Untouchable

by Randall Sullivan

  He and his people were kept outside the gates of the Carolwood property for a full five hours, Williams recalled, while the LAPD photographed the premises, searched the master bedroom, and interviewed Michael Jackson’s security staff. It was dark when the Talon chief got a call from his lead man in Las Vegas informing him that a group of Michael Jackson’s former bodyguards had been caught trying to sneak out of the Palomino hacienda with assorted valuables and were being detained by the police. “Secure the perimeter and let no one inside,” Williams told him.

  It was about 10 p.m. when the security staff at the Carolwood chateau were allowed to leave. The police prepared to vacate just minutes later. Williams and his people were met outside the front gate by Ron Boyd, the Los Angeles Port police chief, who said he was working with the Jacksons as a family friend and would walk the Talon agents onto the property. To Williams, it said something about the position of the Jackson family in Los Angeles that the first black chief in the history of the port police was on hand to personally protect their interests.

  About an hour after Williams and his people had stationed themselves along the perimeter of the Carolwood property’s inside wall, La Toya Jackson and her boyfriend Jeffre Phillips showed up and demanded to be admitted to the house. Tohme had told him that “no one” was to be allowed onto the property or permitted to remove anything from it, Williams recalled, “but La Toya and her boyfriend said, ‘We’re family and we should have access to the house.’ And Ron Boyd gave them tacit permission.” Williams phoned Tohme, who was not pleased. “I knew Michael Jackson’s sister and her boyfriend were in the house taking everything they could,” Tohme Tohme said, “but I didn’t know what to do. It was up to the police.” Three hours after La Toya and Phillips were let into the house, Katherine Jackson arrived and went inside after them.

  It was mid-morning in London, where Grace Rwaramba was staying with Daphne Barak, when the nanny received a call from Mrs. Jackson. According to Rwaramba, Katherine began the conversation this way: “Grace, the children are crying. They are asking about you. They can’t believe that their father died. Grace, you remember Michael used to hide cash at the house? I’m here. Where can it be?” Rwaramba described Michael’s standard practice of hiding his cash in black plastic garbage bags tucked under the carpets of whatever house he was living in. “But can you believe it?” she asked Barak after hanging up. “This woman just lost her son a few hours ago and she is calling me to find out where the money is!” Talon employees said it was La Toya Jackson, though, along with her boyfriend, who loaded black plastic garbage bags filled with cash into duffel bags and placed them in the garage. La Toya would later insist that nearly all of Michael’s money was gone by the time she arrived at the Carolwood house. All she found, La Toya said, were a few wrappers from the bundles of cash that someone else had removed from the premises and a couple of twenty-dollar bills they had dropped on their way out.

  Ron Williams and his agents had remained outside the house, at La Toya’s insistence. It was impossible, Williams said, for anyone to know what Michael’s sister and her boyfriend were doing inside, or what Katherine Jackson was doing after she entered the Carolwood chateau. And he couldn’t account either, Williams added, for whatever had taken place inside the house in the nine and a half hours that had passed between the time that Michael Jackson was carried to an ambulance and when the Talon team had been permitted to secure the Carolwood property.

  It did not become absolutely obvious to Williams and his people that the Jacksons intended to remove whatever valuables were inside the house until the next morning, when Janet Jackson arrived at the front gate, explained that she had just flown in from out of town, and demanded that the gate be opened to admit the moving van that was following behind her. The van had just backed up to the doors of the garage when La Toya came out of the house and insisted that Williams and his agents move their perimeter to the outside of the walls, so that the family would have privacy.

  It was an awkward moment for Williams. He was in the employ of Tohme and AEG, both of whom had made it clear that they did not want anyone, including the Jackson family, on the property. Williams had supervised Secret Service details that protected four U.S. presidents, Queen Elizabeth, and Pope John Paul II, but he found it “pretty hard to tell the Jackson family, after their brother and son had died, to ‘Get your ass off this property.’” So he withdrew his agents to the outside of the walls and gave the Jacksons “unfettered access to the house.” A couple of hours later the moving van rolled back through the front gate with Jeffre Phillips at the wheel. Katherine Jackson and her daughters, though, made it clear they wouldn’t be leaving any time soon. “They camped out for most of a week,” Williams recalled, coming and going “whenever they felt like it.”

  Talon agents remained at the walls of the Carolwood property for three weeks, dealing mainly with “fan types and paparazzis” that attempted to climb the walls. They kept a log of everyone who entered or exited the front gate and never once saw Tohme Tohme. “The Jackson family let it be known that they didn’t want him around,” Williams recalled.

  For several days, it appeared that Michael Jackson had died intestate. In the absence of a will, his entire estate belonged to his children and would be placed into a court-administered trust until the three came of age. This, of course, meant that custody of the children would be the only way any adult could have access to Michael’s wealth. The Jacksons announced their claims on both Michael’s children and his fortune to the media assembled outside the Shrine Auditorium for the BET Awards ceremony on June 28. When CNN’s Don Lemon attempted to interview Joe Jackson for the first time after Michael’s death, a publicist was summoned to read a prepared statement saying that only Michael’s parents “have the personal and legal authority to act, and solely Katherine and I have authority for our son and his children.” Joe then gestured to his partner Marshall Thompson, former lead singer of the Chi-Lites, to tell the CNN reporter all about their new record company. The Los Angeles Times would describe the scene outside the Shrine Auditorium as one in which “camps began to form for what could be extended battles over Jackson’s children, his money, and his legacy.”

  Katherine Jackson initiated the process by filing petitions with Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Mitchell Beckloff to be granted temporary custody of Prince, Paris, and Blanket, and to be named as the administrator of her late son’s estate, so as to ensure that the children would be its beneficiaries. Judge Beckloff granted the temporary guardianship of the children, but scheduled a hearing for July 6, to rule on an estate petition that would give Katherine nearly absolute control of Michael Jackson’s rapidly growing fortune. Beckloff also agreed to determine at that same hearing whether to grant Mrs. Jackson permanent guardianship of the three children.

  A story in the next morning’s Los Angeles Times described Katherine’s court filing as “the first legal volley in what is anticipated to be a protracted battle over custody of the children and control of Michael Jackson’s estate,” then added that “some legal experts believe the pop star’s former wife, Debbie Rowe, is most likely to receive final custody of the two older children.” Katherine and her attorneys clearly felt that concern, describing Debbie’s whereabouts in their court petition as “unknown,” then adding that Prince and Paris “have no relationship with their biological mother.” In the space where they were to identify Blanket’s mother, Mrs. Jackson’s petition had answered “None.”

  At the same time the Jacksons closed ranks around Katherine Jackson’s bid to control both the children and their inheritance, the family began to signal that it was organizing to mount some sort of a wrongful death claim. In an interview with the ABC affiliate in Los Angeles, Joe Jackson advised the channel’s reporter that, “I’m suspecting foul play somewhere.” La Toya told two London newspapers that a “shadowy entourage” of manipulative handlers was responsible for “murdering” her brother. She complained to the Sunday Mail and the News of the Wo
rld that more than $1 million in cash and a valuable collection of jewelry had “somehow” disappeared from the Carolwood chateau, then implied that the “bad circle” around Michael was probably responsible for that, as well.

  The British newspapers and later People and Us magazines had translated La Toya’s remarks into an implicit accusation against the “Lebanese-born, self-appointed business manager” Tohme Tohme, noting her accusation that Tohme had abruptly “fired all the staff” at the Carolwood chateau on the evening of Michael’s death. “At 11 p.m. on the day he dies, all the staff are fired?” she said. “That raised my suspicions.”

  As Tohme knew, at 11 p.m on the day Michael Jackson died, La Toya and her boyfriend had arrived at the Carolwood house to begin searching it, a full hour after the staff had been excused by LAPD investigators. Tohme was less astonished by how brazen La Toya could be, though, than by the realization that he was being set up as the villain who had brought about Michael Jackson’s death. “I am in the media as a murder suspect!” Tohme recalled. “I am ‘the mysterious Dr. Tohme’! People are calling my kids to ask if I’m in jail.”

  Tohme voluntarily turned over the $5.2 million that had been left in the Lockbox account after the settlements with Sheikh Abdullah and Darren Julien, and was still vilified. “Nobody asked for it. Nobody even knows about that money,” he said. “I gave it to the estate because it is Michael’s money.” Dennis Hawk confirmed this claim. He had advised Tohme—not as his attorney, but as a friend, Hawk said—that he probably had a right to hold on to those millions, as an advance against the much greater sum he was owed in management fees. Tohme, though, insisted that it should be returned. “Whatever anybody says about Tohme, it was clear to me in that moment that all he wanted was to do the right thing,” Hawk recalled. “And he thought the right thing was to give back the money. I’m pretty sure nobody else involved with Michael would have done that.” Jeff Cannon, who had worked as Michael Jackson’s primary accountant during most of the last two years of his life, agreed with Hawk that Tohme’s conduct had been above reproach. Cannon, who had been brought aboard by Ron Burkle’s company well before Tohme arrived on the scene, said he had kept track of every dollar that came in or went out for more than twenty months and knew to a certainty that Tohme had been scrupulous about accounting for both the money spent and the money set aside. He was kept informed of what was in the Lockbox “to the penny,” Cannon said, and like Hawk was impressed that Tohme had turned over the entire $5.2 million, since he seemed to have every right to hold on to it.

  Yet only a couple of hours after Tohme delivered the $5.2 million, gossip items and blog posts began to appear that made Michael’s manager out to be a swindler who was caught trying to hide his client’s money, then surrendered the cash only because he was being threatened with legal action. “All I am trying to do is make sure everything is open and above- board,” he recalled, “and suddenly they are calling me a thief.”

  Sensing that this was the moment when his rival could at last be brushed aside, Frank Dileo had seized the opportunity to tell NBC’s Jeff Rossen that he had recognized Tohme as one of those “wrong people” in whom Jackson had invested his trust during recent years. “He controlled Michael’s life. He controlled everything . . . He kept his accounts. He deposited the money in the accounts. He signed the checks,” but Michael had eventually rebelled, Dileo added: “He said [Tohme] tried to tell him who he could see and when he could see them. He said he did not like that.”

  Tohme still fancied himself a tough guy who shrugged off punches. “I refused to talk to the media because I thought, ‘I know better. I know what I did for Michael,’” he explained. “And Michael had just died. I had just lost a beautiful friend. Me, my wife, and my children, we were all heartbroken. Michael loved my family, loved my kids, loved my wife. He loved us all and we loved him. My family didn’t want me to talk to anybody. So I tried not to pay attention. But it was overwhelming. The media was all over my house. I had to climb a fence into my neighbor’s yard to leave. Everybody was attacking me. Even people I thought were my friends stabbed me in the back. I couldn’t believe what was happening.” The climax of the drama for Tohme came a week after Michael’s death when he collapsed in the living room of his home and was transported by ambulance to Saint John’s Hospital in Santa Monica. Doctors at first thought he had suffered a heart attack but concluded it was simply an intense stress reaction. “After that I just withdrew into my family,” Tohme recalled. “I didn’t want to see anybody else. I didn’t want to talk to anybody else. I let them say whatever they wanted about me. I didn’t care. I was numb.”

  There were plenty of other people for the media to interview. So many were putting themselves forward as spokespersons for “the Jacksons” that TV reporters spun dizzily from one to the next, offering the microphone to just about anyone who beckoned for it. Jesse Jackson was at once vying and collaborating with Al Sharpton for some unspecified but not entirely imaginary position that appeared to involve a blend of spiritual direction and racial politics. As Leo Terrell would observe, Jesse Jackson had positioned himself more shrewdly this time around, making sure he was seen as standing by Katherine Jackson, while Sharpton let himself be publicly identified as Joe Jackson’s wingman. The two reverends were actually spending a good deal of time together in Los Angeles in the week after Michael’s death, and their public comments seemed to involve the development of insinuations directed at Conrad Murray, AEG, and Tohme Tohme on the one hand, and a repudiation of any custody claim that Debbie Rowe might make on the other. For Terrell, the most amusing moment of the media frenzy was one he observed from a table at the Ivy restaurant in Beverly Hills. “I saw Jackson and Sharpton walking out the front door as happy as can be, laughing and joking, and then the moment they saw the cameras pointed at them their faces fell and suddenly they were grieving. I mean, it was just that fast. What a pair of actors those two are. I laughed so hard I almost fell off my chair.”

  Ken Sunshine, the veteran PR consultant who had actually been retained as the official Jackson family spokesperson, told the Los Angeles Times he was stunned by all the people who were being identified on television as “an authority” on the clan’s inner workings. “Where are the standards of choosing somebody to go on camera?” Sunshine wondered. “The so-called experts, who the hell are these people?”

  No single moment so begged that question as the appearance of Leonard Rowe on an Atlanta television station that permitted him to tell the story of how he had been “hired in March by Michael Jackson to oversee his comeback tour in England.” When he “last saw” Michael, he sensed the star was in danger, Rowe told the Channel 2 Action News reporter: “I felt something like this was coming if there wasn’t an intervention. I felt something was coming and I hated it.” Rowe went on CNN’s Larry King Live, described himself Michael Jackson’s “manager,” then quoted from a statement that had Michael proclaiming, “I am very pleased that Leonard has accepted my offer to manage my business affairs during this important period in my career . . . Leonard Rowe has been a longtime friend and business associate whose judgment I have come to trust.” Given that Michael’s most recent communication with Rowe had been a letter reading, “This is to inform you that you do not represent me,” it was difficult not to be impressed by the man’s sheer gall. It wasn’t long before Rowe announced that he was working on his own Michael Jackson book, based on his “long relationship” with the star.

  In death, Michael Jackson was serving as the most encompassing tabula rasa in the history of celebrity worship. His passing had created a global community of mourning unlike anything the world had seen before or was likely to see again. “Car windows were open all over the city, and just about every station on the radio dial had switched to an all–Michael Jackson format,” wrote Kelefa Sanneh in the New Yorker. “For the first (and for all we know, the last) time, it felt as if absolutely everyone was listening to the same songs.” It was like that also in London and Sydney and B
erlin and Tokyo. There were Michael Jackson memorials being created in Bucharest and Baku. The mayor of Rio de Janeiro announced that the city would erect a statue of Jackson on the favela of Dona Marta. USA Today ran a photograph of Pakistani girls lighting candles at a King of Pop shrine in Hyderabad. Jesse Jackson addressed the fans assembled at a musical tribute to Michael being staged back in Gary, where the city’s mayor unveiled a seven-foot-tall memorial to him. On the Internet, views of Michael Jackson music videos had increased from an average of 216,000 per day to more than 10 million. ABC’s World News, the CBS Evening News, and NBC’s Nightly News devoted more than a third of their broadcast coverage for an entire week to Michael Jackson. Time was just one of more than a dozen U.S. magazines that produced commemorative editions featuring Jackson on the cover.

  The media’s obsession with Michael itself became both a story and a study in America’s self-contradictions. According to the Pew Research Center, more than two-thirds of people polled felt that the coverage of Jackson’s death had been excessive; at the same time 80 percent of them admitted being fascinated by it. The inevitable backlash forged strange alliances: Rush Limbaugh joined Al Sharpton in decrying the speculation about the cause of Michael Jackson’s death, while Fox News commentator Bill O’Reilly and Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez each objected to the hours that CNN was devoting to the story. The attraction of such opposites was in its own way compelling evidence of how utterly Michael transcended race, creed, and color.

  For most of his adult life, Michael had been described as “strange,” “weird,” and “bizarre.” Only now, after he was gone, did people realize that he was what they had in common.

  26

  The Jackson family celebration of Judge Beckloff’s ruling placing custody of the children and control of the estate into the hands of their matriarch lasted less than seventy-two hours. On the morning of July 1, 2009, a certified copy of a document titled “Last Will of Michael Joseph Jackson” was filed in Los Angeles Superior Court by two of the three executors named in the document, John Branca and John McClain, the latter a record company executive who had a long history with the Jackson clan. The signature on the will had been officially witnessed by McClain and Barry Siegel, the former Jackson accountant who was the third executor named in the document, as well as Trudy Green, who had been Michael’s manager at that time. A handwritten annotation stated that this had taken place in Los Angeles at 5 p.m. on July 7, 2002. According to Branca, who produced the document, Michael’s will had been sitting in the files of his law firm, Ziffren Brittenham, LLP, for the seven years since.