Untouchable

by Randall Sullivan

  The publicity that surrounded the Jackson and Peterson cases had made Geragos into the leading man of Larry King Live, but not into a skillful criminal defense attorney. Within days of taking the Jackson case, he made a pair of crucial errors. The least of these was to permit Jackson’s appearance on 60 Minutes. Michael told Ed Bradley on camera that he had been manhandled during his arrest by Santa Barbara sheriff’s deputies, who dislocated his shoulders and bruised his forearms with overtightened handcuffs, then locked him up in a filthy bathroom where he was “taunted” for forty-five minutes. This story was a gross exaggeration, and the sheriff’s department promptly proved it by, among other things, releasing an audio- tape of Jackson’s ride to the police station, where he was fingerprinted, booked, and released within just over an hour. Combined with the fact that he had lied to Martin Bashir about the extent of his plastic surgery, the 60 Minutes appearance neither helped Michael’s case nor improved his public standing. In fact, it damaged him on both fronts. Geragos’s warning on Larry King Live that the sheriff’s department would face “repercussions” for what it had done to his client only made matters worse.

  More foolish was that Geragos had not only accepted but actually embraced the involvement of the Nation of Islam in the preparation of Michael’s defense. Leonard Muhammad, the NOI’s “chief of staff,” stood directly behind Geragos at the first news conference called to respond to the molestation charges, and afterward was offered space in the attorney’s law offices. The news that Jackson was affiliated with a blatantly racist and anti-Semitic organization did him no good with anyone outside a narrow spectrum of black America. More costly in the short term, though, was that Muhammad and his henchmen were destroying Jackson’s relationships with almost everyone who had done anything to help him in recent years. The most expensive exclusions were those of Marc Schaffel, who had made Michael tens of millions of dollars in 2003 and had tens of millions more in the pipeline, and Al Malnik, who was closer than a lot of people realized to sorting out Jackson’s financial problems.

  Michael had first met Malnik when the movie director Brett Ratner invited him to see a house “so beautiful it will make you catatonic.” Though described by old-money types in Palm Beach County as “gauche,” Malnik’s 35,000-square-foot mansion in Ocean Ridge (reputedly the largest waterfront home in the United States) overwhelmed Michael. So did Malnik’s Asian art collection, which included carved mammoth tusks and an ivory sculpture featuring 8,000 separate figures, all with different faces. Like everyone who met Malnik, of course, Michael soon learned about the lawyer’s “mob connections.” Malnik had consorted with the likes of Meyer Lanksy and Sam Cohen as a younger man. Reader’s Digest had described Malnik as Lansky’s “heir apparent” when the biggest Jewish mobster of his era died in 1983, and that label (fairly applied or not) got Malnik banned from the casinos in Atlantic City. The fact that his Rolls-Royce was blown up in a parking garage in 1982 no doubt contributed to the attorney’s spotty reputation.

  In the years since, Malnik had made much of his immense fortune in the opportunistic (some would say predatory) title loan business. No matter what people said or wrote about him, Malnik had emerged as an undeniable eminence in Palm Beach County, where he was known as the developer of the Skylake Country Club and, especially, as the owner of the Forge, a legendary restaurant (Wine Spectator called it the best in the country) and nightclub in Miami Beach that had remained a major destination since the days when it was the South Florida haunt of Frank Sinatra and the Rat Pack.

  Jackson and Malnik merged realities in the year 2000 within moments of a meeting that almost never happened. “I initially said no,” Malnik recalled, “because I was not a fan, so I really didn’t see the point of inviting him to come over and entertain him.” Malnik’s much younger wife had grown up with Michael Jackson posters on the wall of her bedroom, though, and insisted upon having the star over. In almost no time, Jackson and his children were living in Malnik’s house for long stretches of time. Michael was maybe the easiest houseguest he ever had, Malnik would say later: “He liked to clean his own room and make his own bed, and he taught his kids to do that, too, much to our amazement.” Malnik’s older son Shareef soon formed a foursome with Michael, Ratner, and Chris Tucker. Malnik’s triplets, who were about the same age as Jackson’s two oldest children, quickly bonded with Prince and Paris. A year after Blanket was born, Michael asked Malnik to be the boy’s godfather. When Malnik celebrated his seventieth birthday at the Forge, he sat with his wife on one side and Michael on the other. “Al made Michael part of his family,” said Schaffel. “Michael stayed at his house for months on end and absolutely loved it there.”

  Jackson wrote dozens of new songs at the Malniks’ enormous Ocean Ridge home, usually while walking around the place in pajamas and singing his lyrics a cappella. One of Malnik’s favorite memories of Michael was the day he saw his houseguest walking up one set of stairs, then back down another, over and over again. “I asked him, ‘What are you doing?’ He said, ‘I’m doing two songs at once. I am walking up this set doing one song, and when I walk down the other, I do the other song.’” When Michael asked him to install a portable dance floor, Malnik obliged. The biggest favors he did for Jackson, though, were financial. How much money he spent on Michael, Malnik wouldn’t say, but it was substantial. “Al personally wrote checks to pay down a lot of Michael’s bills,” Schaffel recalled. “He really came to feel a warm affection for Michael. He felt that Michael was vulnerable and that people had taken advantage of him. And he really wanted to help him. But he understood the type of person Michael was. He knew that as well as cleaning up Michael’s debt, he had to rehabilitate Michael’s spending. Among other things, he tried to teach Michael to negotiate instead of just paying top dollar for whatever he wanted.” Malnik demonstrated the art of haggling in his dealings with a number of Jackson’s major creditors. Given Malnik’s wealth, power, and reputation, very few of the people he telephoned were unwilling to hear him out. “Al called the head of Bank of America, and the guy immediately came to have dinner with Al at his house,” remembered Schaffel, who was even more impressed by a conversation he listened to on speakerphone between Malnik and George W. Bush. The president of the United States was calling in the autumn of 2003 to ask for an introduction to rap mogul Russell Simmons, whom he hoped would help with “getting some of the black vote” in the 2004 election. “That’s the kind of stature Al has,” Schaffel observed. “And he used it to help Michael.” By late 2003, after the disposition of the Myung Ho Lee and Marcel Avram lawsuits, “Al almost had Michael’s finances to the point of a turnaround,” Schaffel recalled, “and then it all just blew up.”

  It was Malnik who posted Jackson’s bail following his arrest on the molestation charges in Santa Barbara County, but almost immediately afterward communication between the two ceased. “I told Michael that it was the worst mistake of his life when he allowed the Nation of Islam to come in and convince him to stop speaking to Al Malnik,” Schaffel said. With Leonard Muhammad and associates whispering in Michael’s ear, the relationship with Malnik deteriorated far beyond the point of not talking to one another. By the spring of 2004, Jackson, as drug-addled as he’d ever been, was convinced that Malnik was part of a conspiracy against him that included Sony, Bank of America, and Tom Sneddon, and that all of them were after the Beatles songs.

  Many of the people surrounding Michael at that point were playing on both his sense of persecution and his delusional thinking. The Reverend Jesse Jackson was vying with Louis Farrakhan for first position. He saw something distinctly sinister in the way Bank of America had off-loaded Michael’s debt to Fortress Investments, Jesse Jackson told USA Today. “Who was forcing the bank’s hand and what did they stand to gain?” he asked. “That must come under scrutiny. I think the bank sold the loan rather than face the heat.”

  Louis Farrakhan wasn’t going to be easily shouldered aside by the likes of Reverend Jackson, though, and he continued to work Mich
ael’s sensitivity on the subject of those “Hollywood Jews”—Steven Spielberg and David Geffen in particular—who had strung him along for years but were nowhere to be seen now, when he needed support and protection. Both Farrakhan and Michael appeared to have forgotten that back in Thriller Time the Nation of Islam leader had denounced Michael for his “female-acting, sissified-acting expression,” warning that “it is not wholesome for our young boys nor our young girls.”

  What Michael seemed not to understand was that whether or not he won black people over to his side would have absolutely nothing to do with what was going to happen to him in Santa Barbara County. Mark Geragos didn’t get that, either, just one reason among many why it was so fortunate for Michael that Geragos, distracted by the Scott Peterson case, was on his way out as Jackson’s lawyer.

  Something like poetic justice imbued Johnnie Cochran’s role as the key figure in selecting Geragos’s replacement as Michael Jackson’s defense attorney. It was Cochran, after all, who had persuaded Jackson to make the terrible and enduring mistake of settling the Jordan Chandler case for millions of dollars. “Michael never forgave Johnnie Cochran for that,” Schaffel recalled. Cochran hadn’t helped Michael’s reputation much, either, with a subsequent comment that suggested Michael’s insistence upon pleading the Fifth Amendment when asked about his relationships with young boys during a deposition in 1994 had been an implied admission of guilt. The attorney famed for helping O. J. Simpson avoid a murder conviction was on his deathbed in April 2004, wasting away rapidly from the effects of a fatal brain tumor, when Michael’s brother Randy called Cochran to ask him to recommend an attorney to take Geragos’s place. “If it was me,” Johnnie said, “I’d want Tom Mesereau.”

  Imposingly tall and broad-shouldered, with a shoulder-length mane of white hair and ice-blue eyes, Mesereau looked as if he could hold his own with any movie lawyer onscreen. He had been raised as the son of a U.S. Army officer (and military academy football coach) and briefly pursued a career as a boxer before attending Harvard. Mesereau had become a nationally known attorney only a few months earlier, in the autumn of 2003, when his defense of actor Robert Blake on murder charges at a preliminary trial in Los Angeles Superior Court put his face on television for a solid month. Blake was accused of the 2001 murder of his wife, Bonnie Lee Bakley, as she sat in the car outside a Studio City restaurant where the two had eaten dinner. Convinced that the “egomanical” prosecutors on the case had decided Blake’s guilt was so obvious it didn’t need to be proven, Mesereau approached the prelim as if it were a real trial, and eviscerated the state’s witnesses on cross-examination. The analysts on cable TV all agreed it had been brilliant work, especially after Blake became the first defendant charged with a special circumstances murder case in California to be granted bail.

  Mesereau had taken a vacation in Big Sur after the prelim, and spent an entire week in November 2003 with his cell phone shut off. When he turned the phone back on during the drive back down 101 to Los Angeles, it began to ring repeatedly. “All these friends of Michael Jackson’s were calling me from Las Vegas, begging me to come and see him,” Mesereau remembered. One of the callers was Larry Carroll, who for more than twenty years had been the most prominent black newscaster in Los Angeles, until he was charged with securities fraud by a grand jury in San Bernardino County. Mesereau had represented Carroll at trial and won his acquittal. Of course he was intrigued by the idea of representing Michael Jackson, Mesereau told Carroll, but the Blake case was scheduled to go to trial in February and he needed to give that his full attention. The calls from Michael’s friends kept coming, though. “They were in shock, I think,” the attorney said. “You would turn down Michael Jackson?” they all said. Michael’s brother Randy, now in control of the star’s business affairs, had watched the entire Blake prelim on Court TV and was especially insistent, but Mesereau kept saying that he couldn’t take on both of these cases at once.

  Mesereau was familiar to the city’s African-American elite not just because he lived with a former Miss Black Los Angeles—the cabaret performer Minnie Foxx—and was among the few white people seen regularly in the pews at the African Methodist Episcopal Church on Crenshaw Boulevard, arguably the most august institution in LA’s black community. The attorney had made a virtual alternate career out of his pro bono work for poor black clients both in the Los Angeles Basin and in the Deep South. Nearly every African-American leader in the country, including Louis Farrakhan, was aware of the acquittal Mesereau had won for Terry Wayne Bonner, a homeless black man accused of murdering a white woman in Birmingham, Alabama. Mesereau was admired as well for persuading the San Bernardino district attorney’s office to drop the rape charges it had filed against boxer Mike Tyson in 2001.

  During Blake’s pretrial hearings in early 2004, Court TV began to report on “growing tensions” between Blake and his defense team. One report had Blake unhappy with Mesereau’s partner and cocounsel Susan Yu, insisting she be removed from the case at the same time Mesereau refused to attend court without her. Another story recounted Mesereau’s frustration with his inability to control Blake, who had given an interview to Barbara Walters on ABC against the attorney’s advice. There was also a story that Blake had hired private investigators that were to report directly to him, without consulting Mesereau, and another that the actor had accused his attorney of exploiting the case to promote his career by mentioning it repeatedly in an infomercial.

  Mesereau has refused to explain why he asked the court, in February 2004, to let him be released from the Blake case, but does admit that he withdrew to his offices in a glum mood, realizing that in the course of a couple of months he had lost the two biggest opportunities of his career, the Robert Blake and Michael Jackson cases, and might soon be returning to relative obscurity. Less than two weeks after he withdrew from the Blake case, though, Mesereau received another call from Randy Jackson, who said, “Look, we still want you. Can you come to Florida and meet my brother?”

  The attorney flew to Orlando the next day and was driven to a “secret location” where Michael and his large team of advisors waited. “Michael didn’t say much of anything,” Mesereau recalled. “He just observed me intensely while the others asked questions.”

  “We don’t like what our attorneys are doing with the media,” said Randy Jackson, who told a story about being shouldered aside by Geragos after a court hearing in the lawyer’s rush to get to the microphones. In explaining that he was “not a Hollywood type,” Mesereau found himself being, perhaps, a bit too forthcoming. He had never been much interested in show business, the attorney said, had always been something of a loner, to tell the truth, one whose favorite entertainment was to drive around Los Angeles, especially South Central LA, “just to see what’s going on and feel the people.” Other than a slight smile, Michael Jackson showed no visible response to all of this, and Mesereau walked away from the interview “figuring I was one of a hundred lawyers to come through, and might be the weirdest guy they’d talked to.” He had his own reservations about taking the job, anyway, if it was offered: “People who cared about me were warning that this case would define me for the rest of my life, especially if I lost. I’d be the guy who let Michael Jackson die in prison.” Two weeks later, though, after Michael spoke directly with Johnnie Cochran, Randy Jackson called Mesereau to tell him he had the job, if he wanted it, and the attorney immediately said yes.

  Excited as he was, Mesereau soon began to impose conditions. The first was that Susan Yu would be his cocounsel. “No problem,” Randy Jackson said. Mesereau knew he risked losing the case when he made his second demand, which was that the Nation of Islam disappear from Michael’s life.

  After spending some time in Santa Maria, the small city in northern Santa Barbara County where the trial would be held, Mesereau decided the entire subject of race must be removed from the case. Santa Maria was a mostly white, conservative, largely blue-collar community with a sizeable Hispanic minority but almost no black people. M
esereau spent a week hanging out in local bars and coffee shops wearing jeans and a leather jacket, and realized the place didn’t precisely accord with the effete liberal bias against it. “What I discovered was that Michael was very well thought of by most of the people there,” Mesereau recalled. “He was part of the community, employed a lot of people, and had been a good neighbor. Everyone I spoke to remarked that on the rare occasions when he came into the city he had been very polite and considerate. But the big thing that struck me was that people didn’t see Michael Jackson in terms of race. He was the rare person, maybe the one person, who truly transcended race in people’s minds. As an artist, white people loved him, Hispanics loved him, Asians loved him, everybody loved him. I admit I was surprised, but not a single person I spoke to brought up the subject of race. It just wasn’t an issue where Michael was concerned.”

  Mesereau first publicly distinguished himself from Michael Jackson’s previous attorneys when he supported the prosecution request for a gag order that Mark Geragos had opposed. “I didn’t want to spend a lot of time talking to cameras and microphones,” he explained. That didn’t win him any friends in the media. Geragos’s pal Geraldo Rivera was on TV every night telling his audience what a mistake it was to hire Mesereau, who had never handled a high-profile case other than Robert Blake’s, and had lost that job before the actual trial began. Geragos himself was relentlessly lobbying members of the Jackson family, Jermaine in particular, to put him back on the case. Mesereau found an ally in Carl Douglas, who was now running Johnnie Cochran’s Los Angeles law firm. The Scott Peterson case looked like a loser to him, Douglas would explain later, and “listening to people on TV say that Michael Jackson had the same attorney as Peterson concerned me,” so he privately urged that Geragos be kept away from the case.