Untouchable

by Randall Sullivan

  An even thicker crush of people had assembled outside the wrought iron gates of the Hayvenhurst estate, holding signs and carrying portable music players that blasted Michael’s greatest hits. Many wore an outfit of one white glove, a fedora hat, and big sunglasses.

  Joe Jackson was in Las Vegas but had written himself into the story early on, even before the Facebook announcement of Michael’s death. As early as 1 p.m., Joe informed E! News that his son had gone to the hospital by ambulance and was “not doing well.” At 1:50 p.m. Joe again spoke to E! News by phone, informing a reporter that Michael had suffered a heart attack and “is not okay.” Joe would keep talking all afternoon.

  Long before CNN gave the story of Jackson’s death the stamp of its weakened authority, news organizations were reeling from what they had watched occur in cyberspace during the first minutes and hours after the doctors at UCLA made it official. TMZ’s ringmaster Harvey Levin was crowing that, “No matter what they say, people know we broke this story.” The surge of online traffic so overwhelmed Google that it began to respond as if under attack, answering “Michael Jackson” searches either with “error” messages or the squiggly letters of a “captcha” screen. Wikipedia reported a crash within the first hour after Jackson’s death. Twitter messages had doubled within seconds of the first TMZ bulletin, the company said, increasing to 5,000 per minute by mid-afternoon. Wikipedia reported that there had been nearly a million visitors to its Michael Jackson biography within a single hour, the most in the online encyclopedia’s history by far. The Los Angles Times, which had put out the story of Jackson’s death at almost the same moment CNN did, said its Web site was subsequently swamped by nearly 2.3 million page views in an hour, more than it had seen on the day of Barack Obama’s election. Facebook announced that its status updates tripled during the first hour after the news of Jackson’s death went public. The 16.4 million unique visitors to Yahoo! News easily eclipsed the 15.1 million total that had been reached on the day of the presidential vote. At AOL Instant Messaging, which had collapsed for forty minutes in the immediate aftermath of Michael’s death, company officials issued a message saying that, “Today was a seminal moment in Internet history. We’ve never seen anything like it . . .”

  Cameras and microphones poked through the mob pressed against the barriers at UCLA Medical Center, where the hospital was in full lockdown mode. The scene was almost as frantic inside the building as tense administrators attempted to forestall a scandal like the one that had erupted a year earlier when nineteen of its employees were caught snooping through the private medical records of Britney Spears, presumably with an eye toward cashing in the way their colleague Lawanda Jackson had when she sold the tabloids information lifted from Farrah Fawcett’s files. A group of sobbing girls that blocked the hospital’s emergency room driveway was ushered aside by police as Michael Jackson’s body was surreptitiously loaded into the helicopter that would fly it to the Los Angeles County medical examiner’s office.

  By nightfall there were huge crowds outside the Apollo Theater in New York; at Hitsville U.S.A., the old Motown headquarters in Detroit; and at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, where a memorial wall was posted with photos that chronicled Michael’s career from his days as the lead singer of the Jackson 5 right up through the HIStory tour. In Gary, Indiana, flags were lowered to half-mast and the people who stood singing and crying outside what was once the Jackson family residence included the city’s mayor. Back in Los Angeles, crowds gathered at the Grammy Museum in downtown Los Angeles and at the Staples Center farther south. A group of women locked arms and marched down the Walk of Fame on Hollywood Boulevard singing “We Are the World.” Farther north, people were already making pilgrimages to the gated entrance at Neverland Ranch.

  By the morning of June 26, there were Michael Jackson shrines and crowds of mourners at the Angel de la Independencia monument in Mexico City, on the square in front of the Cathédrale de Notre-Dame in Paris, and outside the U.S. embassies in Moscow, Tokyo, Nairobi, Odessa, and Brussels. In London, after the Liberal Party prime minister Gordon Brown issued a brief statement reading: “This is very sad news for the millions of Michael Jackson fans in Britain and around the world,” his Conservative Party opponent David Cameron promptly answered with: “I know Michael Jackson’s fans in Britain and around the world will be sad today. Despite the controversies, he was a legendary entertainer.” Nelson Mandela made a rare public appearance to salute Michael’s ability to “triumph over tragedy on so many occasions in his life.” Two separate ministers of the national government in Japan issued statements expressing their sadness at this “tragic loss,” while former South Korea president Kim Dae-jung proclaimed that, “We’ve lost a hero to the world.” Imelda Marcos said she cried when she heard the news. In Paris, French culture minister Frédéric Mitterrand told reporters, “We all have a Michael Jackson within.”

  Back in the United States, politicians remained more circumspect. While California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger praised Jackson as “one of the most influential and iconic figures in the music industry,” he was careful to add mention of the “serious questions about his personal life” that remained unanswered. Barack Obama declined to pay homage with a personal appearance, sending press secretary Robert Gibbs out to tell White House correspondents that the president saw Michael Jackson as “a spectacular performer,” but also believed there were “sad and tragic” aspects to the entertainer’s life. The U.S. House of Representatives paused for a tribute moment of silence, which spared them and the American public from anything they might have spoken out loud. The Associated Press dredged up a memorandum written by U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Roberts back in the 1980s when he was working as a young White House attorney that objected to a letter being sent to Michael Jackson on behalf of President Ronald Reagan: “Frankly, I find the obsequious attitude of some members of the White House staff toward Mr. Jackson’s attendants, and the fawning posture they would have the president of the United States adopt, more than a little embarrassing.” The atmosphere was such that the AP actually imagined Justice Roberts might want to clarify his remarks.

  At the Wimbledon tennis tournament in London, both Serena Williams and Roger Federer began the press conferences marking their third-round victories by answering questions about Michael Jackson. “What did Michael Jackson mean to you personally?” was the first query put to Williams, who would take eleven more MJ-related questions before hearing one about tennis.

  Even people who hadn’t exactly been on friendly terms with Jackson in recent years felt obliged to assure the world of their love and admiration for him. “I feel privileged to have hung out and worked with Michael,” read Paul McCartney’s press statement. “He was a talented boy-man with a gentle soul. His music will be remembered forever and my memories of our time together will be happy ones.” Former arch-foe Tommy Mottola described Jackson’s death as “one of the greatest losses” ever, then added, “In pop history, there’s a triumvirate of icons: Sinatra, Elvis, and Michael . . . Nothing that came before him or that has come after him will ever be as big as he was.”

  The Wall Street Journal, of all newspapers, heartily agreed. “The Age of Celebrity died with Michael Jackson’s heart,” wrote the Journal’s deputy editorial-page editor, Daniel Henninger: “Michael is the last celebrity because he rose to fame in the 1980s, and in the 1980s there was no World Wide Web. We didn’t have a thousand cable TV stations . . . It has taken some time to see how modern media squashed the life out of genuine celebrity.” As if to prove Henninger’s point about the degraded nature of modern celebrity, stars such as John Mayer, Miley Cyrus, and Demi Moore all took the opportunity to tweet their deep feelings and shallow thoughts about Michael Jackson’s passing.

  Missing from the cacophony of competing voices was insight from someone who actually knew Michael Jackson, but no such thing was forthcoming.

  “There were a number of people who went on Larry King after he died and professed t
heir great love for Michael Jackson and their great sense of loss,” Tom Mesereau recalled, “who I happen to know would not step forward and help him when he needed it during the trial. With friends like that, Michael didn’t need enemies.”

  Elizabeth Taylor, one of the few women who had been close enough to Michael Jackson to say anything meaningful about him, begged off, explaining through a spokesperson that she was “too devastated” to comment. In the end, the most incisive public observation came from another of Michael’s female friends, Liza Minnelli: “When the autopsy comes, all hell’s going to break loose, so thank God we’re celebrating him now.”

  25

  In the morgue at the Los Angeles County coroner’s office in Lincoln Heights, Chief Medical Examiner Lakshmanan Sathyavagiswaran and his staff were confronted by the corpse of a very thin but not quite emaciated middle-aged man who was nearly bald beneath a black wig that had been stitched into the fuzzy strands of his closely cropped white hair. The skin beneath was covered by what Dr. Christopher Rogers, who performed the autopsy, described as a “dark discoloration” that stretched from ear to ear, apparently a tattoo intended to camouflage the burn scars on the dead man’s scalp. There were also dark tattoos under the eyebrows and around the eyelids, and a pink tattoo on his lips, all of them clearly cosmetic. A bandage covered a nose so cut away that, without a prosthetic, it looked like little more than a pair of slightly ridged nostrils. Dr. Rogers and those who assisted him counted thirteen “puncture wounds” on the body, spread from one side of the neck to both arms and both ankles, suggesting recent needle insertions. The only real signs of trauma, though, were deep bruises covering the chest and abdomen, apparently inflicted during a desperate attempt to resuscitate the man with CPR. Several ribs were cracked, either by chest compressions or by the balloon pump that had been inserted into the lungs. The penis was sheathed by an external urine catheter, as it might have been for a patient suffering severe incontinence, or one who was heavily sedated.

  The most remarkable finding of the autopsy performed on the body of Michael Jackson during the morning of June 26, 2009, was that the entertainer had been in far better physical condition than the public had been led to believe. He had suffered from a slight case of arthritis in his lower back and a mild buildup of plaque in the blood vessels of his legs. The allergies that Michael battled for years probably explained the chronic inflammation in his lungs where “respiratory bronchiolitis, diffuse congestion, and patchy hemorrhage” had been noted by the medical examiners. Such symptoms probably made it difficult to take a deep breath, but were far from life-threatening. At the age of fifty, the man’s heart had been strong, his internal organs clear, his muscle tone excellent. He had weighed 136 pounds at the time of death, on the low end of the normal range for a male adult who stood slightly under five feet, ten inches tall. Michael Jackson had a body that, if he had tended to it properly, he could have lived in for another thirty years.

  The medical examiners were but the first links in a lengthy chain of investigators who would eventually be joined in the complex criminal case resulting from Michael Jackson’s death. Even as Jackson’s body reposed at the morgue, Dr. Conrad Murray’s car was being towed away from the Carolwood chateau by a forensics unit of the Los Angeles Police Department armed with a warrant stating the vehicle might contain “medication or other evidence” related to the demise of Mr. Jackson. The same search warrant permitted LAPD detectives to search the bedroom of the home, where they recovered medical bags from a compartment of Michael Jackson’s clothes closet that contained a virtual pharmacy of drugs, including large quantities of propofol, along with lorazepam, diazepam, temazepam, trazodone, Flomax, clonazepam, tizanidine, hydrocodone, lidocaine, and Benoquin.

  Detectives discreetly requested that Conrad Murray make himself available for an interview the following evening. By then, the LAPD had heard from both the paramedics who responded to the 911 call and the doctors in the emergency room at the UCLA Medical Center that Dr. Murray had said nothing to them about propofol being in Michael Jackson’s system, admitting only that his patient had taken some Ativan.

  Murray was accompanied by attorney Ed Chernoff on the afternoon of June 27 when he arrived at the Ritz Carlton Hotel in Marina Del Rey to be interviewed by LAPD detectives Orlando Martinez and Scott Smith. Chernoff, a senior partner in the Houston firm of Stradley, Chernoff & Alford, was obscure outside Texas but touted as a big gun for hire in Harris County. He had established himself while in the employ of the district attorney’s office, where, his firm boasted on its Web site, he had lost just one felony jury trial out of the forty he had prosecuted. It was Chernoff who provided most of the information the media had about what transpired during Conrad Murray’s LAPD interview. His client was in no sense the suspect in a crime, according to Chernoff, but rather “is considered to be a witness to the events surrounding Michael Jackson’s death.” Dr. Murray was cooperating fully with LAPD investigators and had answered “every and all” questions put to him, Chernoff said, in order to “clarify some inconsistencies.”

  The LAPD’s spokesperson simply stated that Dr. Murray had not been accused of any criminal wrongdoing. The coroner’s investigators reported no evidence of foul play but were listing the cause of death as “deferred” until more tests were completed.

  The Jackson family, though, was already building its own case against the doctor. In the first day or two after Michael’s death, various family members and spokespersons (Jesse Jackson among them) had suggested that Michael died because his doctor left him unattended. The Jacksons had already arranged for an “independent” autopsy to be performed by a privately retained pathologist, Dr. Selma Calmes, just a few hours after Michael’s body was released from the Los Angeles County morgue. Dr. Calmes could do little to satisfy her clients, however, because the county’s medical examiners had stitched up Michael’s body and returned it to the Jackson family without the brain, which would be kept in a jar of formaldehyde as the main piece of forensic evidence in a sprawling investigation that would force the LAPD to seek assistance from the California Department of Justice, the DEA, the FBI, Interpol, and Scotland Yard.

  Forty-eight hours after his death, the real dissection of Michael Jackson was just beginning. What the entertainer had left behind, along with his three children and body of work, was one of the largest and most complicated estates in California history. A crush of creditors and claimants recognized that the fortune they were after was growing at a rate no one could possibly have foreseen. Within hours of Jackson’s death, Thriller was the #1 album on iTunes and Michael Jackson’s albums occupied all fifteen of the top spots on Amazon.com’s best-selling-albums list. Overall, Michael’s record sales were up eighty-fold by the end of that day. In the next two weeks, nineteen of his albums would make the top twenty on iTunes in the United States, while fourteen claimed top twenty places on the Amazon.co.uk list. Six would chart in Japan and nine in Argentina. In Australia, Michael Jackson songs occupied thirty-four spots in the top one hundred. Thirteen countries in total pushed Number Ones to the top of their iTunes charts. Thriller 25 was the #1 album in Poland, where it was quickly displaced by King of Pop, which was also topping the chart in Germany. In America, Michael was breaking assorted records at Billboard, where his albums filled the first twelve spots on the magazine’s top pop catalog chart. Digital sales, though, were what made Michael’s passing an economic event that far exceeded the deaths of Elvis Presley and John Lennon. More than 2.5 million Jackson songs had been downloaded in the four days after his death in a world where no other musical act ever had its songs downloaded even a million times in a week. When this was added to the 800,000 albums sold in the seven days after Michael died, it became clear that he had staged the posthumous revival of an entire depressed industry. And that was just the leading edge in an avalanche of commercial possibility that would exploit his image on T-shirts, coffee cups, and wherever else it could be fitted.

  The King of Pop was going to
be worth a billion dollars again, maybe two billion, maybe more, and the Jackson family intended to make sure they held first position in the collection line. They had begun demonstrating this within hours of Michael’s death, when the women of the clan initiated what became a week-long occupation and search of the Carolwood chateau.

  The family, and La Toya in particular, would later accuse Tohme Tohme of looting the house where Michael had died, but Tohme never set foot on the property that day, or in the days that followed. At the behest of AEG, Tohme had done his best to make the Carolwood chateau off-limits to everyone outside law enforcement. After Randy Phillips suggested that they needed to lock down both the Carolwood house and the Hayvenhurst compound, Tohme had placed a call to Ron Williams, a former agent with the U.S. Secret Service who now operated Talon Executive Services, an Orange County company that provided security and performed investigations for dozens of major corporations and a good many celebrities. Tohme wanted Williams because he knew Williams was a man people trusted.

  The Talon chief immediately dispatched teams of operatives to both the Carolwood chateau and the Hayvenhurst compound, and drove to the Holmby Hills house himself. At Tohme’s instigation, Williams also sent a team to Las Vegas to secure the Palomino hacienda where many of Michael’s most valuable possessions remained in storage in the basement.