Untouchable

by Randall Sullivan

  On April 2, Patrick Allocco had spent nearly an hour on the phone with Katherine Jackson, confirming Leonard Rowe’s promise of a $2 million payment if she could convince Michael to sign the AllGood deal and repudiate his agreement with AEG. Allocco also urged Katherine to persuade her son that he should be represented by Leonard Rowe rather than Tohme Tohme. At least tell Michael he should sit down with Joe and Rowe one more time and hear what they have to say, Allocco told Mrs. Jackson. Katherine did as asked, and before the middle of that month had talked Michael into taking another meeting with his father and Leonard. It wasn’t a coincidence that Joe and Rowe arranged to meet with Michael (and Patrick Allocco, who was there also) at the Sportsmen’s Lodge in Studio City on the morning of April 14, less than ten hours before Darren Julien was scheduled to begin exhibiting his possessions ahead of the April 22 auction. “Let me say my piece,” Joe began the meeting, then launched into a lengthy diatribe about his son’s allowing himself to be controlled by AEG and its agents, particularly this Tohme. Leonard Rowe was a family friend, Joe said, who would look out for the Jacksons’ interests, not AEG’s, and see that Michael’s earnings were protected. With his father literally standing over him, Michael signed a document that read, “Leonard Rowe is my authorized representative in all matters concerning my endeavors in the entertainment industry and any other of my endeavors as he may be assigned by me.” Michael made a number of handwritten amendments to the letter before signing it, however, including one in which he stated that the authority he was giving Rowe applied to “financial overseeing only” and “can be revoked at any time.”

  At that same meeting, Michael signed a notarized “notice of revocation of power of attorney” that stripped Tohme Tohme of his control over the star’s finances, then added the request that “all personal or professional property related to me, my immediate family, and all other related family in the possession of Dr. Tohme R. Tohme, including without limitation any passports or other documents, be returned to me immediately.” Tohme would insist that he never received a copy of any such document and that his position in Michael Jackson’s life was unchanged.

  Frank Dileo was still out there, too, though, working every angle he could find that played off his relationship with Michael Jackson. On April 1, Dileo negotiated an AllGood Entertainment–like deal with a company called Citadel Events that promised to assist in putting on a Michael Jackson concert in Trinidad and Tobago during the fall of 2009. Unlike Patrick Allocco, Citadel’s principals had been reckless enough to advance Dileo a $300,000 “binder” fee. No Michael Jackson concert in Trinidad and Tobago was ever going to happen but Citadel wasn’t going to see its $300,000 again, either.

  Dileo wasn’t Michael Jackson’s manager but the story of those hundreds of millions of dollars in movie money under the control of HRH Arfaq Hussain had helped him recapture a measure of Michael’s attention. Dileo’s first contact with Randy Phillips had come, the AEG Live chief executive recalled, in an e-mail, when “MJ orchestrated a conference call with Mr. Dileo, MJ, and me to discuss a fund that Frank had raised to make motion pictures with MJ. This was prompted by AEG’s commitment to develop a shooting script for a 3-D live-action film based on ‘Thriller.’ MJ mentioned his fondness for Frank and that he wanted him to executive produce these films.” Phillips still saw Dileo as a fringe player, though.

  On April 11, Phillips responded to a cease-and-desist letter from AllGood Entertainment by stating, “Mr. Dileo doesn’t involve AEG in any manner whatsoever.” After learning that Michael Jackson had signed some sort of an agreement with Leonard Rowe on April 14, however, Phillips began to wonder if perhaps he shouldn’t be in business with Frank Dileo after all—especially if Tohme Tohme was on shaky ground. And apparently Tohme was, given that on April 22, 2009, Michael signed a letter to AEG stating that Tohme would not serve as the production manager on the O2 “tour” as had been previously contemplated. The same letter, written by Frank Dileo, directed AEG not to pay Tohme for any work he did on this “tour” or any other. Phillips immediately requested a meeting with Dileo. Three days later, he sent Tohme an e-mail stating that Michael Jackson apparently did not want him to serve as the tour manager during the O2 concerts.

  According to Patrick Allocco, Phillips had already begun to encourage Michael Jackson to replace Tohme with Dileo. “Randy Phillips wasn’t able to control Michael the way he wanted to,” Allocco explained, “and Randy Phillips was most definitely angry at us involving Leonard Rowe in Michael’s life. Randy is the one who hired Frank Dileo.” Michael himself told people close to him that Dileo had been hired by Phillips and said he was furious about it, insisting that he still believed Frank had stolen from him back in the 1980s.

  Tohme, for his part, continued to insist that nothing had changed. “I still had not received anything from Michael saying I was not his manager, or that he didn’t want me with him in London,” Tohme said. “He still called me on the phone and told me he loved me. Randy Phillips still treated me as Michael’s manager.”

  Tohme clearly recognized that his position was precarious, however, and began to backpedal furiously in his public statements, especially with regard to Neverland Ranch. In early April, based on what Michael had been saying for months, Tohme had told the Wall Street Journal, “Neverland is finished.” By May, however, he was veering sharply toward his new position that Michael wanted to keep the ranch, that he envisioned Neverland as a “veritable city for children,” one that would be “ten times bigger than Graceland.”

  Then a new complication surfaced that forced him to “distance myself from the situation,” as Tohme put it. His private investigator’s report on Arfaq Hussain had finally been delivered from London. Hussain was not a Saudi prince, the report stated at the outset, but had been born to a Pakistani family in England in July 1970. “He initially came to the attention of the law enforcement authorities when a series of allegations were received that his business practices were fraudulent and criminal,” Tohme’s investigator went on. That complaint was made by Michael Jackson’s dear friend Mohammed Al Fayed, who told police that Hussain seemed to “come out of nowhere” when he approached the Harrods owner in the spring of 1998, boasting of acquaintance with “well-known Muslim figures in the worlds of show business, politics, and sports,” and “also made much of an apparent close relationship with Michael Jackson.”

  In 2001, the report from London continued, Hussain “was arrested during a massive antidrugs operation by police in the North of England.” After being criminally charged, the report explained, Hussain cut a deal with authorities and turned informant. His plea bargain resulted in a minimal sentence of four months’ imprisonment, related to his fraudulent conduct in business activities.

  “Having investigated this subject thoroughly,” the report’s conclusion began, “it is strongly recommended that your client should not enter into any commercial or social contact with Arfaq Hussain.”

  When he urged Jackson to send Hussain away, Tohme said, Michael refused, insisting that Frank Dileo said Arfaq really did have access to $300 million in Saudi money to finance film productions. “This is the first time I realize that Dileo has Michael’s ear,” recalled an indignant Tohme. “He came for weeks, trying to push himself in, but he couldn’t, not until he got with Arfaq Hussain.” Tohme detailed the efforts and the progress he’d made toward helping Michael realize his dream of creating big-budget motion pictures. He had been talking to major studios about Michael’s cherished King Tut project, Tohme said, and had arranged meetings between Jackson and Andy Hayward, the creator of the Inspector Gadget series that Michael loved, to develop characters for an animated version of the “Thriller” video. “Things are moving along,” Tohme insisted, but Michael believed the “fund” Frank Dileo had supposedly put together with the help of Arfaq Hussain would make it possible for him to proceed immediately. Finally, Tohme said, “I told Michael, ‘I will never set foot next to you if you have that crook around.’” Michael just lau
ghed.

  According to Patrick Allocco, “Michael stopped all contact with Dr. Tohme” around the time of this conversation. Tohme himself insisted that,“Michael and I were still close. There is still love between us. I am still his manager.” What almost everyone else observed, though, was that by the middle of May 2009, Tohme, the man who described his job as “protecting Michael Jackson from everyone and everything that can hurt him,” was largely out of the picture.

  In the eyes of an attorney who had been representing Jackson on and off for nearly twenty years, what was taking place seemed an obvious reification of the star’s relationship with his father: “Michael had always done best in terms of his career when he had some powerful authority figure telling him what to do. He was conditioned to that at an early age. But at the same time he resented those authority figures, because they brought back memories of Joe, who he really hated deep down. So he eventually had to shatter the relationship and push away the one person who was driving him to succeed. Then he’d be on his own again, and he’d start drifting, usually into trouble.”

  Frank Dileo, Leonard Rowe, and the members of the Jackson family were not the only ones whose ears had perked up at the news of the O2 concerts and the enormous sums of money under discussion. Just as the franchise seemed to be cranking up to once again produce huge revenues, those who were Michael’s collaborators back in Thriller Time began lining up in court to be cut in on the action. John Landis had put himself into first position on January 21, 2009, when the London shows were just a rumor, by filing a lawsuit that claimed back royalties from the “Thriller” video, plus a piece of the Nederlander deal. Michael’s attorneys had seen it coming since late 2007 when stories about a possible series of Jackson concerts at the O2 began to appear in print and Landis complained to London’s Telegraph, “Listen, Michael probably owes me $10 million because he’s in hock to Sony so deeply. All the monies from the ‘Thriller’ video, which I own fifty percent, are collected by Sony. My deal is with Michael’s company, and he owes Sony so much that they keep the money.” If Jackson was about to become flush again, though, there would be ways for Landis to collect. TheWrap.com’s Andrew Gumbel, who announced the lawsuit two days before it was filed, reported that Tohme and other Jackson advisors had held a “council-of-war meeting” at the Bel-Air Hotel over the weekend to discuss the Landis suit. “We just wanted to make sure Michael wasn’t upset or distracted,” Tohme explained. That spring, Landis’s claim against Michael would be joined by Ola Ray, the former Playboy centerfold who had been Jackson’s costar in the “Thriller” video. Now a forty-eight-year-old single mom living in Sacramento, Ray’s career had tailed off after a cocaine bust in 1992, and seventeen years later she was demanding to know why she wasn’t receiving royalties from the twenty-fifth anniversary release of Thriller.

  The lawsuits filed against him had always bothered Michael more than he let on. He hated conflict, and despised the attorneys who exploited it. His bodyguards recalled that near the end of one long day spent in a law office where he had been subjected to separate depositions, Michael was so overwrought that he grabbed one of their cell phones and hurled it through the glass of a conference room window.

  “You have the same thousand parasites that float back in and try to take advantage of the situation,” Tom Barrack told the Los Angeles Times near the end of May. If Barrack’s comment was directed at anyone in particular, that person appeared to be Raymone Bain, who, on the same day as Ola Ray’s California court filing, had submitted a lawsuit to the federal court in Washington, D.C., that demanded $44 million from Jackson for 10 percent of every bit of the entertainer’s business she had ever touched, the AEG deal included. Those who had been involved in the negotiations for the O2 shows were incensed. “Raymone Bain was not at a single one of the meetings where the AEG deal was negotiated, not in person and not on the telephone,” said an attorney who attended every one of them. Bain had been unable to so much as contact Michael by phone since 2008, when he changed numbers and insisted that the new one not be given to her. “Raymone Bain wasn’t even mentioned during the meetings with AEG that resulted in the contract for the O2 shows,” the attorney recalled. “She had absolutely nothing to do with that deal. But now she wants a piece of it.” Bain, naturally, saw things differently. She had been in discussions with Randy Phillips and AEG long before Tohme Tohme arrived on the scene, and even if those discussions had not resulted in a deal, they gave her, Raymone believed, the basis for a claim.

  Other lawsuits were coming. The only way to cope with it all was to keep Michael moving forward, looking straight ahead. Yet something in him suddenly wanted to reconcile with his past, to own up and pay out. Drugs could fog him over, but not make him truly forget. He seemed to believe he couldn’t go forward without first going back. Out of nowhere he phoned Terry George in London.

  George’s story of Michael masturbating during a trans-Atlantic phone call back in 1980 had long been and still was the most credible of all the claims made against Jackson for inappropriate sexual conduct with a child. Who Terry George was and what he had become made him especially convincing; he didn’t need money and had never sought attention. George was a multimillionaire businessman now, in his early forties, and remained, as he had been always, essentially a defender of Michael Jackson’s reputation. When the Los Angeles police had contacted him back in 1993 during the Jordan Chandler investigation, George was very clear in telling them that Michael had never touched him in any sexual way, and insisted then, as he continued to do, that he did not believe Michael was a pedophile. He didn’t know for certain, of course, since he hadn’t seen or spoken to Jackson in three decades—at least not until he answered that “shock call” from the Carolwood chateau in the spring of 2009. Michael got quickly to the point and acknowledged what had happened during that phone conversation back in 1980, then said he wanted “to apologize and be forgiven,” as George recounted their discussion. “But he insisted that his love for children was entirely innocent,” George recalled. Yes, there had been accusations from a couple of boys over the years, but there was no truth to those stories at all, Michael said. He believed the kids had been forced to say things that they later regretted, and he really hoped they would some day be given a chance to say so publicly. He asked Michael how he was doing, and the star’s only reply had been to say he had been “under a lot of pressure recently,” George recalled. Michael thanked the Englishman again for being kind enough to forgive him, then said good-bye.

  Perhaps Michael imagined he had wiped the slate clean. Or maybe he knew that really wasn’t possible. Tom Mesereau believed that Michael had never really healed from the series of concussive blows he had absorbed back in 2003, 2004 and 2005. “I think he was bleeding internally the whole time,” Mesereau said. “He was dying right in front of everyone, but nobody saw it.”

  19

  On April 21, 2004, when a Santa Barbara County grand jury indicted Michael Jackson on ten felony counts related to his alleged sexual abuse of Gavin Arvizo, the entertainer’s circumstances—legal, personal, and financial—had deteriorated so rapidly that even those who had been closest to him assumed the end was at hand.

  The raid on Neverland Ranch and Jackson’s subsequent arrest, in November 2003, had come at the worst possible time for Michael, and the district attorney who orchestrated the two events, Tom Sneddon, was fully aware of that. Sony had released Number Ones one day before the raid, sending the album into record stores at the very moment forensics experts, sheriff’s deputies, and police videographers were inspecting every square inch of the main house at Neverland. In Las Vegas, Michael had been putting his final touches on a special for CBS television, featuring both new performances and a retrospective of his entire career, that was scheduled to air the following week. That the network would offer him such a platform (and the seven-figure fee that went with it) was testimony to how successful the “rebuttal video” broadcast on Fox had been both in debunking the Bashir documentary and in
demonstrating Jackson’s continuing ability to draw huge ratings. Michael was on the brink of a renaissance that exceeded what even his most ardent supporters had imagined possible a year earlier.

  But within forty-eight hours of the raid, Jackson and those advising him had made two enormous mistakes that would put his future in serious jeopardy. One was to allow the Nation of Islam to move in and take almost complete control of his life. The other was to retain Mark Geragos as his criminal defense attorney.

  Geragos was a controversial figure among many in the Los Angeles legal community, mainly because a lot of L.A. Lawyers believed he cared far more about getting his face on television than he did about winning cases. Geragos had become a fixture of the twenty-four-hour news cycle when he represented actress Winona Ryder after she was caught stealing $5,500 worth of designer clothes and accessories from the Saks Fifth Avenue store in Beverly Hills in December 2001. Geragos appeared on cable news shows almost nightly as the absurd farce dragged on, mainly because he and his client refused to accept a plea bargain and forced the case to trial. After Ryder was convicted of felony grand theft and vandalism, Geragos boasted before TV cameras that, instead of jail time, he had gotten his client a sentence of three years’ probation, 480 hours of community service, $3,700 in fines, and $6,355 in restitution—the exact sentence the prosecution had asked for. His self-proclaimed ability to manage the media was why Geragos had been hired to represent California congressman Gary Condit when Condit was a public object of suspicion in the disappearance of a young woman named Chandra Levy in Washington, D.C. Condit was never charged with a crime, but that had absolutely nothing to do with Geragos’s nightly appearances on television and everything to do with the fact that no evidence existed to link the congressman to Levy’s disappearance. Just how successful Geragos had been in protecting his client’s reputation was evident a short time later when Condit’s thirty-year political career ended with an eighteen-point loss in the Democratic primary. And yet now, in 2004, after two very public failures, Geragos was the lead defense attorney not only for Michael Jackson, but also for Scott Peterson, whose pregnant wife Laci’s dismembered body had been recovered from San Francisco Bay in April 2003. (That case would result in a trial at which Geragos promised to show that Laci Peterson’s baby had been born alive, suggesting that she was a kidnap victim. No such evidence was ever presented and, after his conviction, Peterson was sentenced to death.)