Authors: Steve Knopper
Whoo Kid joined Jackson, Abdullah, R&B star John Legend, actor Tyson Beckford, and others in town for the Formula 1 event at an opulent palace dinner. Hundreds of expensive cars were parked nearby, including a James Bond–style Aston-Martin and a Mercedes with a gold engine, gold steering wheel, and beige leather seats. At dinner, Jackson dressed like a “black superhero,” glittering in a suit. He insisted Whoo Kid sit next to him. The DJ mentioned to MJ that he heard Neverland was about to be sold. This moved Jackson to rail about how America had betrayed him. He said he felt like Jesus Christ on the cross. And he shocked the room by cursing. “Fuck that place,” he said. In the discombobulating pause that followed, the DJ asked for music. Abdullah arranged for the walls to open, displaying a one-hundred-inch TV set blaring one of MTV’s Asian channels.
Abdullah was serious about being part of the international record business, and after a few months, Jackson was more coherent and driven—he wanted to work with certain well-known musicians and make an album and a documentary about his life.
Holmes, a veteran European record executive, signed on to be the CEO, and Jackson sent him boxes of his business documents. After poring over papers for three days, Holmes learned Jackson was no longer under contract to Sony Entertainment and had the right to record for any company he wished. Jackson and Abdullah agreed Michael would keep
76 to 80 percent of all the revenue from his music after costs. Holmes and Abdullah concocted a multifaceted plan to gradually reintroduce
Michael Jackson to the world, beginning with music, a biography, and a movie, then building up to live appearances. At that point,
more than three dozen lawsuits were pending against Jackson. He was
$275 million in debt, overspending by $15 million to $20 million per year. The team hoped to find Jackson’s old artwork, some of which had been in storage for decades, to help raise cash.
“He knew he wasn’t that fit. Our plan was not to do any concerts for quite a long time,” Holmes recalls. “Our plans didn’t require him physically to do a lot of work.”
Holmes set out to improve Michael’s physical and emotional health. The sheik brought in Tony Buzan, a British neurology expert whose “mind-mapping” techniques are designed to maximize brainpower. Michael’s stay in Bahrain, says Qays Zu’bi, a regional attorney who worked with him, functioned as a post-trial, paparazzi-free tonic, enabling him to
“regain his health and overall stability.” It helped that the sheik provided for his every need, funding his shopping trips for expensive DVD players and hair dryers, providing the requisite
Häagen-Dazs and a Ferrari. In the end, the sheik would say, including the money he sent Jackson during his trial, he gave him $7 million as a loan. He expected his partnership in the Michael Jackson business to make up for it. Michael, however, perceived all this lavish spending as a gift. Or so he’d say.
* * *
In 2005, Michael was still spending truckloads of cash on travel, as well as upkeep for the unoccupied Neverland. But that was nothing compared to the interest he paid to borrow other people’s money. He was taking in
$15 million a year, which would have been more than adequate for any normal human, but he was spending anywhere from $24 million to $45 million—$4.5 million per month in interest alone.
The debt weighed on him. In early 2005, during his trial, MJ had attended the funeral of celebrity attorney Johnnie Cochran at the West Angeles Cathedral in Los Angeles. Ron Burkle, the billionaire investor,
came across a crying Jackson and said he didn’t know he’d been so close with the late celebrity lawyer.
“No,” Jackson told him, “I’m in trouble. They’re turning off the lights at Neverland.” By the end of the year, Michael had to pay off a $270 million Bank of America loan or potentially give up his entire share of the Beatles catalog, which he’d put up as collateral. Jackson asked for Burkle’s help. “Sure,” Burkle said. “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 studied his finances.
Michael was introduced to a large New York private-equity firm, Fortress Investment Group, which specialized in distressed debt. After haggling in vain to buy portions of the lucrative Beatles catalog jointly owned by Sony and Michael, Fortress changed course and bought the singer’s longstanding Bank of America loan outright. This gave Michael a new cash flow of $330 million, but it pushed him even more heavily into debt. Still, the new loan was better than the one from Bank of America, which Donald David, a lawyer who worked on the deal, calls
“grossly disproportionate” with interest rates of the time. “It made a lot of sense,” says David, who represented Prescient Acquisition, which steered MJ into the deal, then sued him (and settled) for reneging on a finder’s fee.
In December 2005, Michael hit another panic point. Fortress, now in charge of his nine-figure loans, began to charge cripplingly high interest rates. Sony executives were afraid that if Michael went bankrupt, his share of the publishing company they owned together would slip into auction, where it’d be sold to the highest bidder—and Sony executives preferred to be in business with Michael and his people rather than some rich unknowns who knew nothing about music. Rob Wiesenthal, chief financial officer of Sony Corp., and another company executive arranged to meet with Michael five days before Christmas in the
$9,000 presidential suite at Dubai’s mega-luxury Burj Al Arab hotel. In the room with him were Sheik Abdullah bin Hamad Al Khalifa and
twelve MJ advisers.
Michael did most of the talking.
“He went through literally every key title we had in our catalog—he had an incredible memory of all our songs,” Wiesenthal recalls. “He was clearly the kind of guy who plays dumb when it’s convenient for him, but when he’s engaged, it’s fantastic.”
Wiesenthal offered to help Michael restructure his debt. In return, Michael agreed to give Sony officials day-to-day control over the company—decisions about which Beatles songs to license would be theirs, not his. Wiesenthal asked for an option—at any point, Sony could buy half of Michael’s stake, or roughly 25 percent of the catalog, worth a total of roughly $1 billion, at a set price. Michael agreed. His advisers said nothing. Wiesenthal went to Citibank, which, according to a
New York Times
story a few months after the meeting, took on Michael’s debt for just
6 percent interest, rather than the exorbitant 20 percent Fortress had been charging. But before Wiesenthal could make the deal with Citibank, Fortress matched the terms. For the time being, Michael’s cash-flow problems were over. As part of the loan agreement with Fortress, Michael immediately bought back his former attorney
Branca’s 5 percent stake in the ATV catalog. As a result of this convoluted deal, Michael was able to keep his stake in the Sony catalog, but his people had to take out a mortgage
on Neverland. This deal would lead to his estate losing the ranch years after his death, something MJ said he’d never let happen.
In Bahrain, the sheik came to believe Michael had been freeloading. Their friendship disintegrated. Guy Holmes, the hard-nosed record executive, was on the sheik’s side.
“Mate,” Holmes told MJ, “if you don’t do what we’re recommending here, you’re going to be in big trouble.” That sort of logic, delivered in that sort of tone, had never gone far with Michael. Instead of dealing with the issues Holmes was raising, he insisted to Abdullah that the British record man stop with the excessive cursing. Holmes told MJ to fuck off. Michael and his family took a vacation and never returned. Later, Michael sent Holmes a conciliatory letter: “Thank you, and I appreciate your help, and I’m going to have other people look over my stuff.”
Michael Jackson was on the run. Tom Mesereau had told Michael he could never live in peace at Neverland after local prosecutors and police had been humiliated during his trial.
“There’s always going to be someone gunning for you. Some child wandering through a fence. They’re never going to stop,” the defense attorney said. “You’ll never have peace here.” So Neverland was out of the question. “America really let him down,” recalls one of his European doctors.
* * *
For about six months in 2006, the small Jackson entourage traversed the Irish countryside, staying in four opulent residences, beginning with the thirty-thousand-euros-a-week
Luggala Castle in Wicklow, where fans swarmed the property during his six-month stay. They spent time at
Riverdance
star Michael Flatley’s castle in Cork County, discussing a future collaboration.
Wherever he went, Michael needed doctors. His vitiligo was spreading, whitening his skin as the darker spots receded. He wore wigs to conceal painful scarring in his scalp. And he liked his sleep medication. Still, when he visited a medical clinic in Europe while traveling with his family, a doctor who did not want to divulge his name found MJ in
“pretty good health.” Recalls the doctor: “He had the body of a dancer and decided to keep it that way. He was very meticulous about his weight.” A consultation grew into a friendship. The doctor became close with Jackson’s children, carrying the reserved Blanket to bed while Michael stuck close to the more loquacious and outgoing Paris. The doctor treated Michael five or six times for what he called “dermal fillers in his face” (a dermatological treatment to soften wrinkles and lines) and problems in the area surrounding his nose, as well as vitiligo and discoloration of his face, hands, and lower legs. He observed Michael’s history of what he estimated to be two or three nose jobs. MJ asked for sedation due to extreme pain sensitivity, so on two occasions, the doctor administered propofol, the sleep-inducing drug
that he considered safe under supervision. During both procedures, a trained anesthesiologist was on hand. Jackson never mentioned sleep problems to the doctor, although he did seem familiar with propofol. He called it
“milk.”
Michael was beginning to think about recording a new album. At the Grouse Lodge studio, he summoned various musicians and producers for collaborations, including Rodney Jerkins, his collaborator on
Invincible
, who stayed for a week. He contacted will.i.am of the Black Eyed Peas, whom he’d been pursuing for months by phone.
MJ’s manager at the time, Raymone Bain, asked Will how much he wanted to be paid for the collaboration. Nothing, the rapper said.
“Because Michael always has leeches around him,” he told her, “and I don’t want to be that guy.” Before embarking for Ireland, Will prepared electronic dance beats in his studio he thought would work for MJ. One work-in-progress track sounded like sixties-style soul music pumped up with hip-hop beats—in the style of Kanye West’s “Touch the Sky.” The bridge softened into a loungey organ sound.
“Nice rhythm,” Michael declared.
MJ and will.i.am made a deal—they maintained separate computer hard drives for their works, Michael with his vocals and Will with his music—and neither would take the other’s contribution without permission. They worked on five songs together, including
“I’m Gonna Miss You,” which MJ wrote after James Brown’s death in 2006; a song influenced by Estelle’s hit at the time, “American Boy”; and an anthem that had the feel of the Jacksons’ show-opening “Can You Feel It.”
“You gotta turn the
snare
up! I need you to get some
ice
!” Michael enthused to Will. “I want you to put the
crunch
on that snare. I want it to be
tasty.
Like people can
bite
it. I want you to feel like you could just
eat
it.”
After staying at Grouse, the Jackson family relocated to Blackwater Castle, a twelfth-century fortress on a fifty-acre estate. Michael asked Grace Rwaramba to scout more luxurious and secluded properties. Soon their van pulled up to Ballinacurra, a forty-acre mansion in Kinsale, a sort of heavy-drinking Martha’s Vineyard.
Rwaramba did
most of the talking, then the van door slid open and a shy, polite Michael Jackson stepped out.
“You could have pushed me over with a feather,” says Des McGahan, the proprietor. They agreed to rent the property. McGahan practiced reverse psychology with the locals, leaving the gate unlocked so he did not appear to have anybody important staying on the grounds.
The small Jackson group took over all twenty-two bedroom suites. When Michael grew restless with the Irish home cooking provided by McGahan’s wife, he instructed his driver to pick up McDonald’s, KFC, and Chinese food. Paris played with the McGahans’ daughter Scarli; when Michael’s daughter found a CD of
Thriller
in the library, she told her friend, “Oh, that’s my dad.” Scarli responded by showing off a homemade mix CD her dad had compiled, which he titled
Ballinacurra Day One Interiors of Sound
, and insisted her dad had an album, too.
When James Brown died on Christmas Eve 2006, Michael flew to Georgia to attend the funeral. The Rev. Al Sharpton, Brown’s longtime friend and former employee, helped with arrangements. At three
A.M.
, Sharpton received an unexpected call from Charles Reid, the funeral director who had been preparing Brown’s body for one of the public ceremonies.
“What’s up, Mr. Reid?” Sharpton asked, bleary-eyed. “I need authorization,” responded the mortician.
“Michael Jackson’s in town and he wants to see the body.” Sharpton told Reid to have MJ call him back. He didn’t.
An hour and a half later, Sharpton called Reid again: “What happened?”
“He told me I did James’s hair all wrong and he combed his hair.”
“He combed a corpse’s hair?”
“He worked on his hair about forty minutes.”
Finally, Sharpton received his call from Michael. “I got the hair straight,” he told him. Michael Jackson had spent four and a half hours with James Brown’s body.
The next day, at the James Brown Arena, Jackson wore a black
leather jacket, a skinny black tie, and sunglasses, and poignantly eulogized his mentor for one minute. Sharpton and the Rev. Jesse Jackson stood at attention behind him, watching warily as people shuffled onto and off the stage. “What I’m going to say is brief but to the point: James Brown was my greatest inspiration,” Michael said, with no preachy flourishes. He said when he was a boy in Gary, his mother had woken him up whenever JB was on TV. “When I saw him move, I was mesmerized,” MJ said. When Michael went to view the body, he reached down and kissed Brown. One last time, he fixed his hair.