Being stabbed in the back by those he let close to him changed Jackson in ways that would prove profoundly destructive. He began to lose faith in everyone around him, and to reach out for the kindness of strangers who wanted only to get their fingers in his pockets. In a search for reassurance that grew as ceaseless as it was unsuccessful, he became prey to every sort of charlatan. Inspecting his bank statements and reviewing his accounting reports was now next to impossible. He cycled in and out of an addiction to the synthetic opiates he had begun to take while recovering from the Pepsi commercial fire in 1984. His need to numb himself became consuming in 1993, after he endured the most mortifying experience of his life, being forced to strip naked from the waist down so that police could photograph his genitals. The purpose of the exercise was to compare the results to pictures and descriptions provided by Jordie Chandler. Now, even the short length of this painfully shy celebrity’s pubic hair was part of the scandal that engulfed him.
Jackson found it more and more difficult to work. He was paying out huge fees and making enormous settlements to try to contain an avalanche of litigation, and was billed tens of thousands every month by the PR consultants he hired to counter bad publicity. He was increasingly susceptible to flatterers and enablers. Millions of dollars were still pouring in each year but now even more was pouring out.
He did manage to complete his double album HIStory for a 1995 release but was not encouraged by the reception. Worldwide sales were barely more than half of what Dangerous had done. HIStory was the first album ever to sell twenty million copies and be considered a failure. Some major critics were openly dismissive. The New York Times’s Jon Pareles built his review around the assertion that, “It has been a long time since Michael Jackson was simply a performer. He’s the main asset of his own corporation, which is a profitable subsidiary of Sony.”
At Sony they were starting to wonder about that last part. Jackson had spent most of the millions allotted for his future video productions on the “teaser” he shot for HIStory in Hungary. “The production company would call me in the middle of the night and say, ‘Michael wants more troops,’” his marketing executive Dan Beck told the Times. By the end of that year, Jackson found himself so short of cash that he was forced to sell Sony a half-interest in the ATV catalog for $100 million, about a quarter of what it would be worth a few years later. He had been able at least to retain 51 percent of the catalog and control of the most profitable part, the Beatles songs, and in the years that followed Sony added any number of classic songs to the package, material that reached across a range stretching from Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind” to Joe Diffie’s “Third Rock from the Sun.” Sony also guaranteed Jackson a minimum income of $6.5 million per year from the licensing rights to the catalog’s songs. In 2001, when 1, a collection of the Beatles’ #1 hits, sold more than twenty million units worldwide, Jackson’s share of the profits was $9 million. It still wasn’t enough to keep him afloat.
His dreams of movie stardom had died in the Jordan Chandler drama but Michael refused to accept it, writing one six- or seven-figure check after another to pay for video projects such as a thirty-five-minute film called Ghosts that he cowrote with Stephen King and shot in 1997 with special effects wizard Stan Winston, only to see it dismissed by critics as a “vanity project.” All told, he would spend an estimated $65 million on video productions during the 1990s and receive little in return but more bad press. Despite a net worth that had been estimated as high as $1 billion, he was struggling to service an increasingly massive debt. Branca made a deal with Sony that netted Michael a quick $25 million in cash, but the price was a reversal of their ownership positions in the ATV catalog. Now the company owned 51 percent of the song titles and Jackson was the minority partner. By 1998, Michael had depleted a $90 million loan from NationsBank taken out two years earlier and was forced to bring Branca back to negotiate a new $140 million loan from Bank of America. That money was gone before a year had passed so Jackson negotiated a $30 million line of credit with the bank that was maxed out within a few months. In 2000, he managed to have his B of A loan raised to $200 million, but now the bank was taking advantage of his financial distress by demanding higher rates of interest.
He began to oscillate wildly between a series of financial advisors, many of them either inept or on the make. One of those who tried to organize his affairs was Al Malnik, a superrich Florida attorney who was best known for his past association with organized crime kingpin Meyer Lansky. Even Malnik, though, couldn’t convince Michael to curb his spending. “There was no planning in terms of allocations,” Malnik would explain in a deposition connected to one of the many lawsuits filed against Jackson. “For Michael it was whatever he wanted, at the time he wanted.” Jackson seemed “bewildered” whenever he tried to discuss money matters, said Malnik, who had tried to explain to Michael that flying to London for a weekend of shopping was one thing, while renting a private jet to carry an entourage and renting an entire floor of a five-star hotel to house them while he did so was quite another. By Malnik’s estimate, Michael was spending about $8 million per year just on travel and antiques.
At Neverland, it was costing the star $4 million per annum to keep employees who ranged from carpenters to snake handlers on the payroll. Michael’s advisor Rabbi Shmuley Boteach got what was for him a shocking display of Jackson’s extravagance in December 2000 when he learned that Michael, who was staying with his entourage at the Four Seasons in New York, had continued to rent an entire floor at the hotel during a nearly month-long trip to Neverland for the holidays. Why didn’t you vacate the rooms while you were gone and save yourself a few hundred thousand dollars? Boteach asked. “What were we supposed to do with our stuff?” Michael wanted to know.
Shopping and spending had become for Michael as addictive as any opiate. Those who worked for him described seeing Jackson leaf through a magazine and order every single product advertised in it. He ran up a bill at Celebrity Costumes for just under $100,000 in a single year. In 1998, he reportedly became the first to place an order for a $75,000 per bottle “limited edition” perfume being licensed as “the ultimate symbol of indulgence.” The “heavenly scent” confected from roses, chocolate, and musk would be sold in a flask made from platinum, gold, and diamonds, packaged in a walnut box manufactured by the same company that did the woodwork for Rolls-Royce interiors, a container that could be opened only with one of the gold, diamond, and ruby keys that Graff jewelers was crafting for that sole purpose, according to the press release announcing that Michael Jackson had already placed a deposit on two bottles, one for himself and one for his dear friend Elizabeth Taylor.
In 1999, Michael paid $1.54 million at auction for the Oscar that producer David O. Selznick had received for Gone with the Wind. Less than a year later, Beverly Hills jeweler David Orgell sued Jackson for nonpayment on a $1.9 million Vacheron watch. The entertainer tried to return the timepiece but Orgell said it was scratched. They settled in 2001, and the very next day Jackson used the Vacheron as collateral on another loan from Bank of America. Soon after this, he submitted the winning bid at auction on a pair of nineteenth-century French paintings but was forced to return the art when Sotheby’s sued him for the outstanding balance of $1.6 million.
Jackson had shown such remarkable business acumen as a young man, skillfully selecting collaborators, representatives, and advisors. Now approaching middle age, he seemed irresistibly drawn to projects that most of the press and much of the public found laughable. In 1996, Jackson flew to Paris to meet the Saudi prince Al-Waleed bin Talal and join him in the announcement of a “family values” global entertainment empire whose projects included plans to create a theme park home for all British bovines afflicted with mad cow disease. Soon after, the singer showed up in Warsaw, where he announced the $500 million World of Childhood amusement park he planned to build with the cooperation of the Polish government. According to Malnik, Jackson’s serial advisors managed to lose $50 million of hi
s money in the 1990s alone on a series of “bizarre” projects that never came to fruition. Two of those advisors were Dieter Wiesner and Ronald Konitzer, who had collaborated with Jackson on a series of grandiose near misses that began with the marketing of a sport cola they called “Mystery Drink.” Wiesner and Konitzer went on to use the singer’s name in promotions for a giant resort near Victoria Falls in Zimbabwe, and for a huge “Majestic Kingdom” theme park in Detroit. By the end of 2000, the press openly mocked any announcement that involved Michael Jackson.
For years, virtually every contract involving Jackson had been freighted with assorted side deals in which various “representatives” pocketed enormous fees for persuading him to sign this or that agreement. Hundreds of thousands of dollars changed hands, almost always under the table, while huge fees were taken off the top by a carousel of attorneys and managers.
In 2001, when Michael LaPerruque became Michael’s new chief of security, he discovered that most of the guards at Neverland were doubling and tripling their salaries by offering to go shopping for Jackson, using Michael’s name to purchase duplicates of the high-end items he wanted, ranging from electronics to jewelry, then having the seconds sent to their own homes. After LaPerruque left Neverland in 2004, he was replaced by Chris Carter, a handsome young African-American man whom the entertainer had spotted while strolling through a Las Vegas casino. As his new head of security, Carter was principally useful to Jackson for his ability to obtain the antianxiety drug Xanax under an assortment of fictitious names. Within the year, Carter’s next-in-command was an eighteen-year-old surfer named Joey Jeszeck whom Jackson hired upon meeting him in a skateboard shop near Neverland. After Jackson dismissed Carter, Neverland’s former security chief readily agreed to testify for the prosecution at the 2005 criminal trial, but was unable to answer when called, having been arrested in Las Vegas on an assortment of felony charges that included armed robbery and kidnapping.
The atmosphere around Jackson grew murkier still when his brother Jermaine introduced the Nation of Islam into his life after the filing of the criminal charges in 2003. Various insiders who found themselves suddenly on the outside claimed that Louis Farrakhan’s son-in-law Leonard Muhammad had not only taken charge of Jackson’s security detail (forcing out LaPerruque), but was also managing his business affairs. The tensions this created boiled over in late 2003 when Jackson’s “chief spokesperson,” Stuart Backerman, abruptly quit his job, citing “strategic differences.” It was widely believed that Backerman had refused to work with Muhammad and the NOI. Later, the PR man admitted this to a London tabloid, the Sun: “I quit because the Nation of Islam had infiltrated Michael’s world. I was the only one who was left standing at this point, because Michael wasn’t in his right mind.”
Stories linking Jackson to the NOI and suggesting he shared Farrakhan’s anti-Semitism further eroded the singer’s shrinking public support. In the media, mentions of Jackson’s career were now almost always coupled with the word “decline.” What may have been Michael Jackson’s saddest career moment came in August 2003, three months before the raid on Neverland, when he celebrated his forty-fifth birthday with a public event that only served to emphasize his reduced status. While hundreds of young people from South Central, East LA, and the San Fernando Valley paid upward of $30 per ticket for seats in the old downtown Los Angeles movie palace where the concert celebration was held, nearly every one of the spots inside the velvet ropes up front reserved for A-list guests remained empty. Instead of Stevie Wonder and Diana Ross, Jackson’s fans found themselves being entertained by obscure performers who lip-synched his greatest hits. And when the birthday boy himself took the stage at the end of the evening to lead a rendition of “We Are the World,” he was accompanied not by the likes of Bruce Springsteen and Ray Charles, but by an assortment of Michael Jackson impersonators.
Unable or unwilling (even those closest to him weren’t sure) to generate any fresh stream of income, Jackson was falling further behind financially. More and more of the people he did business with were not getting paid. Some of those who said he stiffed them not only took the singer to court, but also used the media to gain leverage. No one did more damage in that regard than Myung Ho Lee, the South Korean–born financial advisor who claimed to have managed Jackson’s business affairs from 1997 to 2001, and sued the singer in early 2003, demanding $13 million in back pay. In papers filed with the Los Angeles Superior Court, Lee described Jackson as “a ticking financial time bomb waiting to explode at any moment.” The singer fought back with a countersuit against Lee in which he claimed his signature had been forged on a contract and that it was Lee who owed the millions, siphoned from Jackson’s bank accounts. Michael complained to those around him that Lee had made unauthorized and disastrous investments in various dot-com ventures (most notably the gaming company Tickets.com) that cost him a fortune when the boom went bust. Lee answered by collaborating with Maureen Orth on an article for Vanity Fair that convinced hundreds of thousands of upscale readers that Jacko really was Wacko. In the summer of 2000, Lee told Orth, Jackson had paid an African witch doctor named Baba $150,000 to conduct a “voodoo ritual” in Switzerland that was intended to result in the deaths of twenty-five people on an “enemies list” topped by the names of David Geffen and Steven Spielberg. Though Orth didn’t report it, quite a few people in the entertainment industry knew that Jackson had fallen out with Geffen and Spielberg and this added an undercurrent of credibility to the story. Baba’s curses had been sealed with the blood of forty-two ritually sacrificed cows, according to Lee, who claimed to have wired payment for the slaughter to a bank in Mali.
Though Jackson nearly had Lee’s lawsuit thrown out, the Korean’s attorneys successfully scheduled a deposition of Michael Jackson in June 2003, at which the singer’s finances would be fully explored. The day before he was to be questioned, Jackson settled out of court for a sum said to be “well into seven figures.” He refused payment, though, to European concert promoter Marcel Avram, who had filed a $22.1 million suit against Jackson for backing out of two 1999 “Millennium Concerts” in Sydney and Honolulu. At the end of a 2003 civil trial in Santa Barbara County, a jury of Jackson’s neighbors awarded Avram $5.3 million, but the concert promoter was still chasing his money two years later.
A “forensic accountant” appointed by the Santa Barbara County Superior Court to examine Jackson’s finances reported that the entertainer’s annual budget was $12 million for personal expenses and the maintenance of Neverland, but this amount was a pittance compared to the $54 million a year it was now costing him to service his enormous debt. Yet Jackson continued to stay in $10,000 per night hotel suites and to rent an entire floor of standard rooms for his entourage.
“Michael would believe somehow that Sony was paying for it all,” Schaffel explained, “and they were. But they were charging it to him. Anything he did, whether it was hotels or private jets or whatever, they paid, but they charged him for it. So he was using up more and more of his income and going deeper and deeper into debt with Sony. Sony never really said no. Anything Michael wanted, Sony would say fine, but they would just keep racking up the bill. They had no reason not to, because they had the catalog to cover the cost. Michael was losing more and more of the catalog instead of gaining more and more. And he wouldn’t want to hear about any of that. All he wanted to know was how much cash was in his pocket that day. He would say to me, ‘Look, I don’t want to work my ass off and get nothing out of it.’ That was a lot of the problem with Invincible. The expenses were so high, he owed so much, and he was so far behind on his payments to the catalog, that he felt he’d never see a dime out of the album when it was released. I would say, ‘Michael, if you make $20 million on this deal, you’re paying down your debt to Sony.’ He said, ‘That’s not my money. Everybody’s putting their hands in—the lawyers, the accountants.’ He’d say, ‘They all take their piece of my money and what am I left with?’”
Of course, Michael Jackson tended
to look at money a little differently than other people, Schaffel acknowledged. “I remember this time in Vegas when he wanted to buy something that cost a hundred grand and he wanted me to get him the money. So I went to the Mirage and some casino manager called me back and said, ‘For you, because we know you, we can give you fifty thousand if you want to come down and get it. But because of the time of night and we’re not a bank, we can’t give you a hundred.’ So he gives me the fifty grand. Dieter is with me, and we hurry up to Michael’s suite, because we know he’s antsy and wants to go buy something. He had the Cascio kids with him, and a couple other kids who were traveling with him. And he said, ‘Oh, did you get my money?’ And I said, ‘Well, I have fifty grand. It’s all I can get late at night like this.’ And he looked, kind of not happy, through these stacks of ten thousand apiece. He’s pouting, and he says, ‘It’s no good. I need a hundred.’ And then says, ‘Oh, forget it.’ And he says, ‘Kids, come here.’ All the kids come over, and he hands each of them a stack of ten thousand and says, ‘Go out and entertain yourself for an hour.’ Dieter and I just looked at each other like . . . ‘Only Michael.’”
7
By late January 2006 Sheikh Abdullah could sense in Mikaeel a new restlessness, a mounting dissatisfaction with life in Bahrain. And Abdullah was more and more uneasy. He had planted a story in the Gulf News that was intended to show that the star was settling into his new life and had paid $8 million for a home in Sanad (about ten kilometers south of Manama) where he and his children were now living. The house, of course, was provided by the sheikh. Abdullah got the same newspaper to report on Mikaeel’s surprise appearance at a traditional Arabic wedding involving a member of the prominent Al Gosaibi family who had befriended him during his months in the Persian Gulf. Mr. Jackson had watched from the sidelines, the Gulf News reported, for fear of distracting from the nuptials, and requested that no one take photographs of him. Only the Lebanese pop singer Ragheb Alama, who had performed at the ceremony, was allowed to have his picture taken with the King of Pop. Abdullah confided to the Gulf News reporter that Mikaeel would be vacating the mansion in Sanad soon but planned to keep it for his relatives and friends when he moved into a more impressive home by the sea.
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