Michael Jackson, Inc.
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“He clearly thought the catalogue made him a target,” says Mesereau. “That various interests wanted his catalogue and would do anything to see him destroyed to get his catalogue, would want to see him in prison so he couldn’t fend off lawsuits.”
Jackson got up every morning at around four o’clock to get dressed and groomed before making the thirty-five-mile journey from Neverland to the courthouse. Rather than insist that Jackson don a Brooks Brothers suit and a tie, Mesereau told Jackson to wear whatever he pleased—to be himself. On Cinco de Mayo, for example, he wore a red, white, and green vest.
As the trial wore on, the prosecution tried to bolster its case by calling witnesses who claimed to have seen Jackson fondling other boys at Neverland. But when former Neverland employee Philip LeMarque testified that he’d seen Jackson grope Macaulay Culkin, he admitted upon further questioning from Mesereau that he’d investigated the possibility of selling the story to the tabloids—and was told he could get $100,000 if Jackson’s hand was outside of Culkin’s shorts, but $500,000 if it was inside.36 Later on in the trial, Culkin took the stand and vehemently denied that Jackson had ever behaved inappropriately around him, calling the allegations of abuse “absolutely ridiculous.”37
Chris Tucker and Jay Leno also showed up as witnesses for the defense. Mesereau remembers being impressed that both, as well as Culkin, made the trek to Santa Maria. He figured their agents, managers, and lawyers would advise them against testifying for the same reason his own friends had discouraged him from defending Jackson—“he’s going down, he’s going to prison, you’re going to be ruined”—but their attitude, he says, was simple: “Michael needs us, we’re there.”38
A new picture of the Arvizos began to emerge. Both Leno and Tucker revealed that the family had contacted them numerous times through various charitable organizations; Leno noted that the child’s remarks had seemed “scripted,” while Tucker admitted to wiring the family $1,500 after they’d hounded him for a donation.39
Gavin’s mother didn’t do herself any favors. After revealing that she and her husband had been arrested in 2001 after Gavin stole merchandise from a J. C. Penney,40 she admitted that she may have lied under oath in a civil suit in which she alleged she’d been assaulted in a public parking lot by the store’s security guards (J. C. Penney had settled for upwards of $150,000).41 It also emerged that she’d once said Jackson “helped cure her son from cancer,” marveling at “what a beautiful friendship they have.”42
Aside from the Arvizos, one of the prosecution’s most prized witnesses was Debbie Rowe, who’d been working with the police. When she got up on the stand and anxiously looked over at Jackson, he turned to Mesereau, worried that the lawyer was about to demolish his ex-wife.
“I said, ‘Michael, don’t worry,’ ” recalls Mesereau. “He knew I knew what I was doing. I didn’t use one binder. She was on our side, she was telling the truth; she was clearly sympathetic to him. She turned into one of our best witnesses. . . . She mentioned how people were taking advantage of him and what a good father he was.”43
Some suspected Jackson was still relying heavily on painkillers. Randy Jackson would later explain that his brother was “an addict” who deflected half a dozen family interventions and nearly overdosed in 2005.44 Mesereau says the singer was “always lucid, always delightfully nice to deal with,” but that on verdict day, he looked “terrible.”
Terrible, that is, until the jury read its decision: not guilty on all fourteen counts. Outside the courtroom, as the news began to reach the hordes of reporters and camera crews gathered outside, a group of Jackson’s fans released a single white dove for each charge cleared.45
* * *
Jackson returned to Neverland with his family and a group of well-wishers who included his defense team.
“He just said, ‘Thank you, thanks, thank you, thank you,’ ” Mesereau recalls. “He looked so old . . . not in a celebratory mood, not in an exuberant mood, just in a relieved, grateful, quiet kind of state.”46
He and Yu stayed for a few hours, watching as Jackson met with some of the paralegals who’d worked day and night on the case for much of the past year. The singer hugged each one of them and thanked them for helping him and his children.
Before he departed, Mesereau offered Jackson one last piece of advice: leave Neverland for good. The local authorities had been humiliated, he warned, and they would soon be looking for another shot at him.
“Some child will wander through the fence,” Mesereau told Jackson. “And they’ll trump up some other phony case. . . . You’ve got to leave Santa Barbara County.”
Chapter 15
* * *
THE PRODIGAL KING
After his acquittal in June 2005, Jackson searched desperately for an escape from the public eye—and found one in the Persian Gulf kingdom of Bahrain. He, his children, and their nanny, Grace Rwaramba, arrived as guests of Sheikh Abdullah, son of the country’s king. Soon, Jackson and Abdullah were cooking up plans to start a music company called Two Seas Records together.
The sheikh gave Jackson the royal treatment, providing the singer with a grand home, land to build an even grander one, and three cars: a Bentley, a Maybach, and a Rolls-Royce.1 That summer, Jackson seemed to be enjoying his new life; in August 2005, he was spotted in Dubai with Emirati racing star Mohammed Bin Sulayem;2 by January, he’d reportedly agreed to advise a Bahraini company on creating amusement parks and music schools in the region.3
But the executive ranks of Michael Jackson, Inc. remained on shaky ground. It appeared that Jackson’s former publicist, Raymone Bain, had been brought back to serve as his business manager. This despite the fact that she’d never managed a musician; her closest experience seemed to be suing boxing client “Marvelous” Marvin Hagler for $9.9 million over breach of contract and settling in 1990.4 Even so, Jackson seemed enamored.
“I was impressed by her professionalism, her strategic thinking, and honesty,” Jackson wrote to the Washington Post in a 2006 email, which—as the publication noted—sounded like a press release from Raymone Bain.5
Tom Mesereau discovered Bain had returned to Jackson’s camp while working with his partner, Susan Yu, to help the singer tie up loose ends in the US (it was Bain who kept saying their check for the additional work was in the mail). Apparently, she and Jesse Jackson told the King of Pop they’d been humiliated by their lack of inclusion in the events surrounding his 2005 trial, and the reverend asked the singer to rehire her. Why it had to be as manager remains, like much of Jackson’s life during his later years, a mystery.
Despite Jackson’s fondness for Mesereau and Yu, the checks promised by Bain never arrived, and they reluctantly terminated their working relationship with the singer (a six-figure claim filed after his death was promptly paid by his estate).6
Bain later found herself on the other end of a payment dispute with Jackson and sued him for $44 million in unpaid fees in 2009; her claim was eventually rejected.7
* * *
While in Bahrain, Jackson was pulled into another international legal dispute. This time, it was a civil proceeding that stemmed from unpaid bills for an effort to refinance his ballooning debt a year earlier.
During his child molestation trial, he’d been hemorrhaging cash and wasn’t bringing it in at anywhere near his peak rate. To finance his lifestyle, he had continued to borrow against his stake in the Sony/ATV catalogue, and he found himself needing to pay off a bloated $270 million Bank of America loan by the end of 2005 or risk losing his collateral.8
As he searched for a solution, a dizzying series of events unfolded: his brother Randy introduced him to California-based accountant Donald Stabler, who then brought in a financial company called Prescient Acquisition, which in turn brought Jackson to Fortress Investment Group, a private equity firm that specializes in distressed debt. The latter initially agreed to put up as much as $573 million, with the intention of actually buying Sony’s share of the joint venture for itself and len
ding Jackson enough to pay off the debts on his half, after which he’d be left with additional millions to ease his liquidity crisis.
Around the same time, Jackson also turned to billionaire Ron Burkle for advice. The two had known each other since the late 1980s, when Burkle had flown thirty terminally ill children to Neverland via helicopter as part of a charitable event. They reconnected after bumping into each other at Johnnie Cochran’s funeral in 2005; one of the first things Burkle noticed was that Jackson was crying.9
“I didn’t know you were that close to Johnnie,” he said.
“No, I’m in trouble,” the singer replied.
“What kind of trouble are you in?”
“I’m just in big trouble. They’re turning off the lights at Neverland.”
Jackson met with Burkle afterward to discuss his financial situation, laying out the details as he understood them. The billionaire—who’d made his fortune buying and selling supermarket chains before investing in Spotify, SoundCloud, and Airbnb—listened closely and quickly realized Jackson’s predicament.
“You’re actually a really wealthy guy,” he said. “But you can’t pay for lunch.”
“Will you help me?” said Jackson.
“Sure, I’ll put you on the same plan that I’m on. My office will pay all your bills. But I don’t want anything to do with any of your money. You sign all your checks.”
Burkle lent Jackson a few hundred thousand dollars and told the singer not to let his brother or Stabler make him sign anything. When a dejected Jackson floated the idea of selling his half of Sony/ATV to Burkle, the mogul told him to keep it for his kids. Eventually, Jackson wrote a letter giving Burkle’s company sole authority to make deals on his behalf. Burkle didn’t charge Jackson for the assistance.10
Ultimately, Sony declined to sell its half of the catalogue, perhaps thinking it still had a chance of getting Jackson’s half. Fortress ended up buying the Bank of America note, an outcome that seemingly had little to do with Prescient’s involvement. The consequences of the convoluted series of events meant Jackson had effectively borrowed $330 million from Fortress, enabling him to pay off his Bank of America loan and postpone judgment day on his publishing assets.
But Stabler had promised Prescient a 9 percent finder’s fee ($48 million) for setting up the Fortress deal, and the company argued that Jackson was still on the hook. The sum was a large one under any circumstance, especially for something as simple as an introduction to Fortress, a well-known (and sharp-elbowed) company in its sector.11
Before Jackson left for the Middle East, he and Burkle met with Prescient’s legal team, which included veteran entertainment attorney Donald David (who has handled the postmortem interests of rapper Tupac Shakur). Burkle posited that Prescient had no case, and that Jackson hadn’t authorized the agreement in question—a claim David disputed.
Throughout the meeting, it seemed there were two different Michael Jacksons inhabiting the same body. At some points, he fidgeted so much that he could barely stay in his seat. At others, he would slump down and gaze off into the distance. Says David: “It was like, even though it involved him, and it involved tens of millions of dollars, it was not something that was of immediate importance to him.”12
Burkle and Jackson made an offer to settle for a price between $500,000 and $1 million, which Prescient rejected, deciding to take the matter to court.13 By this point, however, Jackson had left for Bahrain, ditching Burkle’s personal finance regimen in the process. “He just needed someone there to tell him no, and there wasn’t anybody there to tell him no,” the billionaire says. “And if you told him no, he handled it pretty well. But as soon as someone told him yes, he was gone.”14
Once ensconced in Bahrain, Jackson returned to his free-spending ways. Instead of heading back to the US to give his deposition, he elected to fly his own legal team and the legal team of his foes to France, first class. He put all six of them up at the Hotel Plaza Athénée in Paris and had them driven in Mercedes limousines to a Westin hotel in Versailles for the proceedings. The total cost: $116,000.15
A decade earlier, that sum would have been a drop in the proverbial bucket. Jackson hadn’t released a new studio album since 2001 and hadn’t toured since 1997, yet he was still spending like it was 1988. According to an accountant who’d seen Jackson’s budget about five years earlier, the singer’s expenses totaled at least $20 million per year—including $5 million on security and maintenance for Neverland, $5 million on legal and professional fees, $7.5 million in personal expenses, and $2.5 million in miscellaneous costs. On top of that, he was paying $11 million a year in interest on his massive loans.16
Once in France for the deposition, Jackson’s demeanor swung wildly from polite to glib, deeply knowledgeable to completely ignorant. At one point, he burst out laughing and called the entire case “ridiculous,” then excused himself to go to the bathroom. He seemed flippant again when David asked him why he’d appointed Sheikh Abdullah to the board of a company that collected his publishing royalties.
“Who’s asking?”17
“Me,” countered David.
“Are you really?”
“Yes, I’m really asking because my client is really suing you for $48 million based on the agreement that I showed you.”
“Oh, I know that. Interesting.”
At other times, Jackson carefully evaded questions, using phrases like “I can’t recall right now,” “I couldn’t precisely tell you,” and “It’s a bit foggy.” Yet on occasion, he’d slip from the script and give a reasonably lucid explanation of a complex business topic. When asked to explain his publishing companies, for example, he said:
“They collect the royalties from BMI or ASCAP on the songs that are played on radio or TV or film, and the publishing company pretty much administers through mechanical royalties the songs. They pretty much distribute them to the public and collect the royalty. And it’s a huge catalogue—so, that would entail a lot of work and a lot of people and a lot of trust—one of the biggest in the world. My songs were Mijac, my personal ones, separate company. And I have the Beatles and Elvis, and all the other artists from Sony are in Sony/ATV.”
David also noticed that Jackson’s voice would sometimes change from its usual high, soft register to a “normal adult male voice.” Regardless of the singer’s unpredictable behavior inside the courtroom and out, it seemed clear that this wasn’t a simple case of an entertainer blithely frittering away a fortune, but something much more complex.
“He understood what he was doing in terms of his financial arrangements,” says the attorney. “He may have made some bad financial decisions, but he clearly understood the consequences.”18
As the proceedings unfolded, Jackson reluctantly revealed more and more about the state of his empire. He did at times seem to have a tenuous grasp on the identities and roles of those involved in his business, but his evasive manner at the deposition made it difficult to distinguish feigned unawareness from the real thing.
Asked about unofficial advisor Gaynell Lenoir, he said, “I’m not sure exactly what she was doing, but she was definitely around.” When it came to explaining Randy Jackson’s role in his business affairs, Michael’s caginess was almost comical.
“In what way did you limit his authority?” David asked.19
“Oh, I don’t know,” Jackson replied. “And it wasn’t me who did it.”
“Well, who did it?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, then, how do you know it was done?”
“Because I was talking to someone on the phone, and they mentioned it. I forget. I think it was a lawyer or something.”
“So, an unnamed lawyer who you spoke to on the phone told you [he or she] had limited Randy’s authority to act on your behalf?”
“It was something like that. Yeah.”
“Do you remember when this happened?”
“I sure don’t.”
“Do you remember what firm the lawyer was with?�
��
“No.”
“Do you remember anything about that conversation other than the fact that this unnamed lawyer said that to you?”
“That’s all I can remember right now.”
Even amid the absurdity, Jackson’s testimony took a darker turn on occasion. When asked if he believed any of his employees might have stolen money from him so as to ensure that he wouldn’t meet his obligations to Bank of America—thus forcing him to sell all or part of his publishing holdings to Sony—he replied in the affirmative. He wouldn’t identify any by name, though, despite being pressed numerous times by David.
“It’s the entertainment world, full of thieves and crooks,” he offered. “That’s not new. Everybody knows that. And they love entertainers, and they are around.”
Jackson seemed to believe Stabler was in that group, but it was hard to tell from his responses whether that was the case—or if the singer was being cannily evasive in an effort to distance himself from the Prescient deal in hopes of avoiding a potential $48 million payment. When asked if he knew what the deal entailed, he hedged: “As we speak now? Yes. But at the time, I didn’t think that. I didn’t know the details of it.”
Jackson also grudgingly recounted a moment when his brother Randy and Stabler brought him a document to sign at Neverland (he identified the agreement only as a “financial transaction worth multimillion dollars”). On Burkle’s advice, he refused to sign it, angering Stabler, who allegedly left him an accusatory phone message shortly thereafter.
“You’re with the Jews20 now,” said Stabler, who is African American. “You’re not down with blacks anymore.”
Jackson never spoke to the accountant again. But when asked if Stabler was still doing work for him, the singer replied, “I don’t know.”
Eventually, Jackson and his lawyers settled with Prescient for a low-seven-figure sum.21 But it was the behavior of the King of Pop, not the financial result of the case, that left the deepest impression on Donald David.