Untouchable

by Randall Sullivan

  By the time the will and a related trust agreement arrived at the courthouse in downtown Los Angeles, Branca had already retained the services of two powerful and highly paid allies. One was Howard Weitzman, who during the years since he helped Johnnie Cochran persuade Michael Jackson to settle the Jordan Chandler case had become arguably the most influential attorney in Los Angeles. After establishing himself in the early 1980s as a top criminal defense lawyer, Weitzman had branched out into areas that included entertainment, intellectual property, family law, civil rights, antitrust, regulatory, and probate issues. He had represented every single one of the major movie studios and his long list of celebrity clients included the current governor of California. Weitzman was as well connected to the city’s political, financial, academic, media, and cultural power centers as anyone in LA, and as formidable a litigator as there was in the country.

  Branca’s other top hire, Mike Sitrick, was less well known but even more feared. “The Ninja Master of the Dark Art of Spin” was how the Web site Gawker had recently described Sitrick, an ultra-expensive “crisis manager” whose career in media manipulation stretched from helping Exxon cope with the catastrophic Valdez oil spill in Alaska’s Prince William Sound to advising the Roman Catholic archdiocese on how to defend itself against allegations that it had protected priests accused of sexually abusing children. In between, he had managed the assorted PR disasters of such celebrities as Paris Hilton, Michael Vick, and Rush Limbaugh. Sitrick’s skill at mounting counterattacks (or “smear campaigns” as people on the receiving end tended to call them) against those who criticized or accused his clients, however, was the main stuff of his legend. The man’s ability to produce a preemptive strike of news leaks, press releases, and blog posts that simultaneously destroyed an opponent’s reputation and shaped the public perception of a controversy before the local media so much as started to report the story had been dazzling and terrifying onlookers for two decades. People lived in terror of being placed on what Sitrick liked to call his “Wheel of Pain.” That Branca had put Weitzman and Sitrick on his payroll even before producing Jackson’s will was evidence of two things: one, Branca believed he was in for a public fight with the Jackson family; and two, he intended to win that fight.

  The will itself was most striking to the national media for the way it addressed the subject of Debbie Rowe. The first two sentences of the document’s Article I read: “I am not married. My marriage to DEBORAH JEAN ROWE has been dissolved.” The last line of Article VI stated: “I have intentionally omitted to provide for my former wife, DEBORAH JEAN ROWE JACKSON.” Clearly, the intention was to ensure that Debbie didn’t get a dime—or custody of Michael’s kids. Katherine Jackson was emphatically designated as the children’s guardian, though if Katherine was unable to serve in that capacity Michael had named Diana Ross as the first alternate. Ross was reported to be in shock, telling friends she didn’t know any of the three children, hadn’t been in Michael’s life for years, and was well past the age where she wanted to take on the task of raising young children; she most definitely would not oppose Debbie Rowe’s bid for custody if it came to that.

  How the money, property, copyrights, and trademarks would be divided was what most concerned the interested parties, and that was detailed in a separate document. According to the Michael Jackson Family Trust agreement that was submitted to the court by John Branca, 40 percent of Michael Jackson’s estate was to be held in the Michael Jackson Children’s Trust for Prince, Paris, and Blanket, then released to the three in steps as they reached the ages of thirty, thirty-five, and forty. Another 20 percent of the Family Trust would be assigned to various charities; the trust agreement seemed to permit Branca and McClain to choose which charities those were. The other 40 percent would be held by an entity called the Katherine Jackson Trust. Funds from that trust were to be used to support Mrs. Jackson, but there was no provision for Joe Jackson or for Michael’s siblings. The most notable thing about the trust agreement, though, was that it gave Branca (and McClain) “absolute discretion” to decide how the money from the Katherine Jackson Trust would be distributed. Knowing that the provision would send a shiver through the family, Branca arranged to meet with the Jacksons at Jermaine’s house on the day after the will was filed in court. Every member of the immediate family, other than Joe, had been in attendance, according to Branca, who insisted afterward that what he had to say was greeted with resounding approval. “They applauded three times when they were told who got the property,” he said.

  Katherine Jackson remembered the meeting rather differently. According to her, the atmosphere had gone from quiet to glum. She personally was offended that John Branca never once said how sorry he was for her loss, nor expressed any sign that he mourned Michael’s passing. The man was cold, Mrs. Jackson thought, just as her son had described him. “My son had told me and the kids that he never wanted Branca to be any part of his business ever again,” Katherine Jackson said.

  Branca himself professed to be astonished when Katherine Jackson’s attorneys filed a motion asking the court to give Michael’s mother control of her son’s wealth, based on “conflicts of interest” and “other factors” that compromised the ability of Branca and McClain to administer the estate. The deals with Sony and AEG were specifically referenced.

  Katherine had already won a key concession from Judge Beckloff, who ruled that a provision in the will that would punish anyone who attempted to challenge the document with exclusion from the estate should not limit Mrs. Jackson’s ability to oppose the executors. Branca instructed Howard Weitzman to see if a deal could be reached that would avoid a hearing in open court. The prospects for that did not look good when Katherine Jackson’s attorneys responded by asking Judge Beckloff for the power to subpoena Branca and McClain in order to question them publicly about their involvements with AEG and Sony. Branca and his legal team countered by pressing the judge to move forward swiftly, alleging that this court battle was delaying an “urgent probe” into what had happened to millions of dollars in “missing” funds and properties that belonged to the Michael Jackson estate. Branca’s attorneys said they had reason to believe valuable items were already being offered for sale by members of the Jackson family. A rumor was circulating that these items included a computer hard drive filled with Michael Jackson songs, many of them duets recorded with big-name artists.

  He would answer these requests, and more, Judge Beckloff told attorneys for both sides, at the hearing already scheduled for July 6, a court date that suddenly loomed as the decisive battle for control of the Michael Jackson estate.

  By then it appeared obvious that the amount of money at stake would far exceed the $236.6 million estimate of Jackson’s net worth that Thompson, Cobb, Bazilio and Associates had made back in 2007. The chief of Platinum Rye, the world’s largest buyer of music and talent for corporations, would tell Forbes magazine that Jackson’s share of the Sony/ATV catalog alone was worth at least $750 million, considerably more than the accounting firm had valued it at back in 2007. Earnings of $80 million per year on Michael’s half of the catalog would be a reasonable expectation, Forbes reported. The burgeoning value of Michael’s music and image, though, were what lifted the potential size of his estate well above the billion-dollar mark. Demand for his records in the United States would remain strong week after week, making Michael Jackson the best-selling musical artist in the country for 2009, with 8.2 million albums sold. Sony sold 21 million copies of Michael’s albums worldwide in the first eight weeks after his death, and nearly this many again in the eight months after that. Thriller, which had remained the best-selling album ever internationally (with more than 100 million copies sold), was closing the gap between it and the best-selling United States album, the Eagles’ Greatest Hits, with 28 million copies shipped domestically, compared to 29 million for the latter album. Sony held a great deal of unreleased Michael Jackson material in its vaults but what the record company had was just a small portion of the work Michae
l had left behind. Dieter Wiesner and Marc Schaffel, who had probably gained greater access to Michael’s personal film and music archives than any other two people alive, agreed that there were at least a thousand songs and thousands of hours of film and videotape stored away in warehouses. The potential earnings from its exploitation were incalculable.

  Neverland was now worth considerably more than the $22 million Tom Barrack had paid to save it from foreclosure, and the huge collection of valuables that were removed from the ranch and warehoused by Darren Julien had at least tripled in value, and might be worth ten times what they had been before. The day after Michael’s death, Julien’s had placed twenty-one items of Michael Jackson memorabilia purportedly belonging to David Gest on the block at a previously scheduled auction in Las Vegas. Prior to the event, the entire lot had been estimated to sell for $10,500. When the very first two items (a promotional display for a 1973 Jackson 5 album and an autographed copy of the Jackson 5 TV special Goin’ Back to Indiana) sold for $27,500, it became obvious that the take was going to be at least ten times what Julien’s had anticipated. By the end of the day, the take was nearly $1 million. On eBay, sellers were offering domain names like michaelthekingofpopjackson.com for $10 million. The pot of gold at the end of Michael Jackson’s rainbow was not only real, it was also apparently bottomless.

  Branca was in court, but Katherine Jackson was not, when Judge Beckloff convened the hearing that would decide the disposition of the Michael Jackson estate. The introduction of the various attorneys involved took nearly as long as the oral arguments. Branca had surrounded himself with a team of high-priced legal talent. Howard Weitzman informed the court that he was working in association with Joel Katz and Vincent Chieffo of the megafirm Greenberg Traurig. The Atlanta-based Katz was the chairman of Greenberg Traurig’s global media and entertainment practice and perhaps the only music attorney in the country whose practice rivaled Branca’s. Chieffo, based in Los Angeles, was the cochairman of the firm’s national media and entertainment litigation group. Also present in court on behalf of Branca were three attorneys from Hoffman, Sabban & Watenmaker, a small but powerful LA firm that specialized in trusts and estates. One of the three, Jeryll S. Cohen, had been much in the news during the previous year when she helped Britney Spears’s father James Spears gain temporary control of the singer’s estate after the pop star was admitted several times to a psychiatric hospital.

  Londell McMillan appeared as Katherine Jackson’s principal attorney. McMillan had simply showed up at the Hayvenhurst house immediately after Michael’s death, Mrs. Jackson would explain months later, insisting that her son would have wanted him to protect the family’s interest. “He just put himself there,” she recalled. At the July 6 court hearing, McMillan was accompanied by two other attorneys from the Los Angeles office of his law firm Dewey & LeBoeuf: John E. Schreiber and Dean Hansell. Also representing Katherine Jackson as her probate attorney was Burt Levitch, a partner at the Beverly Hills firm Rosenfeld, Meyer & Susman. Present in court as well was Las Vegas criminal defense attorney David Chesnoff, best known for being partners with former Las Vegas mayor Oscar Goodman and for representing a huge roster of celebrities and organized crime figures. He was there as an observer, Chesnoff explained to the court, and as the representative of Michael Jackson’s brothers and sisters.

  The last lawyer to identify himself to the judge was Joseph Zimring, a deputy in the California attorney general’s office who explained that his office was required to involve itself whenever unnamed charitable institutions could receive assets from an individual’s estate. The 20 percent of Michael Jackson’s estate that had been assigned to unnamed charities potentially totaled hundreds of millions of dollars.

  When the hearing finally got under way, it was clear that there would be no real objection to the will itself. According to Branca, the original document had been drafted in 1997 by an attorney at his firm who specialized in wills and trusts. He had no personal involvement, Branca assured the court. All he knew was that Michael did not want a family member in control of his estate and did not feel obligated to take care of his brothers and sisters. The will had been rewritten and signed again in 2002 because of Blanket’s birth, Branca explained.

  Though no one was publicly voicing doubts about the authenticity of the will, a number of people were privately asking rather pointed questions. One of these was why Branca and his law firm had retained an original copy of the will. At the time Branca was fired as Michael Jackson’s attorney in early 2003, he presumably had received a letter that explicitly requested the return of his client’s documents. Why hadn’t Branca turned over the will then? Others pointed out that Barry Siegel had removed himself as an executor of the estate after he was discharged as Michael Jackson’s accountant in 2003. This was the proper thing to have done, according to various interested parties, yet Branca had chosen to remain an executor of the will even after he was dismissed as Michael’s attorney.

  The “complete and unfettered discretion” that the trust document gave Branca and McClain over Michael Jackson’s estate was particularly bothersome to the husband-and-wife probate attorney team of Andrew and Danielle Mayoras, authors of a serialized online analysis of the battle for control of the star’s fortune. “They have total power and control over Katherine Jackson,” Andy Mayoras explained. “This is unusual—because Michael Jackson’s affection and trust and support of his mother was publicly displayed in the past, plus she has his kids. This is not normal for an adult beneficiary.” Even more bothersome was the “exclusion clause” under which anyone who challenged the document risked being cut out of the estate. Since the only person named a heritor of the estate—besides Prince, Paris, and Blanket—was Katherine Jackson, the exclusion clause suggested that Michael had intentionally and specifically blocked his beloved mother from arguing that the will might be invalid.

  Because the estate would not begin disbursing funds to Michael Jackson’s children until they reached the age of thirty and would not finish until the last child, Blanket, turned forty, Branca and McClain (each in his late fifties) would continue to be paid millions of dollars a year to administer the estate for decades to come, if they remained executors. Katherine Jackson almost certainly would not live to see even her oldest grandchild turn thirty. “When you look at the potential for the trustees to reprofit from Michael Jackson’s trust, you have to look at the trust with an extra-careful eye,” Danielle Mayoras said, “because the ones who are profiting significantly from the trust are the trustees.” Her husband complained that it was improper for Branca to be named as the executor and trustee of Michael Jackson’s estate in a will and trust agreement that had been prepared by his own law firm. “Because these are the docs that put John Branca in a position to earn so much money,” Andy Mayoras said, “as such, John Branca’s firm should not have been the one to prep these docs.” (Upon hearing of such complaints, Branca would retort through Howard Weitzman: “We are not aware of any ethical prohibition on an attorney both drafting a will and serving as an executor . . . To the contrary, California’s Probate Code expressly contemplates an attorney drafter serving as either a trustee or executor.”)

  Tohme Tohme and several members of the Jackson family went so far as to question whether the will Branca had submitted to the court was actually signed by Michael Jackson, but none of them mounted a formal challenge. Concerned that Mrs. Jackson might forfeit the 40 percent of Michael’s estate that had been left to her, Katherine’s attorneys made no objection to the will, but did complain that the trust agreement gave John Branca—a man Michael Jackson had regularly professed to distrust—almost total control of the estate.

  She would not have been so concerned, Mrs. Jackson was saying privately, if she believed John McClain was capable of providing a counterbalance to Branca. McClain, though, according to Branca’s attorneys, was suffering from some unidentified affliction that kept him housebound. Howard Weitzman described McClain in court as physically disabled but mental
ly sound. He was reportedly a diabetic who had suffered a stroke that impaired both his mobility and his speech, but this was never confirmed by evidence submitted to the court. For someone so prominent in the music industry, McClain had long maintained a remarkably low profile. A blade-thin black man who in 1990 cofounded Interscope Records with Jimmy Iovine and Ted Field, McClain had worked before that as an executive at A&M Records, where he helped launch Janet Jackson’s career.

  McClain’s decades-long relationship with the Jackson family was complex. During the mid-eighties, Janet formally affirmed her break with Joe Jackson by hiring McClain away from A&M to work as her manager. At the time, Joe had accused McClain of deviously luring his daughter away from him. “I’ve worked hard for my family,” he said. “The problem comes, though, when others come in behind you and try to steal them away.” Few, however, doubted the wisdom of Janet’s decision when her next album, Control, turned into the breakthrough hit she so longed for, selling six million copies and establishing the youngest Jackson as a commercial force in the record industry. McClain, Control’s producer, was given enormous credit for the album’s success. One of those who admired what he’d done for Janet Jackson was her brother Michael, who soon hired McClain away to work for him, reportedly on the condition that he have nothing further to do with his sister’s career. Katherine Jackson was fond of McClain and told those around her that she believed he could be trusted. Joe Jackson doubted that, but like his estranged wife was far more concerned about Branca, who both he and Katherine believed would long outlive his coexecutor. “I told [Michael] all the time to watch John Branca, and that John Branca was no good,” Joe said.