Untouchable

by Randall Sullivan

  The executors were also being forced to sort through scores of financial claims being made against the estate, Weitzman told the court. The executors were offsetting such payments, Weitzman explained, by pursuing millions of dollars in funds that had been “improperly lost” when various business partners took advantage of Michael Jackson’s drug addiction. Their work on all of this was complicated, the executors pleaded to the court, by the fact that Michael Jackson had neglected to pay taxes during the years 2006, 2007, and 2008, and made no quarterly payments in 2009.

  Even as the executors unwound Mr. Jackson’s debt and sorted through the myriad claims made against him and his legacy, Weitzman pointed out, Branca and McClain were negotiating deals that would yield hundreds of millions of dollars to the estate. At the same time, they were required to engage the dozens upon dozens of people who were attempting to profit from either real or imagined relationships with Michael Jackson. Christian Audigier insisted that he and Michael had collaborated on a collection of T-shirts, jackets, and sequined gloves that he was anxious to put into production, and produced assorted e-mails as documentation. At the same time, the estate was forced to involve itself in such sleazy situations as the one created by Eric Muhammad, a former member of Michael Jackson’s security detail who had been caught on videotape attempting to sell a surgical mask he said was worn by the entertainer the night before he died. “This is a very personal item,” Muhammad had told the businessman to whom he offered the mask at a price of $150,000. “This is the only way I could, you know, preserve it. This was his and you are more than welcome to DNA it. It still has his makeup on it. It still smells like him.”

  Dealing with all of that, and more, had forced the executors to keep a seven-days-a-week, fourteen-hours-a-day work schedule, Branca and McClain pleaded to Beckloff when they requested that the judge allow them to collect 70 percent of what they were owed, pending the court’s approval of the full amount. In addition, the two added, they needed more than $3 million to pay the assorted law firms who had handled matters for the estate that ranged from probate issues to extortionary demands.

  What Weitzman didn’t mention (along with the fact that his was one of the firms collecting those enormous legal fees) was that increasing the combined commission paid to the executors from 3 percent to 10 percent would potentially add tens of millions of dollars to their individual earnings—possibly hundreds of millions if they remained in charge for a decade or two. Weitzman defended the arrangement as one by which the executors had forfeited guaranteed compensation to gamble on their ability to make the estate profitable: “Basically, the coexecutors only get paid if they generate income for the beneficiary of the estate.”

  Branca and McClain achieved total victory when Judge Beckloff not only granted each of the requests they had made in their petition for extraordinary compensation as “special administrators” of the Michael Jackson estate, but also agreed that they should be paid immediately. He was making this decision in part, the judge noted, because Katherine Jackson had decided to abandon her efforts to supplant Branca and McClain, and now seemed anxious to work with them. Finally, they could all get on with things, the judge said.

  While he awaited a ruling on his allowance petition, Joe was trying to make ends meet promoting his record company whenever a microphone was placed in front of him. He had also been meeting in Las Vegas with Gary, Indiana, mayor Rudy Clay to discuss plans for the “Jackson Family Project,” a museum, hotel, and performing center complex that a spokesperson for the mayor conceded was still in “the proposal and concept stage.” Brian Oxman filed an appeal of Judge Beckloff’s ruling that Joe had no standing as a representative of Michael’s estate, but it was clear by early January that the attorney and his client had come to believe that cobbling together some sort of wrongful death claim was now their best shot at achieving both a big money award and a continuing presence on cable television.

  In late January 2010, Oxman filed a motion in Los Angeles Superior Court demanding that Michael Jackson’s medical records be turned over to his father, so as to ascertain the exact cause of death. The filing also complained that the Michael Jackson estate was refusing to file a case on Joe Jackson’s behalf, forcing Michael’s father to incur further expenses, which, Oxman argued, should be paid by the estate. Attorneys for the estate questioned Joe’s “intentions” by implying what everyone already knew for certain: If they found any basis for a wrongful death claim, Joe and his attorney were certain to make such a claim.

  The two were already moving in that direction by March 29, 2010, when Oxman began to outline the case he would be making against Dr. Conrad Murray, beginning with the claim that doctors at the UCLA Medical Center had briefly detected a heartbeat in Michael Jackson’s chest while trying to save him. This indicated that, if paramedics “had been called right away, chances are he could have been revived,” Oxman observed. Two days later, the attorney pledged that his client would file a lawsuit against Dr. Murray within the next ninety days. Describing what he knew about the variety and quantity of the drugs that had been injected into Michael Jackson’s bloodstream, Oxman told reporters that it was like playing Russian roulette with a revolver that had bullets in all of its chambers.

  Most observers assumed that Joe’s real aim was to somehow bind himself to Katherine and collect a piece of whatever came her way. Katherine and Joe would be reunited that spring when they were named, along with Jermaine, as codefendants in a court claim made by Reverend Sun Myung Moon’s Segye Times newspaper. Reverend Moon and his Unification Church had been waiting almost fifteen years for this opportunity. Back in the early 1990s, the Moonies had filed lawsuits that demanded the return of all the money and gifts they had doled out in their campaign to stage a concert tour of South Korea headlined by Michael Jackson. Michael himself had settled with the Segye Times back in 1992. Katherine and Joe, though, failed to show up when the case against them went to trial in 1994 and the Moonies had won a $4 million judgment against the couple. Two years later, in 1996, the Unification Church moved to take possession of the Hayvenhurst estate. Joe and Katherine transferred ownership of the estate to Michael and La Toya, then in 1999 listed the Moonies’ judgment against them as part of a $24 million bankruptcy filing. The property transfer to La Toya, though, had provided the basis for a fraud claim that exempted the Moonies’ judgment from discharge in bankruptcy court. The Reverend Moon’s attorneys let the claim lie dormant for years, but then pressed it vigorously in the late summer of 2009 when they learned that Katherine Jackson had, arguably, inherited 40 percent of the Michael Jackson estate. They wanted the full amount of the original judgment against the Jacksons, plus interest, the Moonies demanded in their 2010 Los Angeles court filing, which brought the total balance due to more than $13 million. In order to collect, they moved once again to foreclose on the Hayvenhurst property.

  Through Howard Weitzman, Branca offered a shaken Katherine Jackson a way to both separate herself from Joe and to insulate herself from the Moonies claim: The estate would agree to pay the $5 million mortgage on the Hayvenhurst mansion if ownership of the property was transferred to the estate. Katherine would be guaranteed the right to live at Hayvenhurst free of cost for the remainder of her natural life, and would be well taken care of without possessing any assets that could be attached by the Moonies.

  It was his bitterness about his sense that Katherine was being taken care of while he was cast aisde, sources close to the family said, that had prompted Joe to sit down with the News of the World in early June 2010 for a presumably paid interview in which he seemed to blame his estranged wife for their son’s death. When they had visited the mortuary where Michael’s body was being prepared for burial, they saw their son’s corpse lying on a table and Katherine broke down into sobs, Joe said, “but I didn’t give her a hug because I was mad at her for crying.” She could have saved Michael if she had listened during May 2009 when he told her their son was “looking kinda funny and frail,” Joe said. He asked
Katherine to spend some time with Michael and “keep him cheered up,” Joe went on, and the two of them argued after Katherine refused because she didn’t want to invade her son’s privacy. After Michael’s death, “I said, ‘This would never have happened if you had went and been with him.’”

  Adam Streisand replied on Katherine’s behalf by observing, “The world knows who Joe Jackson is, and he seems bent on never letting us forget it.”

  Joe Jackson’s lawsuit against Conrad Murray was filed by Brian Oxman on a date the two knew was certain to maximize media coverage—June 25, 2010, the one-year anniversary of Michael Jackson’s death. Sure enough, the court claim became the lead-in for any number of TV news stories about the events of the day, which had included the first real mingling of fans and Jackson family members at Michael’s grave site. The Jacksons had pulled their private security guard from the Sanctuary of Ascension back in February, six months after Michael’s interment, arranging for Forest Lawn security to monitor the crypt for as many as twelve hours out of every day. By early March, though, the memorial park’s management had decided that dedicating its manpower to the observation of a single burial spot was unreasonable and instructed its guards to patrol as usual. In early May, Lisa Marie Presley had visited Michael’s tomb and afterward expressed dismay at the empty space surrounding it, posting a plea on her MySpace page for fans to fill that space with sunflowers, Michael’s favorites. The owner of the sunflowerguy.com Web site was quick to seize the opportunity and delivered three hundred bushels of sunflowers in black vases. Lisa Marie had returned with her own bushel of sunflowers, in a purple frame inscribed with the words, “I will always love you.” Some of Michael’s fans brought flowers also, but just as many arrived at Holly Terrace with the Sharpies they used to inscribe the sarcophagus with various dedications. Security was out in force at the Great Mausoleum on June 25, to enforce strict rules on fan decorum that included no releasing of doves or balloons, and no sale of memorabilia.

  On September 15, 2010, Katherine Jackson and her attorneys filed their own eighteen-page wrongful death lawsuit, accusing AEG of being responsible for Michael Jackson’s death. Mrs. Jackson’s suit alleged that the company had failed in “multiple duties of reasonable care,” and named its causes of action as breach of contract, fraud, negligence, negligent infliction of emotional distress, and employer responsibility. Among the few indisputable passages in Mrs. Jackson’s court filing was a description of the deal between her son and AEG: The company would “put up the funds and production expenses” for the O2 concerts while Michael provided “the talent and fame to make the venture a success.” The claim grew murky, though, when Katherine’s attorneys alleged that AEG had advanced large sums of money to Michael Jackson (and provided him with the Carolwood chateau) because they knew that if the London production flopped, the company could seize Michael’s assets, including his stake in the Sony/ATV song catalog, to recover its losses. This was, the lawsuit contended, a way of forcing Michael to hold up his end of the deal despite serious health problems. AEG became upset when Michael missed “some rehearsals” in spring 2009, the lawsuit went on, and insisted that he separate himself from his “treating physician,” Arnold Klein, then hired Conrad Murray to take Klein’s place. “By injecting themselves between Michael Jackson and his treating physician, and telling Michael Jackson what to do medically,” Mrs. Jackson’s attorneys concluded, “AEG committed independent negligence against Jackson.” Specifically, AEG was accused of failing to provide “key lifesaving equipment” (a defibrillator) that should have been available to the physician attending to Michael Jackson in his home and of inadequately monitoring the cardiologist it had hired to take care of him.

  Michael himself was portrayed in his mother’s lawsuit as a helpless, hapless pawn of corporate malfeasance, one who was “confused, easily frightened, unable to remember, obsessive, and disoriented” in the weeks preceding his death. “He was cold and shivering during the summer rehearsals for his show, and as shown in photographs of him, he uncharacteristically wore heavy clothing during the rehearsals, while other dancers wore scant clothing and were perspiring from the heat,” according to the court filing. However, instead of cutting back on Michael’s rehearsal schedule, AEG had “insisted that he attend every rehearsal in a grueling schedule, threatening that if he missed even one more they would cancel the tour,” the lawsuit went on, all this so that the company “could reap staggering profits from the tour.”

  The “great trauma and emotional distress” that Michael Joseph Jackson Jr. had suffered by witnessing the injuries “caused by AEG” that led to his father’s death was cited as a basis for damages. Paris also had been present in her father’s bedroom as Conrad Murray attempted to revive Michael Jackson on the morning of June 25, 2009, but, curiously, her pain and suffering were not listed as a cause of action. No precise amount of money was claimed in Katherine Jackson’s lawsuit, but the demand for economic, noneconomic, and punitive damages meant that AEG could be on the hook for hundreds of millions of dollars if Michael’s mother’s claims were sustained at trial.

  “The purpose of this lawsuit is to prove to the world the truth about what happened to Michael Jackson, once and for all,” the attorney who had filed it on Katherine Jackson’s behalf, Brian J. Panish, said in a statement released to the press. Money might enter into it as well, of course, given that Panish was best known for having won the biggest personal injury and product liability award in United States history, $4.9 billion, in a lawsuit that found the General Motors Corporation guilty of selling Chevy Malibus with faulty fuel systems.

  AEG’s own attorneys denounced the lawsuit as “meritless.” Contrary to the description of Michael Jackson in his mother’s claim, AEG’s attorneys wrote in an answer filed with the court more than three months later, the entertainer “was not helpless or incompetent; he lived in his own home, negotiated his own contracts, engaged his own attorneys, and cared for his own family.” Jackson “controlled his own medical care and hired his own longtime personal physician,” the company’s papers stated. AEG “did not choose or hire Dr. Murray, it merely conducted negotiations aimed at retaining him as an independent contractor on the tour.” All AEG’s executives knew of Dr. Murray, aside from the fact that Michael had chosen him, the company’s attorneys argued, was that he was “a licensed physician with no history of malpractice.” Clearly it was unforeseeable that Dr. Murray would administer propofol in a personal residence “and that Michael Jackson would die as a result.” This lawsuit should be thrown out immediately, AEG’s attorneys argued, finally, because Katherine Jackson and her grandchildren “lack standing to bring these claims other than as wrongful death theories” and their action had been filed, in effect, on behalf of Michael Jackson himself. Another month passed before Judge Yvette Palazuelos denied AEG’s motion to dismiss, though she also ruled that Katherine Jackson’s attorneys would have to show actual evidence of fraud, negligent infliction of emotional distress, and civil conspiracy to prevail at trial: “If the object was to get him to rehearsals, I don’t see that as a wrongful or illegal act.”

  Among the many specters raised for AEG by the Katherine Jackson claim was that, if the case ever reached the point of determining damages, the company might have no choice but to argue that Michael Jackson was, as Joe Jackson so choicely observed, “worth more dead than alive.” Billboard estimated that Michael Jackson had generated $1 billion in income in the first year after his death, an amount that exceeded what all but a handful of artists produce in their entire careers. The Jackson estate had collected more than $250 million of those earnings, approximately five times what was taken in that same year by the most valuable estate in the history of the entertainment industry: Elvis Presley’s. The 31 million Michael Jackson albums sold worldwide in 2009 had far eclipsed that of any other recording artist, and the 8.3 million of those albums sold in the United States were nearly twice the number sold by the second best selling artist, Taylor Swift. Sony had paid t
he estate an advance of $60 million for the rights to the This Is It film, which grossed $261 million worldwide. The merchandising deal with Bravado and the dance game licensed through Ubisoft Entertainment had earned the estate a $26 million advance. The MiJac Music catalog had spun off payments of $25 million on the copyrights to Michael’s own compositions, due to radio play that had increased ten-fold after his death. Sony/ATV had paid the estate the $11 million due under its agreement with Michael, and John Branca was said to be negotiating a new deal that would pay twice that amount annually. The reissue of Michael’s autobiography Moonwalk, plus his piece of AEG’s commemorative ticket sales and other ancillary income, had added another $25 million to the coffers. No one knew how much the estate would earn from the two Michael Jackson–themed shows it had licensed to Cirque du Soleil, but $250 million was the guarantee on the contract that Branca eventually negotiated with Sony. The deal gave the company the right to distribute Michael’s recordings through 2017, along with ten Jackson albums that would be made up of unreleased material, remixes, and reissues of his classic albums, plus DVDs of Michael’s music videos. Not only was the Sony contract worth more than twice the $120 million that Madonna would earn from the “blockbuster” deal she had made with Live Nation, but the Jackson estate had retained control of the enormously valuable merchandising and “likeness” rights that Madonna was forced to surrender. And of course Michael would not be touring, as Madonna was required to do to earn her millions.