Kill 'Em and Leave (19 page)

But his penchant for hiding money never wavered. One afternoon, Dallas and Cannon were chatting with Brown in his Augusta office and Dallas posed a question: “Mr. Brown, where do we look for your money if something happens to you?”

Brown was seated at a desk. He had a yellow legal pad before him. He scribbled one word on it and flipped it around so that Dallas could see it.

The word read: “Dig.”

In his Beech Island mansion off Douglas Drive, Brown had a little red room. Nobody was allowed to enter that room. That was the money room.

Brown led Cannon into that room one day, and as Cannon watched, he opened up one of two big cardboard boxes. The box was loaded to the top with hundred-dollar bills. Cannon was stunned. “Where did you get this from?” he asked. “This is a tax problem.”

Brown wouldn't say. And if Mr. Brown wouldn't say, Cannon knew there was no forcing him. He assumed the tax problem would have to be dealt with soon enough. He'd learn of its source then.

He never did. That is part of the problem. The South Carolina state court system and its bevy of attorneys that have frittered away millions out of Brown's estate as it “administers” it during these confusing court battles is still trying to deflect the blame of “lost funds” onto Cannon, claiming that Cannon “knows where Brown's money is.” Cannon insists he does not know. During his tenure with Brown, Cannon could challenge Brown about his spending, but ultimately no one changed Brown's spending habits. Brown was impulsive. If he wanted to walk into a jewelry store and spend $10,000 on a necklace, or hire a private jet to fly a young lady he'd met overseas thousands of miles to visit him, or book extra gigs while touring Europe that he didn't tell anyone about so that he could bank the cash, or cart $9,000 in silver dollars into his house in a wheelbarrow, he simply did it. Despite Cannon's objections, which usually came after the fact. “I was one of the few people who could get behind closed doors and raise hell with him,” Cannon says.

But that didn't change Brown's penchant for hiding money or spending impulsively. He hid and spent so freely, Cannon says, that even Brown, who could “count his money to the dollar,” began to have trouble keeping up with how much he had. Particularly aggravating, Cannon says, was Brown's habit of spending through the salary they'd agreed on, then borrowing from a huge cache of cash he stored in Cannon's home safe. According to Cannon, Brown treated that safe as a bank for eight years, storing money in it, coming by to pick up thousands at a time, storing thousands more, running out, coming back to put more in, pulling out, taking in, pulling out. The problem grew worse when Brown discovered that Adrienne had taken $93,000 that Brown had hidden in the ceiling of his pool house. He ramped up his use of Cannon's safe. “At one point he had about a million dollars in my safe,” Cannon said. “I told him, ‘Mr. Brown, this money belongs in a bank. I'm not a bank.'

“ ‘No, Mr. Cannon. It's fine right here.' ”

According to Cannon's account, Brown ran so much money into and out of his safe that Brown himself lost track, and about a year and a half before he died, Brown called and said, “I know I don't have any money over there.”

“I said, ‘You got $400,000 here.'

“He said, ‘No, it's yours. I want to borrow $350,000.'

“I said, ‘It's your money.' I gave him $350,000 in cash.” Brown put it in a plastic grocery bag and left.

“That's something no one knows,” Cannon said. “They never deposed me. I've never been on the witness stand. No one knows I was keeping cash for James Brown.” Brown later insisted that Cannon repay himself the $350,000 as payment for constant borrowing and storing his funds. He had offered Cannon 10, 15, even 20 percent for keeping his money in his safe over their fourteen-year relationship, and Cannon had always declined. In addition, Cannon helped Brown broker a huge bond deal with a Wall Street outfit, which advanced Brown $25 million against future royalties. Brown wanted to reward him. That was, Cannon says, the James Brown way of doing business, based on trust, friendship, and his whims. You make a big deal, James Brown rewards you in James Brown fashion. But James Brown gives you what James Brown feels you deserve—maybe more or less than you believe you deserve. It was in keeping with his past behavior, for example the way his son Terry says that Brown would buy cars for friends or trusted associates—it might be a used one, but a used one, Brown said, would do. Or the way Fred Wesley, Brown's co-composer, says he got percentages ranging from 2 to 80 percent on songs he was involved in creating or wrote outright—and for others he did not create at all. “It was all based on JB's whims,” he said.

In December 2006, Brown made an appointment to see an Atlanta dentist about his teeth. When he arrived, the dentist saw that he was seriously ill and sent Brown immediately to nearby Emory Crawford Long Hospital. Cannon got word and drove to the hospital right away. On Christmas Eve, two days later, Cannon drove there intent on staying the night. Brown said, “It's Christmas, Mr. Cannon. Go home to your family.” Cannon left, reluctantly. He'd never see Brown alive again.

Brown died within hours after Cannon left, at about 1:20
A.M.
on Friday, Christmas day. Cannon, who wrote and signed all of Brown's checks for James Brown Enterprises, cashed a check to himself the following Tuesday, three days after Brown's death, for $350,000. The direct source of those funds, he says, was a roughly $900,000 payment to Brown's company from a routine audit that had been performed on one of the entities that collected Brown's royalty and music publishing money. The indirect source, he says, is that it was his money anyway. Brown had given it to him, based on his storing and handling James Brown's money—doing things the James Brown way.

In an estate that at Brown's death was estimated by Cannon conservatively at a minimum of $100 million—and that figure, too, is a matter of court fighting, by the way—and where millions flowed in and out and hundreds of transactions took place annually, $350,000 is not much, particularly between two partners who cut their own deals and worked with a lot of cash. Show business, Cannon points out, is still a cash business, probably second only to drugs in terms of cash moved around. Moreover, most agents who represent artists get 10, 15 percent, even 25 percent of that artist's fees and income. Overall, Cannon's take during the course of his fourteen-year stint with Brown added up, in Cannon's view, to about 15 percent. Brown likely made much more money for the various lawyers, agents, and hustlers who visited his career long before Cannon and Dallas pulled him out of hot water, and most did far less for Brown in his career than those two, which is probably why he appointed them—along with Judge Bradley—to run his education foundation at his death.

But it didn't matter. The flurry of accusations, from Brown's alleged widow and his children, came at Cannon so fast and hard they knocked him on his heels. “You can't imagine my offense,” he said. “For fourteen years my job was to build his credibility.”

The initial legal warring and clamor for Brown's money was so vicious that the various parties couldn't even agree where to bury Brown. After his three funeral services—one at the Apollo in New York, one in Augusta, and a private one at Brown's daughter Deanna's church—were done, Brown's body lay in an Augusta funeral home for months while the lawyers duked it out. Cannon, who had been the guy that Brown trotted out to keep away phonies, money mongers, money grubbers, and even, at times, Brown's children, now found himself on the outside with a bull's-eye on his back, targeted by everyone who had an ax to grind. Cannon initially had to pony up $40,000 of his own money to pay for Brown's funeral and was then ordered by a South Carolina court to pay back the $350,000 check that he wrote without having the chance to explain why he wrote it. As he says, he was never deposed. He never took the witness stand. No witnesses were presented against him. He was never allowed to explain—nor could he have easily explained—the doings of a man who never trusted banks, or the government, or even some of his own children, including two of the daughters who sued their own father in 1997 for royalties over songs they had “written” when they were children, eventually collecting $250,000 in settlement, Cannon says. Cannon's lawyer—since fired—told him, “It looks bad. Just give it back and you won't have to worry about it.” Cannon paid the $350,000 to James Brown Enterprises to help clear the decks.

But placing the $350,000 back into the JB account just made things look worse. By then the war was full-on. All the warring parties who'd been left out of the estate plan—the claimed children minus Brown's son Terry, the alleged widow, and the growing contingent of lawyers working on contingency fees of reportedly up to 30 percent, paid out of Brown's estate and eventually totaling millions—had an easy target: a white guy who had exerted “undue influence” on the Godfather. Dallas and Judge Bradley suffered terribly as well. Dallas spent $300,000 on his legal defense, barely survived a terrible auto accident, and his law practice was nearly destroyed. Bradley died, the stress no doubt helping him to an early death. But it was Cannon who took the brunt of the accusations. A newspaper article, reported from a cleverly placed “tip” from an opposing lawyer to a friendly AP reporter, plastered Cannon's name and face across the country. Readers and television snippets showing Cannon's face bore the news that old Brown had been bamboozled out of his dough. The Internet did the rest, with half facts and rumors morphing into unsubstantiated fact. The South Carolina attorney general, Henry McMaster, who planned a run for governor, marched into the mess trying to play white knight. He tossed Brown's will and rewrote it, creating a new trust mandating that half of Brown's estate be split between the widow and the kids. By then the court had tossed Cannon, Bradley, and Dallas as trustees and appointed a new lead trustee of Brown's estate, attorney Adele Pope, who was eventually ousted by the same old-boy network that appointed her when she attempted to move the estate as Brown intended. She was ousted for a third trustee.

“In nine years, the will has never gone to probate court,” says Buddy Dallas. “As long as it's in state court, they can do with it what they want. It's being sucked to death.”

Meanwhile, attorneys representing Tomi Rae Hynie and Brown's children kept coming after Cannon, claiming he owed millions, at one point tossing a figure of $7 million for “restitution” in the air. Why not $10 million, $100 million? The figures seemed to come out of thin air. It seemed nearly impossible to determine what the real numbers were because the judge in the case, Doyet Early, had banned discovery going back to 2007. The $7 million figure, according to Cannon, had no basis in reality, but rather came from a $7 million certificate of deposit he'd purchased for Brown, who wanted to use it to buy an airplane. Later, when court officials went to look for the CD Cannon was alleged to have “stolen,” they found it in a New York bank in Brown's accounts.

“My attorney hired a forensic accountant,” Cannon says. “He went through the books. He told my attorney, ‘Everything that David Cannon has said has been proven in the books.' They never wanted to take my deposition. They still—today—don't want to hear what I have to say. They never wanted to talk to me. They heard only what they wanted to hear. Things they didn't want to hear, they wouldn't hear.”

By the time the dust cleared, Cannon was ruined. He had lost $4 million in net worth, including an investment home in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, and an office warehouse in Columbia. But more than the financial loss, the embarrassment of the case, which destroyed his reputation, was too much for his wife, Maggie, a delicate, dignified woman of impeccable southern manners and hospitality. Maligned by the publicity that ruined her husband's reputation and by extension hers, she tried to commit suicide twice. Believing that his wife would not survive alone if he went to jail for a long stretch, Cannon, worn down by accusations of a case that dragged on for years, worked out a deal. He agreed to an Alford plea, which basically says he would have been found guilty, and agreed to be sentenced for contempt of court. Four days before his sentencing, his son David was murdered by two young black men who broke into his house to rob him. David's mother and Cannon's first wife, Margaret Fulcher, upon hearing the news, rushed to the hospital to be by her son's side. She crashed her car into a telephone pole en route to the hospital and died.

At Cannon's sentencing, the attorney general's office that had forced him to give up his fight did not trot out one witness against him. The presiding judge, Cannon says, was so startled by that admission that he asked the lawyers from the attorney general's office twice: “You have
no
witnesses?”

The lawyer representing the attorney general's office said nothing. The judge asked him what he thought Cannon's sentence should be. The lawyer said, “I don't have any comment.”

On Cannon's side, Charles Bobbit, who had known Brown for forty-one years, spoke in Cannon's favor. His testimony, in essence, was that whatever Mr. Cannon did, Mr. Brown surely told him to do it. Nobody put one over on Mr. Brown when it came to his money. Nobody ever told Mr. Brown what to do. Cannon says a former FBI agent hired by the prosecutor spent four years investigating him. After Cannon was sentenced, the agent came up to Cannon and told his family, “I investigated this man for four years. The more I investigated, the better he looked.”

The judge was lenient. He reduced a ten-year sentence to time served at home, six months in county jail, and three years' house probation wearing an ankle monitor. Cannon, who had never been arrested in his life, served three months in state prison, and was sixty-eight when he was released.