In a penthouse suite one hundred feet above the streets of Beverly Hills, Justin Bieber sits at the head of a glass table, musing on his recent successes. It’s the spring of 2012—before any major publicity gaffes or run-ins with the law—and he has ridden the last crest of his cherubic adolescence to earnings of $108 million in two years.
He and manager Scooter Braun explain their guiding philosophies: don’t endorse products you don’t like, and include a charitable component in every deal. When I ask them if there’s any artist Bieber is directly trying to emulate, both in terms of music and business, they share a knowing glance.
“For me, it’s only one person,” says Bieber. “Michael Jackson.”1
From his early days, the Canadian singer has tried to model his career after the King of Pop’s, part of the reason he picked Rodney Jerkins to produce a handful of tracks for his album Believe. The Grammy-winning hitmaker was among the principal architects of Invincible, Jackson’s final studio album.
Having a manager who discovered him as a teenaged YouTube sensation didn’t stop Bieber from getting into a great deal of trouble. By the time the King of Pop linked up with Jerkins, he had even less of a support structure in place.
“Michael had always felt like he had to look over his shoulder,” says Jerkins. “There were a lot of trust issues.”2
Jackson started working on Invincible in 1997, shortly after returning from the HIStory Tour. It seemed he’d have little trouble completing an album within the next couple of years, which would keep him on the same four-to-five-year cycle he’d followed during much of his solo career.
The studio experience had changed quite a bit over Jackson’s twenty years as a solo artist. In the Thriller days, the record industry was totally reliant on magnetic tapes; by the mid-1990s, most acts recorded on analog tapes before transferring songs to digital hard drives. At the dawn of the new millennium, recording directly to computers became the standard, opening the door to nearly limitless options for sound manipulation.3
“Having more options and more possibilities doesn’t reduce the time that you invest in something,” says sound engineer Matt Forger. “It actually increases the time that you invest in something. So consequently, things just grew.”
Jackson had another reason for wanting to take his time with the album. He believed he could get out of his latest Sony contract in 2000 and simply sell the new material to the highest bidder. Back when he signed his first solo contract with Sony’s predecessor, CBS, Branca had insisted that the agreement be governed by California law, which would allow Jackson to terminate it after seven years if he saw fit. The singer assumed the same statutes held true.
As Jackson discovered in the mid-1990s, however, the contract had been reworked by one of Branca’s replacements. Three albums were added to his original five-album deal, along with massive penalties for early termination—as much as $20 million for each album he didn’t complete—which effectively nullified the benefits of the California law clause. Jackson eventually determined that he could leave the label only after delivering Invincible and a greatest hits album.
To make matters worse, Jackson’s old ally Walter Yetnikoff was long gone, and Tommy Mottola had been running Sony’s music division for nearly a decade. He helmed a label that was home to legacy acts such as Bruce Springsteen, Céline Dion, and Billy Joel while launching the careers of artists including Jennifer Lopez and Mariah Carey, whom he married in 1993 (and would divorce five years later). When it came to Invincible, he and Jackson clashed over recording budgets. “[I] considered an album that would cost $1 million like an overtly expensive, crazy, ridiculously expensive album,” Mottola explains.4
Jackson’s latest effort would end up costing far more. At one point during the recording process, he was running six studios simultaneously—each with its own producers and engineers—working around the clock, whether he was there or not. Says sound engineer Bruce Swedien, who worked on the album: “Anybody else would have settled for Michael’s take number one. . . . He wanted to make it as perfect as he possibly could.”5
Jackson had always admired the great draftsmen of the world. But even for Picasso, there would come a point when another brushstroke wouldn’t improve a painting, and might even hurt it. In the current iteration of Michael Jackson, Inc., there were no longer any advisors who could tell Jackson when to stop trying to improve his musical canvases. “Not one central figure or anybody saying, ‘No, I don’t advise you to do this,’ ” recalls Mottola, who estimates that Invincible ended up costing Sony $30 million to $40 million. “Because if he said, ‘No,’ Michael would go to the next person who would say ‘Yes.’ ”
By this point, Jackson’s personal expenses might have made even Prince Alwaleed blush. Neverland had a hundred and twenty employees at its peak. There were bills for everything from flowers to flamingos, not to mention the additional staff needed to handle the busloads of underprivileged children whose visits continued even when Jackson wasn’t around. Then there were the expenses for Jackson and his entourage. All in all, the singer’s overhead was approaching $20 million per year in the early 2000s.
That was fine even half a decade earlier, when Jackson earned nearly $200 million in a span of two years. But as the new millennium dawned with Invincible still incomplete, there were five years between Jackson and his last studio album—and seven since he’d played a concert in the continental United States. He hadn’t gotten an endorsement deal after the Chandler allegations, either, and his spending had overtaken his income.
Jackson would have been in immediate trouble if it weren’t for his half of the Sony/ATV catalogue, which enabled him to continue to take out loans to support his lifestyle and provided some income as well. Coupled with continued sales of his own music, he was still pulling in low double-digit millions—and he remained quite cognizant of the value of his copyrights.
“I learned the publishing game by Michael,” says Jerkins. “He taught me . . . how to locate the right catalogues to buy.”6
Jackson finally completed Invincible after four years of recording, and Sony set the launch date for October 30, 2001. The year marked Jackson’s thirtieth as a solo artist, and he decided to plan two anniversary concerts at Madison Square Garden to celebrate.
His friend David Gest, a concert promoter and sometime reality television star, agreed to produce the show; Frank Cascio, now an adult, had become Jackson’s personal assistant and headed up the planning behind the scenes. The latter had developed some concerns that went beyond staging the show—he was worried that Jackson was relying increasingly on “medicine,” his code name for prescription painkillers.7
Cascio had tried a number of times, unsuccessfully, to confront Jackson. He was so worried that, in September, he approached Randy, Tito, and Janet Jackson and explained the situation. They eventually tried to stage an intervention, but Michael insisted everything was fine. “My family talked to me about my medicine,” he told Cascio. “They were out of line.”
If something was wrong with Jackson, it wasn’t readily apparent to the outside world at his anniversary concerts. Both shows featured a solo set by the King of Pop, a Jackson 5 mini-reunion, and performances by stars including Britney Spears, Usher, and Gloria Estefan. After the second show—on September 10—Michael retired to the Helmsley Palace hotel, while the brothers checked into the Plaza nearby. When they went to sleep that night, they had no idea they’d wake up in a different world.8
September 11 dawned cool and crisp in New York without a cloud in the sky, but by the middle of the day, the atmosphere was choked with thick black smoke billowing from the ruins of the World Trade Center. Almost immediately, Jackson started thinking about how he could release his song “What More Can I Give” as a charity single, aiming to raise money for the families of those who perished in the attacks. But according to Cascio, Sony was more concerned with Jackson’s next album; the single was never officially released, escalating the tension between Mottola and Jackson.
Invincible debuted at number 1 on the Billboard charts the following month, selling 366,000 copies in its opening week—slightly less than HIStory, but enough to handily defeat new albums by Enrique Iglesias and the Backstreet Boys.9 Initial reviews were mixed, typified by the New York Times, which both praised Jackson as the “skillful musician at work in the album’s multitracked marvels” and concluded that “there’s no joy or humor in it.”10 The numbers, however, said he was still the King of Pop.
Jackson had hoped to go on tour following the release of the album, but decided against it after the September 11 attacks (though he’d been offered $100 million to do so11). Had he performed even a handful of shows in the following year, he would have given Invincible—not to mention his own bank account—a much-needed boost.
In the months before the album’s release, Jackson’s relationship with Mottola soured further when the latter purportedly tried to impress someone by walking into one of the singer’s recording sessions unannounced, only to find that Jackson wouldn’t let him in. As the story goes, Mottola reacted by sending him a nasty fax.12
Perhaps because of the bubbling vendetta between Jackson and Mottola, perhaps because of the singer’s decision not to tour, Sony stopped promoting Jackson’s latest work after just two months. By contrast, they’d spent two years promoting Dangerous and HIStory. The label released only three singles and two videos (one of which Jackson didn’t appear in because of his feud with Sony).
Jackson seemed to think Sony wanted his album to fail. If his cash flow issues worsened, he might have trouble making payments on a $200 million loan administered by Bank of America and secured by his stake in Sony/ATV.13 So, in July 2002, Jackson went to New York to publicly express his dissatisfaction with his label. At a press conference in Harlem with activist Al Sharpton, he took the stage to speak about the plight of black artists in the music business, an exploitative history that he’d learned as a youngster and fought to avoid as an adult.
“Throughout the years, black artists have been taken advantage of, completely,” he told the crowd. “It’s time now that we have to put a stop to this incredible, incredible injustice.”14
Jackson went on to cite examples from James Brown to Sammy Davis Jr., praising them as artists who inspired and paved the way for him. After a few moments, he went on the offensive. He singled out Sony and Mottola, calling the latter “a racist” and “very, very, very devilish.” Later, he paraded around New York atop a double-decker bus, at one point holding up a sign that showed Mottola’s face with devil horns drawn on in red.
When asked about his reaction to Jackson’s theory that Sony was trying to ruin Jackson’s career in order to gain full control of Sony/ATV, Mottola, who left the company in 2003, was predictably emphatic with his denials. “It’s total bullshit,” he said. “Why would anyone sabotage anything when you’re there to make money? That’s the same as people saying our government was part of the 9/11 conspiracy. I mean, come on.”15
Shortly after Jackson’s barrage, Al Sharpton went on record saying he didn’t believe Mottola was a racist, and that he hadn’t known what the singer was going to say ahead of time.16 Around the same time, Jackson received a call from Berry Gordy, who’d seen the media coverage of the comments. The Motown founder told Jackson he shouldn’t be playing “the race card” and advised him not to do it again.
“We’ve never done that,” Gordy explained to his onetime protégé. “Our philosophy is there’s music for all people, and it’s not about white and black. And we can’t [do that], especially you, because you’ve never felt that way. You’re angry now, you’re bitter now. Think it over.”17
“I agree with you,” replied Jackson. “I don’t have to think it over . . . I’m so glad you called me.”
Jackson promised Gordy he wouldn’t repeat the incident. But he’d never be able to shake the feeling that his catalogue—and the wealth it generated—made him a target on many different levels. That fear was likely the reason he agreed to have an attorney named David LeGrand investigate just about every one of his advisors in 2003, including John Branca.18
LeGrand wondered if Branca and Mottola were somehow conspiring to defraud Jackson, funneling away his cash to offshore bank accounts. Though there wasn’t any proof of such a scheme to begin with, the theory was enough for the singer, who sent Branca a one-page letter informing him that he and his firm had been terminated, effective immediately. Jackson gave no reason for the move, explaining only that LeGrand would be his new attorney.19
LeGrand then hired Interfor, a private intelligence company reportedly run by former Israeli Mossad agents, to look into the matter. Though the agency did suggest it might be possible to uncover a potential offshore scheme if it had “additional time and a proper budget,” it was unable to find any signs of impropriety.20
In the end, the incident turned out to be nothing more than a witch hunt. LeGrand was later asked under oath if he’d found any fraud on Branca’s part. His reply: “I was given no credible evidence to support those charges.”21
As new operatives parachuted into the power vacuum at Michael Jackson, Inc., the news emanating from the King of Pop’s sphere seemed to grow more bizarre by the day.
In April 2003, Vanity Fair reported that Seoul-based lawyer Myung-Ho Lee—yet another “business advisor”—had wired $150,000 to Mali at Jackson’s insistence. As the story goes, the recipient of the payment was a voodoo chief named Baba, who arranged for forty-two cows to be sacrificed in a ritual meant to curse Jackson’s former pals Geffen and Spielberg.22
And then there was the “baby-dangling” incident, where Jackson appeared at the window of a Berlin hotel and held one of his children out over the safety bars for a crowd of onlookers to see. The spectacle prompted German authorities to launch an investigation, and Jackson to issue a statement apologizing for his “terrible decision.”23 But was it a sign of madness or a strategic miscalculation? “Michael Jackson is about as crazy as Colin Powell,” photographer Harry Benson told Vanity Fair. “He knows everything he is doing. He holds his baby over the balcony and everybody goes crazy, but he’s in every newspaper around the world.”
It seemed that Jackson had fallen back into his Bad-era overreliance on the teachings of P. T. Barnum: that any publicity was good publicity. The incident in Germany was not. It’s certainly possible that he planted the voodoo story; like the Elephant Man bones incident, however, it was too strange regardless of whether it was real. And with no album or tour to promote, it was unclear what good the publicity would have done, anyway.
Even as the strange stories continued to trickle out, Jackson did seem to be focused on building businesses that could replace the physically grueling process of touring as a major income stream in the next phase of his career. This was a much wiser emulation of Barnum, who in Humbug described himself as “thoroughly disgusted with the life of an itinerant showman”; he preferred to have “a respectable, permanent business.”24
To that end, Jackson had renewed his interest in buying Marvel. The US economy was in a rut after the tech bubble popped, and stocks were at their lowest levels in half a decade, meaning that some of the best entertainment companies could be had at bargain rates. Jackson’s advisor Dieter Wiesner says he put together a consortium of investors—including banks in Germany, Switzerland, and the US—and they were ready to meet Marvel’s $1.4 billion asking price. Jackson told him to start the bidding at $900 million.
“His plan was just unbelievable,” Wiesner recalls. “He was saying, ‘Dieter, we have to have all the rights. On the one side, I have this Beatles catalogue, I have this Mijac catalogue. On the other side, I will have this Marvel catalogue with forty-eight hundred different characters like Spider-Man, Incredible Hulk, all these things.’ He knew exactly what he wanted to do.”25
Wiesner says Jackson was also working on a multimillion-dollar deal to become the face of the new Mercedes-Benz SLR McLaren, a $500,000 supercar that boasted gull-wing doors and a 625-horsepower V-8 engine. His name would be inscribed on the inside of every door, and an animated King of Pop would moonwalk across the speedometer each time the car started. Wiesner also claims Jackson was doing creative consulting for various Las Vegas properties—and that the singer conceived both the volcano at the Mirage and the fountains at the Bellagio.
But in Wiesner, it seems Jackson might have found an advisor whose humbuggery could rival P. T. Barnum’s. Representatives of Mercedes-Benz couldn’t confirm that a project with the singer ever existed.26 A spokesperson for MGM said that Jackson did have conversations with casino billionaire Steve Wynn, and did create music for a Siegfried and Roy show. The rest, however, was a mirage: “Michael was not involved with the fountains or the volcano in any way.”27
The King of Pop had dismissed the close advisors who’d helped him build his empire, his court had been infiltrated by jesters, and his entire kingdom was now in jeopardy.
In 2002, Jackson received a request from a British filmmaker named Martin Bashir, who wanted to spend the better part of a year following the singer around Neverland to make a documentary called Living with Michael Jackson. Ten years earlier, Oprah Winfrey’s interview had painted him in a reasonably positive light, and perhaps Jackson thought Bashir’s work might have a similar effect.
But when the video aired in February 2003, it quickly became apparent that Bashir was seeking a different angle. His piece focused heavily on the King of Pop’s changing physical appearance and his relationships with children. In one scene, Jackson discussed sharing a bedroom with Gavin Arvizo, a thirteen-year-old cancer survivor he’d invited to Neverland numerous times (the boy would stay in Jackson’s bed while the singer slept on the floor nearby).28
Viewers assumed the worst, though, and Jackson’s reputation was shattered once again. Hoping to stave off further devastation, Jackson rushed to create a way to show that Bashir had cherry-picked the most unflattering parts of his time at Neverland. With the help of the singer’s own videographer, Hamid Moslehi, the “rebuttal video” aired on Fox weeks later; a collection of home videos followed in April (according to court documents later filed by Moslehi claiming he hadn’t been paid, Jackson received $13 million for the two videos).29
The rebuttal seemed to reveal that Bashir had an agenda. On camera, the filmmaker called Neverland “a dangerous place for a vulnerable child to be.” Off camera, he lavished praise upon Jackson: “Your relationship with your children is spectacular . . . it almost makes me weep when I see you with them.” At one point, Bashir even asked the singer, “Do you sometimes despair at human nature? Can you ever do anything right?”30
For a few months, it seemed that Jackson’s rebuttal had been sufficient, and that the scandal had blown over. But in the fall of 2003, about ten years after Jackson’s settlement with the Chandlers, the Arvizos formally accused the singer of child molestation. The charges also included administering an intoxicating agent to a minor, false imprisonment, and extortion. The King of Pop was in Las Vegas when he heard that Neverland had been raided again. Unable to believe that the same nightmare was unfolding, he snapped—throwing chairs, knocking over tables, and generally smashing everything in sight.31
When Jackson recovered, he turned to his first choice for legal representation: Los Angeles lawyer Tom Mesereau, a Harvard grad with a shock of shoulder-length white hair and a reputation for doing pro bono work in the black community, particularly on cases that involved the death penalty. But he was busy preparing to defend Robert Blake in his murder trial and declined. When Mesereau withdrew himself from that case (due to “a falling out over some internal matters”), he received a call from Randy Jackson, who’d taken over as his brother’s de facto business manager.
“Tom, we’ve always wanted you,” Randy explained. “Johnnie Cochran always said you’re the best . . . he said that if we were in trouble, he’d want you defending [Michael] and you were the one that could win.”32
Mesereau agreed to speak with Randy and Michael in person, and flew to Florida, where they’d been staying. The lawyer remembers Jackson being very quiet, sitting in the back of the room. His only questions had to do with who Mesereau was, how he lived his life, and how he approached his profession. Apparently the attorney’s answers were enough for Jackson; Mesereau and his partner, Susan Yu, took over less than two weeks later.
One of the first things Mesereau noticed was the leadership structure of Michael Jackson, Inc., which was such a mess that the Los Angeles Times ran a feature trying to sort through the singer’s long list of past and present advisors. Among them: Leonard Muhammad, who was known for running a series of allegedly deadbeat soap companies affiliated with the Nation of Islam until landing a role running Jackson’s security and business operations, and Marc Schaffel, a director and producer of porn movies who had helped film two TV specials for Jackson.33 Wiesner, meanwhile, had returned to Germany after the Nation of Islam became involved with Jackson’s finances.
“I would have thought the world of Michael Jackson, when I met him, would be run like a major corporation,” says Mesereau. “And I found out it wasn’t true. This is a man who could wake up on any given morning and if he wanted to make millions of dollars somewhere in the world, he could do it. . . . If he wanted to go to any continent, any country, he could do it. So why does he have these mediocre advisors whispering in his ear?”
Mesereau plunged directly into his task. He moved to Santa Maria, where oral arguments began in early 2005. Not wanting to attract any attention from the legions of media members who’d flooded the town, he lived like a monk for six months, eschewing bars and restaurants and going to bed every night at eight o’clock. He spent most of his waking hours in a duplex that he called the War Room, accompanied by binders upon binders of material on the case.
As he grew to know Jackson better, Mesereau came to see that Jackson was much different from the caricature commonly portrayed in the press. He was thoughtful, kind, and incredibly well read—the singer frequented many of the same used book stores as Mesereau. Jackson also knew the cultural history of the United States all too well, and saw himself as a modern-day version of early twentieth-century boxing champ Jack Johnson: a black man who’d won a white man’s game and was in danger of being taken down on false charges.
But Jackson also understood Mesereau’s insistence on keeping the likes of Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson from turning the case into a cause célèbre and potentially alienating a jury that didn’t include a single black person. That didn’t sit well with another member of Jackson’s retinue—Raymone Bain, a boxing-agent-turned-music-publicist who’d taken over as his spokesperson; she had asked both men to come to the trial. Jesse Jackson showed up in Santa Maria; she told Mesereau it was a matter of protecting Michael’s legacy.
“If Michael Jackson is convicted, his legacy is going to be dying in a California State prison,” countered Mesereau. “We’re not going to make a racial issue out of this.” (Bain was relieved of her duties shortly thereafter.)34
The case against Jackson hinged not only on proving that the singer had plied Arvizo with alcohol and molested him. To nail him on charges of extortion, the prosecution tried to establish that the King of Pop was somehow so desperate financially that he would decide to hold an impoverished family hostage in order to extort cash from them—and called an expert witness who seemed to have little idea of what the Sony/ATV catalogue contained (he couldn’t name any songwriters added in the past year), even though that was a crucial component of its future value.35
Jackson had always been hyper-aware of his catalogue’s worth, and the trial only underscored this for him. He’d call Mesereau and Yu in the middle of the night to thank them for doing such a good job—and to beg them not to let anyone pay them off to deliberately lose his case.
“He clearly thought the catalogue made him a target,” says Mesereau. “That various interests wanted his catalogue and would do anything to see him destroyed to get his catalogue, would want to see him in prison so he couldn’t fend off lawsuits.”
Jackson got up every morning at around four o’clock to get dressed and groomed before making the thirty-five-mile journey from Neverland to the courthouse. Rather than insist that Jackson don a Brooks Brothers suit and a tie, Mesereau told Jackson to wear whatever he pleased—to be himself. On Cinco de Mayo, for example, he wore a red, white, and green vest.
As the trial wore on, the prosecution tried to bolster its case by calling witnesses who claimed to have seen Jackson fondling other boys at Neverland. But when former Neverland employee Philip LeMarque testified that he’d seen Jackson grope Macaulay Culkin, he admitted upon further questioning from Mesereau that he’d investigated the possibility of selling the story to the tabloids—and was told he could get $100,000 if Jackson’s hand was outside of Culkin’s shorts, but $500,000 if it was inside.36 Later on in the trial, Culkin took the stand and vehemently denied that Jackson had ever behaved inappropriately around him, calling the allegations of abuse “absolutely ridiculous.”37
Chris Tucker and Jay Leno also showed up as witnesses for the defense. Mesereau remembers being impressed that both, as well as Culkin, made the trek to Santa Maria. He figured their agents, managers, and lawyers would advise them against testifying for the same reason his own friends had discouraged him from defending Jackson—“he’s going down, he’s going to prison, you’re going to be ruined”—but their attitude, he says, was simple: “Michael needs us, we’re there.”38
A new picture of the Arvizos began to emerge. Both Leno and Tucker revealed that the family had contacted them numerous times through various charitable organizations; Leno noted that the child’s remarks had seemed “scripted,” while Tucker admitted to wiring the family $1,500 after they’d hounded him for a donation.39
Gavin’s mother didn’t do herself any favors. After revealing that she and her husband had been arrested in 2001 after Gavin stole merchandise from a J. C. Penney,40 she admitted that she may have lied under oath in a civil suit in which she alleged she’d been assaulted in a public parking lot by the store’s security guards (J. C. Penney had settled for upwards of $150,000).41 It also emerged that she’d once said Jackson “helped cure her son from cancer,” marveling at “what a beautiful friendship they have.”42
Aside from the Arvizos, one of the prosecution’s most prized witnesses was Debbie Rowe, who’d been working with the police. When she got up on the stand and anxiously looked over at Jackson, he turned to Mesereau, worried that the lawyer was about to demolish his ex-wife.
“I said, ‘Michael, don’t worry,’ ” recalls Mesereau. “He knew I knew what I was doing. I didn’t use one binder. She was on our side, she was telling the truth; she was clearly sympathetic to him. She turned into one of our best witnesses. . . . She mentioned how people were taking advantage of him and what a good father he was.”43
Some suspected Jackson was still relying heavily on painkillers. Randy Jackson would later explain that his brother was “an addict” who deflected half a dozen family interventions and nearly overdosed in 2005.44 Mesereau says the singer was “always lucid, always delightfully nice to deal with,” but that on verdict day, he looked “terrible.”
Terrible, that is, until the jury read its decision: not guilty on all fourteen counts. Outside the courtroom, as the news began to reach the hordes of reporters and camera crews gathered outside, a group of Jackson’s fans released a single white dove for each charge cleared.45
Jackson returned to Neverland with his family and a group of well-wishers who included his defense team.
“He just said, ‘Thank you, thanks, thank you, thank you,’ ” Mesereau recalls. “He looked so old . . . not in a celebratory mood, not in an exuberant mood, just in a relieved, grateful, quiet kind of state.”46
He and Yu stayed for a few hours, watching as Jackson met with some of the paralegals who’d worked day and night on the case for much of the past year. The singer hugged each one of them and thanked them for helping him and his children.
Before he departed, Mesereau offered Jackson one last piece of advice: leave Neverland for good. The local authorities had been humiliated, he warned, and they would soon be looking for another shot at him.
“Some child will wander through the fence,” Mesereau told Jackson. “And they’ll trump up some other phony case. . . . You’ve got to leave Santa Barbara County.”