Jesse Jackson Said
Giving alcohol to minors was put forward as corroborating evidence to
the main charges, which were concerned with the committing of lewd acts.
Whether Jackson himself drank or not was surely irrelevant to these accu-
sations. Yet Paul Russell is no fool. Record company executives develop,
out of necessity, a perceptive eye for their artists' drug and drink usage.
Russell even knew why Michael Jackson maintained a large wine ccllar.
'When Michael bought Neverland,' Paul said, someone told him that no
house was complete without a wine ccllar, so he arranged to have one put
in, and being Michael, he had to have the best, but he never drank any of
the wine himself, at least not to my knowledge.'
Put it this way: I completely trusted Paul Russell's veracity and his
judgment on this one. He certainly had no reason to lie (indeed in the
course of our discussions over his autobiography he told me of any number
of incidents featuring himself and his associates which were far worse
than Jackson's supposed alcohol use) and he was expert at knowing what
his artists were up to. You should hear his stories of getting blind drunk
again and again with the manager and producer of Abba, the Swede,
Stig Anderson, as they conducted their contractual negotiations each
November. It seemed to me there was no way Michael Jackson could have
been a secret drinker without Russell being aware of the fact. So what was
going on? Something didn't smell right.
That night Paul Russell checked his recollections with a colleague in
the USA in case his memory was failing him. The word came back that
he had remembered correctly. His opinion about Jacksons drinking was
confirmed. But that confirmation went against the prevailing wisdom.
Just about everyone I spoke to believed, if not the main allegations,
certainly that Jackson was a secret drinker. At my instigation, Russell
repeated his knowledge of this issue to some members of the great British
press a few days later. Yet despite their avarice at the time for Jackson
stories, they were all expecting a guilty verdict, on the alcohol charges
if nothing else. Indeed I would go so far as to say that most of them (for
professional reasons of course), wanted a guilty verdict. This prejudiced
them against the exclusive story staring them in the facc and for whatever
reason, they refused to believe it. Thus a major Michael Jackson scoop,
which would later be verified by the jury's verdict, lost out to the media's
alrcady-dccidcd agenda.
3

Chapter I
It was entirely different a month or so earlier, when Paul gave me infor-
mation concerning Michael Jackson's finances. There had been speculation
throughout the run-up to the trial that the defendant was in financial
trouble. The prosecution sought to introduce the state ofjackson's money
problems at every turn before the trial and during the proceedings. They
claimed that Michael Jackson was, to all intents and purposes, bankrupt.
The reason they gave for their concentration on this point was that if it
were true, it provided a motive for Jackson to have given the broadcaster,
Martin Bashir, virtually unlimited access to his life. The prosecution line
was that Jackson needed money following a downturn in his record sales
in the 1990s. Bashir, through the proposed television documentary, Living
with MichaelJackson, offered the prospect of bringing the fading star back
into the public eye, thereby hclpingjackson generate vast amounts of cash
oncc again. This, they said, was the pivotal event which precipitated the
abuse of Gavin Arvizo.
The lawyers in the Santa Barbara DA's office obviously do not know
very much about the way the entertainment industry works. The fact is,
artists live for the publicity they generate. It's what they believe makes
them whole. Whether or not Jackson's finances were on the skids, he
would probably still have wanted to do the show with Bashir. Although
the prosecution, at great expense, employed a forensic accountant to verify
their claims, the exact nature ofjackson's finances remained a matter of
dispute.
The story Paul Russell told me then was even more extraordinary than
the one concerning Jackson's supposed alcohol consumption. It turned out
that Michael Jackson was indeed in something of a financial hole, although
he was far from bankrupt. Hie details, as they rolled out of Russell's mouth,
were jaw-dropping. His knowledge camc from the fact that he was, in
addition to holding responsibilities at the record label, also Chairman of
a music publishing company called Sony AT V, which was a joint venture
between Sony and Michael Jackson. Jackson was a director and major
stockholder in the company, owning fifty per cent of the shares.
Sony ATV was originally formed under the name Associated Television
(ATV) in the UK during the 1950s. It was founded by one of Britain's
greatest impresarios, Lew Grade. Grade was of one of a family of long-
established show-business agents and entrepreneurs that included Bernard
Delfont, Leslie Grade and, later, Michael Grade, who at the time of writing
4

Jesse Jackson Said
is Chairman of the BBC. Back in the fifties, Lew Grade also started the
Independent Television Corporation (ITC), which provided programmes
such as V)e Prisoner, starring Patrick McGoohan, The Saint, with Roger
Moore and Die Persuaders, which featured Moore and Tony Curtis, to
British and international broadcasters. ATV was itself originally one of
these broadcasters, having been awarded a franchise in the mid 1950s to
operate one of the new commercial television companies in the UK. ATV
broadcast to the English Midlands as part of the Independent Television
Network (ITV).
Grade was also involved with another old-school show business tycoon,
Louis Benjamin, in one of the three major record companies existing in
Britain at the time. This company was called Pyc Records, which, along
with EMI and Decca, accounted for the vast majority of records sold in
the country. ATV acquired Pyc as a wholly-owned subsidiary in 1957
with Lew Grade and Louis Benjamin holding most of the shares. Another
subsidiary company, ATV Music Publishing, was created to exploit
a catalogue of songs, mainly written by or for artists on the Pye label or for
themes to ITC and ATV television programmes. It also bought the UK
rights to some classic rock and roll music coming out of the USA.
When a song is commercially recorded it is the job of the songs publisher
to register it with the appropriate agencies, such as the Performing Rights
Society. If the song proves to be a money-earner, the publisher collccts
royalties from sales and fees which arc payable each time the tunc is played
on radio, television, film or other reproductive medium, like ringtones. The
publisher then pays a previously agreed portion of the money collcctcd to
the writcr(s) of the song.
If this sounds like a model of efficiency, it isn't. Like any industry, the
music business contains its fair share of vendettas, petty rivalries and
office politics. Unlike other industries, though, there is so much money
sloshing around, much of it unaccounted for (many would say it is also
undeserved), that egos can reach stratospheric levels and responses are
often wildly disproportionate. In my experience, the 'prima donna' factor
goes up in inverse proportion to the level of talent.
Back in the late 1970s and early 1980s, for instance, when I was running
with Angie Guest a small, independent record label, we went out to
a working breakfast with an old-time music publisher with whom I was
negotiating over the payment of monies for the promotion of a record.
5