Untouchable

by Randall Sullivan

  Brian Oxman, of whom Mesereau did not speak highly either, was facing perhaps even more serious consequences. In March 2011, the State Bar of California had recommended that Oxman be suspended from the practice of law for two years, with a third year of suspension stayed if Oxman attended and completed the State Bar’s ethics and client trust accounting schools. This latest action against Oxman had resulted from the attorney’s failure to pay sanctions related to a divorce case he had handled and a finding that Oxman, along with his wife and partner Maureen Jaroscak, had refused to surrender money from the trust account of a client who had died. The bar had also found that Oxman and Jaroscak commingled their personal funds with those of clients, used client trust accounts to hide money from creditors, and “lacked candor” when questioned about these and other matters by investigators. Oxman had won a temporary stay of his suspension by appealing to the State Supreme Court. It was a risky maneuver, but Oxman reasoned that at least he might continue his representation of Joe Jackson and join Joe in riding piggyback upon Katherine Jackson’s wrongful death action against AEG.

  What Joe’s lawyer apparently failed to recognize was that the State Bar could not only choose to sustain its recommended punishment, but to impose an even more severe sanction. And that the bar would do, arriving at a decision in the early summer of 2012 that Oxman would be permanently disbarred, effective on July 27.

  It was a particularly painful moment to have been jettisoned from the wrongful death case. For months, various people, including attorneys from the estate, had been attempting to convince Katherine Jackson that continuing with the lawsuit against AEG was a futile endeavor. The problem wasn’t that they didn’t think she could prevail in court, those who had Katherine’s ear told her, it was that they didn’t believe she would be collecting much in the way of damages. Joe’s throwaway line about Michael being “worth more dead than alive” had been borne out by earnings that continued to far exceed what he had been making in the last years of his life. The entire “loss of support” aspect of the claim against AEG was, as a result, looking like a weak one. But the appearance at Conrad Murray’s trial of that June 19, 2009, e-mail to Randy Phillips in which Kenny Ortega had described the star’s pitiful condition and urged the company to “get him the help he needs” had changed the minds of a number of people about how strong the claim against AEG might be. In the months after the trial, the discovery of the Ortega e-mail had been followed by other, less public revelations of what Katherine Jackson’s attorneys believed a jury would see as bullying, threats, and callousness on AEG’s part in its dealings with Michael Jackson. Brian Panish and his partner, Kevin Boyle, were looking more and more likely to take the case all the way to trial and to have a shot at a gigantic judgment.

  The result was a heightening of tensions between the Jackson camp and the estate. Branca and his cohorts wanted the lawsuit against AEG to go away so that they could join forces with the company in compelling Lloyd’s of London to pay off on the $17.5 million “This Is It” insurance policy. In early 2011, Lloyd’s had asked the court in Los Angeles to declare it null and void, claiming that Michael Jackson had lied about his medical history and drug addiction. The company had insured only “losses resulting from accident,” Lloyd’s’ lawyers argued, and the official cause of Mr. Jackson’s death was “homicide.” The estate’s August cross-complaint argued that the policy remained in effect because Michael Jackson never intended to die; suicide would have nullified the policy, but homicide did not. For good measure, the estate’s attorneys had added a demand for punitive damages, which was certain to send a chill through Lloyd’s’ London offices. An arrangement whereby Katherine Jackson and her grandchildren would receive some sort of significant compensation from the estate for dropping the AEG lawsuit had been in the works, according to Mrs. Jackson’s advisors, but now was rapidly falling apart.

  This was in part because several of Katherine’s children had heard from Howard Mann about the tape recording he possessed of a telephone conversation between Joel Katz, Henry Vaccaro, and Vaccaro’s attorney in which Katz and the other attorney at one point could be heard chuckling about the fact that Joe and the rest of the Jacksons would get nothing when Katherine died. In the minds of the Jacksons, this confirmed their suspicion that the estate intended to delay the funding of the Family Trust in the hope that their eighty-two-year-old mother would die before collecting her forty percent of the estate.

  Perry Sanders, by then, was hearing regularly from his client and her advisors that Michael’s siblings were unhappy that he wasn’t moving against the estate, and against Branca in particular. Sanders actually was increasingly impatient with Branca and his lawyers, more inclined by the week to suspect that they were in fact stalling, and for exactly the reasons that Katherine’s children claimed.

  Just six months earlier, Sanders had been assuring Mrs. Jackson and her advisors that settling with the Internal Revenue Service and dealing with Tohme Tohme’s claims were the only two remaining major obstacles to a final settlement of the estate and a funding of the Family Trust. The largest problem previously had been the Segye Times judgment against Katherine Jackson, but in the late summer of 2011 Sanders himself had negotiated a settlement with the Moonies that involved a payment of $6 million, less than half of what the Segye Times’s attorneys had been demanding. Branca and the estate were persuaded to advance that money in the form of a loan that Mrs. Jackson was obligated to pay within one year. In its negotiations with Sanders, the estate had agreed to charge an absurdly low rate of interest on that loan, .16%, to be exact. It was assumed that Mrs. Jackson would be able to pay back the $6 million from her half-share of the $30 million that the estate described as a “preliminary distribution” to the Family Trust. That money could not be released, however, Branca and Weitzman had told Sanders, until the estate had settled with the IRS.

  When the Conrad Murray trial began in September 2011, Katherine Jackson and John Branca had seemed to still be members of the same team. Mrs. Jackson and her grandchildren, Prince and Paris, had flown to Montreal at the estate’s request for the October 2 world premiere of the Cirque du Soleil’s Michael Jackson THE IMMORTAL World Tour, afterward telling television cameras how “fantastic” and “amazing” the show had been. Sanders, meanwhile, was praising Branca at every opportunity. Whatever deal had been cut seemed to be satisfying everyone involved. That deal had been an oral one only, though; nothing had been committed to paper. Like the Jackson children, Sanders had watched with displeasure as Branca and Weitzman appeared to do nothing to discourage the story that they had paid $30 million to his client and her grandchildren, all the while holding the money back until the IRS situation and “other outstanding issues” were resolved. Also, like his client’s children, Sanders had been startled when Branca and Weitzman agreed to be interviewed by Piers Morgan on CNN and told the TV host that Michael’s stake in the Sony/ATV catalog alone was worth more than a billion dollars, an amount that did not even include the MiJac catalog and other music publishing properties. When Morgan observed that Jackson’s “publishing rights alone, by the sound of it, were worth several billion dollars” at the time of his death, Branca did not disagree and neither did Weitzman, who was seated beside him. The clamor among Katherine’s children that Sanders find some way to collect their mother’s share of the estate grew louder and more threatening.

  By the spring of 2012, Sanders’s conversations with Weitzman were no longer friendly ones, and he was once again meeting with Paul LiCalsi to outline the case that could be made against Branca and McClain, insisting to Mrs. Jackson’s advisors that it was far stronger than their questions about the will. Nothing alienated affections between the Katherine Jackson side and the estate side, though, like Sanders’s decision in the late spring of 2012 to join Brian Panish and his law firm in prosecuting the wrongful death lawsuit against AEG. Branca and Weitzman were shrewd enough to recognize that Sanders could and would use that position to conduct discovery of their dealin
gs on behalf of the estate without having to file a lawsuit against them. He already had found evidence of what he believed to be a conflict of interest involving AEG, Sanders told his client, and was looking for proof of actual collusion, along with an accounting of just how much Branca and McClain, along with Weitzman and the other lawyers, had collected from the estate since Michael’s death.

  Sanders still generally gave Branca credit for taking care of business. Katherine’s lawyer would admit to being most impressed that Branca had negotiated a deal to reduce the interest on Michael’s debt by more than three-fourths, from seventeen percent to less than four. The estate’s special administrator had negotiated a deal with Pepsi that was richer even than the ones he’d made on Michael Jackson’s behalf in the 1980s. The soft drink manufacturer was licensed to use the star’s image on special souvenir cans of Pepsi and in a campaign that would coincide with the re-release of Bad, it was reported, even“resurrecting” him in a TV commercial. The estate’s attorneys, meanwhile, were dealing with everything from settling Ola Ray’s claim against royalties from the “Thriller” video, to the handwritten lawsuit a woman named Kimberly Griggs had filed in San Diego that demanded $1 billion for inspiring Michael to write songs for Thriller, Bad, and Dangerous, in the course of a years-long “romance.”

  Neither Sanders nor his client was happy, though, when it was reported that the estate had obtained permission from Judge Beckloff to sell Hayvenhurst. After checking in with Weitzman, Sanders was telling TMZ that “the motion to sell Hayvenhurst was withdrawn and this is merely for permission to buy a different place”—the Calabasas estate—“for the beneficiaries to reside.” The estate in fact had retained the right to sell Hayvenhurst, however, and was in the eyes of the Jackson family once again demonstrating to Michael’s mother who wielded the real power.

  Still, there was little obvious basis for arguing with the claim that Branca had, as promised to Judge Beckloff nearly three years earlier, “maximized” the value of the Michael Jackson estate. Documents filed with Judge Beckloff showed that the estate had generated gross earnings in excess of $475 million through May 2012 and that nearly all of Michael’s debts had been paid off. What Michael’s brothers and sisters wanted to know, though, was how much of that money Branca and McClain and their attorneys were putting in their own pockets. Sanders’s associate Sandra Ribera would tell the Jacksons that the first accounting provided to the court back in November 2010 showed that Branca and McClain had paid themselves $9 million apiece in a seven-month period, and that another $13.6 million had gone to attorneys who included Katz, Weitzman, and Branca’s own law firm. Sanders said the accounting statements weren’t entirely as clear as that, but also told his client and her advisors that Branca and McClain might have made even more than Ribera was saying. Without a truly exhaustive audit, Sanders admitted, it would be impossible to say with certainty what Branca, McClain, Weitzman, Katz, and the rest were collecting.

  Katherine’s children, Randy and Janet in particular, were insisting that they wanted more than an audit—they wanted Branca taken down. Randy had never ceased scheming and plotting with his father how to seize control of the estate, and Janet was becoming increasingly stressed by her role as the Jacksons’ new Michael. Though her wealth was still in the tens of millions, Janet had grown increasingly frugal—even stingy some of her siblings thought—in the aftermath of her 2000 divorce; ex-husband Rene Elizondo had walked away with $15 million, a five-bedroom beach house in Malibu, and a piece of his ex-wife’s song royalties. The family had gotten a good look at the new Janet in July 2003 when they were preparing to celebrate their patriarch’s eighty-fourth birthday with what they had decided to call “Joe Jackson Day” (an event Michael allowed to take place at Neverland, even though he skipped it). The family had decided to present Joe with a fishing boat and a trailer—“nothing big, maybe a fifty-thousand dollar purchase,” recalled one of Michael’s associates who was involved in planning the event. Janet, though, refused to put up her share of the money to pay for the boat until Michael had coughed up his share. And in the summer of 2009, Katherine Jackson had complained to confidants that Janet’s demands to be repaid the $49,000 deposit that she had paid to secure the burial spot at Forest Lawn, which was reserved in Janet’s name, had caused the initial postponement of Michael’s funeral. Katherine had been so frustrated that she asked Marc Schaffel to help her obtain a credit card with a high enough limit to pay Forest Lawn herself. (Through her attorney, Janet Jackson denied this story.) Almost three years later, Janet was increasingly put out by the carousel of brothers, sisters, nieces, and nephews coming to her for handouts. She wanted them to have their own money.

  Randy, though, remained the driving force of the campaign to unseat Branca and was loudly complaining that Perry Sanders should be fired if he wasn’t going to take action. The atmosphere enveloping the Calabasas estate that had replaced Hayvenhurst as Jackson Family Central was increasingly murky approaching the third anniversary of the death of its brightest star.

  Michael might have found comfort in the knowledge that the inheritors of his estate all seemed to be coming into their own. His mother Katherine, her attorneys and advisors said, was increasingly sure of her own mind and less vulnerable to being swayed by Joe. She wouldn’t hear a bad word about any of her children, even the one she knew was bent on making trouble, Randy, but Mrs. Jackson nevertheless refused to yield to her youngest son’s unceasing demands that she hire new lawyers who would go after Branca. The relationship between Michael’s mother and his children was “a moving thing to see, very deep and loving,” Katherine’s attorney Sandra Ribera said, and the two oldest, the teenagers, actually seemed to enjoy spending time around a grandmother who was almost seventy years their senior.

  Prince was still a quiet boy, but he was making the force of his personality felt. On the trip to Montreal for the premiere of the Cirque du Soleil shows, he had confronted Sanders with the complaints he was hearing from some of his aunts and uncles, speaking so forcefully that other people on the trip said the usually unflappable Sanders was struggling to find words “and looked actually intimidated” as one of Mrs. Jackson’s advisors described it. Only a little more than a week before, Prince had traveled to Germany with Katherine’s advisor Lowell Henry and a camera crew dispatched by Mrs. Jackson’s business partner Howard Mann for the “Tribute to Bambi” charity event at The Station in Berlin, where he was to present the handwritten lyrics of “Billie Jean,” “Bad,” and “Smooth Criminal” for an auction to raise money for seriously ill children. Dieter Wiesner had accompanied the traveling party to the event, and even when Henry and the others began to believe that Wiesner had set the whole thing up as a form of self-promotion, Prince had continued to conduct himself with impressive grace. Dressed in a black suit, red shirt, black tie, and red armband—the same ensemble Michael had worn when he collected the Bambi Award in 2002—he told the crowd he intended to “try to build on what my father did. I want to try to help and change things, just like he did.”

  Paris was growing up to be a beauty, every bit as self-assured as her older brother, and a good deal more gregarious. Shortly before Christmas in 2011, Paris had appeared on the Ellen DeGeneres show to talk about her first acting role in a film, Lundon’s Bridge and the Three Keys, admitting that she had lobbied hard to convince her grandmother to let her be in the movie. When she was asked about wearing a mask as a child, the girl admitted that she had chafed against it: “I’m like, ‘This is stupid. Why am I wearing a mask?’ But I kind of realized the older I got, like, he only tried to protect us. And he’d explain that to us, too.” What she liked best about school was being treated like everyone else, Paris had explained to DeGeneres: “When I came to Buckley, they didn’t know who I was. I was like, ‘Yes! I have a chance to be normal.’”

  In the run-up to the third anniversary of Michael’s death, Paris was being asked regularly about the objections of her Aunt Janet to her niece’s insistence on seeking work in
movies. “We’ve spoken about the fact that you’re only a child once,” Janet had told the magazine Prevention. “I think there’s a time for everything, and now is not the time [to act in films].” Paris had stood strong in letting Janet know she could think for herself, people at the Calabasas house said, and Janet hadn’t seemed to like it much. Two weeks before the anniversary of her father’s death, Paris had appeared on Oprah Winfrey’s new show to confess that a number of her fellow students at Buckley weren’t too happy about having Michael Jackson’s two oldest children among them, once they realized who the new kids were. Was she picked on by the other kids? Winfrey asked. “They try, but it doesn’t always work at school,” Paris had answered. “And some people try to cyberbully me. They try to get to me with words, but that doesn’t really work.” She remained wary of making new friends, the girl admitted: “If I feel someone is being fake to me, I will just push away.”

  While the two older children seemed to embrace the public nature of their lives, the youngest, Blanket, continued to be home-schooled, sheltered by his grandmother from a world of prying eyes he wasn’t prepared to face. No one at the Calabasas house wanted the now ten-year-old boy to know that in April his father’s former bodyguard Matt Fiddes had told tabloid reporters he was Blanket’s father and intended to try to prove it in court in order to obtain visitation rights. “More than anything,” Fiddes said, he wanted the boy to meet his biological mother, who was at the moment battling cancer. This wasn’t about money, Fiddes insisted: “I’m a self-made man. I don’t want or need their cash.” The Jacksons weren’t buying it.