Amazon Unbound

by Brad Stone

  Finally, on October 18, Sanchez called up Dylan Howard and revealed that the “Bill Gates type” was in fact Amazon’s CEO. Sanchez and AMI then signed a contract, entitling him to a payout of around $200,000—the most the National Enquirer had ever paid for a story. The contract stipulated that the Enquirer would make every effort to safeguard Sanchez’s anonymity and withhold his identity as the source of the scoop.

  Sanchez didn’t yet reveal the name of the “B-list married actress,” but it didn’t take long for Enquirer editors to figure it out. Dylan Howard dispatched photographers to track Bezos’s jet and was at the MIPCOM entertainment industry festival in Cannes, France, when he received photos of Amazon’s CEO and Lauren Sanchez disembarking from his Gulfstream G650ER.

  On October 23, Michael Sanchez flew to New York and had dinner with Howard and James Robertson, another Enquirer editor, and corroborated what they now already knew. He also showed them a flash drive containing a collection of texts from Bezos to his sister, as well as a handful of personal photographs that the couple had exchanged; and he intimated that at a later date he could show them a more explicit “selfie” that Bezos had sent to Lauren Sanchez. Howard, Robertson, and Simpson would all later submit in federal court, under the penalty of perjury, that Michael Sanchez was the sole source of all the compromising material they received during the investigation.

  Inside AMI’s drab offices on the southern tip of Manhattan, a windowless warren of open desks enveloped in a toxic atmosphere caused by years of downsizing and scandal, the Bezos story was met with excitement. Dylan Howard believed it could revive the publication’s battered reputation, which had once evoked grudging admiration from prestige media rivals after world-beating scoops on the peccadillos of figures like Tiger Woods and John Edwards. “This is a great story. It’s an Enquirer story,” Howard told a colleague, when asked why they were pursuing a business figure who was likely of limited interest to the tabloid’s celebrity-obsessed readers. “This is peeling back the gilded façade of the famous and extraordinarily rich, it’s exactly what we should stand for.”

  But as the paper worked on the Bezos story, David Pecker was nervous. The company had filed for bankruptcy protection in 2010 and was loaded with debt from acquiring magazines such as In Touch and Life & Style. An effort to secure an investment from the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia to finance a bid to buy Time magazine wasn’t panning out, and Anthony Melchiorre, the seldom-photographed chief of the company’s principal owner, New Jersey hedge fund Chatham Asset Management, was anxious about anything that might land the media company in fresh legal peril.

  That September, AMI had signed a non-prosecution agreement with the Department of Justice over allegations that it tried to buy and bury negative stories about Donald Trump. The deal required its executives to cooperate with the federal investigation of Trump lawyer Michael Cohen and to operate in the future with unimpeachable honesty. It also ensured the company would remain under the watchful eye of prosecutors for years. Breaking the agreement could mean financial ruin for AMI.

  Pecker, a temperamental boss who conducted much of his work from his cell phone while driving between his homes and offices in Connecticut and New York City, was alternatively energized about and fearful of the Bezos story. He called one draft of the article “the best piece of journalism the Enquirer has ever done,” and opined in an email to editors that “each page of a story should be another death blow for Bezos,” according to a person with knowledge of the subsequent criminal investigations. But Pecker was also terrified of getting sued by the world’s richest person, particularly over a story of little interest to the paper’s Hollywood-obsessed readers. He demanded the story be “100 percent bullet proof” and vacillated about when and even if they should publish it at all.

  In early November, Pecker grew even more agitated when he learned that Dylan Howard and Cameron Stracher, AMI’s general counsel, had inserted an unusual provision into Michael Sanchez’s contract delineating that he would receive his payment up front, before the story was published. Now Pecker was hemmed in; if they didn’t run the story, or if it broke elsewhere, they would have wasted the large sum and exposed the company to another possible “catch and kill” allegation. After Pecker exploded in anger at Stracher over lunch at Cipriani Wall Street in lower Manhattan, the veteran lawyer walked out of the restaurant, essentially quitting on the spot. That elevated his recently hired deputy: Jon Fine, who—another unlikely coincidence—had previously worked at Amazon for nine years.

  For the rest of that fall, the Enquirer worked on the story with Michael Sanchez’s help. He emailed the paper a selection of the couple’s personal photographs and text messages and reassured Dylan Howard that they knew nothing of the investigation, when the editor wondered whether Bezos and Lauren Sanchez were deliberately planting the story. Sanchez also tipped the paper off to the couple’s travel plans; and when he had dinner with them at the Felix Trattoria restaurant in Venice, California, on November 30, two reporters were stationed at tables nearby and the tabloid’s photographers were clicking away surreptitiously.

  On the promised explicit selfie of Bezos though, Sanchez seemed to equivocate. He arranged to share it with Howard in L.A. in early November, then canceled the meeting. A few weeks later, on November 21, after Enquirer editors kept hounding him, he finally agreed to show it to Andrea Simpson while Howard and James Robertson watched via FaceTime from New York.

  The media, most observers, and even his own extended family would later condemn Sanchez for this astonishing act of betrayal. But in his own mind, at least—distorted by bitter resentments, years of feuds with his sister, and the dysfunctional dynamics of a complex family—Michael Sanchez believed he was cleverly manipulating the Enquirer.

  His sister and Bezos were conducting their relationship out in the open and it was only a matter of time before their families and the larger world discovered it. He was trying to “bring the 747 in for a soft landing,” as he later put it, referring to the delicate process of allowing the couple to inform their respective spouses, initiate divorce proceedings, and then introduce their relationship to the public. “Everything I did protected Jeff, Lauren, and my family,” Sanchez later emailed me. “I would never sell out anyone.” He also believed his source agreement with AMI precluded the media company from using the most embarrassing material he had provided them.

  That justification would ring hollow to many. But on one issue, at least, Sanchez appeared to tell a straightforward truth. He later told FBI investigators for the Southern District of New York that he never actually had an explicit photograph of Bezos in his possession. In the meeting with Enquirer reporter Andrea Simpson on November 21, with Dylan Howard and James Robertson watching via FaceTime from New York and recording the transaction, Sanchez didn’t show them a picture of Bezos at all, but an anonymous photograph of male genitalia that he had captured from the gay escort website Rent.men.

  * * *

  On Monday January 7, 2019, Enquirer editors sent a pair of text messages to Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sanchez that started with a single, incendiary sentence: “I write to request an interview with you about your love affair.” The entire ordeal, unfolding at the very same time as the HQ2 saga approached its fateful denouement in New York, was now nearing its own conclusion, fueled by a half-dozen people each with their own interlocking relationships and complex agendas.

  With what must have been substantial alarm, the couple moved swiftly in response. Lauren Sanchez turned to the person closest to her who best knew the brazen byways of the tabloid industry: her brother. In the midst of the crisis, Michael Sanchez innocently suggested he could exploit his relationships with editors at the Enquirer to find out what materials they had. After signing a $25,000-a-month contract with his sister to help her navigate the descending insanity, he called Dylan Howard to announce that he was acting as his sister’s representative and suggested that he come to New York to review the paper’s reporting (which, of course, he had provid
ed). Confident in the promise of confidentiality from AMI, Michael Sanchez was now playing both sides.

  Bezos, meanwhile, involved his longtime security consultant, Gavin de Becker, as well as de Becker’s longtime L.A.-based entertainment attorney, Marty Singer. Early on Wednesday, January 9, racing to get ahead of the story, Bezos instructed the shocked employees in Amazon’s public relations department to release the news of his marital breakup from his official Twitter account. “We want to make people aware of a development in our lives,” the statement began. “As our family and close friends know, after a long period of loving exploration and trial separation, we have decided to divorce and continue our shared lives as friends.”

  In New York, Dylan Howard was watching the scoop of his career wriggle from his grasp. Even though the Enquirer published on Mondays, he convinced David Pecker to authorize a special eleven-page print run and posted the paper’s first story online that evening. “Married Amazon Boss Jeff Bezos Getting Divorced Over Fling With Movie Mogul’s Wife,” screamed the headline. That night, Michael Sanchez surreptitiously texted Howard, apologizing for Bezos’s tweet and a subsequent story in the New York Post, adding “thanks for trying to work with me, even if those fucks wouldn’t.”

  The Enquirer’s story was designed not only to expose Bezos’s extramarital relationship but to humiliate him as well. In addition to skirting the confidentiality provision in its contract with Michael Sanchez by quoting from the private text messages and describing a few of the intimate photos, it also bizarrely quoted “Aunt Kathy”—the ex-wife of his biological father’s brother—who had last seen Jeff Bezos when he was two years old. And the story utilized every insult in the tabloid arsenal, such as “billionaire love cheat,” “brazen backdoor man,” and so on.

  The article’s ferocity and tone led Gavin de Becker and other observers to naturally question whether presidential politics might sit behind the investigation. Donald Trump, Pecker’s friend and ally before the prosecution of Michael Cohen, regularly railed on Twitter against the Washington Post and accused Amazon of not paying its fair share of taxes and weakening the U.S. Postal Service. The thrice-married Trump also piled onto Bezos’s latest predicament on Twitter:

  Donald J. Trump

  @realDonaldTrump

  So sorry to hear the news about Jeff Bozo being taken down by a competitor whose reporting, I understand, is far more accurate than the reporting in his lobbyist newspaper, the Amazon Washington Post.

  5:45 PM · Jan 13, 2019

  Despite suspicions that its motives might be political, the Enquirer continued to play its hand, pushing out additional stories across its media properties with more details about Bezos and Sanchez and their private text exchanges. Eventually, Michael Sanchez brokered a temporary cease-fire: it called for AMI to stop publishing new articles in exchange for exclusive paparazzi access to Lauren Sanchez, walking with two friends at the Santa Monica airport. The article ran on January 14 in Us Weekly, along with canned quotes and the gentle headline “First Photos Show Jeff Bezos’ Girlfriend Lauren Sanchez Carefree After Scandal.”

  After the story ran, Michael Sanchez privately texted Dylan Howard to thank him. “The level of cooperation that you and I have built in 14 days will be written about in textbooks,” he wrote. The next week, Howard emailed Michael Sanchez and reassured him that his anonymity as the original leaker was secure. “The untold story—if you will—has not been told,” he wrote. “I’m saving it for my tombstone.”

  But this was an unstable peace. Bezos had given de Becker “whatever budget he needed to pursue the facts” of how the paper obtained his private exchanges with Lauren Sanchez. The Hawaii-based de Becker had served on two presidential advisory boards, written four books about the psychology of violence, and consulted for a litany of high-profile political and entertainment figures. Bezos had selected his 1997 book, The Gift of Fear, as one of the first topics of discussion for the S-team reading club and had personally ensured that it was featured in the new Amazon Books stores.

  In other words, de Becker was a savvy and experienced judge of character. After a series of phone calls and text messages with Michael Sanchez, the veteran investigator sensed something was amiss. The brother of Bezos’s new paramour boasted about his ability to control Enquirer editors, shared conspiracy theories about cyber espionage, and referenced a passing acquaintanceship with Trumpworld characters like disgraced conservative political consultant Roger Stone. With no obvious evidence that Bezos’s phone had been hacked, it didn’t take much to convince de Becker that there was a mole in Camp Bezos, and that it might in fact be the person most ardently claiming that he could help.

  To publicize his suspicions, de Becker turned to a friendly outlet: the Daily Beast, the media company run by Barry Diller, a friend of Bezos’s. In an article on January 31, the Daily Beast revealed that de Becker had identified Michael Sanchez as a possible culprit. But perhaps overly invested in positioning the embarrassment of his client as part of a larger conspiracy, de Becker also tied the Enquirer’s investigation to President Trump and his campaign against the Washington Post, opining in the article that “strong leads point to political motives.”

  The saga here reached an even higher orbit of absurdity. De Becker’s insinuation that a political conspiracy was behind the tabloid drama—which was frankly all too believable in the gilded age of Trump—increased the pressure on the National Enquirer. AMI’s boss, David Pecker, fretted that even the rumor of the paper’s involvement in such a plot might undermine its non-prosecution agreement with the Southern District of New York. AMI’s chief financial backer, the shadowy Anthony Melchiorre of Chatham Asset Management, was terrified Bezos might sue AMI and that his own investors, which included drama-shy state pension funds, might withdraw their money from the hedge fund after yet another whiff of scandal.

  Pecker and Melchiorre implored Dylan Howard to fix it—to settle the feud with Bezos’s camp and to secure an acknowledgment that the investigation wasn’t politically motivated and that the Enquirer hadn’t used illegal means in scoring the story. Fortunately, Dylan Howard had a personal relationship with Marty Singer, one of the attorneys who was representing Bezos in the matter. The two were known to attend sporting events together and were frequent sparring partners over the litany of revelations the Enquirer often published about Singer’s famous clients. Howard was actually at dinner with Singer and film director Brett Ratner in New York City when the attorney got the call to help represent Bezos in the unfolding drama.

  But in a way, their casual friendship would help contribute to the tabloid editor’s undoing. Over the first week in February, Howard and Singer engaged in their familiar dance, trying to negotiate an end to the media hostilities between the Enquirer and the Bezos camp. Howard asked the lawyer to get Bezos and de Becker to accept that it wasn’t a political hit job and promised he would cease publication of damaging stories. Singer wanted to know exactly what unpublished text messages and photos the paper possessed. Howard was dubious; he suspected the lawyer was hunting for confirmation of the identity of his anonymous source.

  Contributing further tensions to the discussion was the prospect that the Washington Post was preparing to publish an article on the scandal that would question whether the exposé was “just juicy gossip or a political hit job.” David Pecker feared that another such insinuation in one of the world’s most respected papers could doom his non-prosecution agreement. He again urged Howard to resolve the matter. So Howard finally relented and started showing his cards.

  In an email he sent to Singer on the afternoon of February 5, AMI’s chief content officer wrote, “with the Washington Post poised to publish unsubstantiated rumors of the National Enquirer’s initial report, I wanted to describe to you the photos obtained during our newsgathering.” Howard then listed the nine personal photos that Bezos and Lauren Sanchez had exchanged. These were the pictures that she had shared with her brother, and which her brother had passed to the Enquirer.


  With an abundance of misplaced swagger and burning with injured pride that his tabloid triumph was being maligned, Howard also referenced another photo: the “below-the-belt selfie” that he’d captured via FaceTime from the meeting between Michael Sanchez and reporter Andrea Simpson. Unbeknownst to Howard, he was bragging about the anonymous image that Michael Sanchez had lifted from Rentmen. “It would give no editor pleasure to send this email,” Howard concluded. “I hope common sense can prevail—and quickly.”

  But common sense was in short supply. The Post published its article that night; in it, de Becker once again identified Sanchez as a possible culprit and charged that the leak was “politically motivated.” Michael Sanchez also spoke to the Post reporters, and battling charges of his own culpability, indiscriminately interjected another round of disinformation into the public domain. He suggested incorrectly that de Becker might have leaked news of the affair himself and also convinced the Post (and later, other papers) to report that the Enquirer had started investigating the affair over the summer of 2018—months before his initial outreach (there’s no evidence to suggest that was the case).

  After the article was published, Pecker called Dylan Howard to say that Melchiorre, the hedge fund manager, was “ballistic,” and again pressured Howard to stop the madness. Howard then started negotiating directly over the phone with Bezos’s representative, the savvy de Becker. Suspicious and wary, they both recorded the phone calls.

  Howard had good reason to be cautious. “I suggest clients compel the extortionist to commit to his sleaziness, which puts him on the defensive,” de Becker had written in his bestselling book, The Gift of Fear. “I ask victims to repeat, ‘I don’t understand what you’re getting at,’ until the extortionist states it clearly.” In the phone calls, according to transcripts of the conversations that were later described to me, de Becker seemed to be trying to do exactly that: “So you guys will publish these photos unless we do a written acknowledgment?” he asked Howard.