Untouchable

by Randall Sullivan

  Michael gave Lee the impression that he had received propofol on only a single occasion, prior to a minor surgery of some sort. “I’d fallen asleep so easily that I wanted to have that experience again,” Lee quoted him as saying. Jackson, however, had been put under with propofol on scores of occasions during the HIStory tour, and his request that Lee administer Diprivan to him was just one of many similar conversations that Michael had had with medical professionals in the twelve years since then. After returning from the tour in 1997, he had insisted that dermatologists and plastic surgeons arrange to have him anesthetized with propofol before any number of cosmetic procedures. That Michael believed the drug was safe seems clear from the fact that, in July 2008, while still living in Las Vegas, he prevailed upon a dentist named Mark Tadrissi to put Blanket under with Diprivan for two hours during an unspecified procedure in Tadrissi’s office. Tadrissi would later tell investigators that he told Jackson he didn’t have a permit to administer anesthesia but did so anyway at Jackson’s insistence. Tadrissi also admitted to putting Michael on a propofol drip during a visit to his office.

  Cherilyn Lee brought her copy of the Physicians’ Desk Reference to the Carolwood chateau in order show Michael the dangers of propofol, the nurse said, but the star remained adamant that he wanted an injection of Diprivan. “He said, ‘No, my doctor said it’s safe. It works quick and it’s safe as long as somebody’s here to monitor me and wake me up.’” She again refused to administer Diprivan, Lee said, persuading Jackson instead to try one of her herbal soporifics and let her spend the night watching him while he slept. Once Michael was under the covers, though, Lee found it difficult to convince him to turn off the lights and sounds in his bedroom. He was watching Donald Duck cartoons on the computer he kept by the bed “and it was ongoing,” the nurse recalled. “I said, ‘Maybe if we put on softer music,’ and he said, ‘No, this is how I go to sleep.’” Mr. Jackson did doze off briefly as she observed him from a chair in the corner of the bedroom, Lee recalled, but then jumped out of bed and approached her with a “wide-eyed” stare. “This is what happens to me,” he told the nurse. “All I want is to be able to sleep. I want to be able to sleep eight hours. I know I’ll feel better the next day.” Lee again refused to administer Diprivan and was not called back to the house after that.

  Tohme Tohme first heard the name Frank Dileo in connection to one Arfaq Hussain—His Royal Highness Arfaq Hussain, as the man introduced himself when he showed up at the Hotel Bel-Air in late February 2009 in the company of a young Lebanese woman. The supposed prince had been preceded, Tohme remembered, by a letter from a London lawyer who wrote that he represented a member of the Saudi royal family interested in purchasing Neverland Ranch. “But when he shows up I am suspicious,” Tohme explained. “Arfaq is not an Arab name. It sounds Indian or Pakistani. Also, I know just about every prince in Saudi Arabia, and I’ve never heard of him. So I brushed him off, but politely, just in case I was wrong.”

  HRH Hussain showed up again at the Lanesborough Hotel soon after he and Michael arrived in London to announce the O2 Arena shows, Tohme recalled, asking for a face-to-face meeting with Mr. Jackson. “Michael said he didn’t know him and didn’t want to meet with him,” Tohme recalled.

  It seems likely Michael must have at least recognized the name, given that during the past decade Arfaq Hussain had identified himself in London tabloids both as Michael Jackson’s costume designer and as his perfumer. Whatever their past relationship was or was not, Arfaq Hussain became extremely interesting to Michael Jackson when Frank Dileo called to say that the Saudi prince wanted them to make movies together and had a fund of $300 million set aside for just that purpose. “Before, Dileo cannot even get Michael on the phone,” Tohme said. “Dileo is going every day to Michael’s mother, trying to contact Michael, about the AllGood deal at first. Michael wants nothing to do with him. But Michael is dying to make movies, and when his mother tells him about this prince with $300 million, he wants to talk to Dileo. That is Dileo’s way in.”

  Tohme was concerned—not about Dileo, but about this HRH Hussain character. So he hired a former Scotland Yard inspector, “someone I know has access to government agencies at the highest levels,” Tohme explained, to look into Arfaq Hussain’s background. Shortly after that investigation was launched, however, Tohme discovered that his relationship with Michael Jackson was being tested by a new development that seemed to come out of nowhere.

  On March 4, 2009, the day before the announcement of the AEG deal in London, Michael’s longtime company MJJ Productions had filed a lawsuit against Julien’s Auctions to stop the scheduled April 22 sale in Beverly Hills of the possessions Jackson had left behind in Santa Barbara County. Michael was “horrified,” unnamed associates explained to the media, when he found the catalog for the auction on the Internet and saw what they were trying to take away from him. “It was Peter Lopez and Frank Dileo and that insect Brother Michael,” Tohme said. “They told Michael, ‘Look, he’s selling your clothes. He’s selling everything.’ I wasn’t even here when they moved the things out of Neverland. I was in Bahrain taking care of that problem. So then before we go to London, Michael said, ‘I don’t want the auction anymore.’ I said, ‘Fine, I’ll cancel the auction.’ But Julien doesn’t want to cancel; we have a contract. So we have to file a lawsuit.”

  What Tohme didn’t know was that Michael had begun voicing suspicions about his new manager within a month of signing the power of attorney that gave the Arab absolute authority over his finances and business affairs. In August 2008, Jackson had assigned Michael Amir Williams to find a private investigator who could “check this guy out.” The PI, Rick Hippach, filed a report on August 23, 2008, that “Mr. Tohme has been both a defendant and a plaintiff in at least sixteen (16) civil lawsuits filed from 1986 to 2007, many of which involved contractual disputes,” then added his own opinion that “this is not the best guy to do business with.” Michael Jackson, who had been involved in considerably more than sixteen lawsuits during the past twenty-one years, wasn’t terribly impressed by Hippach’s report, but continued to worry that he had given Tohme too much control of his life.

  “This guy, he just . . . has ways about him,” Michael said during a tape-recorded phone conversation in September 2008. “There’s a divide between me and my representatives, and I don’t talk to my lawyer, my accountant. I talk to him and he talks to them . . . I don’t like it. I wanna get somebody in there with him that I know and trust.”

  During late 2008 and early 2009, Williams had begun to make the case to Jackson that Tohme was a con man. It was increasingly obvious, Brother Michael said, that Tohme was not nearly as intimate with the royal family of Brunei as he claimed to be and was making little progress toward a deal to purchase the Bolkiah’s Spanish Gate estate in Las Vegas. Williams was not able to produce any solid evidence of Tohme’s deceptiveness, though, until his employer became distressed that his cherished “King Tut” project was not moving forward. “This was a film Michael wanted to do for years and [he] already had a full script,” Brother Michael explained. “He told Tohme that he wanted Mel Gibson to direct the film. Tohme then told Michael that he grew up with Mel and that they are best friends. I remember Michael being excited, calling me, telling me that Tohme and Mel Gibson were best friends and he was going to send him the script. For some reason I didn’t believe Tohme; I thought it was too big of a coincidence for him to be best friends with the man Michael wanted to work with. So I decided to try to get in touch with Mel Gibson myself. I reached out to Peter Lopez and asked Peter if he can get in touch with Mel Gibson for me. And he told me that Tohme just called him asking him if he knew Mel Gibson and if he could help him get in touch with him. That’s when I told Michael, but Michael said, ‘Let’s just wait and see what happens.’”

  Tohme insisted that the name Mel Gibson never came up in connection to the King Tut project. “Michael wanted Peter Jackson for that,” he said. “Peter Jackson was the only person he would co
nsider. And Brother Michael would have no idea what Michael Jackson and I discussed. He was never in our meetings. He was an errand boy. He went for coffee. If Michael saw him listening at the door he would tell him to go outside and close the door behind him.”

  Williams had Jackson’s ear, though, when he began pointing out how suspicious it was that “Tohme just happened to know everyone Michael wanted to meet.” Jackson was especially interested in collaborating with A. R. Rahman, the composer who had just won two Academy Awards for the Slumdog Millionaire soundtrack, Brother Michael recalled, and “Tohme told Michael that he had known Mr. Rahman for years and that they were good friends. I didn’t believe him so I decided to do some research myself. The day before [Rahman and Jackson] were supposed to meet I reached out to [Rahman’s] agent. His agent put me in touch with Mr. Rahman and I was able to speak with him. I asked him if he knew Tohme and he told me that he had no idea who Tohme was and that Tohme was making him go to the Hotel Bel-Air two hours before the meeting for drinks with him, and that Tohme and Mr. Rahman were to drive to Michael’s house together. I then told Michael what I found out and I ended up setting up a private meeting with Michael and Mr. Rahman at Michael’s residence without Tohme. Tohme was very upset at me but Michael and I had a good laugh about it . . . we realized that Tohme was doing this with almost everyone. He would meet them at the Hotel Bel-Air and then drive over to Michael’s house with them to make Michael think that they had been good friends.”

  It was true that he arranged to meet Rahman at the Hotel Bel-Air, Tohme conceded, but not that he had claimed to be old friends with the composer. “Brother Michael was working for Dileo by then,” he said, “but I didn’t know it. Michael told me to fire him more than once. He told me Brother Michael was stealing from him. But Brother Michael cried that he had nowhere else to go and I kept him on. I was a fool.”

  Tohme was the one Jackson was planning to get rid of, Brother Michael retorted: “After Michael and I realized Tohme was a liar, I would ask Michael, ‘Why don’t you just fire him?’ Michael’s response would be, ‘Brother Michael, when you’re on a plane flying in midair, you don’t get rid of the pilot in the air. You wait until you land and the job is done, then you can get rid of the pilot.’”

  The deals Tohme had made for him in the first six months after becoming Michael’s manager seemed to ease Jackson’s concerns about the man, but those apprehensions were aroused again when he discovered that Tohme and Randy Phillips had been planning to expand the number of concerts he would perform at the O2 long before they told him about it. At almost the same moment, Michael’s discovery that Tohme had authorized an auction where Darren Julien would be selling “priceless and irreplaceable” personal items, as Jackson’s court filing described them, stoked his fury. MJJ Productions had “authorized the auction house to remove the items from Jackson’s Neverland Ranch,” Michael’s suit alleged, “but not to sell them without Jackson’s permission.” That did not jibe with the recollection of Dennis Hawk, who had served as the main liaison between Tohme, Jackson, and Darren Julien. “I was there in the fall of 2008, when Michael was asked what he wanted to sell from Neverland,” Hawk recalled, “and his answer was, ‘Everything.’ He said it twice: ‘Everything.’ Darren Julien handled the whole thing in the most professional way you could imagine. He sent a fleet of trucks up to Neverland to load everything, at his own expense, and also paid for it all to be stored at warehouses in Los Angeles. Then he prepared this absolutely beautiful catalog of the items for sale at an auction that would have netted Michael millions.” Julien had begun selling $20 tickets to the auction in February, along with auction catalogs priced at $50 for a single volume or $200 for a five-volume boxed set. “Like Disneyland collides with the Louvre,” he had described the contents. The man’s money and his reputation were already on the line. But after making the deal for the O2 shows, Hawk said, “Michael wasn’t so sure he needed the money, and all of a sudden he didn’t want to sell ‘everything’ from Neverland. It put Julien in a terrible position.”

  Confronted by the lawsuit, Julien refused to return the property in his warehouses unless he was paid for time and costs, plus the share of profits he would be losing. It became a nasty public dispute that placed Tohme right in the middle. On one side, Michael Jackson was insisting that he had never intended to sell much of what had been removed from Neverland, that there were things in Julien’s warehouse that meant more to him than money. On the other side, Darren Julien was warning Tohme that he’d better convince Michael Jackson to keep his commitment, or else come up with the $2 million in expenses he had run up preparing for the auction, plus some reasonable percentage of the commissions he would be losing if the event was canceled. In an attempt to settle the matter, Tohme dispatched his business partner, James R. Weller, to a private meeting with Julien. Weller was a legendary advertising man who had won a slew of major awards, including Clios, Emmys, Addys, and prizes from the Cannes and New York film festivals. Ad Age had listed him as the writer or creative director on two of the “10 Greatest Ad Campaigns of All Time.” He had also served as the creative director for the presidential campaigns of Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush. Since 2005, Tohme and Weller had been partners in TRW Advertising, where Weller, who was in his seventies, ran the shop while Tohme functioned as the moneyman. Finesse was supposed to be Weller’s strong suit.

  A PR disaster was the last thing Tohme expected from a meeting where he was represented by Jim Weller. Yet shortly after the meeting (which, oddly, took place in a fast food restaurant on Wilshire Boulevard), Darren Julien filed an affidavit in Los Angeles Superior Court in which he alleged that Weller had threatened his life. “Weller said that if we refused to postpone [the auction], we would be in danger from ‘Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam,’” Julien’s sworn statement read. After stating that “those people are very protective of Michael,” Julien claimed, Weller “told us that Dr. Tohme and Michael Jackson wanted to give the message to us that ‘our lives are at stake and there will be bloodshed.’” (Weller later filed a declaration with the court in which he denied making any of the threats Julien alleged.) Julien and his partner Martin Nolan met with Tohme Tohme the next day at a Starbucks where, according to Julien’s affidavit, Michael Jackson’s manager “denied any knowledge of Weller’s threats, and said that he accepted that the auction would need to proceed as agreed.”

  Tohme was shocked when gossip columnist Roger Friedman got hold of Julien’s affidavit and turned it into a pair of columns that publicly eviscerated Michael Jackson’s “mysterious new manager.” Tohme could only blame himself for some of what Friedman wrote. His clumsy attempts to circumvent Michael’s displeasure about the potential sale of his prized possessions made him sound (assuming Friedman reported his remarks correctly) at once craven and devious. “I did not set up the auction, the auction is not going through!” Friedman quoted him as saying. Tohme most certainly had set up the auction but compounded his problems by trying to make it sound as if he had merely been using Julien to transport and store “a lot of stuff” that had to be removed from Neverland when Colony Capital took possession. Darren Julian was understandably insulted by being described as the operator of a moving and storage service. He urged Friedman to ask what exactly this “Dr. Tohme” was a doctor of. Quoting “sources” who said that Jackson’s manager had “referred to himself as an orthopedist or orthopedic surgeon,” Friedman asked Tohme if he was a licensed physician. “Not at this time,” was Tohme’s answer. When Friedman asked repeatedly what kind of doctor Tohme might once have been, he got no answer. “If you want to talk about Michael Jackson, fine,” Tohme told Friedman. “The story isn’t about me.” After Friedman added the false suggestion that Tohme hadn’t really set up the deal at AEG, Michael’s manager came off looking dubious indeed. Friedman promptly followed with a second column that used Julien’s story of his meeting with Weller to dredge up Michael Jackson’s connections to the Nation of Islam, then reported that he had contact
ed someone at the Senegalese embassy in Washington who said he had never heard of any “ambassador at large” named Tohme Tohme. In fact, Tohme did possess a passport that had been personally signed by Abdoulaye Wade, the country’s president since 2000, with a notation in Wade’s handwriting that identified him as the country’s “Ambassador at Large,” but by then no one was very interested in looking at the thing. Michael himself was most upset by a final comment from Darren Julien that Friedman had added to his second column, in which the auctioneer spoke of voluntarily returning “certain items” that might “be embarrassing” to Jackson.

  Michael’s mortification and fury increased after the Los Angeles Times picked up the story and lent Friedman’s inferences legitimacy. For the first time since the two had met, he began refusing to answer Tohme’s phone calls. “I remember Michael saying, ‘I am never talking to him again!’” recalled Patrick Allocco, who, like Frank Dileo and Leonard Rowe, was maneuvering to fill the opening created by Jackson’s separation from his manager. Darren Julien, meanwhile, refused to back down, and scheduled an exhibition of 1,390 lots of property from Neverland beginning on April 14. That very day, literally at the last minute, the dispute was settled when Tohme presented Julien with a cashier’s check for the full amount he demanded. “Where he got the money remains a mystery,” the Times would report. It had come from the Lockbox and put a far bigger dent in Michael’s house fund than the purchase of Katherine’s deluxe motor home. Tohme Tohme declined to say another public word about the entire auction debacle but the damage to his reputation had been done, and the timing could hardly have been worse.