775,000 payment to cover his back taxes from 2006—whoever was handling his money hadn’t been paying his taxes.
Over $56 million went out the door with one signature. And that was just one document on one night, so it had to be one little piece of what was going on. And it wasn’t like he was doing this with new income. This was coming from another loan. This was taking from Peter to pay Paul. It was all part of cleaning house. When Raymone got cut out, all these new handlers came in, and this was their plan: settle all the old business so we can get down to new business.
You started hearing a lot more talk about doing a show, how much a concert could generate, where’s the best place to do it. Those conversations had always been going on, but they were usually in the background. Now the talk was getting louder, more specific. Word started going around: Michael Jackson is going back to work. You started to see a lot more activity going on. This machine was opening up. And as it opened up, more people were coming through. More faces. More phone calls. Kenny Ortega, the choreographer, suddenly he’s in the mix. This guy, Frank DiLeo, who’d managed Mr. Jackson back in the 1980s. I’d never even heard his name before, but now he’s back in the picture. There were new people coming on payroll. This guy needs a thirty-thousand-dollar advance to start working. That guy needs a fifteen-thousand-dollar retainer to come on board. The money is getting ready to be made now, and everybody wants a piece.
I could see the stress getting to him. There was this weight just coming down on his shoulders. I remember a conversation we had at the Palms. I’d just driven him back to the hotel, and we were in the elevator headed up to his room. We were coming from a meeting where he’d finalized some deal. Probably it was those loan papers, something big. And as we rode up in the elevator, he had this look on his face. It was like he was getting himself ready for something he knew was about to happen, something he was dreading. He said, “You weren’t here before, Bill, so you haven’t seen it yet. But you’re going to.”
“Haven’t seen what, sir?”
“The vultures,” he said. “They’re going to start coming now. Everybody is going to want something, and nobody is going to trust anybody else. You’re about to see the ugliness in people. Just wait.”
16
While talk of a possible Michael Jackson comeback began to circulate, the March 19 deadline to save Neverland from foreclosure still loomed on the horizon. Just days before the cutoff, Jackson’s attorney Londell McMillan made a statement to the Associated Press, claiming that “a secret deal” had been made to keep the estate from going to auction. In reality, that “deal” was simply another extension, giving Jackson an additional two months to locate an investor willing to bail him out.
Then, in April, through his brother Jermaine, Michael met a man named Tohme Tohme, a heavily accented Lebanese businessman of somewhat mysterious origin. Tohme referred to himself as “Dr. Tohme Tohme,” even though, as near as anyone could tell, he was not a doctor of any kind. Tohme was a middleman, a facilitator, someone adept at leveraging his network of relationships to broker deals in the real estate and entertainment worlds. After meeting with Michael and learning of Neverland’s impending fate, Tohme tapped into that network to connect the singer with billionaire Tom Barrack, owner and CEO of the private equity firm Colony Capital.
Barrack met with Jackson in Las Vegas and subsequently agreed to buy out Jackson’s $23 million loan in exchange for a 50 percent stake in the property. Properly restored, Barrack believed, Neverland could easily be worth $60 million or more. Colony would cover the cost of rehabilitating the estate, and then together they would sell it, each pocketing a share of the proceeds. Tohme Tohme was in for a finder’s fee, and soon would be in for a lot more.
The speed with which the Neve
rland deal came together convinced Jackson that Barrack and Tohme were the kind of people he ought to be in business with. That summer, he hired Tohme to succeed Raymone Bain as his manager. After seeing the state of Jackson’s financial affairs, Tohme began aggressively pushing his new client to go back onstage. Tom Barrack, too, saw the potential in a Michael Jackson comeback; he knew what restoring the singer’s public image would do for the resale value of Neverland. Colony Capital, among its many interests, was owner of the Las Vegas Hilton, where Elvis Presley had made his historic comeback in 1969. Barrack broached the idea of Jackson performing there, but Jackson still balked at the idea of a Vegas show.
Barrack then put in a call to his friend and fellow billionaire Philip Anschutz, owner of the Anschutz Entertainment Group, with the notion to put Jackson and AEG together for a show at AEG’s O2 Arena in London, not knowing that AEG was already thinking along identical lines. The promoter was very keen to get in the Michael Jackson business and had been ever since Raymone Bain set up the first meeting between Jackson and AEG Live CEO Randy Phillips the year before. During their first sit-down, Jackson had been deeply ambivalent about the deal AEG was proposing. Since then, circumstances had changed.
Bill: Once I handed things over to Michael Amir, I started to be less aware about what was going on with the business side. I didn’t want to know. Who his new manager was? Didn’t care. Who his new lawyer was? Didn’t care. It had nothing to do with me.
I had a few dealings with this new person Tohme Tohme. His office tried to get me and Javon to sign non-disclosure agreements. Because of the way we’d come on, when there was a gap in security, there was no one around to make us sign them. Then pretty quickly we were the ones in the position of getting other people to sign them. So now this Tohme Tohme guy was trying to get us to agree to one retroactively, saying we couldn’t get all of our back pay until we did. Our paychecks were being used as leverage again. I wouldn’t do it. I took it as a sign of disrespect. I knew it wasn’t coming from Mr. Jackson; he’d never asked that of me. I felt I’d earned his trust by the way I did my job. So now that I was being asked to do it, I saw it as a sign of what was going on in the organization: all these new people maneuvering for control, inserting themselves between me and Mr. Jackson.
After that, I didn’t deal directly with Tohme Tohme’s people. I let all that go through Michael Amir. But I’d still pick up bits and pieces of what was going on. In June, we took Mr. Jackson to a meeting at the Las Vegas Hilton with the owner, Tom Barrack. They had dinner at the Japanese restaurant there, Benihana. Barrack was there to talk to him about their plans for fixing and saving Neverland, about him possibly being a headliner at the Hilton. All those Vegas headliner discussions had been going on for over a year, but that summer, I started hearing not just about the Vegas gig but maybe a tour, a concert overseas. London, maybe. But by that point, I’d heard about so many different things—concerts, appearances, whatever—and none of it ever panned out, so I didn’t put much stock into it.
Javon: I didn’t feel like he wanted it. I didn’t feel like he ever wanted to go back onstage. When he was with us, it didn’t seem like he missed it at all. He was more excited about starting a new chapter of his life, being around his kids every day. He didn’t jump into performing at the Wynn, and they made some really good offers to perform there. If he talked about music or dancing, it was purely from the creative side. Any time the conversation turned toward the business or commercial side, there was no joy, no enthusiasm.
Bill: Every now and then, though, you’d get a glimpse of this other part of him, like when we were at the Ebony photo shoot in Brooklyn. I always called it the King of Pop mode. There were two sides of him. There was Michael Jackson, the family man, the father, and there was the King of Pop. Michael Jackson wanted his privacy. He was desperate for a normal life, but at the same time, if you’ve been the greatest in the world at something, I think it’s hard to let that go. He would say, “I want everyone to leave me alone.” But then when we took him out on details and got caught out by the fans and he was getting that love? Oh, yeah. He liked that. He’d light up. When the stylist used to come and get his hair and makeup looking good and he had his new Roberto Cavalli outfit on? When we had dinner at the Wynn and we’d walk through those casinos and people were shouting his name and saying, “We love you”? All that King of Pop stuff? He’d eat that up.
Javon: There was one night when we were at the Palms. He wanted to go to the club downstairs. He didn’t want to make an appearance or be seen; he just wanted to slip in and hang out for a little while, do some people watching. This club had a private upstairs balcony that overlooked the crowd, so we set it up for him to go down there.
We were in the club for maybe two to three minutes when all of a sudden the DJ started playing one of his songs. They were mixing it with a lot of samples from other artists. Mr. Jackson was bopping his head along to it, and he said, “Wow, I didn’t know that they still played my music.”
We were like, What?! We told him, “Sir, they still play your music all the time. In bars, clubs. You still hear it everywhere.”
He said, “Really?”
He seemed surprised. I think he felt like a lot of people had forgotten him or he wasn’t as popular anymore. It really made him happy to hear his songs in the club like that.
Bill: People often reached out to get permission to sample his music. Peter Lopez handled a lot of that. He would call me and say, “Bill, tell Michael that Kanye West wants to sample such-and-such tune. What does he want to charge?”
I’d relay the message to Mr. Jackson, and he’d say, “Nothing. Tell them it’s fine if they just use it. The more they use my music, that means my music stays alive.”
He could have charged a fortune, but he didn’t. He just wanted his music to be out there in the world. It was important for him to keep that King of Pop title, to be remembered.
One time I was driving with him, and I had on this morning radio talk show and they started doing one of those call-ins. They were asking listeners, “Who do you think was better, Michael Jackson or Elvis Presley? Call in and let us know how you feel.”
I turned it up. I wanted to hear what his reaction would be. People were calling in and giving their opinions, saying they liked one or the other. For a while, Mr. Jackson was just being quiet in the back. He wasn’t making any comments, but I could tell he was listening. Then he just burst out, “Elvis couldn’t touch me! I sold more records than him and the Beatles! They can’t touch what I’m capable of doing.” He still had that performer’s ego. It would come out of him from time to time.
Javon: Being the entertainer he was, it was like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. He didn’t want the bad side of fame. He wanted to be left alone when negative stuff came up, but he didn’t want to be left alone on a good day. Any time he did talk about performing again, he’d say it was because he felt he owed it to his fans. What do you do as an artist if you leave your audience behind? If he didn’t tour or do any records or anything, he’d be turning his back on his fans, and he was huge on his fans. They were his biggest supporters. So that weighed on his decision. “I need to do it for them,” he’d say.
Bill: He’d also talk about doing it for his kids. He’d say that now that they were old enough to appreciate who their father was and what he did, he wanted them to see it themselves. He’d say that he would have loved for his kids to see him and his brothers perform together, to see how it all started. But then that’s all he’d do. He’d just say it. Any time a deal or an opportunity to do it came up, like with the Vegas thing, he’d drag his feet, back away, make some excuse.
So there was some desire on his part to perform but, in our opinion, not that much. That’s not why he went back to work when he did. This concert everybody was talking about, it was being put together because of his financial obligations. It wasn’t “Hey, we should do a show.” No. It was “Hey, you gotta do a show. You have to do a show to get out of this hole.” Who
wants that? He was a perfectionist. He wanted to do things on his own time with his own personal stamp on them, and who can do that under that kind of pressure?
I had my doubts about why he was being steered in this particular direction. He had other options. He still owned half the Sony catalog. Why not sell that and settle your debts and go somewhere and start over? If he really wanted to be left alone, why not do that? Part of the reason he wouldn’t sell it was that he hated Sony. Letting them take the catalog would have felt like they’d beaten him. But from the things I was hearing, I also got the sense that people didn’t want him to sell the Sony catalog. If Michael Jackson sells his half of the Sony catalog, nobody gets paid except Michael Jackson. If Michael Jackson endorses something, nobody gets paid except Michael Jackson. But if Michael Jackson does a show? Everybody gets paid.
That’s where the pressure was coming from. They were starting to put dollar figures in his face, saying, “This will wipe out your debts. This will pay off every lawsuit.” And that was always how he wanted to handle things. “Take care of it.” “Get rid of it.” “Make it go away.” He became convinced he could put everything behind him if he had enough money to pay everyone to get lost. That’s not how it works. If you’re at the top, people come after you. More money, more problems. That’s the game. You know that, and I know that, but I don’t think he saw it that way. He was inside the bubble, thinking about the glory days.
When Thriller first came out, he was the man in everybody’s eyes. What issues did he have? What drama did he have other than making badass music? You didn’t hear all the negative crap. Back then, he really did have enough money to buy his way out of just about anything. He could buy a place like Neverland and escape. That’s why he wanted to be able to buy the house on Durango. That place was like Neverland. It was so huge, you couldn’t see him and he couldn’t see you. That’s the time he wanted to get back to. He thought he could buy his way back there. In his experience, that was the answer: get enough money to get out.
Remember the Time: Protecting Michael Jackson in His Final Days Page 26
