by Ian Halperin
There was one other notable guest at the funeral that day. Nick Gordon had been added to the program as a pallbearer at Bobbi’s request. It was the first time most of the mourners, including the family, had seen the young man, and many wondered aloud who he was.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Only a month after Whitney’s death, Bobbi Kristina agreed to sit down with Oprah and talk about the impact of her mother’s passing. Many had wondered how the teenage girl was coping, especially after reports of her two breakdowns and hospitalizations that weekend.
The autopsy report had not yet been released. When it was, it would reveal the cause of death as accidental drowning, with “heart disease” and “cocaine use” listed as contributing factors.
As Oprah greeted Bobbi in the living room of the Atlanta town house, the host asked how she was doing. “I’m doing as good as I possibly can at this point,” Bobbi told her. “I’m just trying to keep going.” She said her family was helping her get through it.
It is clear that she was still reeling from the death of the woman she called her “best friend, a sister, a comforter.” She told Oprah that she woke at five AM every morning and felt her mother’s presence in the house.
“I can hear her voice in spirit talking to me, ‘Keep talking to me. I got you,’ ” she said. “She’s always with me. I can always feel her. I can always feel her with me. She always asked me, ‘Do you need me?’ And I caught myself, out of nowhere, I didn’t even know I said it, I said, ‘I’ll always need you.’ ”
Bobbi had been named sole heir of her mother’s estate, but it was still unclear how much money that involved. Some estimates put Whitney’s net worth at $115 million, while others had her in the red. In the days following her death, it was revealed she had squandered most of her fortune and was actually in debt at the time of her death, despite earning an estimated $250 million throughout her career. The Daily Mail reported that Clive Davis even had to loan her $1.5 million to settle her debts before her last stint in rehab.
She had been locked in a very nasty battle with her stepmother, Barbara Houston—John’s former housekeeper—over her father’s million-dollar life insurance policy that he had left to Whitney. The fact that she was fighting tooth and nail over such a relatively small sum indicated to many that she desperately needed the money.
Michael Jackson’s estate had raked in a staggering $279 million in sales in the year following his 2009 death, but since Whitney didn’t write her own music, she didn’t have the same earning power as the King of Pop. Still, in the days following her death, a number of her albums returned to the charts, and the estate was clearly raking it in. iTunes immediately raised the price of her songs from ninety-nine cents to $1.29 to capitalize on the new demand. “I Will Always Love You” was downloaded 100,000 times the day after her body was found, and other Whitney Houston hits also enjoyed robust sales.
Whatever financial straits she had fallen into before her death, these sales would guarantee the estate untold millions. In the three years since, the general consensus is that Bobbi Kristina’s inheritance hovers around $20 million, with untold millions more to come.
Yet Whitney’s will was structured in such a way that her daughter would only receive the money in installments, while the remainder would be placed in trust.
The first installment came due on Bobbi’s twenty-first birthday in March 2014. An additional twenty-five percent was due when she turned twenty-five, with the balance coming to her when she turned thirty. As executor of the estate, Pat Houston had agreed to pay Bobbi a monthly allowance until she turned twenty-one, though it’s uncertain whether those sums were deducted from her first installment or, more likely, taken from any interest earned on the trust’s capital.
The fact that she wasn’t due to collect her first installment for another two years may have been the contributing factor in Bobbi’s decision to participate in a Lifetime reality show—The Houstons: On Our Own—only weeks after her mother was buried. Billed as a series chronicling “the lives of Whitney Houston’s family as they move on after her death,” shooting started in May 2012.
When the series premiered in October, it was the first time many had heard of the existence of Nick Gordon, other than Whitney’s brief reference to her godson and his participation as a pallbearer at the funeral. It is still uncertain how the misinformation circulated that Nick was an orphaned boy taken in by Whitney when he was twelve and Bobbi was eight. It was a falsehood that was circulated by ABC News in March 2012, claiming “Houston invited Gordon to live with her more than 10 years ago after learning that his birth mother could no longer care for him. She raised him alongside her daughter.” Surprisingly, the respected news network cited the celebrity website TMZ as the source of their information. The site had claimed to get their information from “sources close to the family.” When ABC contacted Nick to ask him about his relationship with Whitney, he coyly replied, “Everything that me and her went through will go to the grave with me.”
The falsehood quickly gained steam from there and was even cited as fact by Vanity Fair in their June 2012 investigation into Whitney’s death—surprising, considering the vast fact-checking team at the magazine’s disposal. The article, entitled “The Devils in the Diva,” discusses the move to Alpharetta and reveals that, besides Bobbi Kristina, the family sometimes included Bobby’s three children as well as “Nick Gordon, an orphaned boy Whitney had taken in two years earlier, when he was 12.”
During the first episode of the series, Nick tells the camera, “My name is Nick Gordon. My life changed dramatically when I met Krissi and Whitney. I was going to high school. My mom had kicked me out of the house. Krissi being my friend, I got to know Whitney. She took me in.” As it turned out, he was telling the truth. What he didn’t share was that he was eighteen when he got kicked out, not twelve.
Bobbi then adds, “We were best friends a long long time ago.” Then she shares a revelation that would create considerable buzz for months to come. “And now I’m in love with him.”
This is a story line the series had been hyping for weeks to promote the show. It’s conceivable that it was the Lifetime publicity team that first exaggerated the nature of the relationship and made it seem as if Nick and Bobbi had been raised almost as brother and sister from childhood. It had the public and media immediately talking about “incest.” It was this story line that everybody focused on and the one that had people tuning in.
Still, nobody overtly lied about the history of the relationship. But other family members certainly played along. Promoting the show, Bobbi’s aunt Pat revealed to Oprah that she was disturbed by the sudden romantic turn. “It didn’t sit right with me,” she told the talk show host. “I always saw them as the brother and sister type. We weren’t happy about it. No not at all.”
Strangely, nobody could find many photos of Nick with Whitney over the years and few recalled the young man who had supposedly been raised by Whitney as a son. Leolah Brown publicly declared she had never heard of him. Similarly, The Houstons: On Our Own features a scene in which Nick meets Pat’s cousin, and he asks Pat, “Who is this young man right here?,” making it clear that the cousin of the woman who had been closer to Whitney than anybody since Robyn left had no idea who he was.
Michelle Gordon’s interview with Dr. Phil in March revealed that Nick was prone to exaggerate—even lie—about his close ties to Whitney, even falsely claiming to have administered CPR as she lay dying on the bathroom floor.
Still, we know that Nick spent an unspecified amount of time living in the Atlanta town house after he turned eighteen and definitely traveled with Whitney and Bobbi in 2010 and 2011, but even his mother didn’t seem to know when exactly he moved in.
We do know that the first of Nick’s many brushes with the law occurred when Whitney was still alive, and it involved both Bobbi and Max Lomas, the young man who eventually discovered her in the bathtub.
On April 1, 2011, at approximately four in the morn
ing, police received a report that a number of people “armed with guns and shotguns” were involved in a fight in the parking lot of a Chevron gas station in Roswell. When a policewoman, Genevieve Myrand, arrived on the scene, she discovered Nick, Bobbi, Max, Zach Jafarzadeh, his brother Matteen, and a friend named Justin Walls standing outside a Honda and an SUV.
The officer ordered everybody to lie on the ground, then requested backup. Waiting for help, she began questioning those present. According to her incident report, “NICHOLAS stated he and his friend MAX LOMAS followed [the occupants of the Honda] to the Chevron because GORDON’s sister [Bobbi Kristina] was in the Honda with ZACH JAFARZADEH.”
Nick told her he and Max “did not particularly like” Zach and that Max had recently broken up with Bobbi Kristina.
Justin Walls then told the officer that the incident started as they were leaving the Ellard Village complex where Bobbi lived. He claimed Max approached the car and “tried to punch him in the face” while they were stopped at a light. When they got to the Chevron station, things turned violent when everybody got out of their vehicles.
Walls claimed that Max came toward him and hit him in the face repeatedly. “I observed Walls’ face and he was bleeding from the mouth and appeared to have a chipped tooth,” the officer wrote. Zach then tried to pull Max off of Walls and “was struck several times in the head by LOMAS.”
The officer reported that she observed Zach’s face “and his forehead was bruised and starting to swell. [Zach] also had a red mark above his left eye brow.”
When the officer asked Nick if he had any guns in his possession, he told her he had a black handgun in his glove compartment. She located a Glock 19 and two loaded Glock magazines. When she asked Nick what happened with the gun, “he stated that he waved the gun in the air in an attempt to stop the fight.”
When two backup officers arrived, they proceeded to handcuff all six participants. Max started throwing up but refused medical attention. He said he had been drinking. Revealing that Bobbi, Zach, and Walls also smelled of alcohol, Officer Myrand administered a Breathalyzer test to all three.
Bobbi blew .0215, well above the legal limit, though she hadn’t been driving. Police confiscated the black Glock 19 and charged Nick with “pointing a pistol at another.” Meanwhile, Bobbi—who had turned eighteen a month earlier—was cited for “being a minor in possession of alcohol.” Max was charged with two counts of battery and being a minor in possession of alcohol.
Despite Nick’s assertion that he was only waving the gun to break up the fight, a Chevron employee who had called police told Officer Myrand that Nick had been “threatening to shoot the gun at the other subjects in the parking lot.”
Eventually, Bobbi left the scene in Nick’s car with Max even though she was dating Zach at the time, and it was Max who had appeared to instigate the confrontation in a jealous rage. When questioned by police, Nick described Bobbi as his “sister.”
The incident took place only weeks after Whitney had canceled Bobbi’s Bahamas eighteenth birthday celebration and brought her to rehab because of the photos that appeared in the National Enquirer showing her snorting coke under the headline, “Whitney’s daughter hooked on cocaine and booze.” It would later emerge that it was Zach who had sold the photos to the magazine.
Eight months later, on December 26, 2011, Bobbi posted a photo of Nick sitting between her and Whitney in the back of a car, along with a tweet:
“Mom, @ndgordon (: & I on the way to the airport friday! (: #NYCBABYYYYY home home home.”
This was the Christmas trip to New York, where Whitney and Bobbi spent the day at the hotel with Cissy—the last time mother and daughter would ever see each other. Six weeks later, Whitney would be dead.
In a March 2012 tweet—less than a month after Whitney’s passing—Nick responded to a growing chorus of social media vilification. Many were complaining that his relationship with Bobbi was unseemly and that Whitney would have disapproved of a relationship with his “sister.” Responding to these accusations, he tweeted:
“For the stupid ppl out there she gave birth to 1 child. And she trusted me with EVERYTHING!!!!!!!!!!!!!”
It was only a few months earlier that Whitney had referred to him as her “godson” in a Detroit interview.
Michelle told Dr. Phil that the couple had met “in school.” That was my starting point. But try as we might, neither Sheila, my private investigator, nor I could uncover any evidence that Bobbi had ever attended high school in Atlanta. If they didn’t meet in school, how did they first become friends?
Inspired by Being Bobby Brown, and people’s unquenchable thirst for their fifteen minutes of fame, I announced to a lineup of twentysomethings outside an Atlanta club one evening that I was a producer for a new reality series to be set in Atlanta’s club scene. I said I would be looking for six participants to follow as part of my new show. I asked if anyone were interested.
Several hands shot up. I explained that since Atlanta was in the news because of Bobbi Kristina’s near drowning, I wanted to include at least one person who knew her. “Does anybody here qualify?” I asked. Nobody responded. But a woman named Lee-Anne told me that she has a friend who went to the same middle school with Bobbi. What school? “Taylor Road.” She gave me a cell number and her friend’s name—Alex.
The next morning, I called the number and told Alex who I was. Would she be interested in participating in my show? “Not a chance,” she told me. “I’m too shy.” The conversation shifted to Bobbi. She confirmed that Bobbi attended Taylor Road for a year in 2007. “I wasn’t part of her clique,” she told me, but she had friends who were.
What high school did Bobbi attend after Taylor Road? I asked. “She didn’t go to high school, she was privately homeschooled with tutors and stuff.” I told her that Michelle claimed Bobbi met Nick in high school. Bobbi had also once described Nick as her “high school sweetheart” in a tweet.
“No, they never went to school together, he was dating her really good friend. That’s how they met. I have no idea how they hooked up,” she told me.
She gave me some names and numbers of two people who know Bobbi better, one of whom is the apparent source of the information she had just shared. She told me it was all anybody was talking about since Bobbi’s bathtub incident. When I called, however, neither woman had any interest in talking to me. One of them hung up almost immediately.
I had discovered that Nick—who had moved with his mother and stepfather to Atlanta from Toledo, Ohio, when he was young—had attended Chattahoochee High School, which is only a few hundred yards down the road from Taylor Road Middle School, so it’s possible that this is the common link.
If I was a little closer to determining how Bobbi and Nick connected for the first time, I was still uncertain how Nick had linked up with Max Lomas.
Max had a long history of trouble. He had been charged with two counts of battery at the Chevron station when he and Nick confronted Zach in April 2011.
Two months later, in June, Max was once again arrested with four other people in a wooded area in Dawson County, Georgia. Police confiscated three rifles and a significant amount of marijuana. They charged Max, who sported a Mohawk at the time, with “consumption of alcohol on a wildlife management area, possession with intent to distribute marijuana and possession of a firearm in the commission of a crime.” A year later, he was charged with a probation violation stemming from the previous incident.
In June 2013, Max and Nick were back in trouble once again when police responded to a report that they had beat up a man named Steven Stepho in his apartment in an attempt to get money. Stepho would later tell the London Sun that he sold narcotics to both Nick and Bobbi.
“Bobbi and Nick would spend a lot on drugs every day, it just depended on how much money they had,” he told the paper. “It wasn’t unusual for them to spend $1,000 a day on drugs.”
A month later, on July 8, 2013, somebody called 911 to report trouble at the couple’s t
own house. When police arrived, Nick told them that Bobbi had fallen on the floor and was “unresponsive.” According to the police report, “GORDON described it as a seizure. BROWN said she has no history of medical conditions and has never had seizures before. BROWN was disoriented and transported to Emory Johns Creek Hospital by RMA.”
On the evening of June 6, 2014, Roswell police responded to a 911 call at an extended stay hotel called “Studio Six.” When they arrived, they were informed by a man named Garry Grace that his friend Max Lomas had “possibly overdosed on some type of controlled substance,” according to the police report. Max was transported to North Fulton Hospital and police confiscated “drug related objects.” The report describes a tattoo on Max’s left elbow. It reads: “LAUGH NOW CRY LATER.”
On August 28, 2014, Nick was in trouble yet again when he was arrested on a Thursday morning not far from the town house. According to a Roswell police spokesperson, he was behind the wheel of a BMW sedan that struck a curb while changing lanes. The car overturned and hit a fire hydrant. Nick was charged with a DUI, failure to maintain a lane, and driving with a suspended license.
His license had been suspended back in December 2012 when he was caught driving eighty-two miles per hour in a residential zone in Alpharetta. “The danger of that particular incident lies in the fact of 82 MPH in a very busy area within our city,” said a spokesperson from the Department of Public Safety after the incident. When he was pulled over, there was loud music blaring from the speakers. The song playing? Whitney’s “I Will Always Love You.” The officer who stopped him revealed that Nick asked, “Is there any way I can not go to jail.”
“Not for that, not for that speed,” the officer replied.
And in January 2015, two weeks before Bobbi was discovered, Danyela’s mother, Marlene Bradley, called Roswell police, who were dispatched to a motel room on Hembree Road on suspicion that Max Lomas was forcibly confining Danyela against her will.