Untouchable

by Randall Sullivan

  During the summer of 1981, Michael was staying at McCartney’s house in London while the two worked on their duet “Say Say Say” for McCartney’s album. Over dinner one evening, McCartney revealed that not only had his cartoon collection proved a solid financial investment but added that his collection of song rights (he owned titles that included such standards as “Stormy Weather” and “Autumn Leaves,” as well as most of the Buddy Holly catalog) were incredibly profitable, spinning off hundreds of thousands in profits each and every year. Music catalogs were the best way he knew to make “big money,” said McCartney, who was then forced to admit that he didn’t own the rights to his own Beatles songs. He and John Lennon had sold those when they were young men, and now 251 titles—including “Yesterday,” “Hey Jude,” and “Let It Be”—were included in a catalog of more than four thousand songs held by the Australian Robert Holmes à Court’s ATV Music. McCartney had tried to buy the ATV catalog earlier that year but failed to persuade John Lennon’s widow Yoko Ono to go in as partners with him and was unwilling to put up the entire $20 million cost alone. If it became available a second time, though, McCartney added, he intended to make a bid. He had no idea, Paul would say later, that Michael, who mostly listened silently, was looking for ways to put this tip to use.

  When Jackson returned to the United States, he instructed John Branca to look for song copyrights he could purchase. By the end of that year, Branca arranged for Jackson to buy the entire Sly Stone catalog, which included his classics “Everyday People” and “Stand!” (a song Michael had performed with his brothers the first time the Jackson 5 appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show). Branca later helped Michael purchase the copyrights to Dion’s two biggest hits, “The Wanderer” and “Runaround Sue,” as well as Len Barry’s “1-2-3” and the Soul Survivors’ “Expressway to Your Heart.”

  In September 1984, Branca phoned Jackson to say the Beatles song catalog was back on the market. After a bidding war that lasted eight harrowing months and involved a series of tense conversations with McCartney and Ono, Branca closed the deal in May 1985. McCartney was furious when he learned that Jackson now owned most of the songs he had written as a Beatle. It was “dodgy,” he complained, to “be someone’s friend and then to buy the rug they’re standing on.” Michael was “the kind of guy who picks brains,” Paul said and didn’t make that sound like a compliment. Jackson then began to license Beatles songs for commercials, beginning with the use of “Revolution” in a Nike sneaker ad. “I don’t want ‘Good Day Sunshine’ to become an Oreo cookie ad,” McCartney protested, “which I understand he’s done. I think that’s real cheesy.” McCartney was equally incensed when Jackson collected $240,000 from Panasonic for the rights to use “All You Need Is Love” to sell “a friggin’ loudspeaker system.” Not my fault that Paul was too cheap to buy the catalog himself, retorted Michael, who then hired people to begin developing a series of films based on four Beatles songs: “Strawberry Fields,” “Back in the USSR,” “Eleanor Rigby,” and “The Fool on the Hill.” He also intended to design a series of musical greeting cards and music boxes that featured songs from the Beatles catalog, Jackson announced.

  After several years of sniping and estrangement, Jackson and McCartney met in 1990 to discuss what Paul described as “this problem” between the two of them. The very next day, McCartney’s attorney phoned Branca to say that Michael had agreed to pay Paul a higher royalty rate for his songs. No way, Jackson told Branca: “He’s not getting a higher royalty unless I get something back from him in return.” McCartney threatened to sue, but in the end decided that his only recourse was to cut off contact with Jackson. The “problem” continued to irk him, however. As late as 2006, McCartney would tell an interviewer, “You know what doesn’t feel very good is going on tour and paying to sing all my songs. Every time I sing ‘Hey Jude,’ I’ve got to pay someone.”

  What neither McCartney nor most other people understood about Michael Jackson, Branca would explain, was that beneath the breathy voice and halting manner, he was as shrewd a businessman as any artist who had ever lived. “Part of him may be a ten-year-old, with all the enthusiasm that implies,” Branca told a London newspaper, “but the other part is a sixty-year-old genius.” Frank Dileo described him to the same paper as “a cross between E.T. and Howard Hughes.”

  Branca and Dileo had made those observations back in the 1980s, in the halcyon days when the ATV catalog was supposed to be the jewel in the crown of Michael Jackson’s financial empire. No one imagined then that it would become the crown itself. Securing the ATV catalog was crucial for Michael. During his criminal trial, he had raved that the charges stemmed from a conspiracy between Sony, Tommy Mottola, and Tom Sneddon, among others, to gain control of the catalog. He was surrounding himself with Nation of Islam guards, Jackson told a number of people, because he was terrified that Mottola would put out a contract on his life.

  At their meeting in Dubai, Wiesenthal informed Jackson that Sony had set up a preliminary deal with Citibank that would refinance Michael’s $300-million-plus ATV debt on much better terms than Fortress was likely to offer and that Sony was willing to agree to a new dividend policy from the publishing company that would cover much of the interest on the ATV loan. In exchange, Sony would require greater freedom to make investment decisions without Jackson’s approval, a right of first refusal on any sale of Michael’s stake in the ATV catalog, and an option to buy half of his half of the catalog for approximately $250 million. Also, he would have to drop the demand to reclaim his master recordings. Negotiations would drag on for more than two years but the deal in principle seemed to offer the glimmer of hope for a life beyond Dubai and Bahrain. At the height of the holiday season, Michael was suddenly in a mood to celebrate.

  Christmas had almost been ruined on December 9, when the National Enquirer ran a story that Jackson had nearly killed himself with an overdose of drugs and alcohol and was “in a critical condition in Bahrain.” Quoting an e-mail from “a high ranking police official” in Santa Barbara who stated that the entertainer had overdosed at least twice since arriving in the Middle East, the Enquirer cited “sources who said Jackson was shooting himself in his leg with a syringe filled with Demerol.” Michael’s PR spokesperson Raymone Bain denied the story, telling the Enquirer, “I spoke to Michael on the phone today (Friday) and I can tell you he sounded fine. He is not abusing any drugs. He is continuing to work from Bahrain on his Katrina relief song.” When the mainstream media neglected to pick up on the story, Michael heaved a sigh of relief and happily prepared for what he described to his children as “a family gathering.”

  On December 21, 2005, Sheikh Abdullah gave Mikaeel $250,000 to shop for Christmas gifts and to entertain his guests, who would be arriving within days from England and the United States. The sum raised his investment in what Abdullah continued to call their “partnership” to more than $5 million. Michael hurried to Ashraf’s Department Store in Manama the very next day, spending $40,000 in what was little more than a walk-through. He bought $35,000 worth of high-end electronics at Manama’s Panasonic store the following day and awaited the arrival of Mark Lester’s family from London that evening. They would have an old-fashioned Christmas in Bahrain, Michael had decided, with a big tree, piles of presents, and lots of excited children to open them. He was overjoyed when Frank Cascio and his family arrived from New York a short time later.

  Now twenty-four, Frank had been part of Jackson’s life since he was in elementary school. During those years he had become, among other things, Michael’s favorite “pranking” partner. When they were on tour, Cascio was put in charge of the arsenal of stink bombs and water balloons that Michael regularly set off in meetings or threw at cars from hotel balconies. Frank loved, almost as much as Michael did, the water balloon fights at Neverland, which were always organized into a red team and a blue team and usually ended with a bunch of fully dressed people in the swimming pool. He got a kick, too, out of Michael’s superlong-range laser pointer, c
apable of shooting a red dot from a hotel suite on a high floor to the sidewalk in front of an unsuspecting pedestrian a mile away. Once, when they were in New York at the Four Seasons, police officers had followed the laser’s strobe all the way back to the suite and Michael had to hide the thing to keep the cops from confiscating it.

  In 2004, Tom Sneddon attempted to make the case that Michael had served wine to Frank’s fifteen-year-old sister Marie Nicole and twelve-year-old brother Eddie. Only when Dominic and Connie Cascio made it clear they were ready to testify that any wine their kids drank at Neverland had been served by themselves and that as Italian Americans they had been taking a sip of wine at the dinner table since they were very young—it was part of their culture—did Sneddon drop the matter. The Cascios insisted they loved Michael Jackson as much as they ever had and that he was welcome in their home, where he had visited many times, whenever he wanted to stop by. Tom Mesereau questioned just how loyal the family really was after the Cascios refused to let their younger children testify for Michael at his criminal trial, and for a time let it be known that he thought a lot less of them than his client did. Still, in the run-up to the criminal trial in Santa Barbara County, Frank spoke to the media on Michael’s behalf, telling reporters that he had spent many nights in Jackson’s bedroom as a boy and that it was like crashing with a buddy in a college dorm room, not even remotely sexual. On television, he came across convincingly as a no-nonsense New Jersey guy who was sick of all the sleazy opportunists trying to make a quick buck, denouncing Michael’s accuser and the two other boys who, over the years, had claimed to be molestation victims as “nothing but liars.” And in spite of his attorney’s reservations about them, Michael still enjoyed the company of the Cascios far more than he did that of the Jacksons.

  What the Lesters and the Cascios understood better than anyone else was how much it meant to Michael to be able to share a sense of extended family with his children. They traveled in a party of eighteen to the Seef Mall on Christmas Eve to see Peter Jackson’s remake of King Kong, then took a trip to the International Italian Circus courtesy of Abdullah’s money.

  His guests had to return home on New Year’s Day, though, leaving Michael not only lonely but facing the problem of Sheikh Abdullah’s mounting impatience. Many projects had been initiated, ranging from a so-called “comeback album” to what was planned as the first release of 2 Seas Records, featuring Michael singing a duet with his brother Jermaine. Nothing had moved forward.

  The most pressing issue was Michael’s much-ballyhooed “Hurricane Katrina song,” now four months overdue. Katrina devastated New Orleans on Michael’s birthday, August 29, and eight days later he announced that he would release an all-star charity single within two weeks to provide relief for the Big Easy’s huddled masses. By the end of 2005, quite a few people were wondering where that record might be. Not to worry, said Abdullah, who spoke for Jackson in a telephone interview with the Associated Press: “The record is coming along great. We’ve been taking our time to perfect it.”

  Aware that his toxic reputation made it impossible to assemble the polyglot choir of superstars who had collaborated with him on “What More Can I Give?” Michael decided to use only black performers on his Katrina record, which was to have a “gospel feel.” The two biggest names among those who had thus far contributed vocals belonged to a pair of performers quite familiar with criminal charges and bad press: Snoop Dogg and R. Kelly. Ciara, Keyshia Cole, and the O’Jays were among the singers who had recorded sections of the song in a Los Angeles studio in November, with Jackson producing it by phone from Bahrain. A number of the other voices promised back in August—including those of James Brown, Jay-Z, Mary J. Blige, and Missy Elliot—were still missing from the mix. The main reason for the delay, Abdullah insisted to the wire service, was that more artists had come forward to ask if they could contribute. Asked to name those artists, the sheikh demurred: “I’d like to keep that as a surprise.” Abdullah quickly added that Michael had already laid down “a wonderful track” that would serve as the baseline of the song. “His voice is phenomenal,” enthused Abdullah, who added that the working title was “I Have This Dream.” Asked if the Katrina song was the harbinger of a new Jackson album, Abdullah replied with a laugh, “I will just say we’ve been very busy. This is a raindrop before the thunderstorm. He’s getting ready to come out with a lot of bells and whistles. He’s so energized. It’s explosive.” Abdullah promised that “I Have This Dream” would be delivered before the end of February.

  It had now been more than six months since Michael’s arrival in Bahrain and nearly six million dollars of the Al Khalifas’ money had been spent on him and his various projects. Abdullah’s father, the king, was beginning to wonder what exactly the family was getting in return for all their generosity to Mikaeel.

  Increasingly restless and dissatisfied with life in Bahrain after his friends from England and America returned home, Jackson abruptly departed with his children for Orlando, Florida, explaining that he intended to secure the production facilities he needed to finish his Katrina song. “I’ll be back,” he told the sheikh, who certainly hoped so.

  As a regular visitor to Disney World, Michael had been renting houses in Orlando for years. He made no concession to cash-strapped circumstances on this trip, leasing a twelve-bedroom, nineteen-bathroom mansion owned by timeshare mogul David Siegel that featured a sixty-foot pool bordered in real gold. Located on a four-acre private island inside the guarded gates of the Isleworth enclave, the home featured 1,700 feet of shoreline and rented for $15,000 per week. Michael’s presence would rouse media snoopers in ways that neighbors like Shaquille O’Neal and Tiger Woods never would, so privacy was key. Siegel agreed not to tell a living soul but was taken aback when Michael appeared in plain sight on the roof of the house with his children one day after moving in. “He said he’d take it under the condition that nobody knows he’s here,” Siegel recalled. “I didn’t tell anybody. He moves in. Within a day he’s up on top of the house waving at boaters.”

  Jackson was in Orlando mainly to meet with boy band impresario Lou Pearlman, whose success with the Backstreet Boys and ’N Sync had financed the construction of his state-of-the-art Trans Continental Studios out on Sand Lake Road. Pearlman had been supportive during Jackson’s criminal trial, telling CNN that Michael should “get back to the music” as quickly as possible: “What I’m saying is, ignore the personal side of it . . . because he’s never going to eradicate the good, bad, or indifferent of what’s been happening in the media. Let’s talk about the King of Pop. Let’s talk about how he dances, great songs. That’s where he’s got to go.”

  Monitoring the Orlando meetings was no doubt stressful for Sheikh Abdullah, who received reports that Jackson and Pearlman were talking about a deal to record Michael’s “comeback album” in Florida rather than in Bahrain. About all Michael would accomplish during his brief stay in Orlando, though, was to dodge a bullet. Lou Pearlman was about to be exposed as one of the all-time monsters in an industry famous for them.

  Federal investigators were already putting together a case that would charge Pearlman with swindling more than a thousand investors out of $315 million, in addition to $120 million fraudulently taken from banks. Within a few months, the impresario would flee the country to avoid arrest and remain on the run for nearly a year before being captured in Bali, then detained in Guam and extradited back to the United States. Facing a federal fraud trial scheduled to begin in March 2008, he would plead guilty and accept a sentence of twenty-five years in prison.

  For Jackson, of course, a greater concern was the steady leak of allegations that Pearlman had committed dozens of sex crimes against the members of his boy bands, many of whom were living at his Florida mansion when the molestations took place. None of the teenagers were ever formally identified, but Jane Carter, the mother of teen idols Nick and Aaron Carter, told Vanity Fair magazine: “Certain things happened and it almost destroyed our family. I tried to warn
everyone. I tried to warn all the mothers. I tried to expose him for what he was years ago.” Being in business with a man who had been so publicly outed as a pedophile would have been catastrophic for Jackson. Aside from the fact that both Carters had performed with Michael on “What More Can I Give?” Aaron Carter had been a regular guest at Neverland while in his early teens.

  Michael got wind of the sex abuse claims within days of arriving in Orlando and immediately broke off what Pearlman had described in the media as “negotiations.” Jackson returned quickly to Bahrain, knowing he was lucky to get out of Florida before the media learned that he and Pearlman were meeting. Abdullah welcomed him with open arms, relieved to learn that the recording of the Katrina song would be completed in Bahrain after all.

  Or perhaps not. Michael seemed to be dragging his feet about finishing “I Have This Dream.” What concerned him most was that the legacy of “We Are the World” would be tarnished. The success of his first great humanitarian anthem was something he treasured but at the same time felt haunted by. “In the same way he doubted he could ever make another album as good as Thriller,” Dieter Wiesner explained, “he also didn’t think he could do a record as important as ‘We Are the World.’ And he knew that everybody would compare.”

  “We Are The World” was Michael’s real follow-up to Thriller. The pinnacle of success he had achieved with the album created a daunting level of public expectation about what he would do next. Early in 1985, Rolling Stone published an article that described recent months as “a black hole for Michael watchers, who witnessed the most spectacular disappearing act since Halley’s comet.” Kids were already trading in their sequined gloves for Masters of the Universe action figures, the magazine reported, as “remainder tables groan beneath unsold Michael calendars and a Fifth Avenue store was palming off clothes for the Michael Jackson doll as outfits for Ken.”