Kill 'Em and Leave

by James McBride

  In 2000, he spent $20,000 in legal fees to have an airtight will and estate drawn up. The will left his personal effects to his children, plus a $2 million education fund to send his grandchildren to college should they decide to attend. The rest of it, the bulk of his estate—songs, likeness, music publishing—he left in a trust fund that he named the I Feel Good Trust, said by Cannon to be worth conservatively at least $100 million when he died. The trust was set up to help educate poor children—white and black—in South Carolina and Georgia. Brown was specific about that—the main criterion: need. Not black over white or vice versa. With regard to race, he said, “There’s enough of that.” The trust was to be run by the same two business partners who had brought him back to prominence, David Cannon and Buddy Dallas, and a trusted African American road manager and local magistrate named Albert “Judge” Bradley.

  At least $100 million left behind to educate poor children of all races in South Carolina and Georgia. And ten years after he died, not a dime of Brown’s money would go to educate a single impoverished kid in either state. Why?

  The short answer is greed.

  The long answer is boring, which is how lawyers like it. That’s how modern-day gangsters work. They don’t pull out a gun and stick it in your face. They paper you to death. They bore the public, hoping you’ll turn the page, change the channel, surf the Internet, watch the football game, mutter about how shameful the whole bit is, say the hell with it, and move on.

  And that’s exactly, more or less, what happened.

  —

  It’s a complicated business, describing the legal morass of South Carolina, a state that feels fifty years behind the rest of America in the matter of race and class. This is a state where nearly 30 percent of children live below the poverty line, where you see poor blacks in Barnwell County shuffling up and down the roads in white T-shirts, farmer’s pants, and old shoes, looking like slaves of old, some having never left the state in their entire lives, and where internal state politics are rife with political cutthroats who at the smell of red meat will knock one another over the head hard enough to send the most grizzled political veteran blabbering to therapy. The horrific massacre of nine African American parishioners at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston by an avowed racist peels back only a small window to the tumultuous boil that exists beneath the outward calm of that state’s swirling racio-political world. If all politics is personal, it’s nuclear-strength personal in South Carolina, where four state legislators, known as the Barnwell Ring, basically ran the whole state for nearly thirty years, where the Speaker of the House in 2014 went down in ethical flames only after the most embarrassing public disclosures of his oversight, and where the current network of male bullyboys and legal bruisers, many of them judges and graduates of the University of South Carolina School of Law, run the state’s legal system like a private club. “Even if you have a Harvard law degree, you won’t go far over there,” says Buddy Dallas.

  Into the morass of legal backbiting, nepotism, and personal feuding walked David Cannon. Cannon had once headed the local Republican committee that had hosted former president George W. Bush’s campaign visit to Barnwell, and he had actually lunched years ago at the Edisto Beach house with the very same judge, Doyet Early, who would one day be among those who handed him his head. According to Cannon, the trouble began just days after Brown died. Several of Brown’s children, led by daughters Deanna and Yamma, sued, claiming that Cannon, Dallas, and Bradley had “unduly influenced,” i.e., flimflammed, their father in his later years. Tomi Rae Hynie, Brown’s “widow,” who was said to be three thousand miles away in Los Angeles when Brown died and whose bill from a California drug rehab facility that year cost Brown $50,000, filed claims of her own. She appeared on the Larry King talk show shortly after Brown’s death, using the term “my husband” enough times to make your head spin.

  The suits hit the South Carolina courts like a smoke bomb and quickly spread. The mostly white political and legal entities in South Carolina could not have been overly fond of James Brown anyway. The guy had led cops on a two-state chase and brought international spotlight and embarrassment to a proud state, with his six-year sentence drawing international calls for his release—public pressure drummed up by the Reverend Al Sharpton, who among the South Carolina legal bullyboys is probably about as popular as a can of sardines in Rome on a Friday.

  In the wake of Brown’s death, a weird toxic trio of good-old-boy lawyers, Brown’s children, and his poor white widow battled together, using “the poor children” that Brown left most of his money to as a kind of carrot that each of the three dangled publicly as justification for their greed. The mob needed a head on a platter. David Cannon was available. They called for his head. And they got it.

  —

  Cannon sits in the back parlor of his modest Barnwell home, facing his modest yard, surrounded by antique swords and paperwork. In front of him, on the table, is a Scooter Pie and a Coca-Cola. In front of me is the same—my reward for days of grilling the poor man about events that have flipped his life upside down.

  “Have a couple for the road,” Cannon says of the Scooter Pies. “I got a whole box.”

  I saw the crate in the kitchen. That’s when I knew I really liked the guy. I love Scooter Pies.

  Outside, the sound of a lawnmower roars to life, and a middle-aged black man in cool-looking shades and a baseball cap roars past, waving, mowing the grass outside. Cannon calls to him out the window.

  “Hey, hey,” the gardener calls out.

  Cannon watches him. “I’ve known him a long time,” he says. “He wanted to buy a house. He came to me and said, ‘I can’t do it. I don’t know how to get it done.’ ” The gardener knew nothing about banks. He didn’t even have a checking account. Cannon opened one for him, then arranged a meeting for him with one of Cannon’s friends in the mortgage business, who got the gardener a bridge loan. When the gardener had a serious operation, Cannon showed up at his hospital bed. “He was just about to go into surgery, and I was setting by his bed,” Cannon says. “He was worried. I put my hand over his hand and was talking to him. The doctor came into the room and said to him, ‘I see your boss is here!’ ”

  “I’m not his boss,” Cannon said. “I’m his friend.”

  That kind of thinking was one reason Brown asked Cannon and Dallas to join his team in the first place, and why they later became friends. They also did for Brown what several high-powered northern executives and lawyers could not do. They brought him back to prominence and cleared his $15 million debt to the IRS. It was something Brown never forgot, and when a group of northern managers and promoters sought to undermine Cannon and Dallas, promising Brown the moon if he left his southern management team and brought them on instead, Brown told them to get lost. “Mr. Brown died not owing the government a penny,” Cannon says proudly. “He used to tell folks, ‘Mr. Cannon told the IRS what to do.’ But I didn’t really.”

  What Cannon did was maneuver Brown out of an IRS situation with great skill over a two-year period. Brown appreciated that skill, and celebrated the trust between the two when he introduced Cannon and Dallas to thousands at the October 2006 naming of the James Brown Arena in Augusta, Georgia, as two friends who deserved credit for helping his career. As the overseer of Brown’s accounts, Cannon had power of attorney to sign Brown’s checks. He tried to curtail Brown’s crazy spending habits by putting him on a salary of $100,000 a month, which they both agreed on. (Brown called that “walking-around money.”) He and Dallas worked to keep Brown on the right side of things. Dallas’s job was to “keep him out of the ditches.” When Brown put a $300,000 deposit on a private plane, then changed his mind, or made an offer on the land next to his house, then walked away from it, leaving the seller incensed, or found a contractor who ruined his basement, leaving Brown ankle deep in shit, having somehow constructed the basement so that the house sewage poured into it, it was Dallas’s job to handle those matters. Cannon o
versaw the money, watched the deals, sometimes made the deals, and worked to keep Brown out of tax trouble. His job, he says, was to advise Brown as to options. But the ultimate decision regarding all deals, Cannon says, fell to Brown. “No one told James Brown what to do,” he says.

  After Brown’s IRS troubles ended, Cannon and Dallas helped Brown sever ties with his old booking agent, Universal Music, and brought him over to William Morris. Rev. Sharpton marshaled his enormous capacity to push the public relations machinery in the right direction, mounting a huge public outcry for Brown’s release from prison, which led to more gigs. Brown’s appearance as a preacher in The Blues Brothers and later in a Sylvester Stallone Rocky movie had brought him new, young audiences. Things were looking up.

  But his penchant for hiding money never wavered. One afternoon, Dallas and Cannon were chatting with Brown in his Augusta office and Dallas posed a question: “Mr. Brown, where do we look for your money if something happens to you?”

  Brown was seated at a desk. He had a yellow legal pad before him. He scribbled one word on it and flipped it around so that Dallas could see it.

  The word read: “Dig.”

  —

  In his Beech Island mansion off Douglas Drive, Brown had a little red room. Nobody was allowed to enter that room. That was the money room.

  Brown led Cannon into that room one day, and as Cannon watched, he opened up one of two big cardboard boxes. The box was loaded to the top with hundred-dollar bills. Cannon was stunned. “Where did you get this from?” he asked. “This is a tax problem.”

  Brown wouldn’t say. And if Mr. Brown wouldn’t say, Cannon knew there was no forcing him. He assumed the tax problem would have to be dealt with soon enough. He’d learn of its source then.

  He never did. That is part of the problem. The South Carolina state court system and its bevy of attorneys that have frittered away millions out of Brown’s estate as it “administers” it during these confusing court battles is still trying to deflect the blame of “lost funds” onto Cannon, claiming that Cannon “knows where Brown’s money is.” Cannon insists he does not know. During his tenure with Brown, Cannon could challenge Brown about his spending, but ultimately no one changed Brown’s spending habits. Brown was impulsive. If he wanted to walk into a jewelry store and spend $10,000 on a necklace, or hire a private jet to fly a young lady he’d met overseas thousands of miles to visit him, or book extra gigs while touring Europe that he didn’t tell anyone about so that he could bank the cash, or cart $9,000 in silver dollars into his house in a wheelbarrow, he simply did it. Despite Cannon’s objections, which usually came after the fact. “I was one of the few people who could get behind closed doors and raise hell with him,” Cannon says.

  But that didn’t change Brown’s penchant for hiding money or spending impulsively. He hid and spent so freely, Cannon says, that even Brown, who could “count his money to the dollar,” began to have trouble keeping up with how much he had. Particularly aggravating, Cannon says, was Brown’s habit of spending through the salary they’d agreed on, then borrowing from a huge cache of cash he stored in Cannon’s home safe. According to Cannon, Brown treated that safe as a bank for eight years, storing money in it, coming by to pick up thousands at a time, storing thousands more, running out, coming back to put more in, pulling out, taking in, pulling out. The problem grew worse when Brown discovered that Adrienne had taken $93,000 that Brown had hidden in the ceiling of his pool house. He ramped up his use of Cannon’s safe. “At one point he had about a million dollars in my safe,” Cannon said. “I told him, ‘Mr. Brown, this money belongs in a bank. I’m not a bank.’

  “ ‘No, Mr. Cannon. It’s fine right here.’ ”

  According to Cannon’s account, Brown ran so much money into and out of his safe that Brown himself lost track, and about a year and a half before he died, Brown called and said, “I know I don’t have any money over there.”

  “I said, ‘You got $400,000 here.’

  “He said, ‘No, it’s yours. I want to borrow $350,000.’

  “I said, ‘It’s your money.’ I gave him $350,000 in cash.” Brown put it in a plastic grocery bag and left.

  “That’s something no one knows,” Cannon said. “They never deposed me. I’ve never been on the witness stand. No one knows I was keeping cash for James Brown.” Brown later insisted that Cannon repay himself the $350,000 as payment for constant borrowing and storing his funds. He had offered Cannon 10, 15, even 20 percent for keeping his money in his safe over their fourteen-year relationship, and Cannon had always declined. In addition, Cannon helped Brown broker a huge bond deal with a Wall Street outfit, which advanced Brown $25 million against future royalties. Brown wanted to reward him. That was, Cannon says, the James Brown way of doing business, based on trust, friendship, and his whims. You make a big deal, James Brown rewards you in James Brown fashion. But James Brown gives you what James Brown feels you deserve—maybe more or less than you believe you deserve. It was in keeping with his past behavior, for example the way his son Terry says that Brown would buy cars for friends or trusted associates—it might be a used one, but a used one, Brown said, would do. Or the way Fred Wesley, Brown’s co-composer, says he got percentages ranging from 2 to 80 percent on songs he was involved in creating or wrote outright—and for others he did not create at all. “It was all based on JB’s whims,” he said.

  In December 2006, Brown made an appointment to see an Atlanta dentist about his teeth. When he arrived, the dentist saw that he was seriously ill and sent Brown immediately to nearby Emory Crawford Long Hospital. Cannon got word and drove to the hospital right away. On Christmas Eve, two days later, Cannon drove there intent on staying the night. Brown said, “It’s Christmas, Mr. Cannon. Go home to your family.” Cannon left, reluctantly. He’d never see Brown alive again.

  Brown died within hours after Cannon left, at about 1:20 A.M. on Friday, Christmas day. Cannon, who wrote and signed all of Brown’s checks for James Brown Enterprises, cashed a check to himself the following Tuesday, three days after Brown’s death, for $350,000. The direct source of those funds, he says, was a roughly $900,000 payment to Brown’s company from a routine audit that had been performed on one of the entities that collected Brown’s royalty and music publishing money. The indirect source, he says, is that it was his money anyway. Brown had given it to him, based on his storing and handling James Brown’s money—doing things the James Brown way.

  In an estate that at Brown’s death was estimated by Cannon conservatively at a minimum of $100 million—and that figure, too, is a matter of court fighting, by the way—and where millions flowed in and out and hundreds of transactions took place annually, $350,000 is not much, particularly between two partners who cut their own deals and worked with a lot of cash. Show business, Cannon points out, is still a cash business, probably second only to drugs in terms of cash moved around. Moreover, most agents who represent artists get 10, 15 percent, even 25 percent of that artist’s fees and income. Overall, Cannon’s take during the course of his fourteen-year stint with Brown added up, in Cannon’s view, to about 15 percent. Brown likely made much more money for the various lawyers, agents, and hustlers who visited his career long before Cannon and Dallas pulled him out of hot water, and most did far less for Brown in his career than those two, which is probably why he appointed them—along with Judge Bradley—to run his education foundation at his death.

  But it didn’t matter. The flurry of accusations, from Brown’s alleged widow and his children, came at Cannon so fast and hard they knocked him on his heels. “You can’t imagine my offense,” he said. “For fourteen years my job was to build his credibility.”

  The initial legal warring and clamor for Brown’s money was so vicious that the various parties couldn’t even agree where to bury Brown. After his three funeral services—one at the Apollo in New York, one in Augusta, and a private one at Brown’s daughter Deanna’s church—were done, Brown’s body lay in an Augusta funeral home for mo
nths while the lawyers duked it out. Cannon, who had been the guy that Brown trotted out to keep away phonies, money mongers, money grubbers, and even, at times, Brown’s children, now found himself on the outside with a bull’s-eye on his back, targeted by everyone who had an ax to grind. Cannon initially had to pony up $40,000 of his own money to pay for Brown’s funeral and was then ordered by a South Carolina court to pay back the $350,000 check that he wrote without having the chance to explain why he wrote it. As he says, he was never deposed. He never took the witness stand. No witnesses were presented against him. He was never allowed to explain—nor could he have easily explained—the doings of a man who never trusted banks, or the government, or even some of his own children, including two of the daughters who sued their own father in 1997 for royalties over songs they had “written” when they were children, eventually collecting $250,000 in settlement, Cannon says. Cannon’s lawyer—since fired—told him, “It looks bad. Just give it back and you won’t have to worry about it.” Cannon paid the $350,000 to James Brown Enterprises to help clear the decks.

  But placing the $350,000 back into the JB account just made things look worse. By then the war was full-on. All the warring parties who’d been left out of the estate plan—the claimed children minus Brown’s son Terry, the alleged widow, and the growing contingent of lawyers working on contingency fees of reportedly up to 30 percent, paid out of Brown’s estate and eventually totaling millions—had an easy target: a white guy who had exerted “undue influence” on the Godfather. Dallas and Judge Bradley suffered terribly as well. Dallas spent $300,000 on his legal defense, barely survived a terrible auto accident, and his law practice was nearly destroyed. Bradley died, the stress no doubt helping him to an early death. But it was Cannon who took the brunt of the accusations. A newspaper article, reported from a cleverly placed “tip” from an opposing lawyer to a friendly AP reporter, plastered Cannon’s name and face across the country. Readers and television snippets showing Cannon’s face bore the news that old Brown had been bamboozled out of his dough. The Internet did the rest, with half facts and rumors morphing into unsubstantiated fact. The South Carolina attorney general, Henry McMaster, who planned a run for governor, marched into the mess trying to play white knight. He tossed Brown’s will and rewrote it, creating a new trust mandating that half of Brown’s estate be split between the widow and the kids. By then the court had tossed Cannon, Bradley, and Dallas as trustees and appointed a new lead trustee of Brown’s estate, attorney Adele Pope, who was eventually ousted by the same old-boy network that appointed her when she attempted to move the estate as Brown intended. She was ousted for a third trustee.