The Christmas season of 2008 would be a wrenching one for Michael Jackson’s three children. The woman who had raised them was out of their lives and this time, it seemed, for good. Grace Rwaramba had once again been dismissed from Michael’s presence. The reasons were disputed. Rwaramba’s enduring claim was that she and Michael were fighting constantly about his abuse of prescription drugs, but Michael had been injecting or ingesting drugs, often heavily, during most of the time she was in his employ. Grace also said that Michael hadn’t paid her salary or her health insurance premiums in months, and that he gotten rid of her by sending Tohme to say that her pay was being cut by half. Jackson family friend Romonica Harris, a Chicago school teacher, would report that, shortly before her departure, Grace attempted to force Michael to marry her and that Rwaramba grew incensed when Jackson refused. The nanny denied the story and there was no evidence it was true other than Harris’s claim.
Grace’s support of Sheikh Abdullah’s legal claim against Michael, though, was without doubt a sore point. “When Abdullah sued Michael last year, Michael said in the beginning, ‘Oh, I never got money from him,’” Grace would explain not long after being sent away from the Carolwood chateau. Worried that she was being set up to take a fall for filching the more than $1 million that Abdullah had wired to her personal bank account, Grace turned for help to Katherine Jackson: “I said, ‘You, Michael, and I—we will all go to jail! You know we didn’t report to the IRS about that gift.’ I told her I had all the documents. That worked. She immediately called Michael and he stopped denying that he knew about the money.”
What Grace didn’t know was that Michael had become convinced that she was stealing from him. Tohme Tohme and Dennis Hawk had flown to Manama in October to try to settle Sheikh Abdullah’s claims against Michael. After reading the contract Michael and the sheikh had signed, Tohme explained, he realized that they could not close the deal with AEG until Abdullah gave Jackson a release. “Michael signed away his whole life,” Tohme explained. “He cannot fart without the permission of Sheikh Abdullah.” Tohme had traveled to Bahrain in the belief that his relationships in the Arab world and familiarity with Middle Eastern culture would form the basis of a dialogue with the Al Khalifas. Tohme was well connected in neighboring Oman, whose royal family were the Al Khalifas’ closest allies in the region. “And also I understand three things,” the manager explained. “One is that the Al Khalifas do not need the money. Two is that they do not want the publicity. Three is that it is not part of the Arabic tradition to fuck somebody who has been a guest in your home.” On top of that, “Michael really liked Sheikh Abdullah,” Tohme said, “and he felt the Al Khalifas had been very kind to him. I wanted to convey that to them personally, in the language we all speak.” Within a couple of days, Tohme had convinced the Bahraini royal family to let their attorneys try to work out a settlement with Michael’s lawyers that would release him from the 2005 contract and to accept something less than the $7 million they were demanding at the High Court in London. The Al Khalifas even agreed to permit Tohme and Hawk to remove the contents of the safe where Michael’s jewelry and cash were being held. When they opened the safe, though, the two men found it empty. The Al Khalifa people insisted that only one person had been in the safe since Michael’s departure, and that was Grace Rwaramba, who had shown up on her own in Manama, explaining that Michael needed some papers he had left behind. “I don’t have any direct evidence that Grace took anything out of the safe,” Hawk said, “but it was obvious the people in Bahrain thought she had.”
Grace was never accused of any wrongdoing, but nevertheless Michael ordered the nanny gone soon after Tohme and Hawk returned from Manama. Grace swiftly compounded her employer’s disaffection when she agreed to testify for Abdullah in London, where his lawsuit against Jackson was to come before the High Court in November 2008. The sheikh was the first witness on his own behalf and, as anticipated, Jackson’s attorneys went after him with the accusation that he had exploited the performer’s posttrial vulnerability and lack of good sense. Not so, Abdullah told the court: “Michael is an individual who is very switched on. He is a fantastic intellectual.”
“There’s nothing unusual about him?” Jackson’s own attorney in London, Robert Englehart, asked.
“No!” Abdullah replied. The sheikh actually sounded at moments as if he still hoped Mikaeel would come back to him. But if he wasn’t going to get what had been promised, Abdullah made clear, he expected repayment. A court victory for the sheikh and his family looked likely after Grace Rwaramba took the witness stand to back Abdullah’s story in almost every detail.
Michael was so desperate to avoid testifying in London that, Arnold Klein’s assistant Jason Pfeiffer alleged in court, he prevailed upon Klein to supply the evidence of a staph infection that could be offered as an excuse for why he couldn’t fly to the United Kindgom. Englehart, Jackson’s attorney, told the court in London that his client was awaiting test results and that “even in a best-case scenario it would be unwise to travel,” and requested that Michael be permitted to testify by video link from Los Angeles. Abdullah’s attorney Thanki insisted he needed Jackson physically in London and suggested the star be “bandaged up” and brought to London. The ruse bought Michael a brief delay, but the judge ruled he would have to appear in person at the trial. As the appointed day drew near, Tohme arranged through Mohamed Al Fayed to fly Michael and the children to London aboard a private jet, and planned on coming along for the ride. He was with Jackson at the Hotel Bel-Air loading bags into the limousine that was to deliver them to the Burbank airport when his phone rang. “Michael really doesn’t want to go,” Tohme remembered. “He is terrified of being in court. He knows it will be a circus. And literally at the last second I get a call from overseas: ‘Don’t come, it’s not necessary. We’re gonna solve the problem.’ So I told Michael, ‘Okay, let’s go back to the suite. We don’t need to go to London.’ And he was so happy.”
After testifying for Sheikh Abdullah, Grace wouldn’t be returning to Los Angeles any time soon. Shortly after Rwaramba left London, reports came out of Africa that she had married a man named Joseph Kisembo. Grace would not confirm this, but it was true that she had returned for a time to Uganda, where her fluency in Runyankole kept her in the good stead that endured on the reputation of her father Job Rwaramba, a man who had set up and ran medical dispensaries in rural areas all over the country after escaping with his large family from Rwanda. Early in 2009, Grace founded, and appointed herself chief executive officer of, a foundation called World Accountability for Humanity, which was pledged to “bridge the gap” between rich Western donors and poor African recipients. From Uganda, Grace could not keep in contact with the Jackson children even by telephone. It was the longest period of time in their lives that they had gone without speaking to her.
Michael let Dr. Tohme take the fall for sending Grace away. The children believed it and such a story seemed plausible even to the adults following the Michael Jackson saga. Amid widespread rumors that Jackson was on the brink of signing a contract with AEG to perform a series of shows at the O2, Tohme appeared to be in complete command of Jackson’s world. Tohme and Peter Lopez were in discussions with the Nederlander Organization about putting together a Broadway musical for Michael, and for an animated television program based on the “Thriller” video. As the president of MJJ Productions, Tohme was also working out the details of a deal for an MJ clothing line that would include “moonwalk shoes.” He had also retained the services of contract attorneys recommended by Tom Barrack to attempt a renegotiation of the Sony/ATV catalog deal. He intended to “secure the future” of Michael’s children, Tohme told Lopez and Dennis Hawk, with spin-offs from the O2 concert series that would include a 3-D live concert film, a 3-D movie based on the “Thriller” video, and a three-year worldwide concert tour. In Las Vegas, reports surfaced that Tohme and Barrack were simultaneously fleshing out yet another plan to develop a Michael Jackson–themed gambling establishment—a “Thriller Casino”—and were well into discussions about converting Neverland Ranch into a Michael Jackson Museum “in the style of Elvis Presley’s Graceland.”
Reeling from a simultaneous collapse of the real estate and financial markets in fall 2008 that had already cost him an estimated $1.3 billion, Barrack was energized by the realization that at least one of his properties might actually be increasing in value. By January 2009, Colony Capital had hired eighty workers to complete Neverland’s refurbishment, all with an eye to selling the place for up to four times what he had paid for it, as Barrack explained to the Wall Street Journal. And “should Michael Jackson’s career be reaccelerated,” Barrack observed to the Journal, “it will have substantial additional value.”
Prior to the Colony crew’s arrival, Tohme made a second visit to Neverland and returned to Los Angeles convinced that the removal of Michael’s personal property from Santa Barbara County was imperative. “So many things were left lying around, broken,” he recalled. “And people were taking things. Everybody has access. I went to the warehouse where much of Michael’s stuff was being stored, and it was sad that all this money was being wasted. I told Michael and he really didn’t care. He hated Neverland by then. He hated how they treated him in Santa Barbara during that trial. And he said, ‘I don’t ever want to set foot there again. Just get rid of everything.’ I said, ‘How about an auction?’ And he said, ‘Do it.’” Within a few weeks, Tohme made a deal with Julien’s Auctions in Los Angeles to sell off everything that wasn’t nailed down at Neverland in 1,390 lots of “memorabilia.” The potential take, he was told, could easily surpass $10 million.
The “reacceleration” of Michael Jackson’s career that Tom Barrack had spoken of in his interview with the Wall Street Journal began to look more and more likely after Michael signed the AEG “contracts” (actually, a letter of intent and a promissory note) on January 27, 2009. “Michael is very excited, but he is also very afraid that he won’t be able to live up to what people expect from him. Michael Jackson does not wanna go onstage and disappoint,” Tohme recalled. “He still needs to be lifted up, to be convinced that he is still the one, the King of Pop, that no one has replaced him, that no one can replace him.” Tohme continued to demonstrate that he understood how much even minor tributes meant to Michael’s self-esteem. “Michael told me, ‘I go to the store to buy a game for my kids, and everybody has a game except me.’ So I told Sony, ‘Michael Jackson, you have to make a game for him. Otherwise, nothing.’ Because we were discussing doing a new Off the Wall album like they had done with Thriller. So they agree. They send someone to see Michael in Los Angeles and he was flabbergasted. He was so happy.” The planned game would have a dance mat and be programmed with all of Michael’s signature moves.
AEG had locked Michael in with language (tucked into a “miscellaneous clause”) that stated the promissory note agreement was “final” and that by accepting a “loan” of $6.2 million from AEG Michael was backing his promise to perform in London with a lien against “collateral” that included every asset he owned. The document also acknowledged that a “definitive” contract was still to be prepared and signed. Tohme and Randy Phillips continued to barter back and forth about the terms of the “definitive” agreement all through February. It had become clear to Phillips that convincing Michael to extend his concert series far beyond what was initially agreed on might be the only way to meet the worldwide demand for a Jackson tour. Tohme understood that doing just ten shows in London would not produce enough revenue to pay down Michael’s debts. Nevertheless, Michael still believed he would be performing only ten shows when he flew to London shortly after the first of March for the news conference at which the O2 concerts were to be formally announced. According to Tohme, the name for the concert series had been agreed upon just a couple of weeks earlier, when he and Michael were discussing the trip to London during a meeting in the living room at the Carolwood chateau. “Michael said, ‘You know, this is it, this is the last show I’m ever gonna do,’” Tohme recalled. “And I said, ‘So let’s call it ‘This Is It’ then.’ And he smiled and said, ‘Yeah, I like that.’”
The trip to London was, for Tohme, the peak of his experience as Michael Jackson’s manager. “It was beyond your imagination,” he recalled. When he and Michael and the children arrived at the Lanesborough Hotel in Knightsbridge, where they would be staying, “it was below zero temperature and people were sleeping outside in the park across from the hotel just to get a glimpse of Michael getting in and out of the car,” Tohme remembered. “I’ve never seen him happier than when he saw how his fans were running [and] greeting him.”
The night before the March 5 announcement at the O2, Tohme commented on how fit Michael was looking, saying it was obvious he had added some bulk. Michael stripped to his underwear and stood on a bathroom scale that showed him weighing 157 pounds. “We were laughing,” Tohme remembered, “because of stories in the newspaper about how skinny he is, that they just keep printing the old news, they don’t even care what is true now. You should have seen Michael’s legs. They were like an Olympic sprinter’s, like steel bands from all the dancing. The guy is solid muscle.”
Randy Phillips’s appraisal of Jackson’s condition the next day as they prepared for the press conference at the O2 Arena was not nearly so sanguine. “MJ is locked up in his room drunk and despondent,” Phillips wrote in an e-mail to his boss Tim Leiweke.
“Are you kidding me?” was the reply Leiweke sent back minutes later. Just the day before, AEG’s corporate chief had attended a music-industry symposium where he answered a question about Michael Jackson’s readiness for a concert series by saying, “The man is very sane, the man is very focused, the man is very healthy.”
“I [am] trying to sober him up,” a frantic Phillips wrote to Leiweke, as the appointed time of the O2 press conference approached. “I screamed at him so loud the walls are shaking. He is an emotionally paralyzed mess riddled with self-loathing and doubt now that it is show time.”
He and Tohme actually had to dress Michael to get him prepared for the press conference, Phillips wrote to Leiweke: “He is scared to death.”
More than three years later, Tohme would say that Phillips’s e-mails “exaggerated” Michael’s condition. Dennis Hawk agreed. “He might have drunk a couple of glasses of wine to relax,” Hawk said. “I wouldn’t have blamed him if he drank a whole bottle, given how big the moment was for him. But if he’d make the kind of scene Randy described in those e-mails, I think I would have heard about it. I didn’t.”
Nearly four hundred reporters and more than seven thousand fans were assembled at the O2 when Michael arrived more than an hour-and-a-half late for the press conference. If Michael was either intoxicated or frightened, he hid it well behind a broad grin and an assured manner. The shows he would stage in the arena during the summer of 2009 would be called the “This Is It” concerts, because he intended to make them his final curtain call, Michael told the assembled crowd. “‘This Is It’ really means this is it,” he declared into a bank of microphones. Many in the crowd remarked on how deep and resonant his voice seemed to suddenly become. “I knew the announcement of the London shows would be big news, but I had no idea how big,” Tohme remembered.
Michael had asked Tohme to arrange for him to take his children to see the revival of Oliver! at the Drury Lane theater a couple of nights after the O2 press conference. “I leaked it to the media when we were going,” Tohme said. “I wanted the public to know Michael will be there. Because I wanted Michael to get his oxygen back. I want him to know how much he is loved. I told the PR people working with me to leak it everywhere, to make sure his fans will know. But even I can’t believe what it’s like. There are thousands and thousands of people at the theater when we arrive. It was unbelievable how they reacted when they saw him coming. The love—I never saw anything like it. Michael is so happy, he cannot stop smiling. And the kids, they were shocked. They’d never seen this before, not like that. It’s like they finally know who their father is.”
Michael’s mood would change dramatically when he discovered that Tohme and Phillips had already made a preliminary agreement that the number of O2 concerts might be increased if public demand warranted it. There was still some doubt within AEG about whether an audience for more shows existed, at least in London. Michael Jackson had not performed a major concert series since the end of the HIStory tour in 1997. Those forty shows had been hugely successful, raking in $90 million, but still finished second in total ticket sales that year to U2’s take from their PopMart tour. Jarvis Cocker became a folk hero for farting on Jackson during his last London appearance and a great deal had happened in the intervening years, including a criminal trial for child molestation. The only album of new Michael Jackson material released since 1997 was Invincible, widely considered a commercial failure. All of that, combined with the string of canceled performances and appearances in Jackson’s recent past, made the whole “This Is It” concept appear tenuous in the eyes of many.
Early on during the O2 contract negotiations, Randy Phillips confided to several associates that Jackson’s lack of self-confidence was the most surprising—and worrying—thing he had observed about Michael. In London, Phillips tried to laugh off such worries: “If Mike gets too nervous to go on,” he told a reporter from the Daily Telegraph, “I’ll throw him over my shoulder and carry him onstage. He’s light enough.” The AEG Live boss, though, continued to harbor doubts about the investment his company was making. Immediately after the March 5 press conference in London, Phillips and Tohme agreed to test the waters by allowing fans to register for a “presale” drawing of tickets on Jackson’s official Web site. The response was far beyond what either had imagined: Michael’s site was overwhelmed by registrations that poured in at a rate of up to sixteen thousand per second. Despite the fact that hundreds of thousands of fans were unable to get through, nearly one million people had submitted applications within the twenty-four-hour window. Tickets not even printed yet were already being offered on eBay for $450 apiece.
Phillips and Tohme prepared plans to at least double the number of O2 concerts. When Michael discovered what they were up to, he burst into a tearful rage, insisting that ten shows was all that he had agreed to perform. The operatic scene he created initiated a series of high-drama meetings with Phillips, Tohme, and the two LA attorneys representing Jackson’s interests in the AEG negotiations: Hawk and Lopez. Michael announced several times that he was canceling the O2 shows, but Tohme, according to one of the attorneys, had proven to be the first person in years who could force the star to acknowledge his circumstances. He would earn at most $20 million from the ten shows at the O2, Tohme explained to Jackson. Less than half that amount would remain after taxes, fees, and the cost of the settlement with Sheikh Abdullah. Even with what was in the Lockbox, there might not be enough to purchase the Bolkiah’s Las Vegas property. He still owed AEG all the money they were advancing for rent on the Carolwood chateau and for his other expenses, Tohme reminded Michael, and in the meantime he was falling further and further in debt to Sony.
The reality of his financial situation was that Jackson had to earn at least $100 million before his financing arrangement expired in 2011, or face the liquidation of his assets—in other words, bankruptcy. Grudgingly, Michael agreed to twenty shows at the O2. Phillips then played what he had known all along would be his strongest card with Michael by pointing out that the first artist to perform at the O2 had been Prince, toward whom Jackson was well known to harbor both considerable ill will and an intensely competitive fascination. “As soon as Michael heard that Prince had done twenty-one shows at the O2, he insisted on doing more than that,” recalled an attorney who had been part of every negotiating session with AEG. “Ten more, in fact.” Within days, Michael’s agreement to thirty-one concerts at the O2 had been increased to forty-five shows that would continue through the end of 2009. Shortly after this, Jackson, Phillips, and Tohme settled on an even fifty concerts, extending into February 2010.
Phillips helped Tohme persuade Michael to make such a commitment with a series of concessions that some thought ridiculously generous. “Randy really wanted to see these shows happen, and not just because he wanted to make money for AEG,” said the attorney who was handling much of the communication between Phillips and Tohme. “He really did see this as his chance to resurrect the career of a great artist.” Among the promises Tohme and Jackson were able to extract from Phillips were that $15 million would be placed in the “down payment fund” for the purchase of a new home in Las Vegas when the O2 concerts were finished; that an estate near London on a par with Paul McCartney’s place—“sixteen-plus acres, running streams, horses,” as Phillips recalled it—would be rented as a temporary home for Jackson and his children during the full run of the O2 concerts; that AEG would pay for a personal trainer and chef/nutritionist to prepare him for the concerts; and that the company would also hire a personal physician to attend to Michael’s health from the moment he agreed to fifty shows until the last concert was finished. Michael also insisted that AEG had to arrange for the Guinness Book of World Records to document the entire concert series and include any records it broke in the next edition of the book. Phillips and AEG agreed that Jackson would receive 90 percent of all profits from the O2 concerts, and that the London shows would be outsized extravaganzas that included high-wire walkers, acrobats, jugglers, and magicians, something on the order of a Cirque du Soleil spectacle, with elaborately choreographed dance numbers set against constantly shifting multiscreen backgrounds of short films in an IMAX or 3-D format, enhanced by laser light shows. Michael would have to appear onstage himself for only thirteen minutes at a stretch during the concerts, it was agreed, and if his voice weakened, well, the O2 possessed the most sophisticated lip-synching technology on the planet.
On March 11, 2009, AEG began offering half of the seats for the first forty-five “This Is It” shows as “presale” tickets. Minutes after the two Web sites selling the tickets went online, more than a million Jackson fans attempting to log on crashed them both. Two hours after the sites were rebooted, 190,000 tickets had been sold. During the next sixteen hours, all of the 300,000-plus seats available had been snapped up, and more than a million and a half people who had tried but failed to purchase tickets were waiting for another chance. A week later, the other half of the seats for the first forty-five “This Is It” shows, plus all of the seats for the last five shows, went on sale to the general public and sold out within a few hours. With little effort and almost no marketing, AEG had sold 750,000 tickets to the “This Is It” concerts. That guaranteed a minimum gross revenue of $85 million, with a final tally of at least $125 million expected by the time the money from merchandising, a planned documentary film, and other ancillaries rolled in. Sony announced that sales of the King of Pop album it had released on Michael’s fiftieth birthday were up 400 percent. Within days, tickets for the “This Is It” shows were being offered on eBay for up to $15,000 apiece.
Even the British newspapers that had for so long tormented Jackson were forced to genuflect in the face of the public response. “Michael Jackson has floored his critics,” the Times of London acknowledged. An “astonishing comeback for a man who in recent years has been dogged by controversy,” the Guardian said, acknowledging the speed and size of the ticket sales for the O2 shows. AEG had pulled off the “showbiz coup of the decade,” conceded the Evening Standard.
The accolades Tohme and AEG posted on the official Michael Jackson Web site included a list of the records that had been established by the almost instantaneous sell-out of the O2 shows: “The biggest audience ever to see an artist in one city”; “The most amount of people to attend a series of arena shows”; “The fastest ticket sales in history.” Randy Phillips and his company knew full well, though, even if Tohme did not, how dangerous it was to start counting chickens when Michael Jackson was involved. Everyone in the music business was aware of how Jackson had bailed on his heralded “Millennium Concerts” in Honolulu and Sydney back in 1999, even when warned that he was inviting the Marcel Avram lawsuit that eventually resulted in a $5.5 million judgment against him. Phillips and his associates also knew about Jackson’s infamously aborted One Night Onlyspecial for HBO back in December 1995 when a worldwide audience expected to number 250 million had been disappointed after Michael collapsed during rehearsals and had to be rushed by ambulance to New York’s Beth Israel Medical Center to be treated for “dehydration.” The HBO special was canceled amid stories that Jackson had faked the whole thing in order to escape his commitment. Among those suggesting as much was Bob Jones, who said he had repeatedly observed Michael’s “penchant for staging illness and other problems to get out of commitments and promises he had made.” Grace Rwaramba would agree: “To Michael, to go to a hospital was never about being ill. It was all about avoiding a court appearance or a performance.” Jones said he put some stock in the claim that “Michael often pulled these hospital stunts just to see how many gifts and flowers he’d receive.”
Phillips and AEG had little choice but to hope and pray that Dr. Tohme would find a way to keep Jackson on track. Someone was already sawing a circle in the floor under Tohme’s feet, however, and Michael’s new manager wouldn’t even hear the sound until the split second before he was in free fall.
In the newspapers, reports of how rapidly the O2 concerts had sold out were often accompanied by estimations of how much money Michael might earn from fifty shows in London. A total haul of $100 million was entirely realistic when all the ancillaries were included, Dennis Hawk believed. If Michael could be persuaded to follow up the O2 concerts with an Asian tour that turned into a world tour, Hawk had calculated, his client’s earnings might climb to the vicinity of $400 million. AEG’s own estimates of what Jackson would net from a world tour were considerably more conservative: $132 million was the amount the company’s executives had reckoned Michael would walk away with, after his advances and expenses were deducted. “This is not a number that MJ will want to hear,” Gongaware warned Phillips and Leiweke in an e-mail. “He thinks he is so much bigger than that.” They should talk to Michael in terms of gross receipts, Gongaware suggested. Those would come close to the numbers being tossed about by Tohme and Hawk, who believed that if their client followed the world tour with a triumphant return to the United States that ended with a residency in Las Vegas, he could quite conceivably earn a billion dollars during a two- or three-year period.
Even if the eventual take was only a couple of hundred million dollars, that was still a gusher of chum in the water for the sharks who had surrounded Michael Jackson since the age of nine, and, as always, the pushiest snouts in the pack belonged to the members of his own family.
Michael was doing his best to avoid contact with the rest of the Jacksons as he prepared for the O2 shows, but that was impossible. Katherine could always get to him, and she did that spring, with a request made through Tohme Tohme that he purchase her a $750,000 motor home to take a trip back to Indiana. For the first time in years, Michael had millions of dollars of cash on hand, most of it tucked away in the Lockbox account controlled by Tohme that was intended to provide a down payment on his new home in Las Vegas. The rest was hidden beneath the carpets of the Carolwood chateau. “Michael tried to say no to his mother,” recalled the individual who had been forced to serve as go-between in what became a complex transaction. “He wanted to say no. But in the end he couldn’t.” Dennis Hawk was able to take advantage of the deep recession washing over the country in early 2009 to negotiate with Marathon Coach, the Oregon company that produced the customized Prevost Katherine wanted, until the price was reduced to only a little more than half a million dollars, but even that amount made a significant dent in the Lockbox.
Joe Jackson intended to get a bigger piece of the action than that, and was already partnered up with a “promoter” named Leonard Rowe for precisely that purpose. Rowe was an ex-convict who had been arrested on multiple occasions for writing bad checks, and was sentenced to federal prison in the early 1990s after being convicted of wire fraud in the cashing of a bogus insurance payout. He was best known in Hollywood for initiating a class-action lawsuit that accused CAA and the William Morris Agency, among others, of racism for denying him the opportunity to promote concerts. The case dragged through the courts for six years before a judge finally ruled that, “No rational trier of facts could find for the plaintiffs on any of the myriad claims made in this action.” Rowe continued to cast himself in the role of oppressed minority and one of the few to buy it was R. Kelly, who hired Leonard to promote his 2007and 2008 Double Up tour. Both Kelly and his coheadliner Ne-Yo would successfully sue Rowe for defrauding them when the tour was over.
The campaign that “Joe and Rowe” would conduct to usurp Tohme Tohme had already been joined by Michael’s former manager Frank Dileo. On November 26, 2008, at the instigation of Joe Jackson, Dileo had signed a binder agreement with a New Jersey concert organizer called AllGood Entertainment for a “Live Performance of the Jackson Family (Michael Jackson, Janet Jackson and Brothers, hereinafter referred to as the ‘Jacksons’)” at New Jersey’s Giants Stadium. The guaranteed fee would be $24 million for a single show lasting “no less than 150 minutes” in which Michael Jackson was to perform for “no less than ninety (90) minutes” and sing at least two songs with his siblings. The Jacksons were also to receive a percentage of the net earnings from various other “revenue streams associated with the event” that would include licensing royalties, merchandising, pay-per-view, broadcast or cable television, theatrical release, and sponsorships, as well as a concert DVD and CD that would be released through a distribution agreement with major retailers like Wal-Mart.
According to AllGood’s chief executive, Patrick Allocco, he had contacted Dileo after a meeting with Joe Jackson at the New Orleans Casino in Las Vegas where Joe “told me that Michael was closely working with Frank Dileo and that Frank was managing his business affairs.” At the time, Dileo had no business relationship with Michael Jackson. Dileo’s story was that he never represented himself as Michael’s manager and that he told Allocco from the first that Michael would never agree to perform with his family. Allocco recalled their conversations quite differently, insisting that Dileo had claimed that he managed Jackson. All he promised, Dileo said, was to present Michael and the Jackson family with a written proposal for the reunion concert deal, provided AllGood paid a $400,000 “deposit” up front (only $150,000 of that money, “for expenses,” would go to him, Dileo later insisted). The agreement that Dileo and Allocco signed in November 2008, though, called for a $2 million check to be delivered to Dileo no later than December 31, 2008. Soon after signing the agreement with Dileo, Allocco said, he learned that Frank’s partner Mark Lamicka had been named in a lawsuit that accused him of defrauding a promoter who had paid an advance fee on a promised concert deal that never materialized. He and Dileo met again on January 15, 2009, Allocco recalled. Frank said he was ready to move forward with the Jackson family concert deal, but only if he first received his $150,000 share of the advance deposit. Allocco, though, was “uncomfortable” with what he was hearing about Dileo and Lamicka, he said, and offered to put the money in a trust account. No, Dileo said, he would need the $150,000 in hand before he so much as spoke to Michael Jackson about the concert deal.
Right around this time, Leonard Rowe showed up in Allocco’s office insisting that he was Michael Jackson’s manager and could negotiate on behalf of the entire Jackson family. Rowe’s claim was that he had been trying for months to put together a Jackson family concert tour. By the end of 2008, he and Joe Jackson had teamed up, intending, among other things, to cut Frank Dileo out of the AllGood deal. He quickly secured the agreement of all the Jackson siblings other than Michael to join the family concert tour, Rowe said, though not without struggling to convince Janet Jackson that she lacked the “drawing power” to headline such a tour. Rowe had at one point gathered Janet, Jermaine, Jackie, Marlon, and Tito at the gates to Michael’s home, where they informed the security guard who met them that they wanted a meeting with Michael. The guard went inside the house, then came back outside to ask that each of them write his or her name on a piece of paper so that Michael would know who exactly was at his door. Fifteen minutes later, the guard led them inside to see Michael. By Rowe’s written account: “I told him that we want him to reunite with his brothers and tour in America. Michael said, ‘I just can’t do it right now. I have other things I’m planning and working on.’ We stayed there for a few hours trying to persuade him. I could tell that Michael was becoming irritable so we decided to leave.”
In late January 2009, Allocco began to hear reports that Michael Jackson either had signed or was about to sign a deal with AEG for a concert series at the O2. Frank Dileo, who continued to represent himself as Michael Jackson’s manager, Allocco said, “was telling us that the London shows were never gonna happen, and that Michael didn’t have a deal with AEG.” He and his partners were increasingly skeptical about Dileo, said Allocco: “One of my insiders got a call from a guy at AEG saying that they got a deal imminent to be signed with Michael—this was at the end of January. So this told me that Frank Dileo was a fraud.”
Alarmed, Allocco promptly paid Leonard Rowe a $15,000 “retainer” to set up a meeting with Katherine Jackson, the one family member said to have her son Michael’s ear. On February 3, 2009, Allocco met with Mrs. Jackson and Rowe at a restaurant in Encino, just down the hill from the Hayvenhurst compound. “I went through with her my vision for the show,” Allocco recalled. Mrs. Jackson seemed to like what she was hearing, he remembered, because she didn’t think Michael could or should do an entire concert series. “That is why our deal is very suitable,” Allocco remembered Michael’s mother saying, “one day of show with a substantial amount of money.” Only a couple of days later, though, Allocco learned through sources at Sony that Michael Jackson was actually managed by someone named Dr. Tohme Tohme. He suggested that Rowe call Tohme on the telephone and try to arrange a meeting.
Tohme was now in an awkward position. He and the attorneys who negotiated the AEG Live contract on Michael’s behalf had promised Randy Phillips that they would not publicly disclose or discuss that deal until a formal announcement of the O2 concerts was made in early March. Rather than meet with Allocco and Rowe himself, Tohme spoke to the two men briefly on the telephone, then sent them to Dennis Hawk, explaining that Hawk was Michael’s main entertainment attorney. Allocco seemed a decent enough fellow, Tohme told Hawk, but Rowe was obviously a dolt; talk to one, ignore the other. However he handled it, Hawk was going to have to hear the two men out without letting on that Michael already had a deal in place with AEG Live.
Allocco and Rowe arrived at Hawk’s office on February 12, and swiftly abandoned the Jackson family reunion concert concept to begin pitching a deal for a Michael Jackson solo concert with “guest appearances” by family members at the Superdome in New Orleans that would pay Michael as much as $30 million for a single performance. The meeting degenerated rapidly when Rowe began to loudly insist that he, not Tohme Tohme, was Michael Jackson’s manager, that he was an intimate of the entire Jackson family, and that Michael would do whatever he told him to do. Rowe grew more and more out of control, shouting and swearing at Hawk, who merely sat listening until the two men were done talking, thanked them for coming by, and promised to deliver their proposal to Dr. Tohme. For the next few weeks, Hawk answered a number of phone calls from Allocco’s attorney, who wanted to collaborate on a revision of the earlier document signed by Dileo. Hawk took one look at that “contract” (which had been written by Dileo himself) and knew it would never hold up in court. “The worst-drafted agreement I’ve seen in more than twenty years of practicing law,” he later described it.
Hawk researched AllGood and discovered that the company had staged some successful concerts in the Caribbean, including a Bon Jovi performance that sold out the Coliseo de Puerto Rico and a music festival in Trinidad and Tobago where Stevie Wonder and Babyface, among others, had performed for 20,000 people. AllGood was no AEG Live, though, and, like Tohme, Hawk agreed with Randy Phillips that Michael needed to begin his comeback overseas, where he was beloved, before performing in the United States, where his public reception was certain to be more mixed. As much as Michael hated to hear references to the “rehabilitation” of his image, he was shrewd enough, Hawk knew, to recognize that an enormous success on the world stage would make it much more difficult for the American media to marginalize him.
Hawk and Tohme stalled until the O2 shows were officially announced by Michael himself at the press conference in London. Joe and Rowe immediately stepped up their offensive, showing up at the Carolwood chateau day after day for a solid week with demands to be admitted. According to Rowe, Michael told him during a phone conversation on March 22 that he would consider hiring him as a tour manager. Finally, on March 25, Michael made the mistake of letting Joe and Rowe through the door of his home. “I have no money and it’s your fault!” Joe shouted at Michael, all the while pushing him to sign some sort of agreement that would allow Rowe to negotiate a deal with AllGood Entertainment on the star’s behalf. Rowe would claim that Michael did sign some sort of document that day, though he has been unable to present it.
Joe went where he always did after exhausting other options, to his estranged wife Katherine. Joe and Rowe worked Michael’s mother on multiple fronts. Rowe began with a furious denunciation of her son’s new so-called manager. This so-called “Dr.” Tohme was an amateur shyster who knew nothing about the entertainment business and was using Michael to make himself rich, Rowe said. Tohme was in cahoots with AEG, working with them to cut Michael off from the rest of the world, including his own family. If Michael did the Superdome concert, Joe and Rowe said, Michael would pocket at least $20 million for one night’s work, and the rest of the family would split another $20 million after the television rights were sold. Her share alone would be $2 million, Rowe promised Katherine Jackson, and all she had to do for that money was convince the son who loved her that there was a better deal for him on the table than the one he had made at AEG Live.
By the end of March, Katherine had begun to serve as Joe and Rowe’s conduit to Michael Jackson. Michael had issued strict orders that neither his father nor his father’s partner was to be admitted through the gates of the Carolwood chateau ever again, and he refused to speak to either of them on the telephone. His mother, though, always got through within twenty-four hours of calling. “Michael really only listened to Mrs. Jackson when it came to the family,” said one of the attorneys who was representing him. “He didn’t listen to his dad and he didn’t listen to his brothers and sisters. The only one he wanted to help all the time was Mrs. Jackson. Whenever she wanted anything, we had to take care of it. And now she was doing everything she could to convince Michael to sign that AllGood deal.”
Not everything. When Joe Jackson insisted that Katherine should prevail upon Michael to let her move into the Carolwood chateau in order to work on their son around the clock, she refused. “I have more respect for his privacy than that,” she told Joe. Still, she continued to ask Michael every time she spoke to him on the phone why he wouldn’t replace Tohme Tohme with Leonard Rowe and sign the AllGood deal. It would be good for him and for the entire family, said Katherine, who had maintained for years that Michael’s biggest mistake in life was to leave the Jackson 5.
“We were hearing about all of this,” recalled Hawk, “and everyone was worried that Michael would sign an AllGood contract just because his mother wanted him to.”
His siblings had long since fallen into step behind their parents, looking to be cut in on a deal that Patrick Allocco promised would be the biggest payday that any of them other than Janet had seen in decades. Jermaine was especially persistent in lobbying for a collaboration with Michael. “Jermaine called constantly. It was never-ending,” said Hawk, who had become, grudgingly, the liaison between Michael and Dr. Tohme on the one hand, and Michael and the Jackson family on the other.
Meanwhile, Frank Dileo continued to spread the story that Tohme Tohme was a Svengali who had hypnotized Michael into obeying his will, even when it was clearly not in his best interest. He found a receptive audience among the Jacksons, who were eager to believe both that Tohme was keeping them away from Michael in order to maintain his control and that the new manager was in over his head. Perhaps he was. Several seasoned AEG executives noticed that Tohme appeared both enraptured and overwhelmed amid the adulation that surrounded Michael on the London trip for the O2 announcement. The starry look in the man’s eyes, the AEG execs said, made them nervous. Also, Tohme didn’t seem to grasp that his determination to protect his client from any outside demands or pressures, to mediate every one of Michael’s business dealings, no matter how trivial, was alienating those who believed that access to the star was their ultimate validation.
By March 26, when Frank Dileo and Leonard Rowe met for the first time, at the urging of Katherine Jackson, attorney Peter Lopez had joined the chorus of people who were carping about Tohme. Lopez was convinced that it had been Tohme’s decision, not Michael’s, to name Dennis Hawk as Jackson’s primary entertainment lawyer. Also unbeknownst to Tohme, Michael Amir Williams—“Brother Michael”—had formed a behind-the-scenes relationship with Dileo and began to make the complaint that Tohme was “mostly talk.” Tohme’s blustering tone and imperious manner, combined with his broken English, strange name, and Arab background, didn’t win him any friends in the Jackson household or in the media. At the same time, there was a certain naïveté to Tohme, a curious inability to recognize that just because people were warm and friendly when they sat across the table didn’t mean they weren’t sticking pins in a voodoo doll as soon as you left the room. “I am from outside this business,” Tohme explained. “I am a businessman, and I think I have played with the big boys, but I have never seen anything like the entertainment industry, where people will do anything to win, where there is no idea of honor or loyalty, where sneaking and backstabbing are just the ordinary way to do things. I couldn’t believe it. I didn’t believe it until it was already happening.”
On April 2, 2009, the Celebrity/Access Web site published a column by Ian Courtney under the headline “Will Michael Jackson’s Real Manager Please Stand Up?” that cited a press release in which Leonard Rowe claimed to have been hired as Michael’s new manager. The article then quoted a spokesperson for Dileo saying that Frank was Michael’s new manager, and that Mr. Dileo’s company would be joining with AEG to issue a press release that challenged Rowe’s misrepresentations. Tohme held his tongue, letting an e-mail sent from the offices of AEG Live speak for him:
Ian, the only individual that AEG Live has dealt with from the onset of the recent negotiations that resulted in the unprecedented sales of 50 shows at the O2 Arena in London is Dr. Tohme. He has been in attendance at all my meetings with MJ and was instrumental in MJ’s appearance at the now historic press conference in London. MJ has continued to refer to Dr. Tohme as his manager.
I received one phone call from Leonard Rowe requesting a meeting that I, summarily, turned down after Michael Jackson told me, personally, that Rowe was not involved and disavowed that purported quote in the press release. That was my one and only interaction with Leonard Rowe.
As far as Frank Dileo . . . we are not anticipating any press releases involving Mr. Dileo, nor are we in a business relationship with him.
That is it in a nutshell.
Randy Phillips
For Tohme, Phillips’s written remarks were reassurance enough. “Even when I know that Frank Dileo is sniffing around, that Leonard Rowe is sniffing around, that John Branca is sniffing around, that others are sniffing around, I am not worried,” he explained. “I am Michael’s manager! I have the documents! He has given me complete control. So I think it does not matter what the others say. I have a lot to learn.”