PART ONE

EAST

Chapter 1

On June 29, 2005, sixteen days after the not-guilty verdicts in his Santa Barbara County child molestation trial, Michael Jackson came to the end of a journey that had taken him across the country, above the Atlantic Ocean, over the Mediterranean Sea, and into the Persian Gulf, where his private jet landed at Bahrain International Airport in Manama, eight thousand miles from his former home in California. He had to go that far to get relief and even there it wouldn’t last long.

Those who met him on the tarmac were pleased to see that his appearance was markedly improved from the withered wraith he had become during the final stages of his criminal trial. “Near the end, he went days at a time without eating or sleeping,” remembered his lead defense attorney, Tom Mesereau. “He would call us in tears at three or four in the morning, worried about what would happen to his children if he was behind bars. In those last couple of weeks, his cheeks were sunken to the point that his bones looked right on the surface.” By the time he arrived in Manama, Michael had put on nearly ten pounds and looked like he could dance to the terminal if he had to. Bahrainis greeting him at the airport agreed he appeared far less strange in person than they had imagined from photographs. And the size of those hands, Allahu Akbar.

Mesereau had been among the crowd of people who gathered at Neverland on the afternoon of the verdict. Michael repeatedly thanked the attorney but seemed capable of little more than hugging his children and staring into space. Some observers described Michael during the trial as sinking gradually into a drug-induced delirium as he raved about the conspiracy against him but Mesereau insisted that it was only on this final day that he encountered a Michael Jackson who seemed “less than lucid.”

A handful of people knew how thin the star had been stretched by the jury’s deliberations. One was the comedian-turned-activist Dick Gregory, part of the crowd that accompanied Jackson from the courthouse to the ranch on what everyone thought might be Michael’s last trip to Neverland. The gaunt, white-bearded Gregory had been in and out of Jackson’s life for years, but Michael was especially adamant about having Gregory present while he awaited and received the jury’s verdict. Later in the evening, after Mesereau and others had taken their leave, Michael asked him to come upstairs to his bedroom, Gregory recalled. Michael clung to him on the stairs, Gregory said, and he could feel the entertainer’s bones jabbing through his clothes. “Don’t leave me!” Michael had pleaded. “They’re trying to kill me!”

“Have you eaten?” Gregory asked. The comic purported to have been the one who taught Michael to fast, claiming he had coached Jackson through forty days without food. A person had to drink gallons of water to go so long without eating, Gregory had instructed him then, but Michael appeared to have forgotten that part of the regimen. “I can’t eat!” Michael answered. “They’re trying to poison me!”

“When was the last time you drank water?” Gregory asked.

“I haven’t,” Michael replied.

“You need to get out of here,” Gregory told him.

Within an hour, Gregory, along with a small security detail, escorted Jackson to Santa Barbara’s Marian Medical Center. Jackson was immediately put on an intravenous drip of fluids and sleeping medication. The doctors who treated him told Gregory that Michael would not have survived another day without medical attention. As his family prepared for his “victory celebration” party at a nearby casino, Michael himself lay in a hospital bed drifting in and out of consciousness, wondering at one point if he was in jail and at another if this was the hereafter. He was released from the hospital only after spending nearly twelve solid hours on an IV.

He made one more trip to Neverland to pack, then left the ranch for the last time. Mesereau had advised his client to get out of Santa Barbara County as soon as possible and not to return. The district attorney’s office and the sheriff’s department were obsessed with Michael Jackson’s destruction, Mesereau believed, and would be especially dangerous now, after being humiliated by the verdicts. “I told Michael that all it would take to open the door to another criminal charge was one child wandering onto the ranch,” Mesereau recalled.

Michael spent most of the week following his acquittal recuperating at his friend Deepak Chopra’s Center for Wellbeing in Carlsbad, California, on a bluff overlooking the Pacific Ocean, between Los Angeles and San Diego. He was joined by his children and their African nanny Grace Rwaramba. Slim and attractive, with an orange-tinted Afro and large, round eyes so dark brown that they appeared black in anything other than direct sunlight, Rwaramba had been Jackson’s employee for almost twenty years. Now in her late thirties, she had fled a Uganda decimated by the murderous warlord Idi Amin right around the time she reached puberty and had spent her teens living and studying with the Catholic nuns at Connecticut’s Holy Name Academy. Among her classmates, Grace had been best known for her vast collection of Michael Jackson pictures, postcards, T-shirts, and gloves, and for her emotional proclamations of love for the King of Pop. In the 1985 Holy Name yearbook, each graduating senior was permitted a “prophecy.” Hers read: “Grace Rwaramba is married to Michael Jackson and has her own generation of the Jackson 5.”

It was incredible how close she’d come to living her high school dream. After earning a degree in business administration at Atlantic Union College, she met the family of Deepak Chopra, who personally introduced her to Michael and arranged for her to obtain a position on Jackson’s staff during the Dangerous tour. As personnel director, she had been tasked mainly with organizing insurance arrangements, but Grace moved steadily up the ranks at Neverland, becoming Michael’s most trusted employee. When Michael Joseph Jackson Jr. was born in 1997, Michael appointed her the infant’s nanny. She had taken charge of each of the next two children, Paris-Michael Katherine Jackson, born in 1998, and Prince Michael Joseph Jackson II, born in 2001, growing so close to them that all three children called her Mom.

Her relationship with their father was more muddled. Over the years, Grace had developed a certain “be careful what you wish for” cynicism about Michael that strained her devotion to him. The only person on his staff who ever dared to criticize or challenge him, she had been dismissed several times but each time had been brought back almost immediately, mainly because the children cried for her. Tabloid and Internet reports of Michael and Grace’s impending marriage regularly surfaced, but a rarely mentioned obstacle was that Grace was already married to someone named Stacy Adair. She had wed Adair in what was described as “a ceremony of convenience” (presumably to protect Rwaramba from problems with the immigration authorities) in Las Vegas in 1995. Adding to the confusion was that those who spent time around Michael characterized Grace in ways that were wildly contradictory. Chopra invariably referred to her as “a lovely young woman” and said she was “devoted” to Michael and his children. Others reported that she was principally dedicated to the power she wielded as Michael’s “gatekeeper” and spent much of her energy attempting to insulate him from anyone who might attempt direct contact.

Though she had grown up as one of fifteen children in the Ugandan village of Ishaka, Grace had spent most of her adult life living in either fabulous mansions or the presidential suites of five-star hotels, developing an outsized sense of entitlement along the way. “The most powerful nanny in the universe,” was how Time magazine described her, because of the sway she held over Michael’s children. Tom Mesereau acknowledged that Grace’s self-importance was a contributing factor to his subsequent resignation as Michael’s general counsel. “I got really, really tired of dealing with her,” he said. Many reports linked Grace to the Nation of Islam but in truth she had undertaken a course of Bible study during Michael’s criminal trial and was said to have joined the Jehovah’s Witnesses. In the only public comment she made during Michael’s criminal trial, Grace replied to a question about who was behind the molestation charges by answering, “Satan, the devil.” Jackson’s spiritual advisor among the Witnesses, Firpo Carr, said he heard her described as “this woman in the background with all of this power, flexing her muscles,” but that in his personal encounters with Grace he had found her to be “one of the most humble people I’ve ever met.”

That mixture of modesty and might was regularly tested in her dealings with Michael, whom she often treated like the fourth of her juvenile charges. When Michael finally gave in to her demands to get his own cell phone, he lost the device within a day, and went back to telling people to call Grace’s number if they wanted to speak with him. He and the nanny regularly bickered over Michael’s wasteful spending. Nearly all the revenue from Michael’s catalog holdings, record sales, and song royalties was going directly to his enormous debt payments. Yet even as he lived hand-to-mouth, Michael continued to insist on booking the most expensive hotel suite in every city they visited. When there was no money to pay the bills, they stayed with one of the many “friends” the star had around the world who offered hospitality. Michael possessed so little grasp of his finances that he had whatever checks came his way deposited into Grace’s bank account, then asked that she dole cash out to him as needed. He grew peeved or suspicious whenever she told him the money was gone.

On June 17, four days after his acquittal, Jackson’s passport and the $300,000 bond he had posted to meet his $3 million bail were returned to him by Judge Rodney Melville, who had presided over the trial. Two days later, without advising even those who were closest to him, Jackson flew with his children and their nanny aboard a private jet to Paris, then traveled by limousine to the Hotel de Crillon, part of the magnificent palace complex at the foot of the Champs-Elysées. The $300,000 he had pocketed upon his release from bail would cover the cost of ten days at this pinnacle of privilege. Lodging in a presidential suite at the Crillon was almost impossible to obtain on short notice, committed as such accommodations were to the various heads of state and high-ranking government officials who typically occupied them, but for Michael Jackson the Crillon’s management had been willing to make adjustments. During these ten days he could not only rest and continue to recover, but also give himself something that he had been denied in recent months—the trappings of royal status. He was still the King of Pop, something more than a mere celebrity, a personage of such importance that he could have the Crillon’s fabulous Leonard Bernstein Suite, where his children could frolic on the famous wraparound terrace with its spectacular views of the City of Lights while he tickled the keys of the maestro’s piano.

A single item of good news encouraged him: Mediabase, which monitored airplay for the radio and recording industries, reported that spins of Michael’s records had tripled in the first two days after the “not guilty” verdict in Santa Barbara County.

Peace and privacy were promised in Bahrain. Upon arrival at the airport in the capital city, Jackson and his children were transported directly to the staggering palace of their host, Sheikh Abdullah bin Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa, the thirty-year-old, second son of the king of Bahrain. For most of the past decade, Abdullah had been not only the governor of Bahrain’s southern province but also the hardest rocking oil sheikh in the entire Middle East. A devotee of Led Zeppelin and Bob Marley, the portly Abdullah kept a second home in the Kensington section of London, where he was known for riding around on his Harley-Davidson motorcycle, often in flowing robes, occasionally with a guitar strapped to his back. An aspiring songwriter whose family wealth and Islamic faith had imbued him with a sense of transcendent possibility, the sheikh’s plan was to revive Jackson’s career (and launch his own) through 2 Seas Records, a music label the two would own as partners. Abdullah’s palace was fitted with the finest recording studio in the entire kingdom and Michael would have full use of it for as long as he liked, just as the sheikh had assured him during a series of phone calls between Manama and Neverland Ranch during the criminal trial.

The Bahraini prince demonstrated his seriousness during those months of the trial with ample financial largess. Introduced to the entertainer through Jackson’s brother Jermaine, who converted to Islam in 1989, Sheikh Abdullah from the first had lent more than a sympathetic ear to Jackson’s woeful tale of legal bills that were eating him alive. “He would say, ‘What can I do for my brother? What can I give the children?’” recalled Grace Rwaramba. In March 2005, just as the prosecution began to present its case at the criminal trial in Santa Barbara County, local utilities had threatened to shut off service at Neverland unless the cash-starved singer paid his overdue bills. Abdullah, who had never met Michael face-to-face, responded by immediately wiring $35,000 in cash to her personal checking account, Rwaramba recalled. She was “flabbergasted,” but the sheikh merely apologized for the paltry amount, promising “next time it will be more.” A month later, Michael asked for $1 million, Rwaramba said, and “it blew my mind” when Abdullah sent exactly that amount. By the first day of summer, Abdullah had promised to pay the $2.2 million in legal bills Jackson would accumulate by the end of his criminal trial if the singer took up residence in Manama.

Sheikh Abdullah was aching to show off his prize, yet insisted that the media hold Jackson’s presence in Bahrain as a sort of open secret for nearly two months. Various publications reported that Jackson was in the country as a guest of the prince, but added only that, according to the royal family, “Michael wants to lead a normal life and does not want to be hounded by the media.” The sheikh and his famous guest did not venture out in public together until they traveled to the emirate of Dubai on August 20, and even then they did not make themselves available to reporters until another week had passed.

One Middle Eastern story after another celebrated how “happy and healthy” Jackson appeared in the photographs taken at his first public appearance since the trial, in Dubai on August 27, 2005, two days before his forty-seventh birthday. Dressed in an electric-blue shirt and a black fedora, Michael smiled tentatively but sweetly as he and the jowly, droopy-eyed Abdullah posed with the legendary Arab rally driving champion, Mohammed bin Sulayem, while cameras clicked and rolled all around them.

The photo session took place in the corporate offices of Nakheel Properties, the megadeveloper responsible for several of the projects that had transformed Dubai into the world capital of architectural adventurism. Luxury real estate and appointment shopping were what drove the local economy these days and Michael had contributed his part earlier in the week when he ventured out in disguise and behind blackout windows to the absurdly opulent two-story retail complex known locally as “The Boulevard.” When the photo session finished, Nakheel executives took Michael and Abdullah on a boat tour of the Dubai shore, skimming over iridescent blue waters alongside the white shell and coral beaches that had once been the tiny emirate’s main attraction. From the water, Jackson could see each of the skyscrapers that sprouted from Dubai’s fabled sands like petrodollar silos. The Jumeirah Emirates Towers were the twelfth and the twenty-ninth tallest buildings on the planet, he was told, but mere scratching posts compared to the Dubai Tower, where construction had begun almost a year earlier and which, at 2,684 feet, would be the tallest man-made structure on earth by the time of its completion in 2009.

The destination of that afternoon’s cruise was the emirate’s ultimate engineering feat, the Palm Islands, where more than a billion tons of rock and sand were being used to create a residential community of artificial islands, each in the shape of a palm tree topped by a crescent. Here a world of make believe was being brought to life on a scale that would make even Neverland Ranch seem quaint by comparison. While Michael once again assured all present that he was serious about settling down in Dubai, Abdullah delighted the trailing reporters with his announcement that “Mikaeel” planned to build a grand mosque here in his “new home,” dedicated to English-language instruction in the principles of Islam.

Jackson had not actually become a Muslim, but was “on the verge of converting to Islam,” according to the Arab-Israeli newspaper Panorama. The story would soon be picked up by CBS News, then seized upon by New York Sun columnist Daniel Pipes, who observed that “it fits into a recurring and important African-American pattern.” That Jackson appeared to welcome being addressed in Bahrain by the name of Allah’s great angel, Mikaeel, gave the conversion claim credence in the minds of those who did not know that during his criminal trial the entertainer had several times escorted his children to services at the Kingdom Halls of the Jehovah’s Witnesses in both Santa Barbara and Los Angeles and was permitting his mother Katherine to instruct all three kids in church doctrine.

Mikaeel would keep his religious ambivalence to himself while dwelling in the Middle East, and especially when he returned with Abdullah to Manama for a public greeting by the sheikh’s father, King Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa. After His Majesty and Mikaeel withdrew behind closed doors, the king’s staff announced to waiting reporters that Mr. Jackson had just acquired a “luxury palace” in Manama and was donating “a huge amount of money” for a second mosque to be built in Bahrain’s capital city.

The palace was being rented by the royal family, though, and the millions Jackson had “donated” for the two mosques were an empty pledge. The entertainer would live on Abdullah’s dole throughout his stays in Manama and Dubai but even the oil sheikh’s pockets weren’t deep enough to fill the hole that Jackson was in. The vast assortment of problems—legal, financial, personal, and professional—that had chased him to the Persian Gulf were not only following Jackson, but stacking up against his narrow back.

Two weeks before he celebrated his birthday in Dubai, Jackson had been fined $10,000 by a district court judge in New Orleans for his failure to appear at a hearing prompted by a particularly specious sex abuse accusation. A thirty-nine-year-old man named Joseph Bartucci was claiming that, while watching coverage of the trial in California, he had recovered the suppressed memory of an assault on him that had taken place twenty-one years earlier, during the 1984 World’s Fair. According to Bartucci’s complaint, he had been “lured” into Jackson’s limousine and taken on a nine-day ride to California in which he was forced to consume “mood altering drugs” while Jackson performed oral sex on him, cut him with a razor, and stabbed him in the chest with a steel wire. Bartucci could offer not one piece of evidence to support his allegations, while Jackson’s attorneys had provided irrefutable proof that their client was in the company of President and First Lady Ronald and Nancy Reagan during some of the days when Bartucci claimed to be his captive. Yet Judge Eldon Fallon allowed the case to go forward even when it was revealed that Bartucci was an admitted bigamist who had been party to eighteen separate civil suits and criminal complaints during the past seventeen years, and was arrested for stalking a woman in 1996. Infuriated that his attorneys in New Orleans had run up a $47,000 bill without obtaining the dismissal of a fabricated lawsuit, Jackson fired them while he prepared for the trip to the Persian Gulf, then simply turned his back on the Louisiana litigation. Now Judge Fallon was demanding that Jackson show cause why he should not be held in contempt and a default judgment entered against him. Jackson would have to answer, even if he did so from halfway around the world.

It was but one legal predicament among many. During the past twelve years, Jackson had paid out almost $100 million in settlements and attorney’s fees to deal with the scores of court filings, both frivolous and not, against him, and dozens remained pending. Of all these claims, by far the most expensive—in every sense of the word—had resulted in the payment of more than $18 million to the family of a thirteen-year-old boy named Jordan Chandler back in 1994. According to Mesereau, Michael had come to realize that making a deal with the Chandlers was “the worst mistake of his life.” It was the size of the settlement that convinced much of the public and many in the media that Jackson was, more likely than not, a child molester. What sort of innocent man, people asked, would pay that kind of money to a false accuser? “Someone desperate to get on with his life,” answered Mesereau. “Michael had no idea how people would interpret his decision to try to make the whole thing go away.” The consequences of that decision had multiplied exponentially as one lawsuit after another was filed against him, with various grifters lining up for their piece of the entertainer’s rapidly shrinking fortune.

On September 23, 2005, Michael flew to London with Abdullah, Grace Rwaramba, and the children, booking an entire floor at the Dorchester Hotel. It was his standard operating procedure when traveling, he explained to the sheikh, who was footing the bill. Jackson made the trip to deal with what was perhaps the most piercing of all the legal claims currently pending against him: a lawsuit filed in November 2004, in the midst of his criminal trial, by Jackson’s former business partner and erstwhile “dear friend” Marc Schaffel.

The thirty-five-year-old Schaffel had emerged as a public figure in late 2001, when he suddenly became the most visible among a crowd of advisors jockeying for position around Jackson, mainly because he had been charged with assembling a choir of superstars to sing with Michael on a charity single titled “What More Can I Give?” The song had originally been inspired by a meeting with South African president Nelson Mandela but was subsequently intended to benefit Kosovar refugees. Then, in the wake of the September 11 atrocities, “What More Can I Give?” was hastily rewritten with the intention to raise money for the families of those who had died in the terrorist attacks. The evolving project had turned into an almost perfect example of how and why virtually everything that in recent years had been initiated from within what the media liked to call “the Jackson camp” was destined to end in a fiasco of finger-pointing and litigation.

Schaffel had been popping up in Jackson’s life since August 1984. Just eighteen back then, Schaffel was a freelance cameraman for ABC television, which sent him to Detroit to shoot footage of the Jackson 5’s Victory tour. Schaffel arrived at the Pontiac Silverdome late and was mortified when the Jacksons’ security detail denied him permission to join the rest of the media in front of the main stage. “They put me in a room backstage to wait,” he recalled. “So I’m sitting there feeling really stupid when I hear the door open. I assume it’s one of the people that’s going to usher me outside, but in walks Michael, who closes the door, and it’s just the two of us.” Jackson took one look at the enormous camera sitting next to Schaffel and stepped over to inspect it more closely. “This was back in the time when they were switching from film to video, and I had one of the first ENG cameras around,” the thickly built Schaffel explained. “It was a huge thing with a separate flash for video, and Michael was fascinated by it. He asked, ‘Can I look at your camera?’ and I was like, ‘This can’t be real.’ He asked, ‘Can I pick it up?’ and I said sure, but I was a little concerned, because this was one big-ass camera, very heavy. But he just reached over and lifted the camera up like it was made of cardboard. I was amazed by his strength.” As Jackson began to fiddle with the camera’s lens, Schaffel could hear people shouting “Michael!” outside the door, calling out to the star that he needed to make a costume change. “I don’t think Michael even heard them,” Schaffel said. “Finally, he says, ‘We have another show to do here. Can I call you later and use the camera, try it out?’ I said sure, and gave him my number, thinking I’d never hear back. But the next day I get a call asking if I can come by the hotel where the Jacksons were staying. Michael was that interested.”

The two ran into each other again in the mid-1990s at a fund-raiser for the AIDS research foundation amfAR in Beverly Hills. “Michael points to me and says, ‘You were the guy with the camera,’” Schaffel remembered. “He didn’t know my name, but he knew my face.” He and Jackson didn’t have their first real conversation, though, until the year 2000, when they met at the home of the famous dermatologist they shared, Arnold Klein, a friend of Schaffel’s who became a significant figure in Michael’s life over the years, involved in aspects of the entertainer’s life that ranged from financial management to the conception of his two oldest children. “Michael was staying at Klein’s home after a procedure,” Schaffel remembered. “He used to stay at Arnie’s house quite a bit.” The two spent most of that evening in conversation. “Michael testified later that he liked Marc’s enthusiasm and ideas,” Schaffel’s attorney Howard King would recall. “He especially liked that these ideas didn’t involve singing and dancing. Michael was intent on finding a way to make money that did not involve being onstage or in a studio.”

Jackson’s longtime publicist, Bob Jones, recalled that Schaffel had appeared on the scene at almost the very moment when the people who had done Michael’s film work over the past several years were breaking with him amid complaints that they weren’t being paid. Boasting of his background in film production and flashing a bank account that approached eight figures, Schaffel pledged to organize Michael’s various film and video projects through a company the two formed, called Neverland Valley Entertainment. There was talk of building a movie studio at the ranch, of making short films, perhaps producing an animated television series. But Schaffel was swiftly drawn into the preparations for Jackson’s “30th Anniversary” concerts, which were scheduled to take place on September 7 and 10, 2001, at New York City’s Madison Square Garden.

Pulling together a list of performers Jackson considered worthy of the event had proven a complex task, but Schaffel quickly demonstrated he could contribute. Working as Jackson’s liaison with concert producer David Gest and writing a series of checks drawn on his own accounts to cover Michael’s cash flow problems, Schaffel helped secure the participation of many of the stars who would perform at the two concerts. Schaffel’s talent for massaging Michael’s ego would prove as much of an asset to the anniversary concerts project as his organizational abilities. When Michael began delaying his arrival in New York, “David was calling and screaming at me like it was my responsibility,” Schaffel remembered. “‘You gotta get him on a plane and get him here!’ David wanted him to have five days of rehearsal and Michael said, ‘I don’t need that. I’ll do one or two days.’ Michael wanted to go on a private jet, and David was trying to get him to fly commercial because they got comp seats on American Airlines. So Michael just waited him out. See, Michael just really wasn’t that psyched up to do the show. I mean, he thought it was neat, but . . . when something is Michael’s idea, he’s in it 110 percent. If it’s not his idea, if it’s something he’s got to do, he feels it’s work, and he starts dragging his feet.”

Still, when word came that, despite the highest prices in the history of show business, tickets for the two Madison Square Garden shows had sold out within five hours, Michael wept with gratitude. CBS agreed to pay a licensing fee in the seven figures for the rights to edit the concert footage into a two-hour TV special and Jackson was now guaranteed a take of $7.5 million for his appearance at the two concerts, money Michael desperately needed. VH1 would later calculate that for the time the entertainer actually spent onstage, his pay totaled $150,000 per minute.

Jackson at the time was living on what he described as a “restrictive” budget that had been imposed on him by his record company, Sony, and his main creditor, Bank of America. He complained constantly that because of his huge debt he had no ready access to his enormous wealth. “It was not difficult at that time for Marc to withdraw as much as a million dollars from his bank account,” King explained, “so he began to make cash advances to Michael. Generally, they were paid back a short time later, when other funds of Michael’s came in.” The first sum Schaffel handed over was $70,000, in July 2001, to pay for the shopping excursion with which Michael celebrated the news that he was about to receive a $2 million loan advance to create a charity record. When Michael said he “needed” something, Schaffel understood by then, he was not speaking of necessity as most people understood it, but rather about “a psychological state that he required in order to function.”

That first cash advance was repaid in short order, Schaffel recalled. Money was constantly flowing to Michael from sources that were spread all over the globe. He didn’t keep a bank account for fear that some creditor might try to attach it, so all payments were made in cash. One of Schaffel’s main duties soon became acting as, literally, Michael Jackson’s bag man. “Michael’s other advisors, associates, business partners, patrons—whatever they were—would get him money by actually transmitting the payment to Marc, who would deliver it to Michael in cash,” King explained. Schaffel had made the first such delivery to Michael in a paper sack from an Arby’s fast food restaurant. Michael thought that was hilarious and began referring to the money coming his way either through or from Marc as French fries. “They’d have conversations where Michael would say, ‘Bring me some fries, will you? And supersize it,’” King recalled.

A month after handing over $70,000, Schaffel wrote a check for $625,680.49 to cure a default on Michael’s Bank of America line of credit. Repayment continued to flow into his bank accounts, but the sums were not exactly congruent with what he was paying out. Still, Michael’s business manager said the debts would all be evened out over time and Schaffel had no reason to doubt it. “Marc not only adored Michael, he trusted him completely,” King explained. Schaffel made two more French fry deliveries to Jackson in August 2001, filling one bag with $100,000 in cash that Michael wanted to shop for antiques, and another with $46,075 that Michael needed to pay for appraisals of a $30 million mansion on Sunset Boulevard in Beverly Hills, a property Jackson insisted he could afford to purchase after learning that the Madison Square Garden concerts had sold out. In early September, shortly before the concerts, Schaffel made two more payments, the first a relatively minor sum of $23,287 for the supposedly “free” concert tickets that Michael had promised to his personal guests for the anniversary concerts. The tickets turned out to not be free after all, and to avoid the embarrassment of explaining this to friends and family, Michael paid for them out of his own—that is, Marc’s—pocket. The second payment was for $1 million that Michael needed for his “best friend,” Marlon Brando, who demanded that sum in exchange for agreeing to make a videotaped “humanitarian speech” to be shown during the first of the two concerts. Michael’s other advisors all argued that it was ridiculous to pay Brando so much for a speech no one wanted to hear, but Michael insisted. “Marlon is a god,” he said. The naysayers would be proven right when, less than two minutes into the great actor’s incoherent comments, the crowd started booing and didn’t stop until Brando did. Well, it was only a million dollars, Michael said, not that much money, really.

In the days immediately before the concerts, Schaffel gave Jackson $380,395 to pay for a pair of customized automobiles he wanted, a Bentley Arnage and a Lincoln Navigator, as well as a check to cover the interest on the $2 million loan Michael had taken out to finance the charity record.

By this point he had received reimbursements of $1,750,000, Schaffel recalled, but that amount didn’t quite cover the $2.5 million he had paid out. The remaining debt was secured, though, because Michael had signed over the rights to “What More Can I Give?” Schaffel agreed with those who said it was the best song Jackson had delivered in years, with a soaring melody and a lyric that was as moving as any Jackson had ever written. By the beginning of September, the two of them were already talking about using it to produce a charity record that would rival the success of Michael’s “We Are the World” project back in 1985. Survivors of the next major humanitarian catastrophe would be the beneficiaries.

The 9/11 terrorist attacks took place just hours after Jackson finished his “Billie Jean”/“Black or White”/“Beat It” medley at the end of the second anniversary concert. Up to that moment, Michael had imagined that the ugliest part of his stay in New York would be the nasty argument he had gotten into with Corey Feldman backstage during the first concert over Feldman’s plans to write a book about their relationship. When he was awakened after only an hour or two of sleep in his suite at the Plaza Athenee just in time to watch the World Trade Center towers collapse, “Michael was completely freaked out,” Schaffel recalled. “He thought there were terrorists loose in New York and he wanted to get his kids out immediately. We had a lot of police working as security at the hotel he was at, and they helped us get across the Hudson River to New Jersey before the bridges and tunnels were closed.” The next day, when Michael insisted he needed $500,000 in case he and the children were forced to “go underground,” Schaffel drove to a bank and withdrew exactly that amount in cash. Jackson holed up for two days in New Jersey, then summoned Schaffel and the rest of his entourage to White Plains, New York, where the airport was about to reopen for a few hours. Sony arranged for a private jet at one of the hangars. Michael was en route from New Jersey when a new problem developed. The actor Mark Wahlberg had been shooting a movie nearby and was at the White Plains airport also, with his entourage, trying to get on the same plane. “So we had this big spat over who had priority,” Schaffel recalled. The two camps stood on the tarmac shouting at one another until Sony ruled that Michael Jackson was the ranking celebrity. Wahlberg was informed that he would have to wait until another jet could be located, and he stormed off. “But then at the last second Michael decided he didn’t want to fly,” Schaffel recalled. “He said he was going to go back to California by tour bus. So he told the rest of us to just get on the plane and go, before Wahlberg came back.” Within minutes a bus had been hired but by the time it got to White Plains, Michael had changed his mind again. He loaded his mother and other relatives on the bus, sent them off toward 287 West, then got Sony to find yet another private jet, and flew back to Santa Barbara aboard that plane with Grace and his kids plus a pair of bodyguards.

When they reconnected back in California, Jackson and Schaffel immediately began to talk about using “What More Can I Give?” to raise money for the families of those who had died in the terrorist attacks. In October, Schaffel rented a suite at the Beverly Hills Hotel, where he met with senior executives of the McDonald’s restaurant chain to discuss the “What More Can I Give?” charity record idea. It had taken only a couple of hours to strike a $20 million deal, after McDonald’s execs calculated they could sell at least five million copies of the record through their U.S. outlets alone.

Schaffel felt like he was surfing a tidal wave of good fortune during those days, when he worked as Michael’s main intermediary in setting up the recording sessions at which the likes of Beyoncé Knowles, Ricky Martin, Mariah Carey, Carlos Santana, Reba McEntire, and Tom Petty contributed their voices and instruments to the “What More Can I Give?” project. It was the most fabulous experience of Marc’s life. He had gotten everything on videotape and couldn’t wait for the world to see Celine Dion after her first performances of “What More Can I Give?”, cheeks bathed in tears as she explained how much it meant to her to sing with Michael Jackson. One great talent after another had reacted similarly. The immensity of it was breathtaking. “Michael was so excited about the project,” Schaffel recalled. “I didn’t have to beg him to get to the studio, he would come in on his own. He really, really, really wanted to make it happen. He was like a different person when he was like that. He was convinced, and so was I, and so was everyone else, that we had two number one hits here, the English version and the Spanish version, which is actually the better of the two.”

Then things began to unravel, as Schaffel would learn they tended to do in the decaying orbit of Michael Jackson. On October 13 the New York Post printed the first story about the “What More Can I Give?” deal. McDonald’s was startled, then overwhelmed, by the bombardment of complaints from American moms outraged that a so-called family-food chain would consider distributing the music of a suspected pedophile. McDonald’s executives phoned Schaffel two days later to say they were backing out of the deal.

It would get worse. Several of Jackson’s financial advisors were upset by their discovery that Schaffel had obtained the rights to “What More Can I Give?” and they contacted John Branca, Michael’s longtime attorney. Branca had been a recurring figure in Jackson’s business affairs for more than twenty years, negotiating many of the entertainer’s most lucrative contracts. At times, he was Michael’s closest advisor. Relations between the entertainer and the lawyer had been cooling again recently, as Michael became increasingly suspicious that Branca was using him to profit from other business deals. The attorney imagined that Marc Schaffel might be part of a growing problem with his prize client. Branca, as well connected as anyone in the entertainment industry, needed only a few days to determine that Schaffel had made most of his fortune as a gay pornographer, producing and directing films with titles like Cock Tales and The Man with the Golden Rod, as well as operating several pornographic Internet sites. The attorney promptly phoned Jackson and set up a meeting at which he showed him a tape of Schaffel directing a gay sex scene. Soon after, Schaffel received a letter informing him that his contract with Michael Jackson was being terminated because “information about Mr. Schaffel’s background, previously unknown to Mr. Jackson, has just been discovered.”

“That was all complete bullshit,” Schaffel said. “Everybody knew about my past, including Michael. At Arnie Klein’s house, Michael and Carrie Fisher and Arnie all made jokes about it, in front of many people. [Sony Music Group CEO] Tommy Mottola knew, too. He brought Usher to the studio to sing on ‘What More Can I Give?’ and Tommy was sitting there joking with me about some girl in the porn business he knew, to see if I knew her, too. But now suddenly everyone is acting like they’re completely shocked.”

He knew Michael had no issue with his homosexuality, Schaffel said, or with Arnold Klein’s, or with anyone else’s. Still it was a relief, Schaffel admitted, when Michael phoned him a few days after the termination letter was sent and said, “Don’t worry, Marc, this will blow over. Just go with the flow.”

Unfortunately for Schaffel, Branca and other Jackson advisors were actively lobbying Sony to kill the charity project by refusing permission for any of its stars to appear on the record—at least until Michael was able to recover his rights to the song. “And then Sony and Tommy Mottola became concerned that if they let us release ‘What More Can I Give?’ Michael wouldn’t finish Invincible,” Schaffel explained. “And he was dragging his feet about getting that album done. We would go to New York to record, then to Miami, then to Virginia. We would go here and we would go there. And Sony was paying all the bills. What it all came down to was that Michael wasn’t into it. Then when we started on ‘What More Can I Give?’ Michael was one hundred percent into that and zero percent into Invincible. Sony had tens of millions invested in their record, so they decided to shelve ours.” To try to ensure that the song stayed on the shelf, Sony put out the bogus story that “What More Can I Give?” had been considered “too weak” for inclusion on Invincible.

Schaffel pressed on, attempting to stage a concert in Washington, D.C., to raise money for the families of the 9/11 Pentagon victims that would be filmed as a video for “What More Can I Give?” Michael failed to show up. On June 13, 2002, Schaffel faxed a letter to the Japanese chairman of Sony Corporation, Nobuyuki Idei, begging Idei to either release the single or permit its release through an alternative distributor. “It would be a tragedy almost as great as the first one to let corporate greed or politics stop the movement of people working together in the healing process,” Schaffel had written. He received no answer. Schaffel persisted, selling various rights in the “What More Can I Give?” project to an assortment of partners, contingent upon Michael Jackson’s participation, and waited for a chance at rapprochement.

He saw that opportunity in the debacle that engulfed Michael in the months after the late 2001 release of the long-delayed Invincible. Sony had recognized within two weeks that Invincible was going to be the first full-fledged flop of the singer’s career. Like all Michael Jackson releases, the new album had gone straight to the top of the charts, but the 363,000 copies it sold in that first week was still less than a fifth of the 1.9 million units that ’N Sync’s Celebrity sold in the first seven days of its release that same year. And Invincible’s sales had dropped off precipitously. Sony was estimating that it would sell only two million copies of the album in the United States, less than a tenth of what Thriller had done, and only three million copies overseas, less than a fifth of the number Dangerous had racked up. Reviews of the album ranged from lackluster to dismissive. Only one single fromInvincible, “You Rock My World,” reached even the top ten in the United States. Mottola and Sony believed that Jackson’s refusal to support his new album with a world tour had doomed Invincible internationally. The company’s executives also complained that Jackson had failed to show up at a series of promotional appearances both in the United States and abroad.

“There were a lot of events scheduled,” Schaffel recalled, “and all of a sudden Michael didn’t want to do them. That pissed off Tommy, who thought it was all because of ‘What More Can I Give?’ And a lot of it was. Michael wanted them to use ‘What More Can I Give?’ to promote Invincible, but Sony thought, ‘You’ll sell millions of copies of your record but hardly any of ours.’”

Sony was mortified by reports that it had spent $51 million on the production and promotion of an album that was selling so poorly. In early 2002, an unnamed company executive told the New York Daily News, “Charges of pedophilia have really spooked a lot of American record buyers.” Within days, Jackson and his record company were locked in a battle that would become both public and vicious.

The opening volley had been fired before the album’s release, when Jackson demanded that Sony renegotiate his contract. Michael wanted possession of his master recording catalog within three years rather than the seven specified in the current agreement. Also, he asked that Sony throw another $8 million behind Invincible, with most of that money going to pay for the album’s third video. After Sony refused both requests, Jackson contacted his friend, songwriter Carol Bayer Sager, to ask if her husband Bob Daly, the former head of Warner Bros., would investigate whether the record label was cheating him. When Daly reported back that he saw no evidence of this, Jackson not only cut off contact with Bayer Sager and her husband, but proceeded to make what was perhaps the biggest miscalculation of his musical career—accusing Tommy Mottola of being biased against black entertainers.

Al Sharpton was with Jackson when he showed up outside Sony’s New York offices in July 2002 surrounded by a chanting crowd bused in from Harlem, waving photographs of Mottola drawn with horns and a pitchfork. Encouraged by Johnnie Cochran, the former O. J. Simpson attorney who represented Jackson during the Jordan Chandler affair, European fans had been bombarding Sony’s corporate offices with faxed sheets of black paper in a campaign coordinated to support the racism charge. Speaking to the media assembled outside Sony’s offices on Madison Avenue, Jackson not only described Mottola as “very, very devilish,” but branded the entire music business as “racist,” and announced that he intended to form a black artists union to combat discrimination. Michael was furious when Sharpton and Jesse Jackson, who had been egging him on for weeks, began to backpedal. Sharpton actually told the assembled media that he had never known Tommy Mottola to be anything but sympathetic to black causes. By the next day, the backlash against Michael Jackson throughout the entertainment industry was ferocious. Almost instantaneously, Michael found himself despised by the people whose support he needed most.

Schaffel chose that moment to speak up for his estranged friend, telling the Los Angeles Times, “If you ask me, I think there are people who don’t want to see Michael on top.” Some of those people were at Sony, Schaffel suggested, and had been behind the scuttling of the “What More Can I Give?” project, because they knew it “would paint him in a different light than how they want him to be seen. They don’t want Michael to succeed. And they’re using my background as an excuse.” Jackson, who had almost no one else defending him publicly at that moment, was so grateful that he immediately brought Schaffel back on board. In what was for Schaffel a delicious bit of irony (and for John Branca no mere coincidence), Marc’s return to the fold would coincide precisely with Michael’s decision that he was done with his longtime attorney. Branca’s animus toward Schaffel afterward was considerable, but this bit of palace intrigue had actually been wrought by Michael’s new German managers, Ronald Konitzer and Dieter Wiesner. “Dieter and Ronald had brought in an outside auditing firm that did a complete examination,” Schaffel recalled, “and the paperwork Michael was shown attacked Branca for his relationships with Sony and Tommy Mottola.”

The paperwork was a dossier that had been prepared by the Manhattan-based corporate espionage firm Interfor, Inc. The company’s director, an Israeli émigré named Juval Aviv, was regarded as a dubious character in many quarters. The Village Voice had once published an article about him under the headline “Secret Agent Schmuck,” debunking Aviv’s reported claims that he had been the lead assassin of Israel’s state intelligence service, Mossad, in avenging the massacre of Jewish athletes at the Olympic village during the 1972 Summer Olympic Games in Munich. Nevertheless, rightly or wrongly, Michael believed the claims in the Interfor report that Branca and Mottola had been involved in transferring funds that belonged to him into offshore accounts at Caribbean banks. It fit with suspicions he had been harboring for years about Branca’s too-cozy relationship with Sony. “Michael hated all lawyers anyway, including his own, and he made the decision that Branca should be fired,” recalled Schaffel, who was assigned to facilitate Branca’s dismissal, and then to replace Jackson’s longtime attorney with David LeGrand, the same Las Vegas lawyer who had contracted the Interfor report.

As the long process of Branca’s dismissal unfolded, Michael invited Marc to accompany him on a trip to Berlin in October 2002. Jackson was traveling to Germany to be honored at the country’s most prestigious entertainment awards ceremony, the Bambis, with a special Millennium prize that recognized him as the world’s “greatest living pop icon.”

The celebratory trip swiftly turned into a nightmare. First, while being serenaded by the huge crowd of fans gathered outside his Berlin hotel, the Adlon, Michael had impulsively displayed his nine-month-old third child, Prince Michael Joseph Jackson II, by dangling the infant over the balcony railing of his third-floor suite. The images of him holding a baby in a blue jumpsuit, its head covered by a towel as its bare feet kicked the air forty feet above a cobblestone sidewalk, shocked and outraged parents worldwide. Child advocacy groups seized the opportunity to join in an orgy of public castigation. The British tabloids that had, for nearly two decades, called the star “Wacko Jacko” now were delighted to change that to “Mad Bad Dad.” Several commentators in Germany suggested that perhaps Michael Jackson should face criminal charges. Michael, who had never before been deplored on this scale, was forced to issue the first public apology that he had ever offered for his erratic 'margin-bottom:0cm;margin-bottom:.0001pt;text-align: justify;text-indent:9.75pt;line-height:normal'>Jackson was subdued at the Bambi Awards ceremony and when he was called to the stage to pose with a fellow recipient, actress Halle Berry, he could barely whisper the words, “Berlin, ich liebe dich”—“Berlin, I love you.” News reports suggested that the “painfully shy” performance was the result of his humiliation and remorse over the baby-dangling incident. What the journalists didn’t know was that, shortly before Jackson took the stage, Schaffel had alerted him that something far worse was coming his way from across the English Channel.

To support the career comeback he hoped to launch with Invincible, Jackson had agreed to cooperate with a documentary by Martin Bashir, a British journalist to whom he had been introduced by their mutual friend, psychic spoon bender Uri Geller. Bashir seduced Michael, according to Tom Mesereau, among others, by boasting that he had been a confidant of the late Princess Diana. “Michael wanted to hear all of Bashir’s Diana stories,” Geller recalled. Jackson had tried for years, unsuccessfully, to form a relationship with Diana. She and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, in fact, were just about the only two famous people he ever met who chose to keep him at arm’s length, which had only deepened his fascination with each of them. Bashir’s Diana anecdotes had persuaded Jackson to consent to what was about to become the biggest public relations catastrophe of his life.

“Bashir told so many stories about her, and Michael was completely charmed,” Dieter Wiesner recalled. “But then I heard from people in the UK that Bashir wasn’t Diana’s friend at all, that she felt he had tricked her into talking about her affair, and that she felt used by him—as Michael did later. So I was worried.”

Footage of Bashir’s documentary Living with Michael Jackson had gotten loose in London, and friends were phoning from England, Schaffel said, to warn him that Michael was about to be painted as a freakish pervert. After reading transcripts of the documentary’s rough cut, “Marc knew what a disaster this was going to be,” Wiesner remembered, “and Michael could see it in his eyes. After that I said, ‘Michael, this is going to be terrible.’ And he didn’t believe me. He said, ‘Dieter, Dieter, please. I don’t think so. Don’t think bad.’”

Almost a month passed before they flew back to Florida, where Bashir was supposed to personally screen the documentary for Jackson. “Michael was still waiting for him, because he should have the last approval,” Wiesner remembered. “More people were calling from UK, telling me this is going to be a bad thing. Then Bashir shows up with the whole camera team. He wanted to show Michael everything, but he wanted to have his reaction on tape, and I knew that would be used against Michael also.”

Bashir had arrived for what was to be their final interview shortly after the first of the year. Within seconds of sitting down with the star, the formerly unctuous director began to confront Michael with a series of acid-laced questions about his physical transformation. It was a particularly sensitive subject for Jackson at that moment in his life. Less than a year earlier, Michael had been preparing to shoot a video for the Invincible album when his then-manager, Trudy Green, sent someone to the star’s trailer to make a mold of his face. “She told Michael it was something for the makeup artist to use,” Schaffel remembered. “But Michael wanted me to ask her what it was really about. And Trudy told me, ‘Well, you know, he’s not looking too good right now, and we think we should make this mask for him to wear in this video.’ When Michael found out Trudy had said this, he just broke down and sobbed. It was one of only two times I ever saw him do that. I mean he was just heartbroken.” Michael stopped production of the video immediately, then fired Green, replacing her a few days later with “the Germans,” Wiesner and Konitzer. He was still distraught about the incident, though, which perhaps explained why he blatantly lied to Bashir about the extent of his plastic surgery, insisting there had been only a couple of operations on his nose, nothing more.

Bashir ramped up Jackson’s discomfort with an observation that his two oldest children, Prince and Paris, claimed they had no mother, then got Michael to contradict his earlier statement that the mother of his third child was someone with whom he had a relationship by admitting that Blanket was born to a surrogate. When Bashir discussed the subject of children who regularly spent the night at Neverland, often in Jackson’s own bedroom, the end was at hand. After admitting on camera that the ill or disadvantaged children he invited to stay on the ranch often slept in his bed (while he slept on the floor) Jackson grew agitated as Bashir pressed the subject. At first he said it was natural that family friends like Macaulay and Kieran Culkin would sleep in his bed; then he blurted out that “many children” had slept in the same bed with him. In his denial that there was any sexual motivation for this, Jackson uttered a line that would be replayed in countless news broadcasts: He told Bashir, “The most loving thing to do is to share your bed with someone.”

Bashir returned to the UK “without letting Michael see a thing,” Wiesner recalled. Jackson was still in Florida when Living with Michael Jackson—introduced by Barbara Walters—was broadcast by ABC on February 6, 2003. “I was sitting with Michael on his bed watching it,” Dieter Wiesner recalled. “And he just broke down like I never saw before. He couldn’t believe that something like this was coming up again. He looked like he was gonna die. He couldn’t talk. He couldn’t make a word come out.”

The Bashir documentary “rocked his world,” said Santa Barbara County district attorney Tom Sneddon, who by the end of the year would ask a grand jury to indict Jackson on ten felony charges of child sexual abuse. After the documentary aired, Michael was so distraught that he took to his bed—alone—for days. Publicity-seeking Los Angeles attorney Gloria Allred and her associate, Beverly Hills psychiatrist Carole Lieberman, promptly filed nearly identical complaints with the Department of Social Services to challenge Jackson’s custody of his children.

With Jackson incapacitated, Schaffel took charge of damage control. The former pornographer swiftly demonstrated his media savvy by assembling a collection of videotapes about Bashir’s time with Michael Jackson that the British director did not control. Before agreeing to cooperate with Bashir, Jackson had insisted that he would have his own camera crew on location to shoot Bashir shooting him. “Despite how he’s portrayed,” Tom Mesereau observed, “Michael is no fool. He’s actually one of the most intelligent people you’ll ever meet. And he knew that he should have his own record of what was transpiring during those Bashir interviews. It was probably one of the smartest decisions he ever made.”

How smart wouldn’t be clear until almost two years later, when Jackson was in the midst of his criminal trial. On the Jackson tapes, Bashir was seen lavishing praise on Michael as both a father and a humanitarian, saying at one point that he had been moved to tears by his subject’s sensitive approach to parenting and was even more touched by Michael’s kindness to seriously ill and underprivileged children. A juxtaposition of those remarks with Bashir’s condemnation of Jackson in his ABC documentary as “dangerous” to children, Schaffel recognized, would be devastating.

Schaffel’s own stroke of genius was to set up interviews with a young cancer patient named Gavin Arvizo whose relationship with Michael Jackson had become the centerpiece of the Bashir documentary. A child psychiatrist and a child welfare worker were recruited to interview the boy, his mother, and his two siblings, all of whom defended Jackson vehemently. Gavin himself insisted on camera that he had never been touched inappropriately and that Michael was “completely innocent.” His sister Davellin and brother Star supported their brother by saying that during sleepovers at Neverland they always spent the night in Michael’s bed while he slept on the floor nearby. Their mother Janet Arvizo told the interviewers, “The relationship that Michael has with my children is a beautiful, loving, father-son and father-daughter one,” and threatened to take legal action against Bashir. Schaffel also delivered an interview with Debbie Rowe, the much-maligned mother of Michael’s two oldest children, whose generous assessment of her ex-husband’s character stood in marked contrast to what was being reported about their relationship in the media.

Though Schaffel was not able to include the interviews with the Arvizo family in what he was calling “the rebuttal video” (the cameraman who had shot those tapes was refusing to release them, claiming he had not been paid—at least not enough), executives at ABC’s rival networks were wowed by what they saw. Debunking the Bashir documentary might generate ratings that rivaled or even surpassed those that ABC had garnered. Fox eventually made the highest bid for what it would title Michael Jackson Take Two: The Footage You Were Never Meant to See and broadcast “the retaliatory special,” as People magazine called it, on February 23, less than three weeks after ABC aired the Bashir documentary. The Fox special not only stemmed much of the condemnation coming Michael’s way, but made him millions of dollars at a time when, as one associate put it, “he was dead broke on a cash basis.”

Schaffel put together a deal with Fox for a second documentary, this one titled Michael Jackson’s Home Movies, that would be broadcast in April, featuring family and friends such as Liz Taylor describing the sweetly naive man-child they knew and loved. Schaffel’s spreadsheet showed that Jackson would earn at least $15 million from the two videos, and perhaps as much as $20 million. Under the terms of their agreement, 20 percent of that money was Schaffel’s.

While waiting for the checks to arrive from New York and points east, Schaffel resumed his cash advances to Jackson. The first was made in February when Michael wanted to celebrate the Fox deal with a shopping spree. The paper bag he gave Michael was filled with $340,000 in cash, Schaffel said, because he knew how pent up Michael was, and knew also that nothing had a more calming effect on him than making an extravagant purchase. Schaffel gave Jackson another $100,000 for a shopping spree in March, then wrote Michael a check for $1 million in April. He needed $638,000 to pay for a piece of jewelry that Liz Taylor was demanding in exchange for agreeing to the use of an interview with her in the Home Movies video, Michael had explained, and another $250,000 that his mother Katherine insisted upon for her appearance in the video. The remainder was required to make the deposit on a new Rolls-Royce Phantom that he absolutely had to have. A week later, Schaffel gave Jackson an additional $130,000 to help him pay off the Rolls.

Of course it all sounded strange to outsiders when their relationship spilled into the courts four years later, Schaffel would say, but you had to understand the extraordinary character of Michael Jackson. Michael’s overwhelming charisma was combined with a detachment from conventional reality that made him at once enormously powerful and utterly helpless. During a trip to Las Vegas in 2003 they had checked into adjoining suites at the Mandarin Oriental, then headed to a business meeting in a conference room downstairs. Schaffel recalled: “After the meeting, I had to go to the bathroom, so I told Michael, ‘Just wait here a second.’ But, of course, Michael doesn’t want to wait, so he decides go back to his room on his own. But he doesn’t remember the room number or the floor or anything. He probably doesn’t even know what city we’re in. So he just walks up some stairs and starts knocking on doors, waiting for the bodyguards to open one.” As he raced to catch up, Schaffel remembered, he could see the hallway filling with excited people who were following Michael Jackson down the hallway. “I mean, the entire hotel is in an uproar,” Schaffel recalled, “and Michael just keeps moving from door to door, knocking on each one, getting more and more frantic to escape the crowd gathering behind him. I finally run up to him and say, ‘Michael, my God, stop!’ Then I have to lead him to the elevator, with all these people still following us, and get him upstairs. The point is, Michael would have just kept going until somebody showed up to take care of him. Like a lot of people, I wanted to be the one.”

Schaffel still trusted Michael implicitly but by May 2003 he was beginning to grow antsy about the wait to be paid his share of the profits from the sale of the two videos. On top of that, repayment of the money he had advanced to Michael was arriving behind schedule. Not wanting to bother the star with such petty concerns, Schaffel took them to Jackson’s attorneys. The lawyers at first said the money was coming in from Fox more slowly than anticipated and that nothing had been received so far from foreign distributors and DVD sales. When Schaffel pressed, saying he knew that Michael had received at least $9 million to date, the attorneys answered that Michael had other debts to pay and that they weren’t sure Schaffel had a valid contract to collect 20 percent of the video money anyway. Eventually, an agreement was struck that would pay Schaffel $1.5 million for his work on the videos: a $500,000 payment immediately, followed by ten installments of $50,000 each. Less than a month after Schaffel received that first half-million, though, Michael complained that his funds were already depleted, that creditors were hounding him, and that Bank of America was gouging him with a ridiculous rate of interest. What Michael “needed,” Schaffel knew, was to spend money; he gave Michael another $250,000 to go antique shopping in Beverly Hills. “Bear in mind that Marc was still receiving repayments and the installments he had been promised from the sale of the videos,” King would explain. “He understood Michael’s situation as a simple cash flow problem.”

“I knew better than anyone how much money was coming Michael’s way, just from the deals I made for him,” Schaffel said. “Besides the two videos I had done for him, I had signed a deal with one of the broadcast networks to do a one-time concert of all his hit songs that would pay $15.5 million. Plus, I had another deal for Michael to do his own television reality show. This was before the explosion of reality shows. We had an oral agreement with a network to do this show that was basically just about his everyday life. And that was going to be worth $5 million per episode, with the foreign rights and everything. I knew that could become a real money train. So the point is, I wasn’t worried about getting my money back, and then some.”

Schaffel gave Jackson another $100,000 for a shopping spree in August. Periodic repayments continued to be deposited in his bank account, and the $50,000 installment payments for his work on the rebuttal videos were arriving on schedule. On September 18, 2003, Schaffel recalled, Michael’s personal assistant Evvy Tavasci phoned to say that Michael needed $500,000, half of which would go to a Beverly Hills antique dealer who was threatening to sue him for nonpayment. Marc delivered another supersize order of French fries.

The late autumn of 2003 was shaping up as a turning point in Jackson’s life and career. Michael finally negotiated a break with Sony by agreeing to release a series of compilation albums. The first was to be called Number Ones and would include every song of his that had hit the top of the charts. Sony had also agreed to finance a series of music videos—Michael insisted they be called “short films”—that would accompany the record’s release in November 2003. As production for the first of those short films geared up, Schaffel and Wiesner were negotiating with Peter Morton, founder of the Hard Rock Cafe franchise, to do a show for him in Las Vegas sometime the following year. The real excitement in the Jackson camp, though, surrounded the six-month trip combining work and vacation that Michael planned to begin on November 22. He and his core entourage—Grace and the kids, Schaffel, Wiesner, and Michael’s publicist Stuart Backerman—would begin by heading to Europe, where, between scheduled events in Germany, Austria, and France, Michael planned to spend the holidays at Elizabeth Taylor’s Chalet Ariel in Gstaad, Switzerland. From there, he would be heading to South Africa to participate in the Nelson Mandela Tribute that U2’s Bono was organizing, then flying to Brazil. City officials in Rio de Janeiro had given Jackson permission to stage the first nonathletic event they had allowed in years on the grass floor of Maracaña Stadium, a nighttime performance of “One More Chance” in which Michael would be surrounded by two hundred thousand people holding lighted candles. Rio officials also wanted Michael to perform a concert on the beach for an audience they estimated would number two million people, “and we were negotiating the terms of that even as we prepared to leave for Europe,” Schaffel recalled.

Schaffel, Wiesner, and Backerman were all with Michael at the Mirage in Las Vegas during the third week of November, spending hours every day on the phone as they prepared for Michael’s departure, completely unaware that they were being listened to the entire time by deputies from the Santa Barbara County sheriff’s department. “They knew that Stuart and I would be leaving two days ahead of Michael to help set things up in Europe,” Schaffel said. “They probably even knew what had happened on the video with the Cascio kids.”

Jackson had come to Vegas accompanied by Eddie and Marie Nicole Cascio, the younger siblings of his longtime aide Frank Cascio. The family had been a big part of Michael’s life since the late eighties when he had met patriarch Dominic Cascio at the Palace Hotel in New York, where Cascio was working as concierge to the luxury suites. The Cascios were the sort of big-hearted, full-throated Italians Michael had been drawn to for as long as he could remember. He had fallen in love with the entire clan, recognizing them as the close-knit, loving family he had always wished he came from. The Cascios responded in kind, enveloping Michael in a rare experience of human connection that was at least slightly independent of his celebrity. Dominic and his wife, Connie, allowed Frank and Eddie to travel with Michael from the ages of thirteen and nine. Over the years Frank had worked for Michael in a variety of capacities, ranging from roadie to personal assistant, both on tour and at Neverland Ranch. Eddie and Marie Nicole had visited Neverland often as well, sometimes with their parents, sometimes not.

“There was a level of trust with the Cascios that I don’t think Michael had with anyone else,” Schaffel recalled. “They were his family.” It was the Cascios’ home in Franklin Lakes, New Jersey, to which Michael had retreated with his children after the 9/11 attacks. “They were who he went to whenever he wanted to feel safe,” Schaffel said. With their parents’ permission, Eddie and Marie Nicole had been removed from school (to be tutored privately at Michael’s expense) while they learned the dance routines that Michael had planned for the first video he would shoot for Number Ones.

“Michael promised the Cascio kids they would dance with him in the video,” Schaffel recalled. “The two of them worked so hard and were so excited about it. But after we met with the director and looked at the costumes and stuff, Michael said, ‘Ooh, I don’t know.’ He thought the whole idea lacked originality. He dragged Dieter and I into the trailer and said, ‘I can’t do this.’ We knew why—the director sucked. But then Michael said, ‘All right, I’ll just get it done and make Sony happy.’ Mainly, though, he didn’t want to disappoint the Cascio kids. But when he brought the kids in to dance with him, the director said, ‘Who are they?’ And Michael said, ‘They’re going to be dancing with me.’ So the director left and he got on the phone with Sony. Then he came back and asked if he could speak to me privately. When we were alone he told me, ‘We have a problem. Sony says they don’t want Michael in the video with kids.’ I said, ‘Well, I can tell you that these aren’t just dancers. These are what Michael considers his family.’ He says, ‘Are you going to tell Michael?’ I said, ‘Why am I telling him this? Sony should be telling him.’ So a short time later Tommy or someone from Sony calls, and the next thing I hear, five minutes later, is Michael shouting, ‘Marc, come to the trailer right now!’ Michael was so distraught. I mean he was bright red, he was pacing around the trailer, and then he just started picking things up and throwing them. And he said, ‘I am not doing one other thing if I can’t have these kids in the shoot with me. I’m leaving. We’re not doing this. Tell everyone they can go home.’”

On November 17, Number Ones was released to immediate success. Sony, realizing that the record would sell close to ten million copies worldwide—nearly half of those in the United States—immediately became solicitous, offering to assist Michael in any way it could during his six-month trip abroad. Things looked bright again.

“We were all still at the Mirage in Vegas,” Schaffel recalled. “I was in one of the penthouse suites, and Michael was in one of the villas down below. We were having a great time. We did an autograph signing at this novelty store at the Aladdin called the Art of Music, and we did the Radio Music Awards, which was where ‘What More Can I Give?’ was played in public for the first time. The crowd loved it. Michael was really happy.” Then, just as the entourage was preparing to leave for Europe, “the shit hit the fan,” Schaffel recalled.

On the morning of November 18, 2003, the Santa Barbara County sheriff’s department staged a massive raid on Neverland Ranch looking for evidence that would support charges of child molestation. A warrant was issued for Michael Jackson’s arrest that same day. At the Mirage, “it was absolute chaos,” Schaffel remembered. “Michael went nuts. I could hear it even up in my penthouse suite. Michael absolutely destroyed the villa he was in. I mean he threw everything in the place. He broke lamps, he broke furniture, he broke the art on the walls, you name it. He threw things through windows. He made so much noise that the Mirage sent its security, which got into it with Michael’s security. It was completely insane. And that, I would say, was the beginning of the end for Michael. I mean, that was the worst I’d ever seen him, by far. No comparison. Michael was a very strong person, very resilient. I’d seen him be upset, seen him cry, but he would bounce right back up. This time there was no bounce back. This time, I saw him break. Not just break down, but break. After the scene in the villa he didn’t even have the energy to get angry again. I’d have to call it a mental breakdown. He literally just lost it. You could wave your hand in front of him and he couldn’t see it. And it wasn’t drugs, not at first. The drugs came later, of course.”

So did the Nation of Islam. “They arrived on the scene pretty quickly and just took over,” Schaffel recalled. “One of Michael’s brothers called them. Leonard Muhammad came, and then Louis Farrakhan himself showed up. And they were feeding Michael this line that, ‘The Nation will never let anything happen to you. We will protect you.’ And Michael was so helpless that he just put him himself in their hands. It was a huge mistake.”

Schaffel flew back to LA that night. “When it first came out that they were talking about ‘a complainant,’ we knew who it would be,” Schaffel explained: Gavin Arvizo, the featured child in the Bashir documentary. “I knew I had video of Michael and [Gavin Arvizo] and his family, and I figured there was stuff on it that would help. But meanwhile Michael has to get out of the Mirage. They’re calling the cops to throw him out,” Schaffel said. Michael and his security staff were in Schaffel’s Lincoln Navigator, driving around Las Vegas, being followed by camera crews in satellite trucks, with TV helicopters whirling overhead. It was all over the television, even in LA. “He was like a hunted animal,” remembered Schaffel, who found Michael and his entourage a place to stay. Marc had become friends with the owner of the Green Valley Ranch, a hotel and casino resort just south of Las Vegas, in Henderson, while scouting the place as a location for one of Michael’s videos. “I called, and the guy was as nice as could be,” Schaffel remembered. “He extended every courtesy to Michael for the next three days.” Michael phoned him a couple of times from Henderson, but was incapable of conversation, Schaffel recalled. “He still sounded completely broken, completely hollow. All he could say was, ‘How can they do this? How can they say this?’ I don’t know if the Nation was talking to him, or telling him not to talk to me, but he was completely distracted by whatever was going on around him. I had a real sinking feeling.”

Grace Rwaramba and Dieter Wiesner phoned later that evening to ask if Schaffel would wire $30,000 in cash because the security guards were threatening to quit for nonpayment of their wages. “You have to send the money to me, not Michael,” Grace told him, according to Schaffel, “because Michael will use it to go shopping instead of paying the guards.” Schaffel wired the cash but it was the last order of fries he ever delivered to Michael Jackson.

By the end of that week, Jackson was forced to report to Santa Barbara County for arrest. Schaffel would not see him again until almost three years later, in London. Michael did phone him one more time, though, from some place where he was staying in Los Angeles. “He said, ‘The Brotherhood’—he always referred to the people from the Nation as the Brotherhood—‘the Brotherhood feels that—no offense to you, Marc, I love you very, very much—but the Brotherhood feels that I need to only communicate with other people in the Brotherhood. But it’s just temporary, and it’s something I need to do because they’re going to protect me. Don’t take it personally.’ I got pretty concerned when he told me what they were telling him. Michael said, ‘You know, I’m not going to have a problem.’ And I said, ‘Why is that?’ And he said, ‘Because the Brotherhood said that if they indict me, and if they try to find me guilty, that every black person in the country will riot in the streets.’ I said, ‘Michael, I really think you need to reconsider this advice that you’re getting.’ But he said good-bye and hung up on me a moment later, and he never called me again.”

Dieter Wiesner ran into similar problems with the Nation of Islam. “For the first days, I was still with Michael every day and every night,” Wiesner recalled. “I even brought him to the police when he had to be arrested, but then the Nation of Islam took over. Michael was scared and they used that. Leonard Muhammad had complete control of him for a while. They wouldn’t let me see him or even speak to him. So I went back to Germany. And Michael called and said, ‘Dieter, did you hear from my mouth that you are out?’ I said no. And he said, ‘You should come back.’ So I did. But then Muhammad and his people brought him to different places and wouldn’t let me go to Michael. It was worse than Sony. So I went back to Germany again and I didn’t get to talk to Michael after that. I was his manager. I had the contracts. But I couldn’t even speak to him.”

Schaffel bided his time for months while still collecting the $50,000 installment payments he was owed for the rebuttal videos. “Marc honestly thought that Michael was just waiting for the smoke to clear, and that he’d be in touch when he could,” Howard King explained. In June 2004, though, Michael’s brother Randy Jackson became Michael’s new “chief financial advisor,” and immediately stopped the payments to Schaffel. By that point, according to Schaffel’s accounting, he had received a total of $6,283,875 from Jackson, which left him $2,275,889 short of the $8,559,764 he had given Michael out of his own bank accounts.

“We filed our lawsuit almost reluctantly,” King said. “Marc was convinced that Michael didn’t know they weren’t paying him.” Be that as it may, Schaffel demonstrated that he intended to get his money back, whatever it took, in November 2004, when he lodged a $3 million claim against Jackson. The timing was what gave the court filing such a sharp edge: Michael had just been indicted by the grand jury in Santa Barbara. In Schaffel’s lawsuit, he charged that “Jackson’s frequent excessive use of drugs and alcohol impelled him into irrational demands for large amounts of money and extravagant possessions.”

It was King’s idea to have Marc go on Good Morning America for an interview by Cynthia McFadden during which a series of taped phone messages Michael Jackson had left for Schaffel would be played to the American public. “We were trying to make people aware that Marc wasn’t just some guy who passed through Michael Jackson’s life in a week,” King explained. “And that he was seriously involved with Michael. We had thirty phone messages in all. Most were Michael asking Marc for money. ‘Marc, I really need . . .’ ‘Marc, I really want to buy . . .’ Some were very strident, very militant, very contrary to the soft-spoken high-pitched voice we know. ‘I’m insisting that we must do this. We must capture this opportunity.’ He sounded a lot more like a high-powered business executive than the meek and mild superstar.” The ones ABC preferred were those that had Michael pleading for money. “Hello, Marc, it’s Michael,” one message began. “Please, please, never let me down. I really like you. I love you . . . Marc, I really need you to get, um, seven million dollars for me as soon as possible . . . Seven, seven and a half, um, as an advance.”

Now that Michael knew he hadn’t been paid, Schaffel insisted to King, the money would arrive. There was no reply to Schaffel’s TV appearance, though, and all the filing of the lawsuit brought was a cursory denial of the allegations by Jackson’s attorneys at the courthouse in Santa Monica where King had positioned the case. “Michael didn’t even show up at the first two depositions we scheduled,” King recalled. “So we go to court to get an order. Mesereau is there, and suggests to the judge that if we would go to where Michael was at they would pay all the expenses. The judge sends us out into the hallway to talk, and I tell Tom, ‘Look, I’m Jewish. I’m not going to Bahrain. But I’ll go anywhere in Europe that has a nonstop flight so long as we’re talking four first-class tickets so that I can bring an assistant and Marc can bring an assistant. And you guys pay for everything.’”

It was agreed they would meet in London. The “assistant” King brought with him was his wife Lisa. Schaffel’s traveling companion was Dieter Wiesner, someone “who adored Michael more than anyone alive, including Marc,” as King described him. It was intimidating, King admitted, to step off that elevator at the Dorchester and realize that he was about to depose a person who had an entire floor of one of the world’s great hotels all to himself. “They usher us into this absolutely spectacular suite,” the attorney recalled, “and I learn that Michael’s own suite is right next door. He comes in just a moment later, dressed all nice, and sits at the table, but then begins to complain about the lighting. He doesn’t want the sunlight on his skin or in his eyes. So it takes about five minutes to get the drapes adjusted the way he wants, and then we’re ready to go.” But first Tom Mesereau insisted that Dieter Wiesner could not be in the room. “Dieter has come all the way to London, and the whole way there all he can think about is what it will be like when he finally gets to see Michael again,” King said. “I mean, he still loves the guy.”

“We knew Wiesner was probably going to file a lawsuit against Michael at some point,” Mesereau countered, “so it just wasn’t appropriate to have him listening in.”

“Dieter had to go down to the lobby and sit there drinking coffee for the next ten hours,” King recalled. “It broke his heart.” Upstairs, Jackson was cool to Schaffel. “He said hello, but didn’t shake Marc’s hand,” King recalled. Schaffel grew especially glum when Jackson answered a question about his “discovery” that Marc had directed and produced gay porn films. “I was shown a videotape by the lawyer [Branca] and I was shocked,” Michael said. “He was in that whole circle, and I didn’t know.”

“I saw Marc was hurt,” King remembered, “and told him, ‘It’s war, baby.’”

Schaffel had imagined that when the two of them saw each other again, all the good memories would come flooding back and somehow everything would be put right. “We had so many great times together,” Schaffel explained. “Michael used to stay at my house in Calabasas all the time. Grace and the bodyguards would come with him, get him set up, then leave, and either Michael by himself or with the kids would stay there alone for days.” Michael used to love to stroll over to the Commons, a large mall lined with restaurants, theaters, and shops that was just down the hill from Schaffel’s home. He wore disguises, but not the kind that would call attention to himself. “No veil or surgical mask,” Schaffel said. “Just a baseball cap he wore with his hair tucked up into it, and sunglasses. Part of why it worked was that no one would expect to see Michael Jackson in a place like this. He would go into that movie theater right over there, all by himself, walk all around here, all by himself. He loved being able to do that.”

His favorite memory of having Michael at the house, Schaffel said, was the time he stepped out into the backyard and saw Michael with his head thrust into the shrubbery on the border of the property. “The neighbors below me were having a birthday party for one of their kids and Michael was snooping through the bushes,” Schaffel remembered. “All of a sudden I hear some kid scream, ‘Hey, Mommy, look, it’s Michael Jackson!’ And Michael backs away from the bushes like a little kid who’s in trouble. I hear the kid still telling his mom it’s Michael Jackson. So I look through, and the mom says, ‘Oh, no, that’s just our neighbor Marc.’ Michael laughed for an hour afterward.”

It was all business, though, around the table in the suite at the Dorchester. “I don’t think [Michael] even looked at Marc,” remembered King, who was asking all the questions. He tried to fight it, King said, but found himself being much more impressed by Michael Jackson as a witness than he had anticipated. “Michael is very poised, very charming, very aware of the camera,” King recalled. Jackson insisted that he be allowed a break every hour to change his shirt and “refresh.” “The guy spent the first three shirt changes knowing nothing,” King recalled. “But then I had all these phone messages he’d left, plus all these documents and letters he signed. I will say that Michael, to his credit, said right off the top that if Marc was owed money he should be paid. He said he just didn’t know if Marc was owed. And Marc believed him, still believed him. I didn’t. I had recognized by then that Michael is way smarter than he’s made to look in the media. No way he didn’t know. Still, he handled the questions really well, and was very witty throughout. I have reading glasses and when I took them off to look at him, he said, ‘Howard, I know when you take off the glasses you’re really serious.’ He’s very charming, and of course, he’s Michael Jackson. It affects you.”

Mesereau thought King was oblivious to the poignancy of the situation. “The thing that struck me in that deposition, as Marc Schaffel sat across from us, was the sadness in Michael’s eyes,” the attorney explained. “It really hit me then that Michael went through life knowing that anybody he developed a relationship with was eventually going to sue him. And yet he kept hoping it would turn out differently each time.”

During one of the breaks, King’s wife pulled him aside and said, “I think you don’t want women on that jury.” When her husband asked why, Lisa King answered, “The whole time, I felt the need to hug him and be his mother. He looks so sweet and vulnerable sitting there that you want to take care of him.”

For King himself, the moment of insight came during the last break of the day. While Michael was off changing his shirt and refreshing himself, the attorney happened to look down at the floor beneath the chair where Michael had been sitting. “And I saw that with his feet he had chewed up that carpet mightily,” the attorney recalled. “I mean he had literally dug a hole in it with his heels. And it sort of shocked me. Because all day he had looked as cool and calm and collected as you could imagine. That was absolutely how he appeared on camera. But, like us, the camera had only seen what was above the tabletop. Somehow, Michael had managed to channel this tremendous amount of tension he had in his body into his legs and feet, every last bit of it, so that from the waist up he looked perfectly serene.” He stared in wonder at that fist-sized ball of carpet nap beneath Jackson’s chair for several moments, King recalled, “and I thought, ‘Wow, this guy is good.’”