He had become convinced that it was time to “take control of my own life,” Michael Jackson announced as the end of the 1980s approached. Almost immediately, he began to shed the very people who had been the architects of his enormous popular success. Among the first to go was Quincy Jones, the producer of his three previous solo albums. Jackson resented the credit Jones had taken for Thriller, especially since Jones had tried to keep “Billie Jean” off the album. Jones believed there was a simpler explanation: “I think at one point he felt I wasn’t in touch with the market anymore,” Jones would tell CBS News anchorwoman Katie Couric in 2009. “I remember when we were doing Bad I had DMC in the studio because I could see what was coming with hip-hop. And [Michael] was telling Frank Dileo ‘I think Quincy’s losing it and doesn’t understand the market anymore. He doesn’t know that rap is dead.’ This is 1987. Rap hadn’t even started and by 1992 it was all rap and at that time Michael was going after all the big rappers, Teddy Riley, all the rap producers, to spend five times what they were paying me to produce his records.”
Michael then discharged Dileo. As his manager, Frank was adept at massaging Jackson’s ego at the same time he emerged as one of the very few people who could disagree with Michael and make it stick. The best-known story about the two involved Jackson chasing his manager around a hotel room by brandishing his pet boa constrictor; Dileo reportedly pulled out a gun and threatened to shoot the damn snake if Michael didn’t put it down.
The five-year run of success that Jackson and Dileo enjoyed together ended with a thud, though, in early 1989. The media reported that Dileo had been fired for botching the domestic release of Michael’s ninety-minute video Moonwalker, which would not be distributed theatrically anywhere but in Japan. The Jackson family was furious with Dileo for letting Michael spend $27 million on the project; twenty-five people had worked for a solid six months on a four-minute-forty-five-second section constructed around “Leave Me Alone.” Dileo was prominently featured on the Badalbum jacket, appearing with Michael in a large photograph that bore the caption “another great team.” When Bad failed to become “the biggest record ever,” as Michael had predicted publicly and often, he began to divest himself of everyone associated with it, Jones and Dileo among them.
John Branca was the next to go and his departure foreshadowed Jackson’s future even more ominously than the exits of Jones and Dileo. David Geffen was the agent of this specific dismissal, but the pattern was perhaps more important than the particulars. Again and again, Michael would allow a new and exciting voice not only to catch his ear, but also to cancel out the advice of a proven familiar. Anyone who knew how he had been raised understood that loyalty was of little value among the Jacksons. Branca, though, had been instrumental to Jackson in securing the ATV music catalog. He had a handshake agreement with Robert Holmes à Court in the spring of 1985, Branca would recall, but then the Australian “fucked me” by making a more lucrative deal with rival bidders Charles Koppelman and Martin Bandier. Branca maneuvered behind their backs with a phone call to Irving Azoff, chief of MCA, which was putting up the money for that deal, convincing Azoff that a favor to Michael Jackson at this particular moment would be repaid many times over. When Azoff pulled the funding for the Koppleman-Bandier deal, the catalog was sold to the next highest bidder, Jackson. The only concession Branca had to make to Holmes à Court was an agreement that the Australian’s daughter would retain rights to “Penny Lane” as what, according to Branca, Holmes à Court termed a “souvenir.” Five years later, though, Geffen began whispering that Michael should have a better deal at CBS Records and that Branca’s close relationship with Walter Yetnikoff was the main reason he didn’t. In the years since closing the ATV deal, Branca had made Jackson tens of millions in various sponsorship and merchandising deals. The copromoter of the Victory tour, Chuck Sullivan, had paid Michael $18 million in 1985 to develop a clothing line. A year later, Branca negotiated a deal with Pepsi that paid his client $15 million for the rights to sponsor a Michael Jackson solo tour. In 1988, Branca secured an advance of $10 million from a company called L.A. Gear to endorse its sneakers. A year after that, he salvaged the Moonwalker debacle by negotiating a ridiculously lucrative contract for Michael on rentals and sales of the video, a deal that resulted in Jackson’s actually earning a profit on the seemingly doomed project. Michael began to resent the attorney, though, when Geffen and others explained to him how much of that money Branca was putting in his own pocket, and how he was using his relationship with Michael Jackson to feather his nest with other clients. In late 1990, it was announced that John Branca was being replaced as Jackson’s lawyer by a team of attorneys who were closely associated with Geffen. Yetnikoff was fired by CBS Records’ parent company, Sony, a short time later.
All of this had occurred while Michael was sinking deeper and deeper into a self-imposed isolation. He had separated from both his family and the city he had called home from the age of ten when he purchased Neverland Ranch in 1988 and left Los Angeles to live in the Santa Ynez Valley, more than a hundred miles up the coast, just north of Santa Barbara. He had first admired the property while Paul McCartney and his wife Linda were staying there during the filming of the “Say Say Say” video in 1982. It was called Sycamore Ranch back then, nearly three thousand acres where Figueroa Mountain Road wound through lush rolling hills to an estate that had been built to the lavish and exacting standards of a wealthy California developer named William Bone. The 13,000-square-foot main residence, set among one of the most beautiful groves of live oaks in all of California, was a hybrid Tudor mansion and Dutch farmhouse, with brick and masonry walls built around massive wooden beams that framed leaded glass windows, topped by a beautifully gabled roof. There were seventeen rooms on the first floor, sixteen rooms upstairs, and an enormous wine cellar below ground. Branca had handled a lengthy negotiation with Bone, eventually reaching a deal that allowed Jackson to buy the estate for $17 million, a little more than half the asking price. Jackson rewarded his attorney with a Rolls-Royce convertible. Almost immediately after taking possession of the property, Jackson renamed the place Neverland Valley Ranch and made it over into a signal declaration of wealth, success, and the power to create a private world in his own image.
The ranch in Santa Barbara County, just a short drive from Ronald Reagan’s “Western White House,” was far enough removed from the home he had grown up in—for his first ten years, anyway—to support the Jackson family’s rags-to-riches story’s most mythic dimensions. By the time the Bad tour was over, Michael’s personal fortune had grown to considerably more than $100 million and he was looking for something that would awe his visitors in the same way he had been awed when he first saw Berry Gordy’s staggeringly luxurious Bel Air palace, or Paul McCartney’s stunning spread in East Sussex. Neverland Ranch would amply serve that purpose.
Branca warned Jackson that he was unlikely to recoup the $55 million he had invested in “improving” Neverland if or when he sold the place, but Michael was by then indifferent to such concerns. Reporters invited to tour Neverland during its 1990 public unveiling most often began by inspecting the towering statue of Mercury (the Roman god of profit, trade, and commerce) in the driveway outside the mansion, then climbed a hill out back that led to a near replica of the Main Street train station at Disneyland, with a floral clock that was barely less magnificent than the one Walt Disney had designed for his own park. There, they caught a C. P. Huntington–style train out past a two-story fort outfitted with water cannons and a nearby Indian village replete with teepees, a totem pole, and full-size-replica Native Americans, to the amusement park where a carousel with custom-made hand-painted animals awaited young visitors. There was also a Ferris wheel, a bumper car arena, a three-story-high slide, and Michael’s favorite, a roller coaster called the Zipper. Nearby was a zoo where horses and zebras ran together, and buffalo roamed among ostriches, deer, llamas, and giraffes. The “rec building” housed two floors of arcade games, while Neverland’s private lake offered kids the choice between a swan boat, a canoe, and a red dinghy. The train’s final stop was the $2 million Neverland Cinema, with a fully stocked candy counter and a glassed-in viewing booth with reclining beds to welcome seriously ill youngsters.
“Michael Jackson is very fond of children,” Rolling Stone’s Michael Goldberg observed in his report of the trip to Neverland, without a hint of hidden meaning. Goldberg was shown a room on the upstairs floor of the main house where a canopied bed was covered with dozens and dozens of dolls along with jack-in-the-boxes featuring each of the major characters from The Wizard of Oz sitting on shelves beside it. Another room was jammed full of children’s games and toys, coloring books, and crayons. The “train room” featured an enormous and elaborate Lionel set, surrounded by cardboard cutouts of Bart Simpson, Roger Rabbit, and E.T. A pile of Peter Pan, Mickey Mouse, and Bambi quilts lay on the floor, in case the kids staying over wanted to have a slumber party. Goldberg was clearly more captivated by the “exquisitely furnished” first floor, which included an oak-paneled library stocked with rare editions of Charles Dickens, Mark Twain, and Rudyard Kipling, a living room anchored by a custom-made Bosendorfer rosewood piano, and a den warmed by a stone fireplace. Rolling Stone’s reporter refrained from mentioning the numerous life-size paintings of Michael that hung on the interior walls of the main house. Nearly every one showed him striking a heroic pose while costumed in brightly colored but vaguely military uniforms that suggested the dandified garb of nineteenth-century European royalty, replete with cape, sword, ruffled collar, and, very often, a crown.
Goldberg was among those who insisted that one couldn’t fully appreciate the magic of Neverland unless you saw it at night, when the whole place looked as if it had been “sprinkled with a kind of high-tech fairy dust.” Strands of white bulbs ran up the trunks of the oak trees and out the limbs to the branches, blinking on and off at intervals so that the glittering trees seemed to materialize out of thin air one moment, then vanish the next. The sound of music was nearly deafening. After its release in 1995, Michael’s song “Childhood” played constantly on the carousel, while cartoon soundtracks blared from the speakers astride a JumboTron the size of a drive-in movie screen. Songs filled the air even when one wandered off to explore the grounds; on lawns and in flowerbeds, speakers disguised as gray boulders poured forth show tunes until nearly midnight. A winding yellow brick road illuminated by recessed gold-color lights led to an amusement park that was lit against the night sky, while the main house, the lake, the bronze statues of young boys beating drums, playing accordions, or shaking tambourines were lit with strobes that lent the entire scene a sense of Brigadoon-like appearance and disappearance.
Michael’s favorite place in Neverland was the three-turreted tree house that could be entered only by climbing the trunk. It was there, at a spot overlooking the lake, that he had written most of the songs for his new album, Dangerous. The entire music industry was in shock at a report that Jackson had spent $10 million of CBS Records’ money on the production of Dangerous, five times what it cost even the most profligate bands to make a record. Michael publicly reveled in the commercial success of Dangerous, even as he privately winced at the mixed critical reception. The attempt to replicate his earlier successes was painfully obvious to those who panned the album. The song “Who Is It” was filled with sonic hooks almost identical to the ones Michael and Quincy Jones had used on “Billie Jean,” they said, while “Heal the World” seemed like little more than a rewrite of “We Are the World.” The New York Times called Dangerous Jackson’s “least confident” solo album. The Los Angeles Times asked, “How dangerous can a man be who literally wants to please everyone?” Still, Dangerous debuted at #1 on the Billboard album chart and remained in the top ten more than a year later. Record company executives were most impressed that more than three-quarters of Dangerous’s sales had been made outside the United States.
Michael Jackson was the most international music star ever and in recognition Sony had secured his future with a contract that was the most lucrative in the history of the entertainment industry. The $65 million guarantee was but an advance on a deal that could be worth $1 billion to Jackson, according to the Sony press release that announced it. Jackson had become the first artist in any medium to be given 50 percent of profits, or even close to that amount. That was on top of the 25 percent royalty he would receive for each retail sale, plus a signing bonus of $4 million and $1 million per year to run his own record company. Sony had also agreed to put up an additional $2.2 million per year in “administrative costs,” plus more than $10 million to pay for music videos, and honored the singer’s ambition to be a movie star by including provisions that guaranteed him a fee of $5 million for every film he appeared in, plus a large percentage of the gross receipts. “Michael is the greatest superstar in the music industry,” Sony senior vice president Ron Wilcox told the Los Angeles Times, “and the contract is justified by his past achievements, existing talent, and future potential.”
Jackson was now wealthy almost beyond imagining. The ATV catalog was doubling in value annually, spinning off millions in earnings. Dollars were flowing out of his accounts in prodigious amounts, but still not nearly as rapidly as they were flooding in. Michael was watching his fortune grow, keeping a constant eye on cash flow, and paying close attention to accounting statements. “The bookkeeper we hired during Invincible was the same bookkeeper Michael had back in the Thriller days,” said Marc Schaffel, “and she told me that back then Michael would check the complete balance down to the dollar in his bank account, every day. That she would write the checks and deliver them to Michael and he would sign each one personally. She said there were times he would see a bill and he wouldn’t sign the check, that he would call the vendor and ask them, ‘Why is your bill $50,000? You’re charging me too much.’ And then he would go back and tell her to make the check for $40,000. She said he knew every dollar that was going in and out. It amazed me because he was so far removed from that when I met him.”
Michael was in Asia, near the end of the Dangerous tour in the summer of 1993, when word came that he had been accused of sexually molesting thirteen-year-old Jordan Chandler, and that authorities in both Los Angeles and Santa Barbara counties had initiated criminal investigations. He canceled his remaining dates and soon after checked into a rehabilitation facility to deal with what was said to be a prescription drug addiction, then returned to the United States several weeks later to discover that the floor had fallen out from under his entire life.
It was Michael’s misfortune that this first “child sex scandal” had broken the year before O. J. Simpson cut his wife’s throat, at the very moment when cable news and tabloid culture were recognizing their perverse synergy. Jackson’s singular strangeness seemed to make anything possible, and the dollars dangled by various editors and producers attracted a slew of “insiders” who sold the entertainer out for whatever they could get. Two former Neverland security guards received $100,000 to tell Hard Copy that they were fired because they knew too much about the singer’s relationships with young boys. Later, in court, both men admitted they had made up most of their story. Jackson’s former maid Blanca Francia took $20,000 for telling Hard Copy that she had seen Michael naked with young boys, including her own son, then contradicted that claim in interviews with the police and Jackson’s attorneys. Francia later threatened to file a lawsuit that squeezed a $2 million settlement out of the singer. Jackson’s former secretary Orietta Murdoch and his ex-head of security Robert Wegner sold separate stories suggesting that Jackson had been sexually involved with a pair of Australian kids, who each adamantly denied it.
Being stabbed in the back by those he let close to him changed Jackson in ways that would prove profoundly destructive. He began to lose faith in everyone around him, and to reach out for the kindness of strangers who wanted only to get their fingers in his pockets. In a search for reassurance that grew as ceaseless as it was unsuccessful, he became prey to every sort of charlatan. Inspecting his bank statements and reviewing his accounting reports was now next to impossible. He cycled in and out of an addiction to the synthetic opiates he had begun to take while recovering from the Pepsi commercial fire in 1984. His need to numb himself became consuming in 1993, after he endured the most mortifying experience of his life, being forced to strip naked from the waist down so that police could photograph his genitals. The purpose of the exercise was to compare the results to pictures and descriptions provided by Jordie Chandler. Now, even the short length of this painfully shy celebrity’s pubic hair was part of the scandal that engulfed him.
Jackson found it more and more difficult to work. He was paying out huge fees and making enormous settlements to try to contain an avalanche of litigation, and was billed tens of thousands every month by the PR consultants he hired to counter bad publicity. He was increasingly susceptible to flatterers and enablers. Millions of dollars were still pouring in each year but now even more was pouring out.
He did manage to complete his double album HIStory for a 1995 release but was not encouraged by the reception. Worldwide sales were barely more than half of what Dangerous had done. HIStory was the first album ever to sell twenty million copies and be considered a failure. Some major critics were openly dismissive. The New York Times’s Jon Pareles built his review around the assertion that, “It has been a long time since Michael Jackson was simply a performer. He’s the main asset of his own corporation, which is a profitable subsidiary of Sony.”
At Sony they were starting to wonder about that last part. Jackson had spent most of the millions allotted for his future video productions on the “teaser” he shot for HIStory in Hungary. “The production company would call me in the middle of the night and say, ‘Michael wants more troops,’” his marketing executive Dan Beck told the Times. By the end of that year, Jackson found himself so short of cash that he was forced to sell Sony a half-interest in the ATV catalog for $100 million, about a quarter of what it would be worth a few years later. He had been able at least to retain 51 percent of the catalog and control of the most profitable part, the Beatles songs, and in the years that followed Sony added any number of classic songs to the package, material that reached across a range stretching from Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind” to Joe Diffie’s “Third Rock from the Sun.” Sony also guaranteed Jackson a minimum income of $6.5 million per year from the licensing rights to the catalog’s songs. In 2001, when 1, a collection of the Beatles’ #1 hits, sold more than twenty million units worldwide, Jackson’s share of the profits was $9 million. It still wasn’t enough to keep him afloat.
His dreams of movie stardom had died in the Jordan Chandler drama but Michael refused to accept it, writing one six- or seven-figure check after another to pay for video projects such as a thirty-five-minute film called Ghosts that he cowrote with Stephen King and shot in 1997 with special effects wizard Stan Winston, only to see it dismissed by critics as a “vanity project.” All told, he would spend an estimated $65 million on video productions during the 1990s and receive little in return but more bad press. Despite a net worth that had been estimated as high as $1 billion, he was struggling to service an increasingly massive debt. Branca made a deal with Sony that netted Michael a quick $25 million in cash, but the price was a reversal of their ownership positions in the ATV catalog. Now the company owned 51 percent of the song titles and Jackson was the minority partner. By 1998, Michael had depleted a $90 million loan from NationsBank taken out two years earlier and was forced to bring Branca back to negotiate a new $140 million loan from Bank of America. That money was gone before a year had passed so Jackson negotiated a $30 million line of credit with the bank that was maxed out within a few months. In 2000, he managed to have his B of A loan raised to $200 million, but now the bank was taking advantage of his financial distress by demanding higher rates of interest.
He began to oscillate wildly between a series of financial advisors, many of them either inept or on the make. One of those who tried to organize his affairs was Al Malnik, a superrich Florida attorney who was best known for his past association with organized crime kingpin Meyer Lansky. Even Malnik, though, couldn’t convince Michael to curb his spending. “There was no planning in terms of allocations,” Malnik would explain in a deposition connected to one of the many lawsuits filed against Jackson. “For Michael it was whatever he wanted, at the time he wanted.” Jackson seemed “bewildered” whenever he tried to discuss money matters, said Malnik, who had tried to explain to Michael that flying to London for a weekend of shopping was one thing, while renting a private jet to carry an entourage and renting an entire floor of a five-star hotel to house them while he did so was quite another. By Malnik’s estimate, Michael was spending about $8 million per year just on travel and antiques.
At Neverland, it was costing the star $4 million per annum to keep employees who ranged from carpenters to snake handlers on the payroll. Michael’s advisor Rabbi Shmuley Boteach got what was for him a shocking display of Jackson’s extravagance in December 2000 when he learned that Michael, who was staying with his entourage at the Four Seasons in New York, had continued to rent an entire floor at the hotel during a nearly month-long trip to Neverland for the holidays. Why didn’t you vacate the rooms while you were gone and save yourself a few hundred thousand dollars? Boteach asked. “What were we supposed to do with our stuff?” Michael wanted to know.
Shopping and spending had become for Michael as addictive as any opiate. Those who worked for him described seeing Jackson leaf through a magazine and order every single product advertised in it. He ran up a bill at Celebrity Costumes for just under $100,000 in a single year. In 1998, he reportedly became the first to place an order for a $75,000 per bottle “limited edition” perfume being licensed as “the ultimate symbol of indulgence.” The “heavenly scent” confected from roses, chocolate, and musk would be sold in a flask made from platinum, gold, and diamonds, packaged in a walnut box manufactured by the same company that did the woodwork for Rolls-Royce interiors, a container that could be opened only with one of the gold, diamond, and ruby keys that Graff jewelers was crafting for that sole purpose, according to the press release announcing that Michael Jackson had already placed a deposit on two bottles, one for himself and one for his dear friend Elizabeth Taylor.
In 1999, Michael paid $1.54 million at auction for the Oscar that producer David O. Selznick had received for Gone with the Wind. Less than a year later, Beverly Hills jeweler David Orgell sued Jackson for nonpayment on a $1.9 million Vacheron watch. The entertainer tried to return the timepiece but Orgell said it was scratched. They settled in 2001, and the very next day Jackson used the Vacheron as collateral on another loan from Bank of America. Soon after this, he submitted the winning bid at auction on a pair of nineteenth-century French paintings but was forced to return the art when Sotheby’s sued him for the outstanding balance of $1.6 million.
Jackson had shown such remarkable business acumen as a young man, skillfully selecting collaborators, representatives, and advisors. Now approaching middle age, he seemed irresistibly drawn to projects that most of the press and much of the public found laughable. In 1996, Jackson flew to Paris to meet the Saudi prince Al-Waleed bin Talal and join him in the announcement of a “family values” global entertainment empire whose projects included plans to create a theme park home for all British bovines afflicted with mad cow disease. Soon after, the singer showed up in Warsaw, where he announced the $500 million World of Childhood amusement park he planned to build with the cooperation of the Polish government. According to Malnik, Jackson’s serial advisors managed to lose $50 million of his money in the 1990s alone on a series of “bizarre” projects that never came to fruition. Two of those advisors were Dieter Wiesner and Ronald Konitzer, who had collaborated with Jackson on a series of grandiose near misses that began with the marketing of a sport cola they called “Mystery Drink.” Wiesner and Konitzer went on to use the singer’s name in promotions for a giant resort near Victoria Falls in Zimbabwe, and for a huge “Majestic Kingdom” theme park in Detroit. By the end of 2000, the press openly mocked any announcement that involved Michael Jackson.
For years, virtually every contract involving Jackson had been freighted with assorted side deals in which various “representatives” pocketed enormous fees for persuading him to sign this or that agreement. Hundreds of thousands of dollars changed hands, almost always under the table, while huge fees were taken off the top by a carousel of attorneys and managers.
In 2001, when Michael LaPerruque became Michael’s new chief of security, he discovered that most of the guards at Neverland were doubling and tripling their salaries by offering to go shopping for Jackson, using Michael’s name to purchase duplicates of the high-end items he wanted, ranging from electronics to jewelry, then having the seconds sent to their own homes. After LaPerruque left Neverland in 2004, he was replaced by Chris Carter, a handsome young African-American man whom the entertainer had spotted while strolling through a Las Vegas casino. As his new head of security, Carter was principally useful to Jackson for his ability to obtain the antianxiety drug Xanax under an assortment of fictitious names. Within the year, Carter’s next-in-command was an eighteen-year-old surfer named Joey Jeszeck whom Jackson hired upon meeting him in a skateboard shop near Neverland. After Jackson dismissed Carter, Neverland’s former security chief readily agreed to testify for the prosecution at the 2005 criminal trial, but was unable to answer when called, having been arrested in Las Vegas on an assortment of felony charges that included armed robbery and kidnapping.
The atmosphere around Jackson grew murkier still when his brother Jermaine introduced the Nation of Islam into his life after the filing of the criminal charges in 2003. Various insiders who found themselves suddenly on the outside claimed that Louis Farrakhan’s son-in-law Leonard Muhammad had not only taken charge of Jackson’s security detail (forcing out LaPerruque), but was also managing his business affairs. The tensions this created boiled over in late 2003 when Jackson’s “chief spokesperson,” Stuart Backerman, abruptly quit his job, citing “strategic differences.” It was widely believed that Backerman had refused to work with Muhammad and the NOI. Later, the PR man admitted this to a London tabloid, the Sun: “I quit because the Nation of Islam had infiltrated Michael’s world. I was the only one who was left standing at this point, because Michael wasn’t in his right mind.”
Stories linking Jackson to the NOI and suggesting he shared Farrakhan’s anti-Semitism further eroded the singer’s shrinking public support. In the media, mentions of Jackson’s career were now almost always coupled with the word “decline.” What may have been Michael Jackson’s saddest career moment came in August 2003, three months before the raid on Neverland, when he celebrated his forty-fifth birthday with a public event that only served to emphasize his reduced status. While hundreds of young people from South Central, East LA, and the San Fernando Valley paid upward of $30 per ticket for seats in the old downtown Los Angeles movie palace where the concert celebration was held, nearly every one of the spots inside the velvet ropes up front reserved for A-list guests remained empty. Instead of Stevie Wonder and Diana Ross, Jackson’s fans found themselves being entertained by obscure performers who lip-synched his greatest hits. And when the birthday boy himself took the stage at the end of the evening to lead a rendition of “We Are the World,” he was accompanied not by the likes of Bruce Springsteen and Ray Charles, but by an assortment of Michael Jackson impersonators.
Unable or unwilling (even those closest to him weren’t sure) to generate any fresh stream of income, Jackson was falling further behind financially. More and more of the people he did business with were not getting paid. Some of those who said he stiffed them not only took the singer to court, but also used the media to gain leverage. No one did more damage in that regard than Myung Ho Lee, the South Korean–born financial advisor who claimed to have managed Jackson’s business affairs from 1997 to 2001, and sued the singer in early 2003, demanding $13 million in back pay. In papers filed with the Los Angeles Superior Court, Lee described Jackson as “a ticking financial time bomb waiting to explode at any moment.” The singer fought back with a countersuit against Lee in which he claimed his signature had been forged on a contract and that it was Lee who owed the millions, siphoned from Jackson’s bank accounts. Michael complained to those around him that Lee had made unauthorized and disastrous investments in various dot-com ventures (most notably the gaming company Tickets.com) that cost him a fortune when the boom went bust. Lee answered by collaborating with Maureen Orth on an article for Vanity Fair that convinced hundreds of thousands of upscale readers that Jacko really was Wacko. In the summer of 2000, Lee told Orth, Jackson had paid an African witch doctor named Baba $150,000 to conduct a “voodoo ritual” in Switzerland that was intended to result in the deaths of twenty-five people on an “enemies list” topped by the names of David Geffen and Steven Spielberg. Though Orth didn’t report it, quite a few people in the entertainment industry knew that Jackson had fallen out with Geffen and Spielberg and this added an undercurrent of credibility to the story. Baba’s curses had been sealed with the blood of forty-two ritually sacrificed cows, according to Lee, who claimed to have wired payment for the slaughter to a bank in Mali.
Though Jackson nearly had Lee’s lawsuit thrown out, the Korean’s attorneys successfully scheduled a deposition of Michael Jackson in June 2003, at which the singer’s finances would be fully explored. The day before he was to be questioned, Jackson settled out of court for a sum said to be “well into seven figures.” He refused payment, though, to European concert promoter Marcel Avram, who had filed a $22.1 million suit against Jackson for backing out of two 1999 “Millennium Concerts” in Sydney and Honolulu. At the end of a 2003 civil trial in Santa Barbara County, a jury of Jackson’s neighbors awarded Avram $5.3 million, but the concert promoter was still chasing his money two years later.
A “forensic accountant” appointed by the Santa Barbara County Superior Court to examine Jackson’s finances reported that the entertainer’s annual budget was $12 million for personal expenses and the maintenance of Neverland, but this amount was a pittance compared to the $54 million a year it was now costing him to service his enormous debt. Yet Jackson continued to stay in $10,000 per night hotel suites and to rent an entire floor of standard rooms for his entourage.
“Michael would believe somehow that Sony was paying for it all,” Schaffel explained, “and they were. But they were charging it to him. Anything he did, whether it was hotels or private jets or whatever, they paid, but they charged him for it. So he was using up more and more of his income and going deeper and deeper into debt with Sony. Sony never really said no. Anything Michael wanted, Sony would say fine, but they would just keep racking up the bill. They had no reason not to, because they had the catalog to cover the cost. Michael was losing more and more of the catalog instead of gaining more and more. And he wouldn’t want to hear about any of that. All he wanted to know was how much cash was in his pocket that day. He would say to me, ‘Look, I don’t want to work my ass off and get nothing out of it.’ That was a lot of the problem with Invincible. The expenses were so high, he owed so much, and he was so far behind on his payments to the catalog, that he felt he’d never see a dime out of the album when it was released. I would say, ‘Michael, if you make $20 million on this deal, you’re paying down your debt to Sony.’ He said, ‘That’s not my money. Everybody’s putting their hands in—the lawyers, the accountants.’ He’d say, ‘They all take their piece of my money and what am I left with?’”
Of course, Michael Jackson tended to look at money a little differently than other people, Schaffel acknowledged. “I remember this time in Vegas when he wanted to buy something that cost a hundred grand and he wanted me to get him the money. So I went to the Mirage and some casino manager called me back and said, ‘For you, because we know you, we can give you fifty thousand if you want to come down and get it. But because of the time of night and we’re not a bank, we can’t give you a hundred.’ So he gives me the fifty grand. Dieter is with me, and we hurry up to Michael’s suite, because we know he’s antsy and wants to go buy something. He had the Cascio kids with him, and a couple other kids who were traveling with him. And he said, ‘Oh, did you get my money?’ And I said, ‘Well, I have fifty grand. It’s all I can get late at night like this.’ And he looked, kind of not happy, through these stacks of ten thousand apiece. He’s pouting, and he says, ‘It’s no good. I need a hundred.’ And then says, ‘Oh, forget it.’ And he says, ‘Kids, come here.’ All the kids come over, and he hands each of them a stack of ten thousand and says, ‘Go out and entertain yourself for an hour.’ Dieter and I just looked at each other like . . . ‘Only Michael.’”