Untouchable

by Randall Sullivan

  In the months since their father’s death, it had become obvious that Prince, Paris, and Blanket were destined to live out their singularly strange childhoods as the objects of a never-ending soap opera written in tabloid headlines and lit by flash attachments. They would be envied and pitied, enabled and adored, and never left alone, except when they didn’t wish to be. And the people who wanted to protect them were the ones they really had to watch out for.

  At least their grandmother seemed sincerely committed to normalizing the lives of Michael’s children. The kids were allowed to spend their first Christmas without Daddy at the Cascios’ home in New Jersey. Katherine might not celebrate the holiday herself, but she wouldn’t keep Michael’s children from doing so. Six months later, on the first anniversary of her son’s death, Mrs. Jackson lamented that Prince, Paris, and Blanket “don’t have any friends,” during an interview with the Daily Mirror. “They don’t go to school, they have private lessons at home—but that will change in September.” True to her word, Katherine enrolled both Prince and Paris in the Buckley School for the fall term. Prince had been increasingly insistent upon getting the chance to mix with other kids. Paris, at first reluctant, became enthusiastic after a visit to the school. Blanket would continue to be homeschooled for a time, but perhaps in a year or two would join his brother and sister at Buckley, Katherine said.

  The lawyers running the estate would accuse Mrs. Jackson of exploiting her grandchildren later that autumn, though, when she and the other Jacksons made Prince and Paris the point persons in a family campaign against the first posthumous Michael Jackson album. Cobbled together from the bits and pieces of the “comeback album” he had been working on since his 2006 stay in Ireland, plus other cuts that went back decades, the new album, titled Michael, was under attack weeks before its Christmastime 2010 release. The loudest complaints had to do with three songs that had been recorded in the basement of the Cascio family’s New Jersey home. When “Breaking News” was previewed for fans during late October on michaeljackson.com, the Jacksons promptly objected that the voice featured on the track was not Michael’s, then offered his two oldest children as exhibits A and B. Prince had told them he was upstairs listening while his father recorded with Eddie Cascio, the Jacksons said, and the boy insisted that none of what he heard matched the tracks that Sony was including on the new album. Paris was said to be especially “adamant” that the voice singing lead on “Breaking News” was not her dad’s. Sony executives grumbled anonymously that the kids were being “manipulated” by Katherine Jackson. As was his practice, John Branca remained silent and out of sight, dispatching Howard Weitzman to tell reporters that the estate had hired forensic audiologists to verify the tracks recorded in the Cascio basement and that all of them agreed they heard Michael’s voice on “Breaking News” and the two other songs. Eddie Cascio himself sounded more hurt than angry when he insisted, “It is Michael’s voice. He recorded right there in my basement.”

  Randy Jackson, though, said that the first time he heard the Cascio tracks, “I knew it wasn’t [Michael’s] voice.” The objections of other Jackson family members were echoed by will.i.am, who called the release of the new album “disrespectful.” “Now that he is not part of the process, what are they doing?” he asked. “Why would you put out a record like that?” Quincy Jones’s argument was perhaps the most persuasive: Michael was too much of a perfectionist to have put out such a rough and unfinished record.

  Branca and the estate answered with a report stating that “six of Michael’s former producers and engineers, who had worked with Michael over the past thirty years—Bruce Swedien, Matt Forger, Stuart Brawley, Michael Prince, Dr. Freeze, and Teddy Riley—all confirmed that the vocal was definitely Michael.” Riley, the most credited of the several producers on the new album, protested that “without any proof” it was unfair to call the Cascio tracks frauds. “You can hear the authenticity in his voice, and you can hear the natural part of him,” Riley said.

  Sony shipped 900,000 units of the new album domestically when it went into stores during December 2010. Just 224,000 copies of Michael sold in its first week of release, placing it at #3 on the charts behind albums by Taylor Swift and Susan Boyle, and well behind the 363,000 copies of Invincible that had sold in the first week of that album’s 2001 release. The initial single released from the new album, Michael’s “Hold My Hand” duet with Akon, had peaked at #39 on the Billboard Hot 100. Radio and record company executives were in agreement that questions about the authenticity of the tracks on Michael were the main reason for such a disappointing commercial performance.

  The critics weren’t much kinder. “Breaking News,” the track from the new album that had gotten the most media attention, was dismissed as “self-referential rehash that spotlights all that was wrong with” Michael Jackson. In some ways, the saddest thing about Michael was that the two best cuts on the album, “Behind the Mask” and “Much Too Soon,” had been performed and produced back in the 1980s. “Behind the Mask” was especially excellent, a strangely psychedelic, lushly orchestrated R & B reworking of a track off the Yellow Magic Orchestra’s 1979 album Solid State Survivor for which Michael had written fresh lyrics, then sung them with a ferocity that he hadn’t matched since his Dangerous days. A number of critics noted how much the more recent cuts suffered by comparison.

  Sony was spared this suffering by strong international sales of the new album. Questions about the Cascio tracks hadn’t received the same sort of publicity overseas, where Michael Jackson continued to be more popular than he was in his native land. Michael had shipped platinum in thirteen countries outside the United States and gold in another seventeen, making its debut at #1 in Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and Sweden. First-week sales in the UK were the highest for any Michael Jackson album since Dangerous and in Japan it joined Bad, Thriller, and This Is It as the only Jackson albums to debut in the top three. The deal Sony had made with the estate might yet pay off, but only if the company got Michael’s kids and his mother in their corner. That looked less and less likely to happen.

  It was scarcely a surprise that conspiracy theories flourished in the aftermath of Michael Jackson’s demise. Sudden celebrity deaths from Elvis Presley’s to Tupac Shakur’s had generated stories of arcane plots and elaborate hoaxes, and this one would as well. The difference in Jackson’s case was that the decedent himself had long been convinced there was a conspiracy to destroy him. Even in the run-up to the “This Is It” shows, Michael refused to abandon his belief that Sony and a somewhat fluid cast of accomplices were behind the criminal charges that had been filed against him in Santa Barbara County, and that gaining full control of the Beatles catalog was the cabal’s motivation. “Michael Jackson was afraid for his life throughout the entire time I knew him,” Raymone Bain said. “Michael always thought that his property and his possessions—particularly his publishing—were going to be the cause of his death.”

  Sony execs Tommy Mottola and Marty Bandier were nearly always among those Michael accused of plotting against him, as well as his former manager Trudy Green and her boss Howard Kaufman, of HK Management. A paragraph in the Interfor report that claimed Al Malnik had been involved with John Branca in a scheme that used Mr. Jackson’s money was not substantiated by the slightest offer of evidence, but nevertheless had made Michael suspicious of the Florida attorney. The Nation of Islam fed that suspicion and also persuaded Michael to include Charles Koppelman and Brett Ratner among “the Jews” on his enemies list. Tom Sneddon was their partner and their pawn in the plot, as Michael and the NOI had it.

  A surprising number of people from outside the family—some of them substantial figures—had bought into the Sony conspiracy theory during recent years. Tom Mesereau believed “a case could be made” that the company assisted the prosecution in Santa Barbara County in order to gain greater control of the ATV catalog. Tohme Tohme declared himself “convinced there was a conspiracy against Michael—not necessarily to kill him, but to
weaken him, to make him cancel the shows and to use that to get control of the catalog.” Said an attorney who had dealt with Branca, Tohme, Frank Dileo, and Randy Phillips in connection to the AEG contract and the disposition of the Michael Jackson estate, and who had dealings as well with Leonard Rowe and the Jackson family, “Oh, there was a conspiracy certainly, but what kind of conspiracy, who was involved, and how they were involved is difficult to know.”

  Of course, the story that Michael was still alive became the one most welcomed by his legions of fans. It had arisen within twenty-four hours of the death pronouncement at UCLA, when a photograph of someone who was supposedly Michael climbing out of an ambulance in the parking garage of the Los Angeles County coroner’s office had appeared on cable television. Literally thousands of descriptions of how Michael had faked his death surfaced in the months afterward. “I get at least twenty e-mails a week from people who say Michael is not dead,” reported Uri Geller. “I’m not kidding you.”

  Michael was dead, though, and the one person in the world certain to answer for it continued to be Dr. Conrad Murray. As he prepared for a preliminary hearing that was scheduled to begin during the first week of 2011, Murray was left with just a few flickers of hope that he might escape from criminal liability. Among these was that Michael Jackson’s parents appeared to have recognized that they and the doctor shared certain common interests. Joe Jackson had actually written a letter asking Michael’s fans not to assault, verbally or physically, either Murray or his supporters during the doctor’s preliminary hearing. “By calling names, we are lowering ourselves to their level,” read the letter, which itself served as a sort of preamble to the complaint against AEG Joe lodged with the medical board of California one month later. Joe’s accusation in this filing was that AEG had practiced “unlawful corporate medicine.” He supported the charge by claiming that Conrad Murray had repeatedly asked for both a defibrillator and an attending nurse at the Carolwood chateau, and was denied by executives who refused to pay the cost. Court filings being made in Katherine Jackson’s wrongful death lawsuit indicated that the very same claims were going to be at the heart of her case against AEG. What this meant, among other things, was that Dr. Murray himself might be the plaintiffs’ most important witness. Murray indicated he was willing to play ball by encouraging unidentified “friends” to spread the word that he had retained copies of e-mails sent to AEG asking for both the resuscitation apparatus and a registered nurse, and that the doctor blamed Michael’s death on the company’s refusal to comply. “I could have saved Michael if I had the right equipment,” Murray was quoted as saying. “I have the paperwork to prove it.”

  As the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office prepared to present its case against Murray at his preliminary hearing, Michael’s siblings made comments suggesting a growing sympathy for the physician. “Dr. Murray’s the fall guy,” Jermaine Jackson told reporters after one court hearing. “This is bullshit!” It surprised no one when La Toya issued a statement that amplified her brothers’ remarks: “Michael was murdered, and although he died at the hands of Dr. Conrad Murray, I believe Dr. Murray was part of a much larger plan. There are other individuals involved, and I will not rest and I will continue to fight until all of the proper individuals are brought forth and justice is served.”

  The case took an even more unexpected twist when Murray’s attorneys filed court papers suggesting that Dr. Arnold Klein was at least partially responsible for Michael Jackson’s death. Klein “prescribed or may have overmedicated Michael Jackson, including to such point that AEG Live read Michael Jackson the proverbial ‘riot act’ to get him to stop subjecting himself to overmedication by Dr. Klein,” read the filing. Joe Jackson’s attorneys promptly demanded to know “why, given these allegations, Dr. Arnold Klein is not a required party to be added to accord proper relief.” For the first time since Michael Jackson’s death, Klein had declined to reply publicly to an allegation against him. Other people were talking, though. Michael’s longtime hairdresser Karen Faye told police investigators that Michael almost always “exhibited signs of drug use” after seeing Dr. Klein. According to Faye, she had noticed about a week before Michael’s death that he seemed more lucid and asked Frank Dileo if he knew why. “’Cause Klein is out of town,” had been Dileo’s reply, Faye said.

  The knowledge that he had become the target both of a state investigation and of Dr. Murray’s defense strategy did not prevent Klein from submitting claims against the Michael Jackson estate that demanded both $48,522.89 owed for cosmetic dermatology procedures performed on the entertainer in the last months of his life and the return of a $10,000 green Gianfranco Ferre jacket that he had loaned Michael back in the spring of 2009. Those who had read documents Klein had submitted in his demand for payment were asking the doctor some sharp questions. By his own tally, Klein had injected Michael Jackson with either Restylane or Botox at least three times a week during April 2009, a month when he had also injected Jackson with 2,475 milligrams of Demerol. The same records showed that Klein had injected Michael with another 1,400 milligrams of Demerol during a two-week period in May. A number of anonymous medical professionals were quoted as questioning whether the Botox and Restylane injections listed on the medical billings were nothing more than “cover” for the Demerol injections Jackson wanted. Klein insisted he had performed every one of the procedures he had billed for and defended the Demerol injections by explaining, “You have to understand, Michael Jackson was incredibly needle-phobic. I had to sedate him.”

  As questions persisted about his alleged “overmedication” of Michael Jackson, however, Klein grew increasingly mute, hunkered down with his attorneys, it was said, against the possibility that either the California attorney general’s office or the medical board of California might take action against him. Further complicating matters was that Conrad Murray’s accusations against Klein seemed to fly in the face of the claims in Katherine Jackson’s lawsuit that AEG had become responsible for the death of her son by replacing his upstanding “treating physician” Arnold Klein with the recklessly incompetent Dr. Murray. How it would all sort itself out was impossible to predict. The only surety was that the criminal case against Murray would be decided before any settlement of the civil claims against AEG.

  The prosecution case laid out by Deputy District Attorney David Walgren on January 4, 2011, the first day of Dr. Conrad Murray’s preliminary hearing in downtown Los Angeles, was a surprise to no one. Not only had Murray’s administration of the anesthesic propofol to Michael Jackson during the early hours of June 25, 2009, been an “extreme deviation from the standard of care,” Walgren told the court, but the doctor compounded matters by delaying his emergency phone call to 911 while he improperly performed CPR on his dying patient, then concealed the fact that he had injected propofol into Jackson’s bloodstream from both paramedics at the scene and doctors at the hospital.

  Kenny Ortega was summoned to the stand as the first prosecution witness, called mainly to describe how upset the doctor had been when the “This Is It” show director sent Michael home early from rehearsal on the evening of June 19, 2009. During a meeting the next day at the Carolwood chateau, Ortega recalled, Dr. Murray insisted that only he should make such decisions, and maintained that Michael was “physically and emotionally fine.” Murray’s attorney Ed Chernoff asked if Ortega had read Michael “the riot act” before sending him home on the evening of June 19, but Ortega (who had been named in the original filing as a defendant in Katherine Jackson’s lawsuit against AEG) denied it.

  Michael Amir Williams followed Ortega to the stand and told the court about Murray’s approaching him at the hospital to say he needed to get back to the house to retrieve tubes of skin-whitening cream in Michael’s room. The next witness was Faheem Muhammad, who testified that Dr. Murray had told him he wanted to leave the hospital because he was hungry and needed something to eat. Alberto Alvarez described once again being instructed by Murray to remove the IV bag filled wi
th some milky-white substance and of being ordered as well to load bottles filled with a similar milky-looking liquid into a medical bag before the paramedics arrived.

  The two EMTs who had been the first responders to arrive at the Carolwood chateau, Richard Senneff and Martin Blount, were especially damning witnesses. Senneff estimated that Michael Jackson must have been dead for at least twenty minutes before the first call to 911 was made. He and Blount agreed there was absolutely no chance of revival, Senneff remembered, and yet Dr. Murray insisted he felt a pulse and refused to pronounce Mr. Jackson dead. When he and the other paramedic asked if Mr. Jackson had been taking medications, Senneff recalled, the only one the doctor mentioned was Ativan; he never uttered a word about propofol and described his patient’s main problem as dehydration. Blount described Murray as soaked with perspiration when he first spoke to the paramedics and remembered the doctor insisting that he had waited only one minute after Michael Jackson stopped breathing to call 911. Blount echoed Senneff’s frustration at the doctor’s refusal to pronounce death.

  The doctors from UCLA, Richelle Cooper and Thao Nguyen, said that Dr. Murray refused to recognize that Mr. Jackson was dead even though they could find no signs of life when the body arrived at the hospital’s emergency room, and that he implored them to “try to save the patient.” The doctors also remembered that Murray had told them Michael was taking Ativan, but made no mention of propofol.

  Elissa Fleak, an investigator from the coroner’s office, testified that she found not only twelve bottles of propofol in the closet of Michael Jackson’s bedroom, but along with them a virtual pharmacy of other drugs, including lorazepam, diazepam, temazepam, trazodone, Flomax, clonazepam, tizanidine, hydrocodone, lidocaine, and Benoquin, as well as a quantity of syringes, needles, IV catheters, and vials, both opened and unopened. A pharmacist from Applied Pharmacy Services in Las Vegas followed with testimony that Dr. Murray had made six separate orders of Diprivan between April 6 and June 10 in 2009, for a total of 255 vials of the drug, and that he had all of it, as well as the benzodiazepine drugs he wanted, shipped to an apartment in Santa Monica.