Untouchable

by Randall Sullivan

  “I knew better than anyone how much money was coming Michael’s way, just from the deals I made for him,” Schaffel said. “Besides the two videos I had done for him, I had signed a deal with one of the broadcast networks to do a one-time concert of all his hit songs that would pay $15.5 million. Plus, I had another deal for Michael to do his own television reality show. This was before the explosion of reality shows. We had an oral agreement with a network to do this show that was basically just about his everyday life. And that was going to be worth $5 million per episode, with the foreign rights and everything. I knew that could become a real money train. So the point is, I wasn’t worried about getting my money back, and then some.”

  Schaffel gave Jackson another $100,000 for a shopping spree in August. Periodic repayments continued to be deposited in his bank account, and the $50,000 installment payments for his work on the rebuttal videos were arriving on schedule. On September 18, 2003, Schaffel recalled, Michael’s personal assistant Evvy Tavasci phoned to say that Michael needed $500,000, half of which would go to a Beverly Hills antique dealer who was threatening to sue him for nonpayment. Marc delivered another supersize order of French fries.

  The late autumn of 2003 was shaping up as a turning point in Jackson’s life and career. Michael finally negotiated a break with Sony by agreeing to release a series of compilation albums. The first was to be called Number Ones and would include every song of his that had hit the top of the charts. Sony had also agreed to finance a series of music videos—Michael insisted they be called “short films”—that would accompany the record’s release in November 2003. As production for the first of those short films geared up, Schaffel and Wiesner were negotiating with Peter Morton, founder of the Hard Rock Cafe franchise, to do a show for him in Las Vegas sometime the following year. The real excitement in the Jackson camp, though, surrounded the six-month trip combining work and vacation that Michael planned to begin on November 22. He and his core entourage—Grace and the kids, Schaffel, Wiesner, and Michael’s publicist Stuart Backerman—would begin by heading to Europe, where, between scheduled events in Germany, Austria, and France, Michael planned to spend the holidays at Elizabeth Taylor’s Chalet Ariel in Gstaad, Switzerland. From there, he would be heading to South Africa to participate in the Nelson Mandela Tribute that U2’s Bono was organizing, then flying to Brazil. City officials in Rio de Janeiro had given Jackson permission to stage the first nonathletic event they had allowed in years on the grass floor of Maracaña Stadium, a nighttime performance of “One More Chance” in which Michael would be surrounded by two hundred thousand people holding lighted candles. Rio officials also wanted Michael to perform a concert on the beach for an audience they estimated would number two million people, “and we were negotiating the terms of that even as we prepared to leave for Europe,” Schaffel recalled.

  Schaffel, Wiesner, and Backerman were all with Michael at the Mirage in Las Vegas during the third week of November, spending hours every day on the phone as they prepared for Michael’s departure, completely unaware that they were being listened to the entire time by deputies from the Santa Barbara County sheriff’s department. “They knew that Stuart and I would be leaving two days ahead of Michael to help set things up in Europe,” Schaffel said. “They probably even knew what had happened on the video with the Cascio kids.”

  Jackson had come to Vegas accompanied by Eddie and Marie Nicole Cascio, the younger siblings of his longtime aide Frank Cascio. The family had been a big part of Michael’s life since the late eighties when he had met patriarch Dominic Cascio at the Palace Hotel in New York, where Cascio was working as concierge to the luxury suites. The Cascios were the sort of big-hearted, full-throated Italians Michael had been drawn to for as long as he could remember. He had fallen in love with the entire clan, recognizing them as the close-knit, loving family he had always wished he came from. The Cascios responded in kind, enveloping Michael in a rare experience of human connection that was at least slightly independent of his celebrity. Dominic and his wife, Connie, allowed Frank and Eddie to travel with Michael from the ages of thirteen and nine. Over the years Frank had worked for Michael in a variety of capacities, ranging from roadie to personal assistant, both on tour and at Neverland Ranch. Eddie and Marie Nicole had visited Neverland often as well, sometimes with their parents, sometimes not.

  “There was a level of trust with the Cascios that I don’t think Michael had with anyone else,” Schaffel recalled. “They were his family.” It was the Cascios’ home in Franklin Lakes, New Jersey, to which Michael had retreated with his children after the 9/11 attacks. “They were who he went to whenever he wanted to feel safe,” Schaffel said. With their parents’ permission, Eddie and Marie Nicole had been removed from school (to be tutored privately at Michael’s expense) while they learned the dance routines that Michael had planned for the first video he would shoot for Number Ones.

  “Michael promised the Cascio kids they would dance with him in the video,” Schaffel recalled. “The two of them worked so hard and were so excited about it. But after we met with the director and looked at the costumes and stuff, Michael said, ‘Ooh, I don’t know.’ He thought the whole idea lacked originality. He dragged Dieter and I into the trailer and said, ‘I can’t do this.’ We knew why—the director sucked. But then Michael said, ‘All right, I’ll just get it done and make Sony happy.’ Mainly, though, he didn’t want to disappoint the Cascio kids. But when he brought the kids in to dance with him, the director said, ‘Who are they?’ And Michael said, ‘They’re going to be dancing with me.’ So the director left and he got on the phone with Sony. Then he came back and asked if he could speak to me privately. When we were alone he told me, ‘We have a problem. Sony says they don’t want Michael in the video with kids.’ I said, ‘Well, I can tell you that these aren’t just dancers. These are what Michael considers his family.’ He says, ‘Are you going to tell Michael?’ I said, ‘Why am I telling him this? Sony should be telling him.’ So a short time later Tommy or someone from Sony calls, and the next thing I hear, five minutes later, is Michael shouting, ‘Marc, come to the trailer right now!’ Michael was so distraught. I mean he was bright red, he was pacing around the trailer, and then he just started picking things up and throwing them. And he said, ‘I am not doing one other thing if I can’t have these kids in the shoot with me. I’m leaving. We’re not doing this. Tell everyone they can go home.’”

  On November 17, Number Ones was released to immediate success. Sony, realizing that the record would sell close to ten million copies worldwide—nearly half of those in the United States—immediately became solicitous, offering to assist Michael in any way it could during his six-month trip abroad. Things looked bright again.

  “We were all still at the Mirage in Vegas,” Schaffel recalled. “I was in one of the penthouse suites, and Michael was in one of the villas down below. We were having a great time. We did an autograph signing at this novelty store at the Aladdin called the Art of Music, and we did the Radio Music Awards, which was where ‘What More Can I Give?’ was played in public for the first time. The crowd loved it. Michael was really happy.” Then, just as the entourage was preparing to leave for Europe, “the shit hit the fan,” Schaffel recalled.

  On the morning of November 18, 2003, the Santa Barbara County sheriff’s department staged a massive raid on Neverland Ranch looking for evidence that would support charges of child molestation. A warrant was issued for Michael Jackson’s arrest that same day. At the Mirage, “it was absolute chaos,” Schaffel remembered. “Michael went nuts. I could hear it even up in my penthouse suite. Michael absolutely destroyed the villa he was in. I mean he threw everything in the place. He broke lamps, he broke furniture, he broke the art on the walls, you name it. He threw things through windows. He made so much noise that the Mirage sent its security, which got into it with Michael’s security. It was completely insane. And that, I would say, was the beginning of the end for Michael. I mean, that was the worst I’d ever seen h
im, by far. No comparison. Michael was a very strong person, very resilient. I’d seen him be upset, seen him cry, but he would bounce right back up. This time there was no bounce back. This time, I saw him break. Not just break down, but break. After the scene in the villa he didn’t even have the energy to get angry again. I’d have to call it a mental breakdown. He literally just lost it. You could wave your hand in front of him and he couldn’t see it. And it wasn’t drugs, not at first. The drugs came later, of course.”

  So did the Nation of Islam. “They arrived on the scene pretty quickly and just took over,” Schaffel recalled. “One of Michael’s brothers called them. Leonard Muhammad came, and then Louis Farrakhan himself showed up. And they were feeding Michael this line that, ‘The Nation will never let anything happen to you. We will protect you.’ And Michael was so helpless that he just put him himself in their hands. It was a huge mistake.”

  Schaffel flew back to LA that night. “When it first came out that they were talking about ‘a complainant,’ we knew who it would be,” Schaffel explained: Gavin Arvizo, the featured child in the Bashir documentary. “I knew I had video of Michael and [Gavin Arvizo] and his family, and I figured there was stuff on it that would help. But meanwhile Michael has to get out of the Mirage. They’re calling the cops to throw him out,” Schaffel said. Michael and his security staff were in Schaffel’s Lincoln Navigator, driving around Las Vegas, being followed by camera crews in satellite trucks, with TV helicopters whirling overhead. It was all over the television, even in LA. “He was like a hunted animal,” remembered Schaffel, who found Michael and his entourage a place to stay. Marc had become friends with the owner of the Green Valley Ranch, a hotel and casino resort just south of Las Vegas, in Henderson, while scouting the place as a location for one of Michael’s videos. “I called, and the guy was as nice as could be,” Schaffel remembered. “He extended every courtesy to Michael for the next three days.” Michael phoned him a couple of times from Henderson, but was incapable of conversation, Schaffel recalled. “He still sounded completely broken, completely hollow. All he could say was, ‘How can they do this? How can they say this?’ I don’t know if the Nation was talking to him, or telling him not to talk to me, but he was completely distracted by whatever was going on around him. I had a real sinking feeling.”

  Grace Rwaramba and Dieter Wiesner phoned later that evening to ask if Schaffel would wire $30,000 in cash because the security guards were threatening to quit for nonpayment of their wages. “You have to send the money to me, not Michael,” Grace told him, according to Schaffel, “because Michael will use it to go shopping instead of paying the guards.” Schaffel wired the cash but it was the last order of fries he ever delivered to Michael Jackson.

  By the end of that week, Jackson was forced to report to Santa Barbara County for arrest. Schaffel would not see him again until almost three years later, in London. Michael did phone him one more time, though, from some place where he was staying in Los Angeles. “He said, ‘The Brotherhood’—he always referred to the people from the Nation as the Brotherhood—‘the Brotherhood feels that—no offense to you, Marc, I love you very, very much—but the Brotherhood feels that I need to only communicate with other people in the Brotherhood. But it’s just temporary, and it’s something I need to do because they’re going to protect me. Don’t take it personally.’ I got pretty concerned when he told me what they were telling him. Michael said, ‘You know, I’m not going to have a problem.’ And I said, ‘Why is that?’ And he said, ‘Because the Brotherhood said that if they indict me, and if they try to find me guilty, that every black person in the country will riot in the streets.’ I said, ‘Michael, I really think you need to reconsider this advice that you’re getting.’ But he said good-bye and hung up on me a moment later, and he never called me again.”

  Dieter Wiesner ran into similar problems with the Nation of Islam. “For the first days, I was still with Michael every day and every night,” Wiesner recalled. “I even brought him to the police when he had to be arrested, but then the Nation of Islam took over. Michael was scared and they used that. Leonard Muhammad had complete control of him for a while. They wouldn’t let me see him or even speak to him. So I went back to Germany. And Michael called and said, ‘Dieter, did you hear from my mouth that you are out?’ I said no. And he said, ‘You should come back.’ So I did. But then Muhammad and his people brought him to different places and wouldn’t let me go to Michael. It was worse than Sony. So I went back to Germany again and I didn’t get to talk to Michael after that. I was his manager. I had the contracts. But I couldn’t even speak to him.”

  Schaffel bided his time for months while still collecting the $50,000 installment payments he was owed for the rebuttal videos. “Marc honestly thought that Michael was just waiting for the smoke to clear, and that he’d be in touch when he could,” Howard King explained. In June 2004, though, Michael’s brother Randy Jackson became Michael’s new “chief financial advisor,” and immediately stopped the payments to Schaffel. By that point, according to Schaffel’s accounting, he had received a total of $6,283,875 from Jackson, which left him $2,275,889 short of the $8,559,764 he had given Michael out of his own bank accounts.

  “We filed our lawsuit almost reluctantly,” King said. “Marc was convinced that Michael didn’t know they weren’t paying him.” Be that as it may, Schaffel demonstrated that he intended to get his money back, whatever it took, in November 2004, when he lodged a $3 million claim against Jackson. The timing was what gave the court filing such a sharp edge: Michael had just been indicted by the grand jury in Santa Barbara. In Schaffel’s lawsuit, he charged that “Jackson’s frequent excessive use of drugs and alcohol impelled him into irrational demands for large amounts of money and extravagant possessions.”

  It was King’s idea to have Marc go on Good Morning America for an interview by Cynthia McFadden during which a series of taped phone messages Michael Jackson had left for Schaffel would be played to the American public. “We were trying to make people aware that Marc wasn’t just some guy who passed through Michael Jackson’s life in a week,” King explained. “And that he was seriously involved with Michael. We had thirty phone messages in all. Most were Michael asking Marc for money. ‘Marc, I really need . . .’ ‘Marc, I really want to buy . . .’ Some were very strident, very militant, very contrary to the soft-spoken high-pitched voice we know. ‘I’m insisting that we must do this. We must capture this opportunity.’ He sounded a lot more like a high-powered business executive than the meek and mild superstar.” The ones ABC preferred were those that had Michael pleading for money. “Hello, Marc, it’s Michael,” one message began. “Please, please, never let me down. I really like you. I love you . . . Marc, I really need you to get, um, seven million dollars for me as soon as possible . . . Seven, seven and a half, um, as an advance.”

  Now that Michael knew he hadn’t been paid, Schaffel insisted to King, the money would arrive. There was no reply to Schaffel’s TV appearance, though, and all the filing of the lawsuit brought was a cursory denial of the allegations by Jackson’s attorneys at the courthouse in Santa Monica where King had positioned the case. “Michael didn’t even show up at the first two depositions we scheduled,” King recalled. “So we go to court to get an order. Mesereau is there, and suggests to the judge that if we would go to where Michael was at they would pay all the expenses. The judge sends us out into the hallway to talk, and I tell Tom, ‘Look, I’m Jewish. I’m not going to Bahrain. But I’ll go anywhere in Europe that has a nonstop flight so long as we’re talking four first-class tickets so that I can bring an assistant and Marc can bring an assistant. And you guys pay for everything.’”

  It was agreed they would meet in London. The “assistant” King brought with him was his wife Lisa. Schaffel’s traveling companion was Dieter Wiesner, someone “who adored Michael more than anyone alive, including Marc,” as King described him. It was intimidating, King admitted, to step off that elevator at the Dorchester and realize that
he was about to depose a person who had an entire floor of one of the world’s great hotels all to himself. “They usher us into this absolutely spectacular suite,” the attorney recalled, “and I learn that Michael’s own suite is right next door. He comes in just a moment later, dressed all nice, and sits at the table, but then begins to complain about the lighting. He doesn’t want the sunlight on his skin or in his eyes. So it takes about five minutes to get the drapes adjusted the way he wants, and then we’re ready to go.” But first Tom Mesereau insisted that Dieter Wiesner could not be in the room. “Dieter has come all the way to London, and the whole way there all he can think about is what it will be like when he finally gets to see Michael again,” King said. “I mean, he still loves the guy.”