Crazy Rich: Inside the Johnson & Johnson Dynasty

by Jerry Oppenheimer

  While Libet didn’t go on the record with New York, a year later she did cooperate with The Wall Street Journal in a story headlined: “An American Heiress Aims to Rescue Cambodia by Giving Orphans a Family.” She was quoted as saying, “I’ve been very, very fortunate in my life and I always wanted to do something larger with the gifts I have been given—and I don’t mean financial. I mean my own personal internal resources. I thought there was a way for me to be useful here … I am not a trained social worker, but I felt that we should give these children loving parents, a safe environment, lots of opportunities, lots of ideas and an amazing education.”

  Fishman says he came away from the assignment feeling that, “Libet, who had five husbands and a whole bunch of boyfriends, was clearly very sexual and loves exotic guys … but she’s not sexy, she’s not provocative … She falls for guys and she falls fairly hard. Clearly, she fell for Bissoon in a big way. She’s a lost girl … She found Cambodia and found a purpose, something like a benefactor doing some good there, and that was laudable.”

  In 2010, the New York Court of Appeals ruled that Bissoon had legitimately adopted William in June 2004. Press reports quoted court documents stating that in 2006, Libet had tried to adopt the boy through the courts without telling Bissoon, and that she had failed to disclose her time in rehab. The ruling stated that Libet “should not have been allowed to adopt [William] without notice to the person who was [William’s] father under Cambodian law.” But the court’s decision permitted the boy to continue living with his heiress mother. Bissoon, the ruling stated, “Has no intention of removing the child from the only home he had ever known.”

  * * *

  Besides collecting men, Libet Johnson, one of the wealthiest women in New York, and a minority stockholder in her brother Woody’s football team, collected multimillion-dollar properties as routinely as if she was playing Monopoly.

  In 2005, she had purchased Meryl Streep’s $2 million Greenwich Village town house for $9.1 million as an investment, never moved in—Libet was not a Village person—and in early 2007 had put it on the market for close to $16 million. She sold it later in 2007 for $12.8 million. While Libet owned the twenty-five-foot-wide home with what was described as “wonderful details, excellent sunlight, and magnificent space,” according to her agents, she had loaned the house to Michael Douglas’s ex-wife and Casey Johnson’s godmother, Diandra, who had since married a guitar maker by the name of Michael Klein.

  Earlier in 2007, Libet had sold off a more than five-thousand-square-foot penthouse, 51-B, the largest apartment at the Trump International Hotel and Tower on Central Park West, for $18.5 million, which she was said to have bought for $20 million; the buyer reportedly sold it a few hours later for a profit of $2,750,000. As the venerable New York Post gossip columnist Cindy Adams often signs off, “Only in New York, kids, only in New York.” Libet had previously sold off other pieces of her twenty-thousand-square-foot triplex palace there, which was valued in around 2000 at more than $62 million. At one point she had a total of six apartments on the forty-ninth, fiftieth, and fifty-first floors in the ultra-luxurious building. Her reputed lover at the time, the hair stylist Fekkai, with whom she was reportedly living, was said to have told her to keep just one.

  She also owned a spectacular and immense home in Vail, along with her estate in Millbrook.

  Her splashiest acquisition occurred in 2011 during the height of the national recession and disastrous housing market when she paid close to fifty million dollars for the Vanderbilt Mansion at 16 East Sixty-Ninth Street, near Central Park on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. The late-nineteenth-century palace was once owned by Alice Gwynne Vanderbilt, widow of Cornelius Vanderbilt II, who headed the New York Central Railroad.

  As the New York Post once noted, Woody Johnson’s sister “has a voracious appetite for handsome husbands and big-time real estate.”

  However, by the summer of 2012, Libet, known for her capriciousness, had already grown tired of her Vanderbilt acquisition and wanted it sold. It wasn’t the only high-end property she, or members of her family, were trying to unload under the cover of an entity called Falconer LLC. That other property, according to the New York Observer, was a chic Greenwich Village town house, on the market for almost $10 million.

  While there was nothing extraordinary about Libet buying and selling big-ticket abodes, the agent overseeing the sale of the Greenwich Village property seemed a curious choice since her surname had some notoriety within the Johnson dynasty. The agent was related to the late psychiatrist Vincent D’Arc, Mary Lea Johnson’s second husband, whom she had publicly accused of putting out a murder contract on her, resulting in a front-page scandal that had rocked the dynasty back in the mid-1970s.

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  In 2006, the same year that troubled Casey Johnson attacked her aunt Libet in print, she fell in love with the idea of adopting a baby—an idea that came to her after visiting Libet’s Cambodian orphanage. Firmly believing that Casey was incapable of caring for a child, the older Johnson heiress made it clear to the younger Johnson heiress that there was no way she’d permit her to take one of her orphans.

  Casey’s father’s sister appeared to be the only one in the family who had voiced any such objection. “When she was talking about wanting to adopt everybody of sound mind remained stone quiet, or asked very polite questions about the level of commitment required because Casey couldn’t even keep a houseplant alive,” asserts a family member. “Her parents certainly didn’t draw a line in the sand. They were trying to be supportive. Maybe there was an eye-roll.”

  Casey’s mother, Sale, claims otherwise.

  “I told her I was totally against the adoption,” she emphatically maintains. “I said, ‘You don’t have your own life together, how are you going to keep track of somebody else’s life? This is not a puppy that if it doesn’t work out, you can give it to a friend.’”

  Casey had never planned to have a child of her own, her mother says, because she was aware, when lucid, of her mental instability from borderline personality disorder and poor health as a result of her diabetes.

  At the same time Casey became serious about adoption she had another major item on her to-do list: marriage. She had become quietly engaged to the heir to an Atlanta gasoline station and vending machine fortune, and their wedding was in the planning stages. Casey was even talking about the style of mansion she wanted them to buy, and how she wouldn’t let her child watch TV.

  “He was crazy about her,” her mother states. “I said, ‘Casey, you’re engaged, don’t you think you should have the luxury of enjoying your engagement, your first years of marriage, before you have [adopt] a child? I’m sure that he would love to have kids, but maybe not yet.’”

  Casey didn’t listen, and she and her fiancé split up.

  “I think pretty much the adoption became an issue,” says her mother. “Casey became adamant about it, and told him, ‘If you don’t want the baby, then I don’t want you.’”

  The only person vociferously cheerleading Casey’s decision to adopt was her godmother, Diandra Douglas, mother of heroin addict and drug dealer Cameron Douglas, with whom Casey had a close relationship. Douglas herself had adopted an orphan from Kazakhstan and had started guiding Casey through the process.

  Diandra was among several older women, close to Sale and Woody, whom the heiress had informally adopted as surrogate mothers during her twenties. “Diandra and Casey had a relatively close relationship during the many times when Casey was on the outs with her own parents,” says the family member. “When it came time for Casey to make that fateful decision to adopt, Diandra was all on-board and encouraging, but she wasn’t doing jack-shit in terms of giving good advice. Sale was not very happy about it.”

  In 2007, with the support and guidance of Douglas, and against her divorced parents’ wishes, Casey adopted a Kazakh baby girl who had been born premature at twenty-six weeks in 2006, and weighed just two pounds. Casey named her Ava-Monroe, in honor of her ido
l Marilyn Monroe. She would require special diets and close care through her early years.

  The same year Ava-Monroe came into the world, Casey welcomed a new family member. He was named Robert Wood Johnson V and was born to pretty, blond Suzanne Ircha, Casey’s father’s girlfriend and future second wife. Woody finally had a namesake to carry on the Johnson dynasty line.

  In 2008, an emotionally charged and hurtful family confrontation was ignited involving Casey, her father, and Ircha, at the New York Jets owner’s Easthampton estate. During one of her up periods, Casey had come east from California with hopes of introducing her father to Ava-Monroe, and ending their long estrangement. She had also been thinking seriously about moving back to New York so she would have the emotional support of her mother and sisters and help with her child, and had even done some apartment shopping, but couldn’t find an appropriate place at the right price and in the proper neighborhood.

  By the time Casey showed up on her father’s fashionable Hamptons doorstep with two-year-old Ava in tow, Woody had been incommunicado for several years. The turning point for him had been her refusal once again to get treatment for her serious emotional and physical issues.

  Three years earlier, in 2005, Sale had convinced Woody to accompany her, Jaime, and Daisy to California, so they could surprise Casey and do an intervention, and get her to go to a clinic that her mother had arranged. It didn’t work out and caused more problems. “We got there,” reveals Sale, “and Casey just blew us off. She said, ‘I don’t need any help. I’m sorry you wasted a trip.’ After that, Woody basically washed his hands of Casey.” Moreover, her public bashing of Libet a year later was the final straw for her billionaire father.

  “It’s a horrible saga,” declares Sale.

  When Casey arrived at her father’s mansion in Easthampton to introduce Ava, Woody wasn’t home, but Ircha was. It was actually Casey who had first introduced her father to Ircha. Several years earlier, Casey, then still on relatively good terms with her father, had flown to Miami to see the Jets play the Dolphins. A girlfriend who had accompanied her brought along her pal, Ircha. A few days later Woody called Casey and asked for Ircha’s number, and they began dating.

  Ircha, however, later claimed that she and Woody were introduced by a publicist. “My friend said, ‘You know Woody Johnson is single, you should meet him … Two days later he called.” Afterward, she taught him how to use his new BlackBerry and “from then it was history.”

  Whichever way they met, there was no friendliness the afternoon Casey arrived at her father’s home. Casey’s nanny was waiting in the car with Ava along with a couple of Casey’s friends. Ircha, Casey let everyone know, was far from hospitable.

  “What are you doing here?” Ircha fumed, Casey later told her mother.

  When Casey explained that she had come to see her father, Ircha, was said to have replied, “This is my house, so leave.” But Casey stood her ground. “This is my father’s house and I’m staying here until he gets here because I want him to meet my daughter.”

  Ircha then warned, “If you don’t get out of my house, I’m going to call the police.”

  Casey told her, “I’m not going anywhere.”

  Ircha dialed 911.

  About the same time that the police arrived and told Casey she had to leave because she was trespassing, Woody pulled up. Backing the new love of his life, he also demanded that his daughter get off of his property, stay off, and never come back.

  “Woody doesn’t like confrontation. He doesn’t like negative publicity. He doesn’t like anything like that,” maintains Sale Johnson Rashad of the incident.

  The confrontation at the mansion would be one of the last times Woody would ever see his daughter alive. The clock was ticking. She had just months left to live.

  A close relative recalls a conversation with Casey not long after the Hamptons fireworks.

  “I said, ‘Well, how are things,’ and she said, ‘My fondest wish, my dearest wish, is that I can someday be on good terms and talk with my father again.’ I was shocked. I said, ‘Casey, what are you telling me?’ And she says, ‘He won’t have anything to do with me. If I go to his house he tells me to get off his property.’ It was really heart-wrenching.”

  In October 2008, Ircha had Woody’s second son, about eight months before the couple finally tied the knot. As she was giving birth at a New York hospital—the bouncing baby boy was named John and weighed seven pounds, three ounces—Woody’s girlfriend prior to Ircha, Erika Mariani, received a bizarre ten-minute voice mail left from his cell phone, according to a report in the New York Post headlined, “Oh, Baby, Listen to This.” Mariani said she was “shocked” when she heard the infant crying and Woody talking to hospital staff, even discussing his newborn’s weight. “It was pretty surreal,” said Mariani. “I felt like I was in the room. I’m just glad I wasn’t the one giving birth.”

  The question remained—why did Woody Johnson still have a former girlfriend’s number in his phone book?

  There may have been more.

  Ircha and Mariani were among a number of attractive, bright, well-educated career women with whom Woody had become involved after he and Sale had split. One of the first, who he was said to have met at his gym, was a model-thin, buxom thirty-year-old investment banker and heartbreaker by the name of Holly Newman. She was from an upscale Jewish family in Buffalo, New York, where her father was a prominent lawyer, and her mother a retired librarian. She and Woody first caught the attention of gossip writers in early 2003 when she was spotted at his side at Jets games and at the fancy restaurant in the Trump building where Woody had established his bachelor pad.

  Before Woody, Newman had been involved with a rich hedge-fund manager. The New York Observer quoted someone who knew her as saying, “Holly gets what Holly wants … a girl with a mission,” and the weekly newspaper described her as the Jets owner’s “discreet main squeeze … who plays sports [and] knows about football.”

  In many ways she was a lot like Sale—a driven, ambitious Jewish jock.

  Like his relationships with other women, Woody’s with Holly didn’t last long. In early 2004, the New York Social Diary, a Web site that covers New York society, reported that the romance between Woody and Newman, who had been living with the billionaire, had “gone kaput.” She later got married.

  It was Suzanne Ircha who won the Johnson heir’s big diamond ring.

  The sixty-two-year-old Woody and the forty-two-year-old Ircha had a June 4 wedding in 2009 at the fashionable Brick Presbyterian Church, founded in 1767, on Manhattan’s Upper East Side.

  “Woody Weds,” declared the headline in the Post, reporting that “the stars were out to toast” the Jets owner “who tied the knot with longtime squeeze” Ircha at an early-evening ceremony. Among the guests were the usual suspects—Donald Trump and the Douglases, Michael and Catherine Zeta-Jones. “The party of about one hundred and fifty then shot down Park to the Four Seasons Hotel, where revelers were treated to an intimate reception.”

  For a brief time in the mid-1990s, the second Mrs. Woody Johnson reportedly did some minor acting, garnering small roles as a go-go girl, as a waitress, and her image even made an appearance in a video game.

  When 9/11 happened she was working as a trader for the investment firm Sandler O’Neill & Partners, which had offices on the 104th floor of World Trade Center’s tower two. Sixty-six of Ircha’s one hundred and forty-eight coworkers were killed.

  On the tenth anniversary of 9/11, Woody had his Jets play, calling it “a great honor,” and saying it brought back memories of Ircha’s experience when the attack occurred. “My wife, who wasn’t my wife at that time, just happened to be late [for work] because she was out with clients the night before and didn’t go in … Everybody has a story from that day.”

  Suzanne Ircha was brassy with a penchant for glittery high heels, and a reputation for being tough, according to people who knew her. She also was said to have had a lot in common with his first wife. As a Jo
hnson family friend notes, “Suzanne’s like Sale—very assertive and high energy.”

  Not long after Woody and Suzanne tied the knot, wife number two followed in the Louboutin footsteps of wife number one and reinvented herself as a Manhattan socialite, boasting of the boldface names in her new platinum circle. And, enjoying her husband’s very public business, the Jets, she became a spokeswoman for the women’s apparel line that was promoted by the National Football League. She saw Woody’s “thing” as football and her “thing” as fashion. She claimed Woody once told her, “Go ahead, you’ve had babies, so go out there and be your own person again.”

  Because the new parents required close-by help with the little ones, Woody reportedly bought an almost $3 million apartment to house nannies in the Trump International Hotel and Tower, where Woody and his bride were ensconced in a $10 million penthouse.

  Besides Casey, Ircha also was said to have had conflicts and run-ins with Woody’s other two daughters, Jaime, and especially Daisy, the youngest, who was her mother’s favorite because of their close bond as champion equestrians. Twenty-five-year-old Daisy (with her favorite horse, a Hanoverian named Atlanta 447) was among a group of equestrian heiresses featured in a Town & Country cover story in August 2012 called “RISKY RICH GIRLS: Why They’re Obsessed with Competing in the Most Dangerous Olympic Game.”

  “Daisy’s like Sale,” says a friend. “She has a million trophies and medals from riding.” When someone would ask the baby powder heiress Daisy how long she’d been on horseback, her glib response was, “Since I was a fetus,” because, “I was riding when I was pregnant with her,” boasts her mother.

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  On Sunday, June 21, 2009—Father’s Day—all hell broke loose between the increasingly emotionally disturbed Casey Johnson and her mother, who was desperate to get her into treatment for her borderline personality disorder.