MJ (47 page)

II
. In 2012, Tohme sued MJ’s estate, demanding a 15 percent commission on his client’s revenue and a finder’s fee for helping him secure a Neverland loan. The estate fought back, insisting Michael fired him in March 2009 and he manipulated MJ into “unfair financial compensation.” The case is pending.

III
. A source with knowledge of the discussions denies MJ wanted to hire Phillinganes; an internal AEG memo showed Phillinganes cost $200,000 more than Bearden.

IV
. After AEG officials boasted of this feat to reporters, Phillips had to do damage control—with Prince. “This booking has nothing to do with breaking your record,” he wrote in an e-mail to the Purple One, whose tour AEG had promoted five years earlier, “but keeping the arena booked for as many nights as possible.”

C
arnival, the annual street celebration in Trinidad, is a sweaty, Technicolor mass of beautiful women in fringed bikinis, hula skirts, and feathered helmets, and drunken men, some in equally colorful and skimpy costumes. In 2005, a two-man energy-drink company called Pit Bull had hired six models to walk through the festival from five
P.M.
to six
A.M.
every night for a week. One of Pit Bull’s partners, six-foot-four, 220-pound Dr. Conrad Robert Murray, drank a bit and posed shirtless with his young charges, whom he paid $1,200 apiece in addition to expenses. Walking and dancing through one dicey stretch of the parade early in the morning, the models witnessed a fight in which a man stabbed another man. The crowd’s momentum pulled Murray away from the scene, but the doctor insisted on going back. He approached the wounded man, frantically motioning for a clump of promotional Pit Bull T-shirts to help staunch the bleeding. “No!” the Pit Bull models begged him. “You can’t do it. You have no gloves. Are you crazy?” Finally, Murray found somebody else to help the guy and left with his group. “He is a pleaser,” says Karen “Kalucha” Chacon, one of the models.

That is certainly a positive spin on Dr. Conrad Murray, who would be forever marked as the man who killed Michael Jackson.
“He knew better.
He shouldn’t have done it. He should have walked away,” says Detective Orlando Martinez of the LA Police Department, who investigated Murray after MJ’s death. But Chacon and other Murray friends make an important point. Murray had no boundaries and found it hard to say no to people who needed help. Sometimes he rushed foolishly into bad situations.

Conrad Murray was hardly the first doctor to enable Michael Jackson and his need for sleep drugs and painkillers, which grew in spurts beginning in the early nineties, when he went to rehab during the
Dangerous
tour. Michael was always scouting for new doctors. He collected them like hotel-room keys. He called them, often unexpectedly, and at strange times. His bodyguards made arrangements for him to show up at their offices after hours. Even in Botox-obsessed Beverly Hills or celebrity-packed Las Vegas, starstruck doctors were thrilled to be making small talk with MJ. He had two main doctor constants over the years. One was Steven Hoefflin, the plastic surgeon who corrected his first, botched nose job in 1979 and stuck with him for numerous procedures. The other was Arnold Klein, the “Father of Botox,” as
Vanity Fair
called him, who charmed celebrity patients in Beverly Hills with his regal manner and gruff, fast-talking style. They developed a sort of medical arms race over their care for MJ. Debbie Rowe, Klein’s assistant, referred to it as a
“pissing contest over who could give the better drug.” Significantly, they were never charged with negligence or malpractice at any time.

Michael worked with dozens of doctors over the years, and some became his friends.
Scott David Saunders, a UCLA-trained doctor, received a 1998 call from an anonymous woman who asked if he’d make a house call. He said he would, and found himself at a private room on Neverland Ranch, where he encountered the King of Pop lying in bed with an upper respiratory infection. After this first connection, Jackson and Saunders watched
Spider-Man
in the Neverland movie theater. Michael showed up unexpectedly one night at Saunders’s house in Solvang, near Santa Maria, and the surprised doctor
allowed Michael’s kids to play with his kids. Later, Michael gave the doctor a
PlayStation 2 and a
carnival-style popcorn machine. They’d drive around Neverland in Michael’s Navigator and talk until Saunders insisted he had to return home to his family.

Allan Metzger, another longtime personal physician, traveled with MJ throughout the
HIStory
tour and visited him in New York, at Neverland for holiday dinners, and at his Century City apartment on what the doctor called
“innumerable occasions.” Like many of Michael’s doctors, Metzger compiled medical records for his superstar patient under assumed names. (Michael used more than a dozen aliases, including Omar Arnold, Peter Madonie, Josephine Baker, Michael Jefferson, and Paul Farance.) “For confidentiality,” Metzger explained.

Once these doctors saw MJ a few
times, he felt emboldened to make unusual requests. According to Rowe’s testimony, in the early nineties, Rowe discovered Hoefflin had given Michael a bottle of Dilaudid, a narcotic painkiller widely known as
“hospital heroin.” She confiscated it immediately. Later, according to Rowe, Hoefflin became the first to give him Diprivan, or propofol, used by hospitals under strict medical supervision to put their patients to sleep while they undergo a painful procedure, like breaking an arm for medical reasons. MJ would receive this drug some ten times over twelve years. Metzger insisted he never gave Michael propofol or intravenous drugs of any kind, although he did prescribe anti-anxiety meds such as Xanax and Klonopin.
“He had different doctors in different places, and that was one of my concerns,” Metzger said.

By 2002, MJ was receiving regular Botox injections, and David Fournier, his nurse anesthetist, was sympathetic to his concerns about pain.
“He would be getting hundreds of injections around the eyes and various painful parts of the face, and it was more than the average person would get,” said Fournier, one of those medical professionals who had become so friendly with Michael that he received invitations to Neverland Ranch. “So therefore he often needed to be sedated.” Fournier administered Versed, a sleep drug, and propofol. “He referred
to it as ‘the milk,’ ” Fournier recalled. There was nothing illegal about it—Fournier went by the book, giving Michael a standard lecture about the risks, including death. Over time, Michael began to cut him off.
“You’ve done enough,” he said. “I’ve got it.” In 2003, Michael called Dr. Stephen Gordon’s office in Las Vegas and asked for lower-eyelid Botox injections for crow’s feet and collagen in the sides of his nose
“to give a flatter appearance, which is presumed to be more youthful,” Gordon recalled. The doctor brought in an anesthesiologist, who knocked out Michael with propofol. Again, Michael called it “milk,” which surprised Gordon. “Most people don’t really, you know, relate to it like that,” the doctor said.

By the early 2000s, Michael’s friends, family, associates, and doctors were noticing his erratic behavior. There was the time before the Jacksons’ thirtieth-anniversary shows in Madison Square Garden when Cascio couldn’t get Michael out of bed for the performance. Another time, a mysterious 911 call came from MJ’s hotel room; security called bodyguard Mike LaPerruque, who rushed to the room and found a sobbing Paris and Prince Jackson saying they couldn’t “wake up Daddy.” LaPerruque gave mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to his boss, who regained consciousness before paramedics arrived. Many around Michael Jackson at that time noticed he slurred his speech. He was unusually tired. He showed up late, or not at all. “I’m not going to lie. I’ve heard those stories,” says Henry Aubrey, an MJ bodyguard during this period. “It was true.” By 2009, he’d spent nearly two decades with
“profound” trouble sleeping, according to Metzger, who added: “Particularly when performing. He could not come down.”

Over the years, some of these doctors pushed back. From 1997 to 2009, Dr. Christine Quinn, a Los Angeles dental anesthesiologist, had put the singer to sleep ten times during a variety of procedures, including a root canal. Early on, Michael left an impromptu message on her answering machine; she called back immediately, and he asked her to meet him at the Beverly Hills Hotel. She brought her sister—
“I don’t
usually go meet people in hotel rooms,” Quinn explained—and found herself insisting to Michael Jackson that she couldn’t possibly administer propofol to him to help him sleep.
“He told me that it’s the best sleep that he ever has,” she recalled. After Gordon conducted a routine Botox procedure on MJ’s face in 2003, the patient asked for a
“shot of Demerol for the road.” The Las Vegas cosmetic surgeon laughed. “There’s no way I’m going to do that, Michael,” he said. “You just need to go home and take it easy.” Gordon didn’t hear from Michael again after that—until May 2007. This time, Michael wanted an injection of Juvéderm, a filler that makes cheeks look thicker and healthier. That request wasn’t unusual to Gordon. What was unusual was that Michael had brought a doctor of his own: Conrad Murray. Gordon had never had a patient show up with his own cardiologist before. Murray even spoke for Michael. Afterward, it was Murray who wrote the check. Michael had found his pleaser.

*  *  *

Conrad
Murray had eight children with seven different women. While living with his girlfriend, Nicole Alvarez, and their son at a Santa Monica apartment, he
met Sade Anding at Sullivan’s Steakhouse in Houston, gave her his phone number, and exchanged texts. Later, he introduced Anding to strangers as his girlfriend. He was a
“serial womanizer,” according to the London tabloid
Daily Mail
, which added: “Had it not been for his voracious sexual appetite he might have achieved great things; for he took up medicine intending to help those who couldn’t afford decent healthcare.” All those sides to Murray, altruistic and promiscuous, were part of his complex personality.

Murray’s parents, Rawle and Milta, met in Grenada, where Murray was born. They split up, and Milta took Conrad back to her hometown, Port of Spain, on the nearby island of Trinidad. The elder Murray was a general doctor, and after he moved to Texas, he sent money to the family. Conrad earned a high school scholarship and planned to become
a doctor so he could return to tend to the poor and sick in his neighborhood. By the time he graduated from his father’s medical school,
Meharry, in Nashville, Tennessee, in 1989, he had married pharmacist
Zufan Tesfai, divorced her, then had a child with another woman.

Murray’s financial negligence was almost a match for Michael Jackson’s. Three years after he graduated from medical school, he filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy protection; by the early 2000s, he owed nearly $45,000 in taxes in Arizona and California. He was running two separate cardiology practices, a lucrative one in Las Vegas and a sentimental one in a section of Houston known as Acres Home. Murray’s father had been treating patients in Acres Home since he opened his clinic in 1968, and when he died in 2003, he left a vacuum in the neighborhood of predominantly poor, African-American senior citizens. One of his patients, Dennis Hix, visited Murray for a heart procedure after another doctor had told him there was nothing he could do to save his life; Murray installed a total of
thirteen stents, and when Hix said his insurance couldn’t possibly cover it, Murray treated him for free. Yet when Murray came to work for Michael Jackson as his personal physician in spring 2009, he was in what police would term
“desperate financial trouble.” He owed more than
$1.6 million on his home. A college student-loan company successfully sued him for unpaid bills totaling
$71,332, and various finance companies won judgments against him for nearly $800,000.
“He’s not a businessman,” says Miranda Sevcik, a veteran communications professional in Houston who worked with Murray on crisis public relations. “Look at his financial situation—it was a mess, a shambles, and yet he would go to Houston every month for a week to treat people at the clinic his father worked at.”

In early 2007, Michael Jackson and his children were living in Las Vegas when they caught some kind of viral infection—coughing, runny nose, dehydration. A hospital visit would mean paparazzi. MJ needed discretion. One of his bodyguards tracked down Murray, who, within a few hours, arrived at
MJ’s home. Murray wound up treating Michael two or
three times for the infection, and called a podiatrist about painful calluses on his feet. Murray continued to see MJ and his kids from time to time.

In 2009, Murray received a phone call from Michael Amir Williams. MJ was about to play a number of O2 Arena concerts, and he’d
“very much like” Murray to accompany him to London. Murray hesitated: “Well, I need more details about that.” The next call came from Michael Jackson himself. On May 8, Murray received an e-mail from AEG’s Timm Woolley, outlining the $150,000-a-month deal they’d agreed on: the doctor would travel to
London on a chartered jet with Michael or, short of that, in commercial first class; he’d live in a guest house on the grounds of whatever property AEG rented for Michael; and he’d wind down his Las Vegas and Houston medical practices over ten days. In negotiating with Brigitte Segal, hired by AEG to secure houses, Murray asked for one big enough for his wife, three daughters ages eight, twelve, and sixteen, and their three-month-old son.
“Make sure that the mattresses are in top shape otherwise they will have to be changed to a very suportive [
sic
] type,” Murray wrote in an e-mail to Segal.

Michael invited Murray to spend the night at his house on Carolwood in Los Angeles. The doctor became a fixture. Security took for granted that Murray’s 2005
BMW 6 Series convertible would be parked in the driveway every night, and Michael’s kids and employees accepted that Murray was the only one allowed upstairs, although household staff occasionally left Michael’s meals outside the bedroom door. When Prince and his friends ventured to Michael’s room during a game of hide-and-seek, they found the door locked.
“I was twelve,” Prince would say. “To my understanding, [Dr. Murray] was supposed to make sure my dad stayed healthy.”