PART THREE
Michael Jackson was wearing his standard travel disguise of sunglasses and a veil when he stepped off his jet in a private hangar at McCarran Airport in Las Vegas on the evening of December 23, 2006. The entertainer, his children, and Grace Rwaramba climbed into a limousine that skirted the towering lights of the Strip, carrying them instead to the upscale suburbs northwest of the city, stopping finally at 2785 South Monte Cristo Way, a gated Spanish mansion on ten acres of grounds in the “custom home community” of Summerlin. Michael had signed a six-month lease on the property—sight unseen—that required an advance payment of $1 million, more than five times what it was worth on the open rental market.
A large Christmas tree with dozens of brightly packaged presents beneath it waited in the living room of the Jacksons’ new home, placed there by gaming dealmaker Jack Wishna and his wife, Donna. Wishna, best known for bringing Donald Trump to Las Vegas (he was now a partner in the Trump International Hotel and Tower), had arranged for the private jet that brought Jackson and his entourage to Las Vegas from Ireland and already was letting reporters know that he and Michael had been talking for weeks about staging the star’s “comeback” in Las Vegas, possibly with a live show like the hugely successful one Celine Dion had been headlining for months at Caesars Palace. The two of them envisioned what would be a sort of Michael Jackson Hotel they could create either by transforming an existing property or developing a new one, Wishna said. Jackson had suggested that they use one of the statues left over from the HIStory promotion at the hotel, according to the businessman: “Michael says, ‘I want the hotel to encase it in the wall and the nights I’m in performance the statue comes out to the center of the Strip so the world knows that I’m here.’ It would come out on a conveyer belt.” Jackson even wanted to design his own King of Pop slot machines. But that was just one of several projects under consideration, added Wishna, who answered a call from Us Weekly by assuring the magazine’s reporter that Jackson “is poised to return to the top of the entertainment world soon.”
Michael himself stayed silent and out of sight, hidden behind his new home’s gated entrance, except for a quick shopping excursion on Christmas Eve at the Forum Shops in Caesars Palace. The photographers and cameramen who missed him there attempted a series of drive-by shootings at the Monte Cristo compound but came away with nothing except pictures of the 16,000-square-foot mansion’s red-tile roof.
Michael would make his first public appearance on American soil since the end of his criminal trial less than a week later, though, when he flew to Georgia for the funeral of James Brown. The seventy-three-year-old Brown had died of congestive heart failure on Christmas morning after being admitted to an Atlanta hospital with pneumonia. Two days later, his body was transported to Harlem for an open-casket viewing at the Apollo Theater that would last all day and into the evening of December 28 in order to accommodate the lines, in which some people waited as long as five hours in the cold for a look at the Godfather of Soul. By nine that night, Brown’s remains were in the cargo hold of a private jet, on their way back to his hometown of Augusta, Georgia. Michael Jackson was flying toward Georgia also, and made it to Augusta’s C. A Reid Sr. Memorial Funeral Home just after midnight on December 29, less than an hour after the arrival of James Brown’s body.
The gold-plated casket was in the chapel when Mr. Jackson walked into his establishment at about 12:30 a.m., Charles Reid recalled, and he immediately asked that the funeral director raise the lid. Michael looked at James Brown’s embalmed body lying in a bed of cream-color satin, dressed in a black jacket worn over a ruffled red shirt, then leaned over to kiss the corpse on the forehead. He ran his hands through Brown’s freshly oiled pompadour and pulled a lock down onto the brow, in order to create the slightly disheveled look that he had seen so many times before, onstage and in photographs. Reid was preparing a moment later to reclose the lid of the casket. Michael Jackson, though, showed no sign of leaving. “Normally, a person comes in, views, and that’s pretty much it,” Reid explained, but Michael Jackson would remain beside James Brown’s body for four and a half hours.
Mr. Jackson spent the first hour just standing and looking, Reid remembered. Gradually, he began to talk to the funeral director about how much Mr. Brown had meant to him, telling Reid that when he was six or so years old his mother used to wake him up any time James Brown was on television, just so he could watch his idol dance. The relationship that began back on the chitlin’ circuit had fluctuated over the years but grew strong in 2003, when Brown had been among the first black celebrities to offer support after criminal charges were filed against Michael Jackson.
What took Charles Reid aback on that evening in late December 2006 was that after spending about an hour beside James Brown’s casket Mr. Jackson began to ask the funeral director a series of very specific questions about the preparation of a dead body. He wanted to know “how it was done,” Reid recalled. “What do you actually do?” Mr. Jackson made him go through the entire process in elaborate detail, Reid remembered. His famous visitor listened intently and interjected demands for the exact details as the funeral director described how one went about “setting the features” with eye caps and a needle injector. Michael Jackson didn’t want the funeral director to stop there. “What types of fluids do you use?” he asked. “And how do you put them in the body?” Reid found himself describing the various processes of embalming, the sorts of things that almost no one outside the mortuary professions wanted to know. “Most people shy away when it comes to death,” Reid would later explain to New York Daily News columnist Michael Daly. “They would be trying to head the opposite way. It was amazing to me he would talk about it the way he did. It’s just out of the ordinary.”
Mr. Jackson’s questions weren’t morbid in nature, though, Reid said, not at all. Mr. Jackson was humble in his curiosity, very respectful and genuinely kind. He just wanted to know. It was almost five in the morning when Michael finally told Reid to close the casket and then walked back out of the funeral home.
Michael Jackson was clearly the star attraction at Augusta’s James Brown Arena the next day, where the funeral was staged. Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson stood beside him as Michael stepped to the podium and spoke to the crowd of 8,500 over a microphone. In some way that was clear yet ineffable, Michael’s appearance seemed to culminate a reassertion of himself as a black man that had begun back in 2003, shortly after the criminal charges were filed against him. A crowd that was largely African American had been swaying and singing along to such James Brown hits as “I Feel Good,” “It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World” and yes, “Sex Machine,” which had ended with Brown’s casket being covered by the cape that had so often been laid over his shoulders at the end of his stage shows. The Reverend Sharpton delivered a stirring eulogy that recalled the impact of James Brown’s 1968 song “Say It Loud—I’m Black and I’m Proud.” “I clearly remember we were calling ourselves colored, and after the song, we were calling ourselves black,” Brown had told the Associated Press in 2003. “The song showed people that lyrics and music and a song can change society.” Sharpton devoted a surprising amount of his speech to an explanation of Michael Jackson’s presence in Augusta. “I don’t care what the media says tonight, James Brown wanted Michael Jackson with him here today,” Sharpton boomed into the microphone. “He said . . . ‘I love Michael.’ He said, ‘Tell him don’t worry about coming home. They always scandalize those that have the talent. But tell him we need to clean up the music, and I want Michael and all of them that imitated me to come back and lift the music back.’”
Amid the squeals and shouts of the rapturous crowd, Michael, dressed in a fitted black leather jacket, his makeup streaked with tears, stepped to the microphone and spoke in the voice that only those who did business with him knew well, a voice far deeper and stronger than the sibilant whisper to which the American public had grown accustomed. “James Brown is my greatest inspiration,” he told a crowd that deeply wanted to believe it. “When I saw him move, I was mesmerized . . . I never saw a performer move like James Brown . . . James, I shall miss you, and I love you so much. Thank you for everything.”
Michael made his deepest impression on those who saw television footage of the funeral, though, when he bent once more over the gold casket, this time in broad daylight, to again kiss the corpse of James Brown, right on the lips.
By the middle of January 2007, word had begun circulate in Las Vegas that Michael Jackson was in talks with Steve Wynn, the opportunistic billionaire developer credited for the dramatic resurgence of the Strip in the 1990s, having either built or refurbished casino resorts that included the Mirage, Treasure Island, and the Bellagio. The two had some history. Steve Miller, the former prosecutor whose Inside Vegas blog made him the closest thing to a muckraking journalist the city had seen in recent years, reported that, “On the many occasions when Jackson was in Vegas, often in the company of small boys, he and the unchaperoned children slept and played together in a specially decorated suite in Steve Wynn’s hotel and had free use of Wynn’s private jet.” Miller had reported extensively about the triangular relationship between Wynn, Jackson, and Michael Milken, the fabled “junk bond king” who had been convicted of illegal securities trading in 1990, then was visited more than fifty times in prison by Wynn (despite Nevada laws that forbade the association of gaming licensees with convicted felons). After Milken’s release from prison, Wynn had helped the former Californian rehabilitate his public image as a resident of Nevada, and introduced the still enormously wealthy financier to Jackson when the three posed together on the pirate ship during the grand opening of the Treasure Island Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas. Relations had chilled in 2005, though, after Wynn was listed as one of the character witnesses for Jackson that Tom Mesereau might call to the stand at the criminal trial in California. Michael was hurt that Wynn dispatched his head of public relations to tell the local media in Las Vegas that the casino mogul had no plans to be a witness and “actually was surprised to see his name mentioned.” Jackson and Wynn appeared to be on friendly terms once again, though, in January 2007, when they dined together in a private room at Alex, the most opulent of the gaming magnate’s many restaurants. Immediately afterward, however, Wynn went out of his way to squelch a report that he and Jackson were on the verge of a deal that would have made Michael a sort of in-house entertainer at his hotels.
Jack Wishna’s relief was short-lived. Yet another impresario, the flamboyant fat man Jeff Beacher, who had transformed the Hard Rock Cafe into his Madhouse at Hard Rock with the wildest and most lurid show (“think The Original Kings of Comedy combined with Girls Gone Wild,” Backstage West had suggested) the Strip had ever seen, followed Wishna to Us Weekly in order to tell the magazine that he, too, was meeting with Jackson. Michael was so committed to making his comeback in Las Vegas, Beacher said, that he was already looking for the property that would become his new Neverland. Also in the mix was Simon Fuller, the producer-manager whose big piece of American Idol was supplemented by the fees he earned managing Idol stars Kelly Clarkson, Ruben Studdard, and Clay Aiken, as well as soccer player David Beckham. Fuller had set up a series of meetings between Jackson and his Thriller choreographer Kenny Ortega, who by now was better known for staging High School Musical. The “scenarios” involving Wynn, Wishna, Beacher, and Fuller would all come to nothing, but at least the various meetings and negotiations provided Michael with an excuse to avoid his father.
Joe Jackson had been living primarily in Las Vegas for more than a decade, having been gradually banished from the Hayvenhurst estate for various indiscretions. Foremost among these was Joe’s close relationship with his illegitimate daughter, Joh’Vonnie, whose birth (the day after Michael’s sixteenth birthday) in 1974 had forced Katherine Jackson to acknowledge that the stories about Joe’s infidelity were true.
Michael had made an explicit statement of his intention to be eventually reconciled to Joseph when he spoke at Oxford in March 2000. The occasion was one of several events intended to launch the humanitarian initiative that Michael Jackson pledged would be at the center of his life’s work from that day forward: his Heal the World Foundation. Rabbi Boteach would later claim that he had written the speech for Michael “based on our interviews.” The theme was forgiveness and the focus was on Michael’s relationship with his father. He described Joe as “a tough man,” but glossed over the physical abuse he had endured as a child. “I want to forgive him because I want a father and this is the only one that I’ve got. I want the weight of my past lifted from my shoulders, and I want to be free to step into a new relationship with my father for the rest of my life, unhindered by the goblins of the past.”
That was easier said than done, of course. Michael might make Prince’s middle name Joseph, just as Paris’s was Katherine, and he could encourage his children to phone their grandparents on holidays, but he still almost never wanted to spend much time with anyone from his family.
During the past three decades, Michael had grown increasingly determined to distance himself from the sordid soap opera that was life among the Jacksons. The process of separation had been going on since 1974, when Katherine and the rest of the family had learned of Joe’s relationship with twenty-five-year-old Cheryl Terrell, who gave birth to Joh’Vonnie Jackson later that same year. In 1982, when Marlon filed for divorce from his wife, Carol, Michael urged his brother to attend counseling sessions to try to save his marriage. He tried to be supportive as well when eighteen-year-old Janet eloped with James DeBarge, whom the rest of the family despised. Michael had thrown up his hands, though, by 1983, when Jackie’s affair with Los Angeles Lakers cheerleader Paula Abdul blew up his marriage amid a series of scenes that culminated in Enid Jackson’s breaking her husband’s leg by running him over with a car after catching Jackie in bed with Abdul. In March 1987, Jermaine showed up for Marlon’s birthday party carrying his three-month-old son by a young woman named Margaret Maldonado, while his thirty-four-year-old wife, the former Hazel Gordy, looked on with an expression of bewilderment. During their divorce, Hazel would allege Jermaine had attempted to rape her in front of their children. By 1990, Michael had moved to Neverland and was keeping his distance from the other Jacksons. He made no comment when newspapers reported that Randy’s wife Eliza was accusing him of beating her throughout her pregnancy and claimed that one of his girlfriends had phoned to say that she, too, was about to give birth to Randy’s child. Eliza shook her head when Randy denied these accusations in court. The Jackson brothers were all just like Joe, Eliza told a reporter, except for Michael.
Michael’s sister La Toya, meanwhile, would not be ignored. She’d been a problem without a solution for years. As a teenager, La Toya raged against being shut out of the spotlight, demanding to be put onstage and brought into the studio. Her ranting and raving was spectacular, but her talent nonexistent. Well, she could dance a little, Joe allowed, and he let her join the Jacksons’ Las Vegas shows in 1974, if she promised only to lip-synch onstage.
La Toya began to get all the attention she craved in 1988, when she eloped with her Jewish manager Jack Gordon to Las Vegas and permitted him to arrange the press conference where she announced that she was posing for Playboy. La Toya’s cover shot and nude pictorial in Playboy’s March 1989 edition made it the best-selling issue in the magazine’s history. The other Jacksons were most concerned, though, by the news that La Toya had informed the press she was working on an autobiography that would reveal “the whole truth about my dysfunctional family.”
When La Toya: Growing Up in the Jackson Family was published in 1991, the most scandalous revelation was La Toya’s claim that Joe Jackson had sexually abused both her and her older sister Rebbie. What most stunned fans, however, was the book’s scathing portrait of Katherine Jackson, whom her daughter described as “the guiding force behind the cruelty and abuse” in her family.
Katherine expressed more sadness about what was happening to her daughter than she did anger about La Toya’s attacks on her character, and Mrs. Jackson’s dignified response won her some admirers, even among the media. Michael, though, was shaken by La Toya’s graphic description of his mother’s 1980 physical assault on a young woman named Gina Sprague, whom Katherine suspected of having an affair with Joe. Michael’s relationship with his middle sister was not completely shattered, however, until December 1993, when La Toya responded to the Jordan Chandler scandal by holding a press conference in Tel Aviv, Israel, at which she declared her belief that the accusations against her brother were true. “I can’t remain silent,” she squeaked into a bank of microphones. “I will not be a silent collaborator in his crimes against small, innocent children.”
Within three years, La Toya would insist that she had been bullied and manipulated by Jack Gordon into saying and writing such terrible things about her family. Katherine impressed onlookers once more by accepting La Toya’s disavowals and welcoming her daughter back to the Hayvenhurst compound with open arms. Michael, though, still did not want anything to do with his sister, or for that matter with any member of the Jackson family other than his mother. According to Bob Jones, when Michael went on tour he instructed his bodyguards not to let any of the other Jacksons near his dressing room.
That hard line softened after Michael’s arrest on child molestation charges in 2003. Michael suddenly wanted his family near, and the Jacksons responded by closing ranks around the face of the franchise, rallying to his side when even the people he called his closest friends were keeping him at arm’s length. Reporters mocked the emotional scenes of Michael walking into and out of the Santa Maria courthouse during the trial, surrounded by family members (with Joe Jackson usually at his right elbow), as a marriage of financial arrangement with performance art.
Those closer to the scene were especially nauseated whenever Jermaine showed up. A growing number of people knew that back in 2003, when Michael’s world was collapsing all around him, Jermaine had gone to New York publishers with a “tell-all” book proposal in which he admitted believing his little brother might be a child molester. “I don’t want to tell you my brother’s innocent. I am not certain he is,” Jermaine had stated in the eight-page proposal for a book he wanted to call “Legacy.” Along with detailing his claims of Michael’s dishonesty, drug abuse, cruel streak, and rampant anti-Semitism, Jermaine had described what he observed during a family gathering in the mid-1990s, after the death of Tito’s ex-wife: He had walked into a bedroom where he found Michael sitting on the bed with three young relatives and holding them in a manner that left “the entire house shaken,” the older brother told publishers, adding, “Yes, he has a thing for young children.”
Some cynics questioned even Katherine Jackson’s loyalty to her son. “Sure, his mother was in court every day,” observed the black Los Angeles attorney and radio host Leo Terrell, whose familiarity with the Jacksons went back to his days as a Johnnie Cochran acolyte, “but I have heard that he had to pay her to be there. I’m sure Tom [Mesereau] wanted a united front, but I’m also sure that every one of them had his or her hand out. They all looked to Michael as an ATM machine.”
That was literally true, according to Grace Rwaramba. When Sheikh Abdullah began to wire money from Bahrain during the trial, Michael instructed her to run it through her bank account, Rwaramba said. Upon learning about the money coming from the Persian Gulf, Grace recalled, Katherine Jackson immediately complained to Michael that she needed cash, and Michael ordered the nanny to give his mother her ATM card. Tens of thousands of dollars quickly disappeared, according to Rwaramba: “[Katherine] was cashing out of the machine every day.” Soon she was told that “other Jackson relatives needed money, too,” Grace said. “So Michael told me to give them my ATM card. They were taking cash out of the machine every day.”
The Jackson brothers had needed less than a decade to blow through the millions they brought home from the Victory tour. By the time Michael returned to the United States from Ireland at the end of 2006, all of them were strapped, none more so than Marlon, who was about to lose his home to foreclosure and move into an extended-stay hotel. Marlon was fifty-one when Michael settled into his rented Las Vegas mansion, and he worked stocking shelves at a San Diego–area supermarket. Randy Jackson at age forty-six supplemented his savings by fixing cars in a Los Angeles garage owned by a family friend, while fifty-six-year-old Jackie had turned to managing his son Siggy, an aspiring rapper. Fifty-five-year-old Tito was the only Jackson brother besides Michael who continued to make music for a living, fronting a blues band that played occasional club gigs for a group fee that was usually under $1,000. Jermaine, his singing career kaput, was recovering from bankruptcy at age fifty-four by shuttling between his girlfriend’s home in Ventura County and the Hayvenhurst estate, where Jackie and Randy also slept many nights. More than $5 million in federal, state, and local liens were on file against Jermaine, who was overjoyed to discover (right around the time Michael landed in Las Vegas) that he had won a place on the UK reality show Celebrity Big Brother, noting how difficult it would be for creditors to attach his earnings in England.
Most of the Jackson 5 had filed for bankruptcy. After Joe and Katherine were declared insolvent back in the late 1990s they had been followed to federal court by Tito and Marlon, and then by Jermaine, leaving Jackie as the only original member, other than Michael, who had avoided a Chapter 7 filing. And Jackie was barely holding on after an Internet clothing business he had launched three years earlier began to go belly up.
Joe Jackson had been hiding from creditors since 1987, when concert promoter Gary Berwin won a $3 million judgment against him for writing a bad check to purchase the former Hollywood Athletic Club. The Segye Times was awarded an even larger judgment against Joe, Katherine, and Jermaine a few years later for swindling the Moonie newspaper out of the money it had spent to try to arrange a Michael Jackson concert in Seoul. The bankruptcy court refused to discharge that debt, ruling that Joe, Katherine, and Jermaine were guilty of fraud. A former business partner named Henry Vaccaro also had a judgment against Joe and Katherine that had survived bankruptcy court and was chasing their hidden assets all over California. Vaccaro finally trapped them by issuing fake “rebate” checks in the amount of $50 made out to each family member. When Katherine Jackson deposited one of those checks into her bank account, Vaccaro followed a paper trail that led eventually to a pair of storage units in Oxnard where Joe and his estranged wife had stashed a huge trove of Jackson memorabilia. Since then, Joe had been living mostly on handouts from Katherine (who divvied up the $25,000 check Michael sent to her each month among various needy members of the family) and was incessantly looking for opportunities to draw his most famous son into assorted dubious business deals.
Michael had refused to discuss the financial problems of family members during a holiday gathering he hosted at his home in Vegas, shortly after returning from Ireland. He hardly said a word to anyone, afraid that his father and brothers would begin pestering him with propositions. To avoid eye contact, he kept his sunglasses on even during dinner. The Jacksons recognized it as an ominous sign. Wearing dark glasses indoors, the family knew, had long been Michael’s way of signaling that he wanted to be more involved with whatever drugs he was taking than with the people around him.
The Santa Barbara district attorney’s office had largely ignored a case against Michael Jackson for procuring and using prescription drugs that was far stronger than the one it filed charging him with child molestation. Tom Mesereau actually introduced more evidence about Jackson’s “drug problem” at trial than the prosecution did, telling the jury early on that his client “had gotten a lot of prescriptions from various physicians” under assorted identities. Yet most of what Mesereau knew about Michael’s use of painkillers and antianxiety medications had been gleaned from reports filed by police investigators working out of Santa Barbara and Los Angeles counties.
Court documents revealed that Jackson had used dozens of names to obtain prescription drugs since 1993. In 1998 alone Michael collected an assortment of drugs—mostly synthetic opiates, or “opioids”—under false names that included M. Johnson, Michael Scruz, Bill Scruz, Joseph Scruz, John Scruz, Omar Arnold, and Arnold Omar. He also had collected prescriptions in 1998 under the names of his employees Bill Bray and Bob Jones.
District Attorney Sneddon understood that a key job description for Jackson’s security staff was the procurement of prescription drugs. Chris Carter, the entertainer’s chief of security at the time of the raid on Neverland, told Santa Barbara County investigators that he regularly obtained Xanax prescriptions for Michael under an array of fictitious names, but occasionally resorted to using the names of Neverland employees like Frank Cascio, Jesus Salas, and Joe Marcus to get the drugs. Michael LaPerruque, who became Jackson’s chief of security a year later, said that most of the drug prescriptions he saw Michael use were under the name Chris Carter. Joey Jeszeck, the blond surfer whom Michael had recruited to work for him after meeting the teenager in a Santa Barbara beach shop, told Sneddon’s investigators that Jackson regularly sent him to the pharmacy to pick up prescriptions obtained under assorted names from doctors all over the country. When a pharmacy wouldn’t release the drugs he wanted under one name, Michael would call the doctor and have the name on the prescription changed to the person standing at the counter, deputies were told by Jeszeck, who remembered dealing with a “Dr. Farshchian in Florida” in that regard on multiple occasions.
Dr. Alimorad “Alex” Farshchian was the founder of the Center for Regenerative Medicine in Miami, a clinic ostensibly devoted to helping patients recover from injury or arthritis. Farshchian had regularly traveled with Jackson during the years 2002 and 2003 and was with him during the baby-dangling incident in Berlin. Jackson spent time as a guest at Farshchian’s home in Bay Harbor Islands and visited the doctor’s office during his frequent stays at Miami’s Turnberry Isle Resort. Carter described Michael to investigators as being sharp and “in tune” before his visits to Farshchian but “out of it” afterward. LaPerruque told Santa Barbara detectives that he believed Dr. Farshchian “may have been overprescribing medication” to Michael. Carter advised the same detectives that Farshchian had said Jackson was addicted to Demerol and that he was attempting to wean Michael off the drug. Michael was seeing Farshchian on an almost daily basis when the Bashir documentary aired in February 2003. The Florida doctor flew back to California with Michael a few days later, then stayed on at Neverland Ranch during that period when, according to Dieter Wiesner, Michael was so loaded on opioids that he couldn’t feed himself. In the months before the criminal trial in Santa Barbara County, Farshchian told reporters that he was mainly prescribing vitamins for Michael and the press took to describing him, tongue in cheek, as “Jackson’s vitamin doctor.”
“My biggest gripe about the doctors around Michael is that they didn’t treat him as a patient,” said Marc Schaffel. “They just gave him stuff. And Farshchian is exactly who I’m thinking of.”
Investigators in California had recovered a July 21, 2002, handwritten note from Farshchian to Jackson in which the doctor informed the star that he had just sent him a special “package.” It was “a 5 to 7 day program that offers you the solution,” Farshchian had written. “Buprenex is the potent narcotic I told you about last week, it is just like the D but better.” The “D” Farshchian referred to was the highly addictive painkiller Demerol, investigators believed, and Buprenex, they knew, was a newly developed and even more powerful injectable analgesic.
For Dr. Farshchian, Schaffel said, “it wasn’t about money so much, I don’t think, as the glamour and excitement. I remember Farshchian and his wife had quite a bit of problems at one point, because she did not approve of him leaving his house and family in Miami to go hang out with Michael.”
Before Farshchian, Jackson had relied upon Dr. Allan Metzger to provide his medications. Metzger, a specialist in the treatment of lupus, had accompanied Michael in 1996 on the entire HIStory tour and, according to Dieter Wiesner, “gave him whatever he asked for.” Among Metzger’s other duties on the tour had been videotaping the Michael Jackson–Debbie Rowe wedding in Australia. The Los Angeles County authorities that later reviewed Metzger’s files found one labeled “Omar Arnold/Michael Jackson.” In September 2000 the medical board of California had officially reprimanded Metzger for “fraudulent medical practice based on prescriptions written for an international entertainer, using a false/fictitious name.” That “entertainer,” though, was not Michael Jackson, but his sister Janet, according to Metzger, who insisted that he had not seen Michael Jackson “regularly” as a patient for several years.
Metzger and Farshchian were but two of the countless physicians who over the years had assisted Jackson in obtaining drugs. Helping Michael find doctors who would write prescriptions for him was a crucial task of the enablers who traveled with Jackson as part of his security staff. An MD who demanded anonymity would provide the Las Vegas Review-Journal with a snapshot of the methods Michael and his team used to make new drug connections. After being summoned to Jackson’s hotel suite, supposedly to treat a sore throat, the doctor said, he quickly realized that the entire examination had been “staged” and that “they just wanted drugs.” When he was asked to “call in all these pills under someone else’s name,” the doctor said, he refused and was immediately confronted by a hulking “handler” who gruffly asked, “What do you mean? They always do that.” Frightened, he agreed to see what he could do, and headed for the door, but was stopped by the big bodyguard, who “put a finger in my chest and said, ‘You do that.’”
Both the amounts and the combinations of the drugs Jackson asked for astounded any number of reputable doctors who treated him. Rabbi Boteach recalled an occasion when the Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel had asked his personal physician to attend to the back pain Jackson complained of during a stay at the Waldorf-Astoria. “One of New York’s most prestigious doctors” emerged from Michael’s bedroom “ashen faced” after about fifteen minutes alone with the star, Boteach remembered, and immediately announced that, “Michael has just asked me for a quantity of drugs that would kill a horse.” When he went into the bedroom to ask if it was true, Boteach said, Michael calmly replied, “I have a very high tolerance. I’m used to this. I’ll be fine.” Orthopedic surgeon Mark Sinnreich, who treated Jackson at his clinic in Miami, reported that in 2000 Michael had asked for 200 milligrams of Demerol, four times the dose that would normally be administered to a patient his size. “But he said that he needs more since he had this burn,” Sinnreich recalled. “And I know burns are very, very painful. He said that ever since he was in that Pepsi commercial and burned his hair that he had a lot of pain and that he had a very high tolerance to pain medication.”
That was true, but as doctors who have studied the subject understand, a high tolerance for pain medication equates to a low tolerance for pain. Ordinary aches can become debilitating for a person who consistently refuses to feel them. Clinical studies have consistently shown that heavy use of pain medications changes brain chemistry in ways that profoundly affect perception and can result in a condition known as hyperalgesia, in which taking painkillers causes a person to actually feel pain more acutely. This can advance to the point in an addicted brain where getting off the drugs equates to a sense that one is committing suicide. Michael Jackson consistently described himself that way, telling one person after another that it wasn’t a question of wanting drugs but rather of needing them. “If I stop using drugs, I’ll die,” he told one concerned friend. “I won’t survive another day without them. No one understands that. I need to be here for my kids. There’s no other way. There’s just no other way.”
Tarak Ben Ammar, a Tunisian film producer and distributor who managed the HIStory tour, said he was tempted to describe Jackson as a hypochondriac but hesitated because, “One never really knew if he was sick.” Michael complained constantly of this condition or that one. He truly did suffer from a constellation of autoimmune disorders (most linked to childhood trauma) but whether these caused him real pain or merely discomfort was impossible even for a trained physician to know. Twenty years later, Michael was still using the small patch of scarring from the burn he had suffered during the Pepsi commercial filming as a reason why he needed a new prescription of pain medication. He also would say the rib he had broken while training for the Dangerous tour was bothering him, or that an ankle he had twisted during the HIStory tour was acting up again.
Back pain was what he most often cited when he asked for the opioids that were his drug of choice. Jackson regularly told people that he had fractured a vertebra years earlier. That wasn’t true, though he did suffer from a mild case of arthritis in his lower back. Rabbi Boteach would recall how, after he was jostled by autograph seekers at a charity event in New York, Michael almost immediately began to complain that his back was injured and he needed pain medication. Jackson showed up in Britain for the Oxford speech with his foot in a cast and on crutches, Boteach remembered, claiming he had broken his foot while practicing dance moves at Neverland and needed to see a doctor who could give him Demerol. Over the next few days, he heard Michael tell a number of different stories about what had happened to his foot, the rabbi recalled, “but again, I made nothing of it, thinking that Michael was forgetful.”
People constantly made such mental adjustments to accommodate Michael Jackson. No one showed more flexibility in that regard than his old friend Dr. Arnold Klein. In the process of becoming the most famous dermatologist on earth, Klein had explored the frontiers of pharmacology, an adventure he began right around the time he started treating people’s skin. Back in 1972, one year after graduating Phi Beta Kappa from the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, Klein was credited as the coauthor of a book published by the University of Pennsylvania Press titled Drug-Trip Abroad: American Drug-Refugees in Amsterdam and London. During the next two years, while working as a resident at the hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, Klein made a number of trips to Mexico, where he was said to have experimented with and purchased a wide range of pharmaceuticals. He abandoned his Ivy League residency in 1974 under circumstances that were the subject of considerable rumor and speculation, nearly all of it involving the use and distribution of prescription drugs. Klein told colleagues (who did not know he was gay) that he was moving to the West Coast to marry a woman he had met there.
In 1975, Klein became the chief resident in dermatology at UCLA’s School of Medicine. The young doctor swiftly discovered, though, that the skin care business in Southern California is fiercely competitive. Still working part-time at UCLA, he took a position with a small practice in the San Fernando Valley where he spent his time “giving light treatments and picking pimples,” Klein recalled. As bored as he was ambitious, the young Dr. Klein used $18,000 in savings to “venture into the jaws of what was Beverly Hills,” opening his own practice in an 800-square-foot office. The new practice flourished in part because Klein was so adept at developing personal relationships. He obtained his earliest referrals, the doctor remembered, by knocking on the door of every physician’s office in Beverly Hills. Within a year, he had so many patients—many of them celebrities—that he opened a larger office and hired an associate. But television was what lifted him into the stratosphere of the medical business. Klein’s first TV appearance, on The Merv Griffin Show, changed his life overnight. “The next day, people were asking for my autograph, and soon thereafter, I received ten thousand letters,” he remembered.
By the time Klein went on television to discuss his experimentation with collagen injections his office was nearly ten times the size of the one he had started. The practice exploded after that. Within a couple of years Klein’s client list included the largest assembly of stars boasted by any doctor on the planet (though the majority of his patients were merely rich people). That list continued to increase—in fame and wealth, if not in number—when he pioneered the field of Botox injection. His relationships with his celebrity clients, Cher and Dolly Parton among them, were the common currency of Hollywood in-jokes that made their way into at least two feature films, Postcards from the Edge (based on a book by his client Carrie Fisher) and The First Wives Club. He was best known around town, though, for his close personal friendships with two particular clients: Elizabeth Taylor and Michael Jackson.
Klein’s relationships with Taylor and Jackson were forged through what the doctor had done to help Liz preserve her looks well past the age of fifty and how he had cured the acne that had tormented Michael all through his late teens and early twenties.
Klein was more than a physician to his most favored patients, however. Nothing said more about his relationship with Taylor, for example, than the note the actress had written in the copy she had given him of her book My Affair with Jewelry. “My beloved Arnie,” it read, “I love you more than I can tell. I feel you have saved my fading life. I love and thank you forever. Yours, Elizabeth.” The doctor’s mastery of collagen and Botox injections were but two of the four pillars that supported his exalted status in Beverly Hills. The other two were Klein’s intellectual sophistication and his sensitivity to client “needs.” The doctor made no secret of his belief that pain, like need, was a highly subjective concept, and that achieving the proper chemical balance for the full enjoyment of life might involve the judicious use of pharmaceuticals.
How liberally Dr. Klein might be interpreting “pain” and “need” was first publicly suggested in the 1980s when Liz Taylor attempted to kick her by-then-voracious prescription drug addiction. During consultations with the physicians who supervised her rehabilitation, Taylor acknowledged that Dr. Klein—a man she dearly loved—had written her multiple prescriptions for various drugs that included Dilaudid and Ativan. Klein’s name appeared in news columns a second time, in the autumn of 1993, when a deputy sheriff arrived at the doctor’s office in Beverly Hills armed with a search warrant connected to the Jordan Chandler investigation. “Dr. Klein said that prior to the service of the search warrant on November 19, 1993, he removed Jackson’s medical files from his office at [his lawyer’s] direction and kept the files in his home and car,” read the deputy’s report of that encounter. During the 2003 investigation of the criminal charges filed against Jackson in Santa Barbara County, Klein admitted to police that he had prescribed Dilaudid and Ativan to both Michael and Liz Taylor. Tom Sneddon’s office later listed Klein as one of the doctors who had prescribed Demerol to Jackson, under the name Ferdinand Diaz.
He and Michael had first met in 1983, Klein would recall, shortly after he sat in the audience that had cheered madly as Jackson introduced the Moonwalk during his performance of “Billie Jean” at the “Motown 25” show in Pasadena. A week later, he was “sitting in David Geffen’s driveway,” Klein would recall, when he saw Michael Jackson sitting in the backseat of a Lincoln Town Car, looking “very lonely.” Geffen brought Michael to his office just days later, according to Klein, to look at the “butterfly rash” on his face that was accompanied by a severe crusting of his scalp. He had diagnosed Jackson with lupus that day, Klein said, and a relationship that would endure for more than a quarter-century was forged. “Michael was probably the purest person I ever met,” Klein would tell Vanity Fair’s Mark Seal. “He did not have a mean bone in his body.” Carrie Fisher saw the relationship in somewhat starker terms: “They each had something that the other desperately coveted,” the actress would write in her book Shockaholic. “Arnie wanted to be friends . . . with the biggest star on the planet [and] Michael wanted access to the farthest reaches of the medical community 24-7.”
In spite of rampant rumors about the kinds and amounts of drugs Klein was prescribing to Jackson, however, there was little if any follow-up investigation of Klein’s role in Michael’s life by police officials in either Los Angeles or Santa Maria, in either 1993 or 2003. Klein had become immensely wealthy and well connected. He demonstrated how willing he was to fight any accusations made against him during a lawsuit filed in 2004 by Irena Medavoy, wife of former TriStar Pictures chairman Morris Mike Medavoy, who accused the doctor of giving her Botox treatments that brought on crippling migraine headaches. Klein won the case even in the face of evidence that demonstrated how dependent his medical practice was on injection treatments, and that he had collected a good deal of money from Botox manufacturer Allergan. He was by then an eminence in Los Angeles, a cofounder with his friend Rose Tarlow (LA’s most prominent interior designer) of the Breast Cancer Foundation at UCLA and a philanthropist credited with raising more than $300 million for HIV research. He was among Southern California’s leading art collectors and delighted in mentioning that one of his patients had offered to name a new building at UCLA’s School of Medicine for him, but that he had modestly declined, accepting an Arnold Klein teaching chair instead.
Klein was not only a prominent member of a profession that prides itself on self-policing, but projected enormous confidence that he knew where the line was between serving his patients’ “needs” and feeding their addictions. He did not overprescribe, the doctor insisted, to Michael Jackson or anyone else. His friend and patient Marc Schaffel defended this claim as true. “When people go into Arnie’s office, he’s completely different than he is when they’re in his home,” Schaffel said. “I’ve never seen Arnie not be professional with any patient, including Michael.” The problem in Jackson’s case, though, was that Klein’s relationship with Michael was just one among the dozens that the star maintained with doctors all over the country and in Europe, each of whom wrote him prescriptions for the medications and sleeping aids that Jackson carted around for years in a large black suitcase that was filled with preloaded syringes, IV bags, and a collapsible IV pole. None of them, individually, needed to overprescribe in order to keep Jackson’s black suitcase full.
“I had lots of fights with these doctors,” Dieter Wiesner would insist. “Michael didn’t need it, that was the problem. When Michael was down you could talk to him, and he got a good feeling again, and everything was all right. But these doctors told Michael, ‘Take this and take this, and you will feel good.’ And Michael would do it. Money, money, money, that’s what the doctors were about. That’s all they wanted.”
Jackson’s drug problem had been a serious one ever since the first sex abuse charges were made against him by Jordan Chandler in 1993. The tabloids began reporting on Michael’s prescription drug addiction in 1999, when the National Enquirer published an article claiming that the entertainer was feeding himself painkillers through an intravenous drip. After their 2000 civil filing against Jackson, Marcel Avram’s lawyers submitted a document proving that two doctors in Munich, Germany, were owed $264,000 for “services rendered” that the concert promoter’s attorneys suggested mainly involved the supply of prescription drugs during Jackson’s HIStory tour. Avram’s lawyers also introduced a monthly budget for Jackson that showed he was running up $10,000 per month in charges at the Mickey Fine Pharmacy, a legendary establishment just downstairs from Dr. Arnold Klein’s offices on North Roxbury Drive in Beverly Hills. In 2003, Myung Ho Lee’s attorneys had submitted documents to the court in Santa Barbara County demonstrating that Jackson owed the pharmacy $62,645. The most graphic evidence of Michael’s drug use, though, was a photograph obtained by the Daily Mail in London that showed what an intravenous line being fed into Jackson’s lower right leg had caused him after months of usage: a huge and horrific-looking black wound that doctors agreed was necrosis—a shin-size patch of dead tissue surrounded by dozens of puncture marks.
Jackson’s self-medication became so sophisticated (at least in his own mind) over time that the IV lines he used were filled not with a single prescription drug but with the combinations of opioids, benzos, and sleeping aids that he called “mixes.” Michael “always ate too little and mixed too much,” according to Grace Rwaramba, who claimed that “I had to pump his stomach many times.” Yet members of the Jackson family suspected that Rwaramba was more than a passive observer of Michael’s drug addiction. For years she had been his closest adult companion, often the only aide who traveled with Michael and his children. Even when there was a larger entourage around Jackson, the nanny was the only one who had unfettered access to him. The police investigation would disclose that Rwaramba’s name was used to rent the mailbox to which prescription drugs were shipped to Jackson, and her credit card (unbeknownst to her, she claimed to police) was used to pay for those shipments.
Rwaramba’s own story was that she had attempted on more than one occasion to curb Michael’s addiction to prescription drugs and actually approached Katherine and Janet Jackson to help her persuade Michael that he needed to enter a treatment program. His response had been to accuse her of “personal betrayal,” Grace recalled, and to dismiss her from her position as the children’s nanny. Weeks passed before Michael yielded to the kids, who kept asking for her, Rwaramba said, and invited her to return. She never went behind his back again.
In early 2007, as Michael and the children were still settling into the house on South Monte Cristo Way in Las Vegas, the Jackson family decided that Grace was collaborating with Raymone Bain to keep Michael cooped up and under control and that the two believed his drug addiction made him more pliable. Whatever might be said about the Jacksons’ financial interests, his family members were the only people who had consistently attempted to get Michael off drugs. As early as 2001, Janet, Tito, Rebbie, and Randy Jackson attempted an intervention in New York City, shortly before the “30th Anniversary” concerts. Their brother’s response had been to tell them to leave him alone. “Look, I’ll be dead in a year, anyway,” Michael said.
Twelve months later, his sisters and brothers attempted a stealth intervention by showing up at Neverland unannounced, hoping they could take him directly from the ranch to a treatment facility. According to the story Rabbi Boteach heard from Joseph and Katherine Jackson, Michael found out ahead of time that the family was coming and fled the ranch before they got there; the Jacksons suspected that Grace Rwaramba had warned him to leave. Tito Jackson would tell a different story when he granted an interview to the London Daily Mirror. Six family members in all—he, Jackie, and Randy, along with Janet, Rebbie, and La Toya—pushed their way past Michael’s bodyguards to gain access to Neverland. Tito said: “We bust right into the house, and he was surprised to see us, to say the least. We kept asking him if it was true what we had heard, that he was using drugs. He kept denying it. He said we were overreacting. We also spoke to a doctor [Tito declined to give the physician’s name], and he assured us it was not the situation. He said he was there to make sure Michael was healthy.”
The Jacksons believed that the pressure they were applying was at least part of what motivated Michael to kick his drug habit a couple of months later. He had come clean without rehab and was very proud of himself, but when the Bashir documentary aired just a few months later, Michael not only resumed the use of Demerol and Xanax that he had abandoned earlier but upped the dosages, never again getting completely free of drugs.
In December 2005, just six months after Jackson moved to Bahrain, the National Enquirer reported that Michael had suffered several drug overdoses and that the situation had “become critical.” Raymone Bain promptly issued a written statement declaring, “That story is entirely false.” Michael “is doing fine,” Bain assured the media. “I have never seen him happier or healthier.” Bain then added a threatening coda: “Mr. Jackson’s tolerance [for such stories] has come to an end. The green light that people have thought they have had to willfully impugn Michael Jackson’s character and integrity has now become red.” Bain would be forced to revisit this promise thirteen months later when, in the second week of January 2007 (three weeks after Michael landed in Las Vegas), the Mickey Fine Pharmacy filed a lawsuit in Los Angeles County Superior Court claiming that Michael Jackson owed them $101,926.66 for “prescription medicines.” This time, Bain informed the media simply that “the issue has been amicably resolved. Mickey Fine Pharmacy has been paid.”
The Jackson family did not ignore the reports—or the signs—that Michael was once again flirting with disaster and in late January 2007 made what was at least their third attempt at a coordinated drug intervention. Multiple versions of what took place emerged, two stories put forth by people close to one or more Jackson family members, and another by Michael’s team of bodyguards. By one account, Janet Jackson had visited Michael at his Vegas home on South Monte Cristo Way after the Mickey Fine lawsuit appeared in newspapers and was shocked by both her brother’s appearance and the “creepy” environment in which he and his children were living. She phoned her brothers Jackie and Randy to come and convince Michael to get help but Michael ordered his bodyguards to turn the two away at the front gate, insisting that they needed to make “an appointment” if they wanted to see him. In the second version, Jackie and Randy got in the door, along with their sister Rebbie, but Michael became enraged when they suggested he was a drug addict and ordered them to leave. The bodyguards’ version was that Michael refused to let any of his siblings inside his house, agreeing to meet with them only briefly outside in the security trailer. According to the bodyguards, Randy Jackson came back later with his girlfriend Taunya Zilkie, who had worked for a short time as Michael’s PR person after his arrest in 2003. Randy tried to sneak past them as the gate was opening and closing during a delivery, the bodyguards said, and banged his vehicle against the iron bars as he wedged through. One of the bodyguards, Bill Whitfield, drew his gun. “Get that thing out of my face or I’ll call the press,” Randy snarled. When he realized he was confronting Mr. Jackson’s brother, he put the weapon away, Whitfield said, and phoned the house. Michael was “not happy” to hear that his brother had showed up unexpectedly, according to Whitfield, and said, “Send him away.” Furious, Randy backed his dented car into the street and drove off.
One story not in dispute was that Joe Jackson had showed up at the mansion on South Monte Cristo Way only a few days after Randy’s attempt to gain access. Joe demanded a meeting with his son but was refused entry by Grace Rwaramba, who came out to meet Michael’s father when the bodyguards phoned her. Michael did not want to see him, Grace told the elder Jackson, who sat in his car outside the gates for three hours, finally driving away when they did not open for him.