MJ (44 page)

This taste of America inspired Michael to return home. But not to Neverland. In addition to the bad memories and legal predators, he’d laid off most of the staff earlier in 2006, and forty-six of the remaining employees had been working without pay for so long that California Department of Industrial Relations officials were penalizing Jackson more than
$100,000. Even Michael’s beloved animals were under legal scrutiny—veterinarian Martin Dinnes, who had once helped MJ acquire his giraffes, elephants, and orangutans, sued him for
$91,602 in back animal-care bills. (When Bubbles grew into an adult, MJ allowed his trainer to take the chimp to his own facility; in 2005, the four-foot-six, 185-pound Bubbles moved to the Center for Great Apes, an orangutan sanctuary in Wauchula, Florida, where he lives with other chimps.) Everything else, from the train to the movie theater, made for a Michael Jackson Ghost Town.

Michael had an idea: Las Vegas.
Celine Dion had been pulling in more than $500,000 per show at the four-thousand-seat Colosseum in Caesar’s Palace since 2003, and grossed roughly $80 million in a year. (MJ apparently ignored the fact that she needed 147 shows to make that kind of money.) Older rock and pop stars from Elton John to Carlos Santana were beginning to set up similar residencies. Michael rented a fifteen-thousand-square-foot mansion at
2785 South Monte Cristo Way, with seven bedrooms, ten bathrooms, a gated entrance, and what his security would call an “absurdly oversized living room.”
It had a private movie theater, a two-thousand-square-foot master bedroom, and a pool house and tennis courts out back.

During Michael’s time in Vegas, he couldn’t help but encounter his father, Joe, a longtime resident of the city. Joe showed up one day, unannounced, in his PT Cruiser, circling the block four times before stopping near the front gate. When Michael’s head security guard, Bill Whitfield, stuck out his hand to greet him, Joe said,
“You’re probably one of those putting needles in my son’s arm.” Michael refused to see his father.

At one point, Randy, Jackie, and Rebbie zoomed past the gate in a black Hummer, demanding to see their brother. “We need to talk to him
now,
” Randy informed the security guards. Michael refused. After the siblings were escorted off the property, Michael told Whitfield: “Bill, that can never happen again. Never. Do you understand that?” Michael told his security guards his family was trying to extort him, as always, for some kind of Victory–style reunion tour. Later, Randy Jackson actually plowed his gray Mercedes SUV full-speed into Jackson’s front gate with a neighborhood-rattling crash. According to Jackson’s guards, who pulled a gun on him, Randy kept saying, “Michael owe me money! I want my fuckin’ money!” and threatened to call the press.

Michael and his family were locked in a sad cycle of mistrust. He perceived them as financial leeches, even when they were trying to help him. Whenever they did show up, they bothered him about his drug problems. They knew he’d employed associates and security guards to procure opioids since 1993, and they believed his use had escalated.

Dr. Alimorad “Alex” Farshchian, a Miami doctor who specialized in orthopedic regenerative medicine, confused many in Michael’s entourage when he first showed up. Michael had approached the doctor to treat a sprained ankle during the Madison Square Garden concerts back in 2001. Once he became comfortable with Dr. Farshchian, Michael confided that he had a problem with Demerol and asked for treatment. In late 2002, the doctor installed a Naltrexone implant into Michael’s
abdomen, which supposedly inhibited the effect of narcotics. Farshchian installed the implant four or five times over the next year or so. MJ’s friend Frank Cascio, dubious at first,
came around to the doctor’s plan of weaning Michael off narcotics. But Henry Aubrey, Michael’s bodyguard in the early 2000s, was one of several business associates who mistrusted the doctor. He told his boss:
“If certain things continue with this Dr. Farshchian, you’ll have to fire me, or I’m going to have to quit.” Michael told him, “Things will stop.” They didn’t. Randy Jackson and various other family members had showed up at Michael’s home several times over the years, beginning early in the Santa Maria trial, to stage drug interventions. They continued to do so when he lived in Vegas. In Randy’s view, Grace Rwaramba was both the enabler and whistle-blower. Before one intervention attempt, Randy said, she called him three times, begging him to come over and help Michael with his drug problems:
“It was ironic because she was the one giving it to him, but at the same time complaining about it. I think she had a hard time saying no to him.”

“Michael struggled with substance abuse, to the point where he, numerous times, wanted to get clean and couldn’t,” adds a source close to him at the time. “He’d be clean for a while and then he would relapse. He was an addict and he struggled with it.”

Michael continued to work on his album. Upon arriving in Vegas in December 2007, Michael moved in to one of the sky villas in the Palms hotel, which happened to contain a full-service studio where the Killers, Paris Hilton, and others had recorded. George Maloof, one of the brothers who owned the NBA’s Sacramento Kings, arranged for Michael to use the hotel elevators without detection—room service left his food in an alcove outside his suite, so he never had to directly answer his own door. Sometimes Maloof himself would personally escort MJ from his room to the studio.
“He was good at hiding,” recalls Zoe Thrall, the studio’s director. During his time at the Palms, Michael worked with Akon (who said he
“clicked instantly” with the star on
a song called “Hold My Hand”), will.i.am, and rising R&B singer and songwriter Ne-Yo. MJ also collaborated with
SoBe Lifewater on a TV commercial with tiny lizards singing “Thriller” that appeared during the 2008 Super Bowl.

Michael’s plan to build a Celine-style Vegas residency wasn’t going anywhere. He met several times with his old friend, Steve Wynn, owner of the Wynn resort and casino, but promoters insisted he work the standard five nights per week. Jackson preferred three.
“I can’t just be like the Osmonds,” he said. “I can’t just sit on a stool and sing ‘Kumbaya’ like these old Vegas crooners. People want me to dance from beginning to end.” “Billie Jean” couldn’t be performed without a moonwalk routine. “Smooth Criminal” couldn’t be performed without a Hollywood-level production of gangsters in zoot suits and dancers in garter belts. It never occurred to Michael that he probably could have gotten away with crooning his old songs on a stool—that might have been a refreshing new look. But “perfectionism” may have been code for “fear of change.”

What Jackson didn’t know was that while he was stalling out with Vegas promoters, Terry Harvey, who’d been managing his brother Tito, was meeting with his semi-retired manager Frank DiLeo. In 2007, Frank began telling people he was back on MJ’s team, which had a grain of truth. After DiLeo had regularly attended Michael’s child-molestation trial, silently showing support for his old friend and client, the
Thriller
and
Bad
teammates were beginning to talk again for the first time in years. Harvey and a group of promoters, Allgood Entertainment, devised a plan: a one-time reunion concert, starring Michael and all his brothers, Victory tour style, at Texas Stadium in Dallas. They’d sell pay-per-view rights and everybody would get rich.

The Allgood team initially met with Joe Jackson, who said he’d participate on one condition—he wanted an RV with
$50,000 in cash packed in the glove compartment. Patrick Allocco, the New Jersey promoter in charge of the Allgood promoters, found that reasonable.
Insane, but reasonable. The meeting was contentious—Allocco recalls
“a good amount of infighting” between Harvey’s group and Joe’s group—but they agreed to move forward.

To get Michael on board for a July 9 show in Dallas, Allocco met with
Katherine Jackson at a Benihana-type grill. Michael’s mother kept saying, “This is a good deal for Michael.” Allocco’s team estimated $9 million to $12 million in gross ticket sales. And if the promoters added merchandise and concessions, Allocco says, “Michael could have walked away with $24 million pretty effortlessly.” That made sense to DiLeo, Joe, Katherine, and Debbie Rowe, whom Allocco had also approached for support.

Due to his debts and spending, Michael had just
$668,215 in cash, according to an audit conducted by Thompson, Cobb, Bazilio, and Associates. That may seem like a lot, but dozens of people were suing him. At one point, a man showed up at Jackson’s house to serve him with legal papers; the farthest he got was one of Michael’s security men, Javon Beard, who wouldn’t touch them.
“People would come up and drop these things through the gate, onto the driveway, and we wouldn’t go near it,” Beard wrote. “We’d just go get the water hose, wash it right back out into the street.”

Still, in Vegas Michael continued to aspire for bigger and more opulent homes. He became obsessed with an estate containing a
thirty-seven-thousand-square-foot house on 99 Spanish Gate Drive that belonged to the Sultan of Brunei. But it was a fixer-upper, and banks wouldn’t loan Michael the money. In spring 2007, Jackson’s publicist-turned-manager
Raymone Bain and his attorney Peter Lopez met with a big-time concert promoter, Randy Phillips, chief executive of AEG Live in Los Angeles, about staging a run of comeback concerts at London’s new O2 Arena. MJ rejected the idea. He wasn’t ready.

The lease on MJ’s family home in Vegas was set to expire at the end of June 2007. Jackson needed a vacation. The family flew to Middleburg, Virginia, to stay for five months at the Goodstone Inn,
a former plantation west of DC, which was close to his new attorney, Greg Cross. MJ’s former manager, Dieter Wiesner, had sued him for fraud and breach of contract (they later settled for
$3.5 million). When Michael showed up at Cross’s office for a deposition, he owned up to an important detail. Wiesner’s lawyer, Howard King, asked Michael if, in 2003, he was
“under the influence of drugs or alcohol that impaired your ability to understand what you were doing.” Michael’s revealing answer: “It could have been medication, yes.” During the same deposition, Michael acknowledged he gave Wiesner and business partner Ron Konitzer power of attorney to make his financial decisions when he was “under the influence of prescription medication.”

In August 2007, Michael and his kids took off for New York. They showed up at a birthday party for Frank Cascio’s mother.
“You’re surrounded by idiots again,” Frank lectured his old friend. “Get back to what you do best. . . . Start working, start writing, start producing.” Michael stayed with the Cascios for four months, working with Frank’s brother Eddie in his home studio on several songs, including two schmaltzy ballads called “Best of Joy” and “(I Like) The Way You Love Me.” While Frank found Michael to be “alive and excited, getting back into being creative and free,” his financial problems were weighing him down. Fortress Investments, which held Neverland’s
$23 million mortgage, was threatening to auction Michael’s beloved but abandoned ranch if he didn’t pay the amount he owed by March 19. One of Michael’s new attorneys, L. Londell McMillan, bought him a few extra weeks by arranging a
confidential deal with Fortress, but later that year came another financial blow—Sheik Abdullah bin Hamad Al Khalifa, crown prince of Bahrain, was suing him in British Royal Court for $7 million. It seems all those luxuries MJ received from the sheik had been loans, not gifts.

Debt had no impact on Michael’s expensive ideas—during this period, he and Jermaine, apparently with straight faces, were discussing
a plan to create a
Wizard of Oz
–style
“leisure kingdom” in the Middle East. Jermaine asked around for well-connected businessmen with ties to the region, and an architect friend gave him a number for Dr. Tohme Tohme. What was Tohme a doctor of? He wouldn’t say. He did, however, exercise
“his extraordinary gift for facilitation, brokering assorted deals that drew alternately on sources of Middle Eastern or Southeast Asian money, as well as an impressive range of international contacts,” wrote Randall Sullivan, one of the few to interview Tohme at length. Jermaine first met with Tohme in March 2008. Not long afterward, Jermaine called again, this time in a panic. Michael was about to lose Neverland. “Is there
anyone
you know who’d be willing to help?” Jermaine asked. Tohme answered the question by pointing to a bald-headed man on the cover of a business magazine. “This guy,” Tohme said.

“This guy” turned out to be another Lebanese businessman, Thomas Barrack, founder of Colony Capital, a $35 billion international real estate investment firm. When Tohme first called, Barrack wasn’t interested. But Tohme was persistent. While in Vegas for a business meeting, he called Barrack again, put on the hard sell, and Barrack agreed.

Barrack and Tohme met Jackson at his rented home on Palomino Lane in Vegas. Michael was making one of his kids a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich. “I don’t understand what’s happening,” MJ told them.
“All of a sudden I got to this place where they’re saying Neverland will be foreclosed on Friday.” Barrack studied the documents and caught up on the MJ story—he hadn’t toured in a decade, he hadn’t released a new album in seven years, and most of his income came from his song-publishing catalogs. Like many of Michael’s previous advisers, Barrack told Michael he’d have to stop spending outrageous amounts of money and work on growing his income. This time, Michael was desperate. He appeared to listen. “Are you willing to start down that line?” Barrack asked. “Yeah,” Jackson responded. “I am.”

Michael suggested the same types of risky ventures he’d discussed with Ronald Konitzer and Marc Schaffel—3-D films and holograms—
none of which would force him to work very hard. Barrack countered with a more traditional idea: concerts. After years of avoiding the inevitable, Michael finally agreed. Barrack decided to buy the $23 million Neverland note from Fortress, entering a partnership with Michael Jackson that put incredible pressure on the singer to pull himself out of insolvency.

Barrack had done business with Phil Anschutz, the reclusive billionaire who owned concert promoter AEG—short for Anschutz Entertainment Group. Anschutz put Barrack in touch with Randy Phillips, the Live division’s chief executive. Phillips had met with MJ about doing concerts the previous year, but this time it was obviously serious. Phillips was old-school music business. He was ambitious and shrewd. He told people he got into it not because of the music but because of the deal.
“He’s a real nonstop salesman. He gets emotionally excited about things,” recalls Arnold Stiefel, who used to manage rock star Rod Stewart jointly with Phillips. “Indefatigable in his efforts for things he believes in.” Phillips and Stiefel had met Jackson years earlier, in the early nineties, when they facilitated an unprecedented $20 million endorsement deal between the King of Pop and the LA Gear shoe company.