Every Little Thing Gonna Be Alright (23 page)

At the time of the assassination attempt, Marley was being hailed as the next big thing in music. He had appeared in
Time
and
People
magazines and was the subject of numerous television specials throughout Europe.

Though he had a grassroots following at home, he was never popular among the middle and upper classes, who not only looked down on the Rasta movement, but also blamed it for leading many upper-crust children astray.

But his funeral in May 1981 attracted the country’s most influential minds.

And 19 years after his death, even followers of different religious persuasions are hailing Marley’s contribution as a musician who had a major impact on society.

Ian Boyne, leader of the Jamaican chapter of the Worldwide Church of God, conceded that the
Time
and BBC acknowledgements went a long way in winning Marley new fans among Jamaica’s ruling class.

“His icon status has been solidified by the elite in Jamaica because two of its most credible international voices
(Time
and the BBC) have acknowledged his superstar status,” Boyne wrote in a column in the
Gleaner
newspaper.

“There is nothing like a little validation from outside for us good colonials to feel good about ourselves.”

For all the acclaim Marley has been receiving since late 1999, his timeless music still receives only token airplay in a country entranced by dancehall and hip-hop, out of North America.

Rastafarian leaders have consistently called for Marley to be made a national hero, and for his ideas to be taught at the university level. Until such proposals are reality, Marley’s call for one love will remain just a pretty song in his homeland.

J
ust as Bob Marley’s artistic credibility and status as a prophet of Rastafarianism grew immensely after his death, so did his fortune. The legalities surrounding that estate became one of the most tangled legal issues in the history of music, and many battles are yet to be resolved.

Ever distrustful of legal documents as harbingers of Babylon, Mar-ley died intestate. From there, through a labyrinth of he-said-shesaid, the estate fell into the hands of a trustee who made it available to the highest bidder. This put the Marley family in the odd position of having to bid for its own birthright, which they eventually won with the help of Chris Blackwell.

These legalities begat other legalities and also unearthed other issues as well. It brought the Marley name together with such boy scouts from the jamboree (see the introduction to Section 1) as Morris Levy.

Beyond this, wealth can make someone a legal target: A variety of people have sued the Marley estate for a wide range of reasons. It all keeps the attorneys very busy.

I
N life, the reggae singer Bob Marley disdained the impediments of what he called “Babylon”—modern Western civilization—such as lawyers, preachers and barbers. His philosophy was a radical Caribbean romanticism, surcharged with the Biblical cult of Rastafarianism. His habits ran to regular indulgence in cigar-sized joints of powerful marijuana. Neither was conducive to an orthodox personal life. He did business with his band on the basis of a handshake, paying them when and what he chose; he fathered at least seven children by as many women, not counting four by his wife, Rita; and when he was dying of cancer in 1981 at 36, he refused to make out a will. Preferring to believe he would live forever, he ordered a new Mercedes Benz. A decade later, the car is one small piece of a monumental legal tangle over Marley’s $30 million estate that just goes to show, as he might have put it, that “Babylon” always wins in the end.

At the center of the dispute are Rita, 46, a former dancer with Marley’s band whom he married in 1966, and J. Louis Byles, the court-appointed administrator of the singer’s estate. Under Jamaican law, Marley’s widow would have been entitled to half his estate, with the remainder divided equally among his children. But Byles charges that for much of the 1980s money that should have gone to the estate was diverted to offshore corporations controlled by Rita and her lawyers. After the 1984 release of Marley’s
Legend
album, a compila- tion of his great hits, Marley’s royalties jumped from around $200,000 a year to $1 million, and eventually much more, but the estate never saw most of the money; a subsequent audit found discrepancies totaling around $16 million. Rita admitted in court forging her husband’s signature on backdated documents transferring ownership of Marley’s companies to her. She did this, she told
Newsweek
, on the advice of her lawyers and in the belief that since she was the prime heir anyway, “how can I steal from myself?” The court dismissed her as one of Marley’s original executors, but she was not charged with a crime; the estate has sued her lawyer to get the money back and, after more than four years, a federal court in New York is expected to rule later this year. “I did nothing of my own thought,” Rita added. “I was a lowly wife who went on stage and danced when Bob told me to dance.”

Byles—a conservative 79-year-old Kingston banker who never cared for Marley when he was alive—has been hunting down the estate’s assets with a relentlessness that has disconcerted even some of the heirs whose interests he is protecting. Since Marley never bothered to legally transfer to his mother the $400,000 house in Miami he bought for her in 1978, the estate’s lawyers tried to evict her and put the house on the market. Chris Blackwell, the Island Records producer who gave Marley his start, eventually bought the property and gave it to her. “These people [the estate’s lawyers] are so bright and so evil,” Marley’s mother says. “They are the devil’s tools.” The Mercedes Marley bought on his deathbed didn’t arrive until after he died, and was paid for by the estate. When Byles discovered that Rita had been driving it since 1981, he began legal proceedings to reclaim the car, which by now has more than 90,000 miles on it. His efforts to make the strictest principles of English probate law fit the circumstances of a Jamaican folk hero and Rastafarian mystic have not endeared him to the Jamaican public, and he has been wounded by the bad publicity. “I can honestly say I have regretted the day I agreed to take this job,” he says. “It has indirectly caused me three major operations and the addition of a pacemaker.”

Then there are the other heirs. Marley once said he wanted as many children as there were “shells in the sea,” and appears to have made good on the boast. When the courts advertised for potential heirs, hundreds of would-be Marleys appeared from all over the world. Rita herself helped winnow the claimants down to seven. But the heirs, most of them poor, must have been quite disappointed to discover that their share of the great singer’s estate at first came to approximately $210 every three months. The situation has improved somewhat since then. Five of the heirs have reached their majority and gotten cash settlements of around $70,000. They will receive more when the estate finally sells the rights to Marley’s music, but the sale has been held up while the courts decide whether the price, $8.2 million, is fair.

Meanwhile, the estate gave about $100,000 to the heirs last year. This compares to roughly $2 million for “professional services” in the same year. The “stiff-necked baldheads,” as Marley described Jamaica’s ruling class of professionals and politicians, got it all, at the going rate of $300 an hour for the estate’s lawyers. The one thing they couldn’t take cuts of, though, was Marley’s own indomitable spirit, which appears to have been passed down more or less intact to his and Rita’s son Ziggy, 22. A reggae singer himself with several Grammys to his credit, Ziggy filed a statement in Florida’s Dade County Court expressing his desire to be rid of the whole mess. “Let them have it,” he said. “Me can go out and make me own money.”

A
S the voice of Bob Marley, singing “Get up, stand up, stand up for your rights,” plaintively echoed from a car parked outside a downtown Kingston courtroom, the prolonged and bitter battle over the rights to his estate finally came to an end. Chris Blackwell’s Island Logic, widow Rita Marley, and the six adult (of the 11 total) sons and daughters of Bob Marley have been collectively awarded the right to buy the music-related assets of the late reggae singer’s estate.

In a decision handed down by Justice Walker Dec. 9 in the Supreme Court of Jamaica, the Island Logic/Marley family offer of $11.5 million was deemed more “certain” than the MCA conditional bid of a “maximum” of $15.2 million, which had, said the judge, “too much uncertainty surrounding it.”

Chris Blackwell, who was in London when the hearing on the sale was concluded, declared himself “thrilled with the decision,” but admitted to being “a little afraid to believe that it’s finally over and that we’ve won. For two years we’ve been on semi-hold and we couldn’t really go forward with anything. We can really get behind it now, and I’m looking forward to getting on with the job of running the future.” Said Rita Marley’s attorney, Michael Hylton, “the future is exciting. When you look at how Bob’s music has kept alive and sold for the last two years of its own accord, the potential of his work if it’s promoted internationally is immense. We are very pleased with the decision.”

During the weeklong hearing, competition between the two contenders was intense, each attempting to outdo the other with terms more attractive to the beneficiaries. Both offered ownership shares to the Marley heirs: MCA proffered a 4% share to each of the beneficiaries, and Island Logic provided a similar option to the infant beneficiaries, to be exercised when they came of age.

Island Logic bought the Marley music assets (together with real estate in Kingston that includes Marley’s Tuff Gong Studio and manufacturing facilities) for $8.2 million in 1989, but the purchase was halted midstream when the U.K. Privy Council upheld an appeal by some of the beneficiaries that alleged that the assets had been insufficiently advertised. When, after the assets were advertised internationally, MCA almost doubled the Island Logic figure, Blackwell, who had earlier said that such a high bid was suspect, joined forces with the Marley family, upped his price by $3.2 million, and changed some of the terms of the Island offer.

The terms of the revised Island Logic tender provide that the adult beneficiaries will waive their right to immediate financial benefit so that the sale proceeds can be divided equally among the five infant beneficiaries—each child to receive U.S. $1,174,000. MCA’s monies would have been split among all 11 legatees, giving each one $1,234,242. However, the court stated that although the potential proceeds of MCA’s offer were higher, Island Logic’s figure was firm and unconditional and of more tangible benefit to the Marley heirs.

Bob Marley was a Rasta rebel who did not believe in wills, a belief that cost his heirs 10 years of courtroom drama and, in the last five years alone, more than $8 million in administrative and legal fees. With a widow, 11 children (by eight mothers), and a backing band (the Wailers) all entitled to a portion of the proceeds, acrimony and dissension have plagued the estate over the decade since Marley died of cancer in a Miami hospital, leaving what was then estimated to be $30 million.

Litigation filed by or against estate administrator Kingston-based Mutual Security Merchant Bank includes a lawsuit against Rita Marley (who was dismissed as co-administrator) and her U.S. attorney and accountant, David Steinberg and Marvin Zolt, respectively, for alleged fraud and withholding of funds totaling $14 million; a countersuit by Rita Marley against the administrator; an action against Marley’s mother, Cedella Booker, for the recovery of $500,000; an action against the estate by Marley’s backing band, the Wailers, for a 50% share of royalties; and an action against Mutual Security Merchant Bank brought by the guardians of three of the infant beneficiaries alleging mismanagement of funds. There were 10 lawsuits in all, and most remain unsettled.

The most recent controversy erupted last month when Chris Blackwell, at a London press conference, implied the administrator had misappropriated funds, an accusation that Louis Byles, the bank’s executive director, called a “blatant lie.” Byles added that “if Chris Blackwell said this, he should bring an action against the administrator instead of shooting off his mouth.”

Asked whether he intended to carry out his threat of legal action, Blackwell explained that his threat had been made to force the administrator “to present our bid to the court. I believe if we had not had that press conference, we would not have had our day in court.”

Up until Nov. 15, the administrator had not presented Island Logic’s increased offer to the court. Even though the original sales price of $8.2 million had been paid by Island Logic to the administrator (and the administrator had transferred some of the assets to Island Logic before the U.K. Privy Council’s surprise ruling), Mutual Security Merchant Bank had deemed Island Logic’s increased tender of $ 11.5 million (first presented to the court by letter) “only a proposal.” It was the MCA bid that won the endorsement of the administrator, according to Hylton.