Untouchable

by Randall Sullivan

  Amid the squeals and shouts of the rapturous crowd, Michael, dressed in a fitted black leather jacket, his makeup streaked with tears, stepped to the microphone and spoke in the voice that only those who did business with him knew well, a voice far deeper and stronger than the sibilant whisper to which the American public had grown accustomed. “James Brown is my greatest inspiration,” he told a crowd that deeply wanted to believe it. “When I saw him move, I was mesmerized . . . I never saw a performer move like James Brown . . . James, I shall miss you, and I love you so much. Thank you for everything.”

  Michael made his deepest impression on those who saw television footage of the funeral, though, when he bent once more over the gold casket, this time in broad daylight, to again kiss the corpse of James Brown, right on the lips.

  By the middle of January 2007, word had begun circulate in Las Vegas that Michael Jackson was in talks with Steve Wynn, the opportunistic billionaire developer credited for the dramatic resurgence of the Strip in the 1990s, having either built or refurbished casino resorts that included the Mirage, Treasure Island, and the Bellagio. The two had some history. Steve Miller, the former prosecutor whose Inside Vegas blog made him the closest thing to a muckraking journalist the city had seen in recent years, reported that, “On the many occasions when Jackson was in Vegas, often in the company of small boys, he and the unchaperoned children slept and played together in a specially decorated suite in Steve Wynn’s hotel and had free use of Wynn’s private jet.” Miller had reported extensively about the triangular relationship between Wynn, Jackson, and Michael Milken, the fabled “junk bond king” who had been convicted of illegal securities trading in 1990, then was visited more than fifty times in prison by Wynn (despite Nevada laws that forbade the association of gaming licensees with convicted felons). After Milken’s release from prison, Wynn had helped the former Californian rehabilitate his public image as a resident of Nevada, and introduced the still enormously wealthy financier to Jackson when the three posed together on the pirate ship during the grand opening of the Treasure Island Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas. Relations had chilled in 2005, though, after Wynn was listed as one of the character witnesses for Jackson that Tom Mesereau might call to the stand at the criminal trial in California. Michael was hurt that Wynn dispatched his head of public relations to tell the local media in Las Vegas that the casino mogul had no plans to be a witness and “actually was surprised to see his name mentioned.” Jackson and Wynn appeared to be on friendly terms once again, though, in January 2007, when they dined together in a private room at Alex, the most opulent of the gaming magnate’s many restaurants. Immediately afterward, however, Wynn went out of his way to squelch a report that he and Jackson were on the verge of a deal that would have made Michael a sort of in-house entertainer at his hotels.

  Jack Wishna’s relief was short-lived. Yet another impresario, the flamboyant fat man Jeff Beacher, who had transformed the Hard Rock Cafe into his Madhouse at Hard Rock with the wildest and most lurid show (“think The Original Kings of Comedy combined with Girls Gone Wild,” Backstage West had suggested) the Strip had ever seen, followed Wishna to Us Weekly in order to tell the magazine that he, too, was meeting with Jackson. Michael was so committed to making his comeback in Las Vegas, Beacher said, that he was already looking for the property that would become his new Neverland. Also in the mix was Simon Fuller, the producer-manager whose big piece of American Idol was supplemented by the fees he earned managing Idol stars Kelly Clarkson, Ruben Studdard, and Clay Aiken, as well as soccer player David Beckham. Fuller had set up a series of meetings between Jackson and his Thriller choreographer Kenny Ortega, who by now was better known for staging High School Musical. The “scenarios” involving Wynn, Wishna, Beacher, and Fuller would all come to nothing, but at least the various meetings and negotiations provided Michael with an excuse to avoid his father.

  Joe Jackson had been living primarily in Las Vegas for more than a decade, having been gradually banished from the Hayvenhurst estate for various indiscretions. Foremost among these was Joe’s close relationship with his illegitimate daughter, Joh’Vonnie, whose birth (the day after Michael’s sixteenth birthday) in 1974 had forced Katherine Jackson to acknowledge that the stories about Joe’s infidelity were true.

  Michael had made an explicit statement of his intention to be eventually reconciled to Joseph when he spoke at Oxford in March 2000. The occasion was one of several events intended to launch the humanitarian initiative that Michael Jackson pledged would be at the center of his life’s work from that day forward: his Heal the World Foundation. Rabbi Boteach would later claim that he had written the speech for Michael “based on our interviews.” The theme was forgiveness and the focus was on Michael’s relationship with his father. He described Joe as “a tough man,” but glossed over the physical abuse he had endured as a child. “I want to forgive him because I want a father and this is the only one that I’ve got. I want the weight of my past lifted from my shoulders, and I want to be free to step into a new relationship with my father for the rest of my life, unhindered by the goblins of the past.”

  That was easier said than done, of course. Michael might make Prince’s middle name Joseph, just as Paris’s was Katherine, and he could encourage his children to phone their grandparents on holidays, but he still almost never wanted to spend much time with anyone from his family.

  During the past three decades, Michael had grown increasingly determined to distance himself from the sordid soap opera that was life among the Jacksons. The process of separation had been going on since 1974, when Katherine and the rest of the family had learned of Joe’s relationship with twenty-five-year-old Cheryl Terrell, who gave birth to Joh’Vonnie Jackson later that same year. In 1982, when Marlon filed for divorce from his wife, Carol, Michael urged his brother to attend counseling sessions to try to save his marriage. He tried to be supportive as well when eighteen-year-old Janet eloped with James DeBarge, whom the rest of the family despised. Michael had thrown up his hands, though, by 1983, when Jackie’s affair with Los Angeles Lakers cheerleader Paula Abdul blew up his marriage amid a series of scenes that culminated in Enid Jackson’s breaking her husband’s leg by running him over with a car after catching Jackie in bed with Abdul. In March 1987, Jermaine showed up for Marlon’s birthday party carrying his three-month-old son by a young woman named Margaret Maldonado, while his thirty-four-year-old wife, the former Hazel Gordy, looked on with an expression of bewilderment. During their divorce, Hazel would allege Jermaine had attempted to rape her in front of their children. By 1990, Michael had moved to Neverland and was keeping his distance from the other Jacksons. He made no comment when newspapers reported that Randy’s wife Eliza was accusing him of beating her throughout her pregnancy and claimed that one of his girlfriends had phoned to say that she, too, was about to give birth to Randy’s child. Eliza shook her head when Randy denied these accusations in court. The Jackson brothers were all just like Joe, Eliza told a reporter, except for Michael.

  Michael’s sister La Toya, meanwhile, would not be ignored. She’d been a problem without a solution for years. As a teenager, La Toya raged against being shut out of the spotlight, demanding to be put onstage and brought into the studio. Her ranting and raving was spectacular, but her talent nonexistent. Well, she could dance a little, Joe allowed, and he let her join the Jacksons’ Las Vegas shows in 1974, if she promised only to lip-synch onstage.

  La Toya began to get all the attention she craved in 1988, when she eloped with her Jewish manager Jack Gordon to Las Vegas and permitted him to arrange the press conference where she announced that she was posing for Playboy. La Toya’s cover shot and nude pictorial in Playboy’s March 1989 edition made it the best-selling issue in the magazine’s history. The other Jacksons were most concerned, though, by the news that La Toya had informed the press she was working on an autobiography that would reveal “the whole truth about my dysfunctional family.”

  When La Toya: Growing Up in the Jacks
on Family was published in 1991, the most scandalous revelation was La Toya’s claim that Joe Jackson had sexually abused both her and her older sister Rebbie. What most stunned fans, however, was the book’s scathing portrait of Katherine Jackson, whom her daughter described as “the guiding force behind the cruelty and abuse” in her family.

  Katherine expressed more sadness about what was happening to her daughter than she did anger about La Toya’s attacks on her character, and Mrs. Jackson’s dignified response won her some admirers, even among the media. Michael, though, was shaken by La Toya’s graphic description of his mother’s 1980 physical assault on a young woman named Gina Sprague, whom Katherine suspected of having an affair with Joe. Michael’s relationship with his middle sister was not completely shattered, however, until December 1993, when La Toya responded to the Jordan Chandler scandal by holding a press conference in Tel Aviv, Israel, at which she declared her belief that the accusations against her brother were true. “I can’t remain silent,” she squeaked into a bank of microphones. “I will not be a silent collaborator in his crimes against small, innocent children.”

  Within three years, La Toya would insist that she had been bullied and manipulated by Jack Gordon into saying and writing such terrible things about her family. Katherine impressed onlookers once more by accepting La Toya’s disavowals and welcoming her daughter back to the Hayvenhurst compound with open arms. Michael, though, still did not want anything to do with his sister, or for that matter with any member of the Jackson family other than his mother. According to Bob Jones, when Michael went on tour he instructed his bodyguards not to let any of the other Jacksons near his dressing room.

  That hard line softened after Michael’s arrest on child molestation charges in 2003. Michael suddenly wanted his family near, and the Jacksons responded by closing ranks around the face of the franchise, rallying to his side when even the people he called his closest friends were keeping him at arm’s length. Reporters mocked the emotional scenes of Michael walking into and out of the Santa Maria courthouse during the trial, surrounded by family members (with Joe Jackson usually at his right elbow), as a marriage of financial arrangement with performance art.

  Those closer to the scene were especially nauseated whenever Jermaine showed up. A growing number of people knew that back in 2003, when Michael’s world was collapsing all around him, Jermaine had gone to New York publishers with a “tell-all” book proposal in which he admitted believing his little brother might be a child molester. “I don’t want to tell you my brother’s innocent. I am not certain he is,” Jermaine had stated in the eight-page proposal for a book he wanted to call “Legacy.” Along with detailing his claims of Michael’s dishonesty, drug abuse, cruel streak, and rampant anti-Semitism, Jermaine had described what he observed during a family gathering in the mid-1990s, after the death of Tito’s ex-wife: He had walked into a bedroom where he found Michael sitting on the bed with three young relatives and holding them in a manner that left “the entire house shaken,” the older brother told publishers, adding, “Yes, he has a thing for young children.”

  Some cynics questioned even Katherine Jackson’s loyalty to her son. “Sure, his mother was in court every day,” observed the black Los Angeles attorney and radio host Leo Terrell, whose familiarity with the Jacksons went back to his days as a Johnnie Cochran acolyte, “but I have heard that he had to pay her to be there. I’m sure Tom [Mesereau] wanted a united front, but I’m also sure that every one of them had his or her hand out. They all looked to Michael as an ATM machine.”

  That was literally true, according to Grace Rwaramba. When Sheikh Abdullah began to wire money from Bahrain during the trial, Michael instructed her to run it through her bank account, Rwaramba said. Upon learning about the money coming from the Persian Gulf, Grace recalled, Katherine Jackson immediately complained to Michael that she needed cash, and Michael ordered the nanny to give his mother her ATM card. Tens of thousands of dollars quickly disappeared, according to Rwaramba: “[Katherine] was cashing out of the machine every day.” Soon she was told that “other Jackson relatives needed money, too,” Grace said. “So Michael told me to give them my ATM card. They were taking cash out of the machine every day.”

  The Jackson brothers had needed less than a decade to blow through the millions they brought home from the Victory tour. By the time Michael returned to the United States from Ireland at the end of 2006, all of them were strapped, none more so than Marlon, who was about to lose his home to foreclosure and move into an extended-stay hotel. Marlon was fifty-one when Michael settled into his rented Las Vegas mansion, and he worked stocking shelves at a San Diego–area supermarket. Randy Jackson at age forty-six supplemented his savings by fixing cars in a Los Angeles garage owned by a family friend, while fifty-six-year-old Jackie had turned to managing his son Siggy, an aspiring rapper. Fifty-five-year-old Tito was the only Jackson brother besides Michael who continued to make music for a living, fronting a blues band that played occasional club gigs for a group fee that was usually under $1,000. Jermaine, his singing career kaput, was recovering from bankruptcy at age fifty-four by shuttling between his girlfriend’s home in Ventura County and the Hayvenhurst estate, where Jackie and Randy also slept many nights. More than $5 million in federal, state, and local liens were on file against Jermaine, who was overjoyed to discover (right around the time Michael landed in Las Vegas) that he had won a place on the UK reality show Celebrity Big Brother, noting how difficult it would be for creditors to attach his earnings in England.

  Most of the Jackson 5 had filed for bankruptcy. After Joe and Katherine were declared insolvent back in the late 1990s they had been followed to federal court by Tito and Marlon, and then by Jermaine, leaving Jackie as the only original member, other than Michael, who had avoided a Chapter 7 filing. And Jackie was barely holding on after an Internet clothing business he had launched three years earlier began to go belly up.

  Joe Jackson had been hiding from creditors since 1987, when concert promoter Gary Berwin won a $3 million judgment against him for writing a bad check to purchase the former Hollywood Athletic Club. The Segye Times was awarded an even larger judgment against Joe, Katherine, and Jermaine a few years later for swindling the Moonie newspaper out of the money it had spent to try to arrange a Michael Jackson concert in Seoul. The bankruptcy court refused to discharge that debt, ruling that Joe, Katherine, and Jermaine were guilty of fraud. A former business partner named Henry Vaccaro also had a judgment against Joe and Katherine that had survived bankruptcy court and was chasing their hidden assets all over California. Vaccaro finally trapped them by issuing fake “rebate” checks in the amount of $50 made out to each family member. When Katherine Jackson deposited one of those checks into her bank account, Vaccaro followed a paper trail that led eventually to a pair of storage units in Oxnard where Joe and his estranged wife had stashed a huge trove of Jackson memorabilia. Since then, Joe had been living mostly on handouts from Katherine (who divvied up the $25,000 check Michael sent to her each month among various needy members of the family) and was incessantly looking for opportunities to draw his most famous son into assorted dubious business deals.

  Michael had refused to discuss the financial problems of family members during a holiday gathering he hosted at his home in Vegas, shortly after returning from Ireland. He hardly said a word to anyone, afraid that his father and brothers would begin pestering him with propositions. To avoid eye contact, he kept his sunglasses on even during dinner. The Jacksons recognized it as an ominous sign. Wearing dark glasses indoors, the family knew, had long been Michael’s way of signaling that he wanted to be more involved with whatever drugs he was taking than with the people around him.

  The Santa Barbara district attorney’s office had largely ignored a case against Michael Jackson for procuring and using prescription drugs that was far stronger than the one it filed charging him with child molestation. Tom Mesereau actually introduced more evidence about Jackson’s “drug problem” at trial tha
n the prosecution did, telling the jury early on that his client “had gotten a lot of prescriptions from various physicians” under assorted identities. Yet most of what Mesereau knew about Michael’s use of painkillers and antianxiety medications had been gleaned from reports filed by police investigators working out of Santa Barbara and Los Angeles counties.

  Court documents revealed that Jackson had used dozens of names to obtain prescription drugs since 1993. In 1998 alone Michael collected an assortment of drugs—mostly synthetic opiates, or “opioids”—under false names that included M. Johnson, Michael Scruz, Bill Scruz, Joseph Scruz, John Scruz, Omar Arnold, and Arnold Omar. He also had collected prescriptions in 1998 under the names of his employees Bill Bray and Bob Jones.

  District Attorney Sneddon understood that a key job description for Jackson’s security staff was the procurement of prescription drugs. Chris Carter, the entertainer’s chief of security at the time of the raid on Neverland, told Santa Barbara County investigators that he regularly obtained Xanax prescriptions for Michael under an array of fictitious names, but occasionally resorted to using the names of Neverland employees like Frank Cascio, Jesus Salas, and Joe Marcus to get the drugs. Michael LaPerruque, who became Jackson’s chief of security a year later, said that most of the drug prescriptions he saw Michael use were under the name Chris Carter. Joey Jeszeck, the blond surfer whom Michael had recruited to work for him after meeting the teenager in a Santa Barbara beach shop, told Sneddon’s investigators that Jackson regularly sent him to the pharmacy to pick up prescriptions obtained under assorted names from doctors all over the country. When a pharmacy wouldn’t release the drugs he wanted under one name, Michael would call the doctor and have the name on the prescription changed to the person standing at the counter, deputies were told by Jeszeck, who remembered dealing with a “Dr. Farshchian in Florida” in that regard on multiple occasions.