Untouchable

by Randall Sullivan

  Phillips helped Tohme persuade Michael to make such a commitment with a series of concessions that some thought ridiculously generous. “Randy really wanted to see these shows happen, and not just because he wanted to make money for AEG,” said the attorney who was handling much of the communication between Phillips and Tohme. “He really did see this as his chance to resurrect the career of a great artist.” Among the promises Tohme and Jackson were able to extract from Phillips were that $15 million would be placed in the “down payment fund” for the purchase of a new home in Las Vegas when the O2 concerts were finished; that an estate near London on a par with Paul McCartney’s place—“sixteen-plus acres, running streams, horses,” as Phillips recalled it—would be rented as a temporary home for Jackson and his children during the full run of the O2 concerts; that AEG would pay for a personal trainer and chef/nutritionist to prepare him for the concerts; and that the company would also hire a personal physician to attend to Michael’s health from the moment he agreed to fifty shows until the last concert was finished. Michael also insisted that AEG had to arrange for the Guinness Book of World Records to document the entire concert series and include any records it broke in the next edition of the book. Phillips and AEG agreed that Jackson would receive 90 percent of all profits from the O2 concerts, and that the London shows would be outsized extravaganzas that included high-wire walkers, acrobats, jugglers, and magicians, something on the order of a Cirque du Soleil spectacle, with elaborately choreographed dance numbers set against constantly shifting multiscreen backgrounds of short films in an IMAX or 3-D format, enhanced by laser light shows. Michael would have to appear onstage himself for only thirteen minutes at a stretch during the concerts, it was agreed, and if his voice weakened, well, the O2 possessed the most sophisticated lip-synching technology on the planet.

  On March 11, 2009, AEG began offering half of the seats for the first forty-five “This Is It” shows as “presale” tickets. Minutes after the two Web sites selling the tickets went online, more than a million Jackson fans attempting to log on crashed them both. Two hours after the sites were rebooted, 190,000 tickets had been sold. During the next sixteen hours, all of the 300,000-plus seats available had been snapped up, and more than a million and a half people who had tried but failed to purchase tickets were waiting for another chance. A week later, the other half of the seats for the first forty-five “This Is It” shows, plus all of the seats for the last five shows, went on sale to the general public and sold out within a few hours. With little effort and almost no marketing, AEG had sold 750,000 tickets to the “This Is It” concerts. That guaranteed a minimum gross revenue of $85 million, with a final tally of at least $125 million expected by the time the money from merchandising, a planned documentary film, and other ancillaries rolled in. Sony announced that sales of the King of Pop album it had released on Michael’s fiftieth birthday were up 400 percent. Within days, tickets for the “This Is It” shows were being offered on eBay for up to $15,000 apiece.

  Even the British newspapers that had for so long tormented Jackson were forced to genuflect in the face of the public response. “Michael Jackson has floored his critics,” the Times of London acknowledged. An “astonishing comeback for a man who in recent years has been dogged by controversy,” the Guardian said, acknowledging the speed and size of the ticket sales for the O2 shows. AEG had pulled off the “showbiz coup of the decade,” conceded the Evening Standard.

  The accolades Tohme and AEG posted on the official Michael Jackson Web site included a list of the records that had been established by the almost instantaneous sell-out of the O2 shows: “The biggest audience ever to see an artist in one city”; “The most amount of people to attend a series of arena shows”; “The fastest ticket sales in history.” Randy Phillips and his company knew full well, though, even if Tohme did not, how dangerous it was to start counting chickens when Michael Jackson was involved. Everyone in the music business was aware of how Jackson had bailed on his heralded “Millennium Concerts” in Honolulu and Sydney back in 1999, even when warned that he was inviting the Marcel Avram lawsuit that eventually resulted in a $5.5 million judgment against him. Phillips and his associates also knew about Jackson’s infamously aborted One Night Only special for HBO back in December 1995 when a worldwide audience expected to number 250 million had been disappointed after Michael collapsed during rehearsals and had to be rushed by ambulance to New York’s Beth Israel Medical Center to be treated for “dehydration.” The HBO special was canceled amid stories that Jackson had faked the whole thing in order to escape his commitment. Among those suggesting as much was Bob Jones, who said he had repeatedly observed Michael’s “penchant for staging illness and other problems to get out of commitments and promises he had made.” Grace Rwaramba would agree: “To Michael, to go to a hospital was never about being ill. It was all about avoiding a court appearance or a performance.” Jones said he put some stock in the claim that “Michael often pulled these hospital stunts just to see how many gifts and flowers he’d receive.”

  Phillips and AEG had little choice but to hope and pray that Dr. Tohme would find a way to keep Jackson on track. Someone was already sawing a circle in the floor under Tohme’s feet, however, and Michael’s new manager wouldn’t even hear the sound until the split second before he was in free fall.

  In the newspapers, reports of how rapidly the O2 concerts had sold out were often accompanied by estimations of how much money Michael might earn from fifty shows in London. A total haul of $100 million was entirely realistic when all the ancillaries were included, Dennis Hawk believed. If Michael could be persuaded to follow up the O2 concerts with an Asian tour that turned into a world tour, Hawk had calculated, his client’s earnings might climb to the vicinity of $400 million. AEG’s own estimates of what Jackson would net from a world tour were considerably more conservative: $132 million was the amount the company’s executives had reckoned Michael would walk away with, after his advances and expenses were deducted. “This is not a number that MJ will want to hear,” Gongaware warned Phillips and Leiweke in an e-mail. “He thinks he is so much bigger than that.” They should talk to Michael in terms of gross receipts, Gongaware suggested. Those would come close to the numbers being tossed about by Tohme and Hawk, who believed that if their client followed the world tour with a triumphant return to the United States that ended with a residency in Las Vegas, he could quite conceivably earn a billion dollars during a two- or three-year period.

  Even if the eventual take was only a couple of hundred million dollars, that was still a gusher of chum in the water for the sharks who had surrounded Michael Jackson since the age of nine, and, as always, the pushiest snouts in the pack belonged to the members of his own family.

  Michael was doing his best to avoid contact with the rest of the Jacksons as he prepared for the O2 shows, but that was impossible. Katherine could always get to him, and she did that spring, with a request made through Tohme Tohme that he purchase her a $750,000 motor home to take a trip back to Indiana. For the first time in years, Michael had millions of dollars of cash on hand, most of it tucked away in the Lockbox account controlled by Tohme that was intended to provide a down payment on his new home in Las Vegas. The rest was hidden beneath the carpets of the Carolwood chateau. “Michael tried to say no to his mother,” recalled the individual who had been forced to serve as go-between in what became a complex transaction. “He wanted to say no. But in the end he couldn’t.” Dennis Hawk was able to take advantage of the deep recession washing over the country in early 2009 to negotiate with Marathon Coach, the Oregon company that produced the customized Prevost Katherine wanted, until the price was reduced to only a little more than half a million dollars, but even that amount made a significant dent in the Lockbox.

  Joe Jackson intended to get a bigger piece of the action than that, and was already partnered up with a “promoter” named Leonard Rowe for precisely that purpose. Rowe was an ex-convict who had been arrested on multiple occasions
for writing bad checks, and was sentenced to federal prison in the early 1990s after being convicted of wire fraud in the cashing of a bogus insurance payout. He was best known in Hollywood for initiating a class-action lawsuit that accused CAA and the William Morris Agency, among others, of racism for denying him the opportunity to promote concerts. The case dragged through the courts for six years before a judge finally ruled that, “No rational trier of facts could find for the plaintiffs on any of the myriad claims made in this action.” Rowe continued to cast himself in the role of oppressed minority and one of the few to buy it was R. Kelly, who hired Leonard to promote his 2007and 2008 Double Up tour. Both Kelly and his coheadliner Ne-Yo would successfully sue Rowe for defrauding them when the tour was over.

  The campaign that “Joe and Rowe” would conduct to usurp Tohme Tohme had already been joined by Michael’s former manager Frank Dileo. On November 26, 2008, at the instigation of Joe Jackson, Dileo had signed a binder agreement with a New Jersey concert organizer called AllGood Entertainment for a “Live Performance of the Jackson Family (Michael Jackson, Janet Jackson and Brothers, hereinafter referred to as the ‘Jacksons’)” at New Jersey’s Giants Stadium. The guaranteed fee would be $24 million for a single show lasting “no less than 150 minutes” in which Michael Jackson was to perform for “no less than ninety (90) minutes” and sing at least two songs with his siblings. The Jacksons were also to receive a percentage of the net earnings from various other “revenue streams associated with the event” that would include licensing royalties, merchandising, pay-per-view, broadcast or cable television, theatrical release, and sponsorships, as well as a concert DVD and CD that would be released through a distribution agreement with major retailers like Wal-Mart.

  According to AllGood’s chief executive, Patrick Allocco, he had contacted Dileo after a meeting with Joe Jackson at the New Orleans Casino in Las Vegas where Joe “told me that Michael was closely working with Frank Dileo and that Frank was managing his business affairs.” At the time, Dileo had no business relationship with Michael Jackson. Dileo’s story was that he never represented himself as Michael’s manager and that he told Allocco from the first that Michael would never agree to perform with his family. Allocco recalled their conversations quite differently, insisting that Dileo had claimed that he managed Jackson. All he promised, Dileo said, was to present Michael and the Jackson family with a written proposal for the reunion concert deal, provided AllGood paid a $400,000 “deposit” up front (only $150,000 of that money, “for expenses,” would go to him, Dileo later insisted). The agreement that Dileo and Allocco signed in November 2008, though, called for a $2 million check to be delivered to Dileo no later than December 31, 2008. Soon after signing the agreement with Dileo, Allocco said, he learned that Frank’s partner Mark Lamicka had been named in a lawsuit that accused him of defrauding a promoter who had paid an advance fee on a promised concert deal that never materialized. He and Dileo met again on January 15, 2009, Allocco recalled. Frank said he was ready to move forward with the Jackson family concert deal, but only if he first received his $150,000 share of the advance deposit. Allocco, though, was “uncomfortable” with what he was hearing about Dileo and Lamicka, he said, and offered to put the money in a trust account. No, Dileo said, he would need the $150,000 in hand before he so much as spoke to Michael Jackson about the concert deal.

  Right around this time, Leonard Rowe showed up in Allocco’s office insisting that he was Michael Jackson’s manager and could negotiate on behalf of the entire Jackson family. Rowe’s claim was that he had been trying for months to put together a Jackson family concert tour. By the end of 2008, he and Joe Jackson had teamed up, intending, among other things, to cut Frank Dileo out of the AllGood deal. He quickly secured the agreement of all the Jackson siblings other than Michael to join the family concert tour, Rowe said, though not without struggling to convince Janet Jackson that she lacked the “drawing power” to headline such a tour. Rowe had at one point gathered Janet, Jermaine, Jackie, Marlon, and Tito at the gates to Michael’s home, where they informed the security guard who met them that they wanted a meeting with Michael. The guard went inside the house, then came back outside to ask that each of them write his or her name on a piece of paper so that Michael would know who exactly was at his door. Fifteen minutes later, the guard led them inside to see Michael. By Rowe’s written account: “I told him that we want him to reunite with his brothers and tour in America. Michael said, ‘I just can’t do it right now. I have other things I’m planning and working on.’ We stayed there for a few hours trying to persuade him. I could tell that Michael was becoming irritable so we decided to leave.”

  In late January 2009, Allocco began to hear reports that Michael Jackson either had signed or was about to sign a deal with AEG for a concert series at the O2. Frank Dileo, who continued to represent himself as Michael Jackson’s manager, Allocco said, “was telling us that the London shows were never gonna happen, and that Michael didn’t have a deal with AEG.” He and his partners were increasingly skeptical about Dileo, said Allocco: “One of my insiders got a call from a guy at AEG saying that they got a deal imminent to be signed with Michael—this was at the end of January. So this told me that Frank Dileo was a fraud.”

  Alarmed, Allocco promptly paid Leonard Rowe a $15,000 “retainer” to set up a meeting with Katherine Jackson, the one family member said to have her son Michael’s ear. On February 3, 2009, Allocco met with Mrs. Jackson and Rowe at a restaurant in Encino, just down the hill from the Hayvenhurst compound. “I went through with her my vision for the show,” Allocco recalled. Mrs. Jackson seemed to like what she was hearing, he remembered, because she didn’t think Michael could or should do an entire concert series. “That is why our deal is very suitable,” Allocco remembered Michael’s mother saying, “one day of show with a substantial amount of money.” Only a couple of days later, though, Allocco learned through sources at Sony that Michael Jackson was actually managed by someone named Dr. Tohme Tohme. He suggested that Rowe call Tohme on the telephone and try to arrange a meeting.

  Tohme was now in an awkward position. He and the attorneys who negotiated the AEG Live contract on Michael’s behalf had promised Randy Phillips that they would not publicly disclose or discuss that deal until a formal announcement of the O2 concerts was made in early March. Rather than meet with Allocco and Rowe himself, Tohme spoke to the two men briefly on the telephone, then sent them to Dennis Hawk, explaining that Hawk was Michael’s main entertainment attorney. Allocco seemed a decent enough fellow, Tohme told Hawk, but Rowe was obviously a dolt; talk to one, ignore the other. However he handled it, Hawk was going to have to hear the two men out without letting on that Michael already had a deal in place with AEG Live.

  Allocco and Rowe arrived at Hawk’s office on February 12, and swiftly abandoned the Jackson family reunion concert concept to begin pitching a deal for a Michael Jackson solo concert with “guest appearances” by family members at the Superdome in New Orleans that would pay Michael as much as $30 million for a single performance. The meeting degenerated rapidly when Rowe began to loudly insist that he, not Tohme Tohme, was Michael Jackson’s manager, that he was an intimate of the entire Jackson family, and that Michael would do whatever he told him to do. Rowe grew more and more out of control, shouting and swearing at Hawk, who merely sat listening until the two men were done talking, thanked them for coming by, and promised to deliver their proposal to Dr. Tohme. For the next few weeks, Hawk answered a number of phone calls from Allocco’s attorney, who wanted to collaborate on a revision of the earlier document signed by Dileo. Hawk took one look at that “contract” (which had been written by Dileo himself) and knew it would never hold up in court. “The worst-drafted agreement I’ve seen in more than twenty years of practicing law,” he later described it.

  Hawk researched AllGood and discovered that the company had staged some successful concerts in the Caribbean, including a Bon Jovi performance that sold out the Coliseo de Puerto Rico an
d a music festival in Trinidad and Tobago where Stevie Wonder and Babyface, among others, had performed for 20,000 people. AllGood was no AEG Live, though, and, like Tohme, Hawk agreed with Randy Phillips that Michael needed to begin his comeback overseas, where he was beloved, before performing in the United States, where his public reception was certain to be more mixed. As much as Michael hated to hear references to the “rehabilitation” of his image, he was shrewd enough, Hawk knew, to recognize that an enormous success on the world stage would make it much more difficult for the American media to marginalize him.

  Hawk and Tohme stalled until the O2 shows were officially announced by Michael himself at the press conference in London. Joe and Rowe immediately stepped up their offensive, showing up at the Carolwood chateau day after day for a solid week with demands to be admitted. According to Rowe, Michael told him during a phone conversation on March 22 that he would consider hiring him as a tour manager. Finally, on March 25, Michael made the mistake of letting Joe and Rowe through the door of his home. “I have no money and it’s your fault!” Joe shouted at Michael, all the while pushing him to sign some sort of agreement that would allow Rowe to negotiate a deal with AllGood Entertainment on the star’s behalf. Rowe would claim that Michael did sign some sort of document that day, though he has been unable to present it.