Michael Jackson refers to white wine as “Jesus juice” and red wine as “Jesus blood.” He prefers the juice and usually drinks it out of soda cans so that nobody will know he is consuming alcohol. In and out of rehab over the years for addictions to Demerol and morphine, the King of Pop also habitually gulped down soda cans of wine, particularly when he was on airplanes. On a flight to Frankfurt in 1999, for example, his former business adviser Myung-Ho Lee, who was accompanying him, had to help the staggering Jackson stand up to get off the plane. “He was lying on the floor by the time we landed,” says Lee. “I told Security, ‘You can’t get drunk like that on white wine,’ and the security people said that it’s not only wine but that he takes pills with it.”
The incident may be telling, because in January, Michael Jackson was arraigned on seven counts of child molestation and two counts of administering an “intoxicating agent with intent to commit a felony” between February 7 and March 10 of last year at Neverland, his 2,700-acre ranch near Santa Barbara, which he has converted into a mini Disneyland for kids. The boy in question in the case—a cancer victim who was 13 at the time—alleges that Jackson gave him wine in co*ke cans on a flight from Florida in February 2003, right under the nose of the boy’s unsuspecting mother. The boy knows Jackson’s names for white and red wine, which Lee says “only his inner people know,” adding that it “tells you that the boy spent ‘quality time’ with Michael.” The boy and his siblings, however, have said that “all the kids around Michael” knew about Jesus juice, and that he told them, “Jesus drank it, so it must be good.”
Lee says he is not surprised at the boy’s allegations. Lee was with Jackson in Tokyo in 1998, when Jackson announced with great fanfare a new venture with a Japanese consortium to open three theme parks and a chain of stores called Wonder World of Toys that would stretch across Japan. The project failed almost immediately, according to Lee, because of what happened to the 13-year-old son of one of Jackson’s Japanese partners: “During this time Michael took [the boy] to a theme park one evening. One of Jackson’s people gave Michael three soda cans full of Jesus juice. Later that evening the boy came back sick. Security informed me that he appeared drunk, and his father was very upset.”
In the current case, the trip the boy and his family made to Florida coincided with the airing of the British documentary on ABC last year in which Jackson, now 45, told interviewer Martin Bashir that there was nothing wrong with sharing his bed with little boys. It was a very brazen thing for Jackson to admit, given the fact that in Los Angeles in 1994 he had had to pay $25 million to Jordie Chandler and his family in order to settle a civil suit in which Jordie, then 13, charged that Jackson had masturbat*d and fella*ted him during their relationship, which ironically also included a trip to Florida. Similarities in Michael Jackson’s modus operandi between the latest bizarre scandal and the one that preceded it abound, right down to the tactics of intimidation and the controversial use of the Nation of Islam for security. In 1993 armed members of tough South-Central L.A. gangs, including the notorious Bloods, were transported to Neverland. The employment of these toughs was said to have sent a strong message to Neverland employees who might have considered cooperating in the Jordie Chandler investigation, not to mention the subliminal message it gave out to other boys and their families who might have been thinking of coming forward.
When 70 members of the Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s Department and D.A.’s office, including a team of forensic experts, invaded Neverland last November 18, while Jackson was in Las Vegas, they had already spent five months investigating the child’s allegations. Although Jackson was reputedly taken by surprise—cops with search warrants also entered the homes and workplaces of Jackson employees and a private investigator named Bradley Miller—his high-powered and expensive criminal attorney, Mark Geragos, had already been on the case since February, a curiosity in itself, since no criminal charges had been filed.
Over the years Jackson has doled out millions upon millions of dollars to lawyers, doctors, accountants, security people, con men, voodoo chiefs, business advisers, members of his bankrupted dysfunctional family, an ex-wife who allegedly threatened to tell his secrets, former staffers on remittance, and the families of young boys he has made his “special friends” all over the world. There is almost never a time when he is free of crisis, and as a result, say many who know him, it has become more and more difficult for him to trust his advisers or not to feel paranoid about something. “He has a lot of skeletons in his closet,” says Lee. “Some are real and some are in his mind, which makes him a prisoner of all those around him.” The result is often chaos. Jackson has a $200-million-plus bank loan—guaranteed by his half-interest in the Sony/ATV music catalogue, which owns the publishing rights to 251 Beatles songs and many other pop songs—and it falls due in 2005. These days it is difficult to get a straight read on Jackson’s finances, other than the cash-flow situation, which is reportedly dire. “Nobody really knows if there is money or not,” says Dieter Wiesner, one of his recent managers. The coveted Sony/ATV catalogue is worth hundreds of millions of dollars. However, as I reported in this magazine last year, Sony has the right of first refusal if Jackson is forced to sell his share, and he cannot sell, according to Lee, before October 2005, the 10th anniversary of the partnership. There are reports that Jackson is meanwhile being bailed out by a number of interested parties, including Al Malnik, the flamboyant Miami lawyer who once represented Meyer Lansky. Malnik reportedly put up much of the money to settle two civil suits against Jackson last year—a figure estimated at close to $10 million.
In times of trouble in the past, most notably during the first molestation case, Jackson has turned to drugs. Kat Pellicano remembers a very high Michael Jackson in her house in August 1993, nodding out and drinking glass after glass of orange soda. Kat is a former wife of Anthony Pellicano, the private investigator who worked back then for Jackson’s attorneys Bert Fields and Howard Weitzman. Fields has been questioned in a current F.B.I. investigation involving Pellicano’s use of wiretapping for clients. Pellicano, who is now in jail, was then the muscle the Jackson team used to intimidate potential witnesses against the singer and to accuse Jordie Chandler’s father of extortion. After the first molestation scandal broke, “Anthony wanted to get Michael out of the country as soon as possible,” Kat says. “When Michael came into the house, my three-year-old daughter asked if he were a boy or a girl. I told her a boy—that some boys had long hair. ‘But do they wear makeup?’” That day Kat drove her husband and Jackson to the airport, where they boarded a private jet for Asia. A few months later Jackson checked himself into a London detox center.
His stay there was prompted by a frantic phone call a Mexican doctor had made to one of the pop star’s business advisers, who recalls, “The doctor said, ‘Either the drugs are going to kill him or he’s going to die by flying out of a window because he thinks he can fly. You better get someone here he’ll listen to. Otherwise there won’t be a Michael Jackson.’” Elizabeth Taylor was enlisted. “She immediately said, ‘I’ll go.’ She got him into rehab, and he got himself out right away.”
While Jackson was in London undergoing detox, Los Angeles and Santa Barbara authorities negotiated terms for his coming back to have his genitals photographed: if he returned voluntarily, they would not handcuff or arrest him. It turned out that Jordie Chandler had been able to draw very accurately certain distinctive markings on Jackson, which gave the boy’s lawyers the ammunition they needed to settle the civil suit at such a high price. (The case was settled the night before Jackson was to be deposed.) Several months later, when the authorities were finally ready to bring charges, the boy and his family declined to prosecute, saying they feared they would be harmed. There are reports that the boy in the current case also has provided drawings of Jackson’s private parts to police.
Throughout the 90s, Jackson portrayed himself as a sort of pure, ethereal Peter Pan, but he had serious drug problems. Last year I covered the civil trial in which European concert promoter Marcel Avram was suing Jackson for $21.2 million for canceling two “millennium concerts” scheduled for New Year’s 2000. During his first appearance in front of the jury, Jackson practically fell asleep, and when he came back later he grimaced at spectators, made devil’s horns with his fingers, and generally behaved as if he were 12. He ended up losing the case and having to pay Avram $5.3 million. Looking back, I remember being struck by one exhibit presented by the plaintiff, a bill Avram said he had paid to two German doctors for nearly $264,000. I later learned that the doctors had not only taken care of an injury Jackson had suffered when he fell onstage in Munich in 1999 but also previously put him through drug detox.
In expense reports submitted in a lawsuit that Myung-Ho Lee brought against Jackson, which was settled last June, there are entries showing $62,645 owed to the Mickey Fine Pharmacy in Beverly Hills.
Lee tells me that in 1999 he employed Dr. Neil Ratner, an anesthesiologist and former rock drummer, to put Michael through detox in Seoul. (Ratner, the government’s star witness against prominent Manhattan gynecologist Dr. Niels Lauersen, who was convicted of insurance fraud in 2001, admitted to being stoned himself much of the time he injected his patients in the 80s and to once collapsing in an operating room after mistakenly shooting himself up with a paralytic agent.) “I met with the doctor on a regular basis,” says Lee. “We were getting Michael off what he was addicted to, Demerol and morphine. His problem is a sleep disorder. He’s up up to 48 hours at a time, and then crashes.” When I ask Ratner about his work with Jackson in Seoul, he says, “Patient-doctor relationships are not something I choose to comment about.”
In Washington, D.C., in 2001, after Jackson appeared at a benefit concert for 9/11 victims, he left his ubiquitous black bag filled with his prescription drugs behind. It was found by Washington police, who returned it, no questions asked.
Clearly, Michael Jackson is not the defenseless creature and victim of racism he and his family and handlers so assiduously claim him to be in the never-ending stream of interviews they grant—and mostly dominate—on cable-TV and network news shows. And in real life he does not speak in the falsetto he employed most recently in the controversial 60 Minutes interview on CBS in December, when he was asked only very general questions relating to the current case and when he charged that he had been injured by Santa Barbara police during his arrest. People who have spent time with Jackson report that he has a soft but normal “guy’s voice,” in the phrase of one. Since his charges of police brutality have largely backfired, his side is once again claiming that the family accusing him now is only out for money, and that Santa Barbara County district attorney Tom Sneddon—who, along with L.A. County officials, investigated him in 1993 but did not bring charges—is out for revenge. Those are the twin spins held by Jackson’s supporters, whether they coincide with the facts or not.
The 10-year-old boy had been given only a few weeks to live, and Michael Jackson was No. 3 on his wish list of people he wanted to meet. Adam Sandler was first, and then Chris Tucker. But at just the moment in 2000 when he was being asked to come up with names, Jackson’s image happened to be on MTV in his hospital room, and he pointed to the screen and told his friend Jamie Masada, owner of L.A.’s Laugh Factory, “I want to meet Michael Jackson too.” In order to get the boy, who weighed only 60 pounds, to eat, Masada would say, “You’ve got to get better if you’re going to see Adam Sandler!” The Hispanic boy from East L.A. had been operated on for an eight-pound cancerous tumor on his left kidney; his spleen and the kidney had been removed, but the cancer had spread across his lungs and liver. He had not taken chemotherapy well, and his blood type was the rare O-negative/CMV-negative. He had sores in his mouth and could not keep anything down. “He started to eat cantaloupe and ice cream, but after two spoons he started vomiting blood,” Masada recalls. “Would you try again?,” Masada begged him. “If you eat, you can meet anyone you want.” The boy gradually got better, and after several months Masada, who visited daily, took him in his wheelchair to the Laugh Factory on Sunset Strip, where the comics onstage took special notice of him. Some of them also did benefits for him, and anyone who donated blood got into the club free.
Masada, a charitable Iranian immigrant who arrived in L.A. at 14, sponsors the Laugh Factory’s Comedy Camp during the summer. The program helps underprivileged children turn their pain into laughs by having them do stand-up routines under the tutelage of well-known comedians. The boy in question, along with his younger brother and older sister, had participated in the camp.
Masada phoned Neverland, told whoever answered to try to watch a local TV broadcast that night about the blood drive for the boy, and asked if Michael Jackson would call “to cheer him up.” Two days later Jackson called. At that time the boy’s parents, who had married as teenagers, were in their early 30s and still together, but in a volatile household where money was always short.
One Saturday last December, I visited the gritty East L.A. suburbs where the family had lived. In a yard sale in El Monte, where the boy’s maternal grandparents reside, used clothes and toys priced at 50 cents and a dollar were displayed mercado-style on lawns and across bushes. Many people spoke only Spanish and would say little about the family. There were drawn curtains and a NO TRESPASSING sign on the grandparents’ door. To the lower-middle-class people with little education who live on these smog-filled streets, Neverland, with all its enticements, must seem like an incredible dream.
Both parents accompanied the boy, along with his sister and brother, to Neverland in August 2000 to meet Jackson. The father also went with the boy to have lunch on the Sony lot with Adam Sandler, who introduced him to Rob Schneider. Chris Tucker, according to Masada, became a kind of mentor to the boy, outfitting him in Nike clothes; the boy, in turn, took Tucker to Neverland to introduce him to Jackson. George Lopez also befriended the boy. These comics are now distancing themselves from the case, and their representatives barely acknowledge, or even deny, their clients’ meetings with him.
One day when the boy had begun to improve, he told Masada, “Me and my dad went to Neverland.” Not long after, Masada claims, the father stopped by the Laugh Factory to show off a car with a TV in it, which he said was a gift from Jackson. Jackson had also lent the family his pickup truck to go to chemotherapy appointments, but they did not pay many visits to Neverland. After about a year and a half of chemo, Masada says, and all the special attention from the comics and the trips to Neverland, the boy’s cancer went into remission.
This child, according to people who know him, is far less sophisticated than Jordie Chandler was at his age, and his relationship with Jackson was not of the same intensity, though the setup when the family stayed at Neverland was very similar. The boys got to sleep with Michael rather than in the guest bedroom up a flight of stairs. The sister had her own room, and the mother was put up in a guesthouse some distance from the main house. Jackson reportedly made it very clear that he did not want the girl or the mother around, allegedly telling the boys, “Girls are tattletales.” Gaining access to Jackson’s private quarters is not at all the easy pass the Jackson camp has suggested in various interviews, where they have implied that servants and staff can freely observe the goings-on. Myung-Ho Lee, who was at Neverland on many occasions, describes the layout of Jackson’s bedroom:
“You enter the main door on the right-hand side, and there is a small hallway of about six feet to another door on the left. As soon as anyone comes through the first door, an alarm goes off, and the camera mounted above the second door shows on the monitor in his bedroom who is approaching.” A visitor first enters a large sitting room, a sort of throne room, “of about 500 square feet, where he has a chair where the King sits with other chairs grouped around.” Lee says of the bedroom, “Nobody’s allowed in there, even guests.”
According to a confidential report prepared for the Chandler suit, electric eyes were installed in the ceiling 10 feet from the bedroom door, and the system was always active when Jackson was at the ranch. “The alarm was loud enough to be heard in the bathroom, even with the shower running.” The alarm was not installed to deter prowlers or kidnappers. The security outside was sufficient for that: “Infrared beams planted every 20 feet in concrete beams sunk 17 feet into the ground.” The bedroom alarm was strictly to alert Jackson to the presence of anyone outside the door.
Inside the bedroom closet was a special cedar closet, built to hold the original owner’s furs. Five vertical stainless-steel panels between the two closets would lower when a five-digit secret code was triggered. In case of a security risk, a ranch supervisor would “alert Jackson by intercom and tell him, ‘Michael, go to your room.’” This was the signal for Jackson to lock himself in the fur vault. Once things were under control, the supervisor would let him out.
As for other surveillance, Myung-Ho Lee says, “Michael has a very bad habit of videotaping and recording everyone. His entire house is wired so he can hear conversations anywhere.” A similar situation is set up when Jackson travels. Security has a monitoring room with cameras trained on the hallway to his hotel suite and on the interior of the suite.
One of the largest bills in the expense reports filed in Lee’s case was from a local audiovisual store, for hundreds of thousands of dollars. “One time in New York I got a $150,000 bill for surveillance equipment,” says Lee’s sister, So-Yung, who was the chief legal officer for Jackson International between 1998 and 2001. She was often frustrated because the store’s invoices never specified what the money actually went to purchase, but she thought that was the way Michael wanted it. “Once, Michael bought $70,000 worth of merchandise, and they were very difficult to deal with, because they were very secretive about what it was Michael bought. I heard it was mostly surveillance equipment to watch his own staff.”
Myung-Ho Lee, who traveled the world with Jackson, observed his behavior at first hand. “He had a number of guests in his suite for the night—they were always boys in the 10- to 13-year-old range.” Lee adds, “I’ve never seen him share a suite with an older teen boy, a girl, or an older female. I thought it very strange.” A family from the Netherlands with two young boys stayed with Jackson in his suite in Sun City, in South Africa, when Lee was along. The parents stayed, just as June Chandler, Jordie’s mother, had, in the suite, but in a different bedroom. Lee paid the bills for the family’s first-class holiday and gifts. Jackson’s own children often stayed in rooms away from the suite, and security and staff usually slept in a different part of the hotel altogether.
For anyone familiar with the Jordie Chandler case, seeing the current boy lovingly lay his head against Jackson’s shoulder in the Martin Bashir documentary was a shock. The boy was very much the same type as Jordie, the same age, and he repeated the same words that Jackson had once allegedly told Jordie: “If you love me, you’ll sleep on the bed.” Jackson even had the same nickname for both Jordie and this boy: Rubba. The boy made it clear on-camera, however, that Jackson had slept on the floor.
The documentary aired in the U.S. on February 6, but it had been broadcast three days earlier in Britain, and it immediately caused a stir because of Jackson’s admissions about his habit of sleeping with little boys. Suddenly the grandparents’ neighborhood was filled with TV satellite trucks. The mother claims she had not even known that the special was being made. (Granada Television, which produced the special, claimed that it had gotten permission from the maternal grandmother, which the grandmother denies.) If he did well on the show, Jackson allegedly told the boy, he would help him get into show business. The boy praised him on the program. Soon after the taping with the boy was complete, Jackson took off.
Then suddenly, about the time the documentary was shown on ABC’s 20/20, Jackson invited the boy to Florida, ostensibly for a news conference, which never took place. The mother says she insisted that she and the boy’s two siblings go along, with Chris Tucker on a private jet. According to the family’s accounts, Jackson was peeved and made it clear that he thought the mother was expendable. After several days in Miami, where Jackson allegedly gave the boy alcohol, everyone flew back together, and there was reportedly more drinking of Jesus juice out of co*ke cans.
The documentary had immediate repercussions for the boy. His mother called Masada in tears. They had been at a gas station where kids recognized the boy from TV and started teasing him for sleeping with Michael Jackson and calling him gay. Masada, who had not yet seen the special, asked her if she had given permission or signed a release for the boy to appear on TV. According to Masada, she said no, adding that Jackson’s camp was trying to get her to sign something now. Masada told her to ask Jackson if he had given permission. Then, Masada and several insiders claim, the Jackson camp swung into action on a number of fronts. Principal members of the team minding the family reportedly were gay-p*rn producer-director Marc Schaffel, who had once produced a song for Jackson, his longtime handler Frank Tyson, known as Cascio, who traveled when he was a child with Jackson, and Vinnie Amen from New Jersey. The bewildered family had little idea what was going on, but they wanted to help Jackson. “The boy was very high on Michael,” says a family associate. “They are simple people,” Masada tells me.
