MJ (48 page)

Murray began to order staggeringly large
shipments of propofol—ten 100-milliliter bottles and twenty-five 20-milliliter bottles, which he had shipped to a “clinic” that was actually the Santa Monica apartment of his girlfriend Nicole Alvarez. Bigger shipments followed, of not just propofol but Benoquin cream (to treat MJ’s vitiligo) and anti-anxiety
drugs such as lorazepam, better known as Ativan. Nobody other than Jackson or Murray knew about any of this.
“He liked his privacy,” said Michael Amir Williams, MJ’s assistant. Michael’s family and employees were not privy to a May 9 voice recording he left on Conrad Murray’s iPhone. On it, Michael’s voice sounded shockingly deep and scratchy, and he slurred his nonsensical words into a jumble.
“We have to be phenomenal,” Michael declared, referring to his O2 concerts. “When people leave this show, when people leave my show, I want them to say, ‘I’ve never seen nothing like this in my life. Go. Go. I’ve never seen anything like this. Go. It’s amazing. He’s the greatest entertainer in the world.’ ” Two days later, Conrad Murray ordered another shipment of propofol—a total of 45,000 milliliters in sixty-five bottles.

Somebody was suspicious of Dr. Murray. His name was
Justin Burns, an underwriter for Cathedral Capital, part of a British company administering the $17.5 million Lloyd’s of London insurance policy on Michael Jackson’s health for his upcoming O2 concerts. If Michael missed shows, AEG wanted Lloyd’s to reimburse at least a portion of the money the promoter would lose. It was standard concert procedure—and Michael, given his history of illness and cancellations, was likely to be expensive to insure. Concerned about press reports suggesting Michael was in ill health and photos of him in a wheelchair, Burns and his colleagues requested medical records and an examination. In a June 24 e-mail, Burns wrote of his concern that nobody had passed along MJ’s five-year medical history or a
description of his fitness program. He insisted a doctor would have to examine Michael on July 6 with nobody else, not even Murray, in the room. “Anything less,” Burns wrote, “would not be considered prudent and arguably negligent on are [
sic
] part.” Burns might have had trouble spelling, but his instincts were correct.

*  *  *

At 12:13
P.M.
on Thursday, June 25, 2009, about eleven hours after Michael Jackson’s personal manager Michael Amir Williams and bodyguards
Faheem Muhammed and Alberto Alvarez dropped him off at Carolwood, Williams received a call. He was in the shower. It went to voicemail. Williams listened to the voicemail, from a 702 number. Vegas. Conrad Murray. The doctor had spent the night at Michael’s home as usual.
“Call me right away. Call me right away,” he said. “Thank you.” Within two minutes, Williams called back. “Get here right away,” Murray said. “Mr. Jackson had a bad reaction.”

Williams lived in downtown Los Angeles. He was too far from Carolwood to reach the house quickly. He called Muhammed, who’d just left the property to go to the bank. “Hurry,” Williams told him, “turn around and go back.” In a panic, Williams called Alvarez, who was in the security trailer on the property.
Speed up
, Williams told him. With Williams squawking on his cell phone, Alvarez dutifully ran to the front door, where the Jacksons’ nanny, Roselyn Muhammed, let him in. (AEG’s Gongaware had fired longtime nanny Grace Rwaramba on MJ’s behalf in April, paying $20,000 in severance.) Paris was with her. Alvarez saw Murray at the top of the stairs, with his hands on the railing, leaning forward, looking down. On the phone, Williams instructed Alvarez to run up the stairs. He’d been upstairs at the house only twice over the last six months, once to accompany MJ’s hairdresser. Murray spotted Alvarez: “Alberto, come. Come quick,” he shouted. Alvarez hung up on Williams, leaped up the stairs, and entered Michael Jackson’s room. There, he saw his boss, eyes and mouth open, lying on a pillow in his bed, face slightly to the left, reaching out toward the door as if trying to grab something.

Conrad Murray began to give Michael chest compressions. Paris and Prince walked into the room. “Daddy!” Paris screamed. Murray gave orders to Alvarez: “Don’t let them see their dad like this.” Alvarez soothed the kids—“Everything is going to be okay”—and ushered them toward the door of Michael’s suite. Alvarez returned to the room. He scanned Michael’s suite, took in a few odd details. A condom catheter—Alvarez would call it “some sort of, you know, medical device”—was protruding from MJ’s groin area. Oxygen tubing was attached to his nose.
And, confusingly, Murray was asking Alvarez to help him put some vials from Michael’s wooden nightstand into a plastic grocery bag. Alvarez did as he was told. Then Murray asked him to put that bag into another bag.
“I thought we were packing,” Alvarez would say, “getting ready to go to the hospital.” Murray instructed Alvarez to call 911 on his phone. The recording would be etched in history:
“He’s fifty years old, sir. Yes, he’s not breathing, sir. No, he’s not conscious, sir. Sir, just, if you can please . . .”

Alvarez helped Murray move MJ from his bed to the floor. Alvarez noticed the tubing from an IV stand connected to Michael’s leg. Murray clamped a small device, which Alvarez recognized as a pulse oximeter, to Michael’s finger. Faheem Muhammed returned to the room. “It’s not looking good,” Alvarez told him. Although he was a trained cardiologist, Murray had never given mouth-to-mouth before, but he bent down to touch Michael Jackson’s lips with his.

From the nearby Bel Air fire station on Sunset and Beverly Glen,
Engine 71 rolled up to the Carolwood mansion at 12:25
P.M.
An ambulance followed and pulled into Michael’s driveway, where security men opened the large gates into the street and waved the paramedics through. The ambulance parked next to the front door. Richard Senneff, one of the emergency technicians from the ambulance, followed security up the stairs into Michael’s bedroom. He saw Murray, Alvarez, and Muhammed moving MJ from the bed to the floor. Michael was wearing pajama pants, an unbuttoned pajama shirt, and some kind of surgical cap. He looked pale and underweight. Senneff could see his ribs. He thought the unconscious patient had been suffering from cancer. Thinking hospice, he asked if the patient had a do-not-resuscitate order. Murray responded, “What?” Someone mentioned Michael Jackson’s name. Senneff glanced at his patient’s face and recognized it. Senneff asked for MJ’s medical history. “Nothing,” Murray said.
“I’m just treating him for dehydration and exhaustion.”

Senneff didn’t buy the explanation. Michael had no pulse. His pupils were dilated. His eyes were dry, which meant he hadn’t blinked in some
time. His skin was cool, his legs were pale, and his hands and feet were tinted blue. Talking to Senneff, Murray allowed that he’d given his patient
“a little bit of lorazepam to help him sleep.” Senneff injected life-saving drugs atropine and epinephrine into MJ’s system to speed up his heart. By this point he was convinced Michael was dead. He believed further rescue efforts would be useless, but the voices at the Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center on the other end of his cellphone instructed him to continue. Finally, Senneff and his crew loaded MJ onto a gurney, then hauled him down the stairs and into the ambulance. Murray climbed into the back. Alberto Alvarez had loaded Michael’s three children into an SUV and tried to distract them so they wouldn’t see their father in this state. The ambulance took off at 1:07
P.M.
for the six-minute drive to the hospital, and two
Escalades followed, one carrying Alvarez, the other with Muhammed, Williams, and another bodyguard. By this point, the media had gotten wind of the story, and paparazzi were snaking through LA following the emergency vehicles and the official Michael Jackson security tails. The caravan picked up another vehicle. Randy Phillips, chief executive officer of AEG Live, had been at Sterling Cleaners on Westwood Boulevard in LA when Frank DiLeo called from his room at the Beverly Hills Hilton. “There’s something wrong,” DiLeo said. “Michael’s not breathing. I don’t know how serious it is. I can’t get there fast enough. Can you get there?” Phillips was closer, so he dropped his dry cleaning on the counter, jumped into his car with his business partner, Dave Loeffler, and rushed to Carolwood. The ambulance and fire engine, as well as the two black Escalades carrying Michael’s kids and security men, were pulling out of the house. Phillips pulled in behind them. Two paparazzi vehicles almost ran him off the road, but he made it to UCLA before anyone else. He waited in the hallway. Within half an hour, DiLeo joined him. They sat silently.

Paramedics wheeled Michael Jackson into the emergency room. Michael’s children waited for their grandmother, Katherine, to show up.
“It was madness at the hospital when I got there,” Tohme Tohme,
Michael’s manager, recalled. “Police, fans, media. The police are keeping everybody back.” Alvarez confronted some paparazzi who’d made it into the hospital. “Please,” he said,
“this is a private moment. Please, just step away.” Inside, beginning at
1:13
P.M.
, doctors continued to administer heart-pumping drugs. A technician did physical chest compressions. At 1:21
P.M.
, Conrad Murray declared he heard a pulse, encouraging the doctors to continue their work. Nobody else felt one. At 2:26
P.M.
, Richelle Cooper, a veteran emergency-room physician who had the shift at UCLA that night, pronounced Michael Jackson dead. A nurse came out and asked Phillips and DiLeo, who’d been waiting in the hallway, when Katherine Jackson would be arriving. Michael’s mother, giving instructions to her driver somewhere in Santa Monica, was on her way. Phillips wanted to know why the nurse was asking.
“Well, I really shouldn’t be telling you this,” she told them, “but there’s really nothing else we can do.” The heavyset DiLeo collapsed into Phillips’s arms.
“I almost fainted,” DiLeo would say. By the time Katherine Jackson arrived, Michael was dead. In the hallway, Murray pulled Michael Amir Williams aside. They talked about how horrible everything was. Then Murray confided to Williams that there was some cream in Michael’s room, back at Carolwood,
“that he wouldn’t want the world to know about.” Murray asked for a ride back to the house. He’d accompanied the ambulance to the hospital; his BMW remained parked in Michael’s driveway. Emotional, and not wanting to deal with the doctor’s bizarre request, Williams asked Faheem Muhammed for his opinion. Muhammed said, “I am not giving him the keys.” Murray then asked for a ride to get some food. Williams refused, and instructed Muhammed to lock down the Carolwood house and “make sure security doesn’t let anyone in or anyone out.” By the time police showed up to sequester MJ’s body in a secured hospital room, Murray was gone. To avoid traffic and paparazzi, police air-lifted the body to the coroner’s office.

Michael Jackson had written a vision of his death, in prose form,
back in 1992:
“A star can never die. It just turns into a smile and melts back into the cosmic music, the dance of life.

“I like that thought,” he added, “the last one I have before my eyes close.”

He was fifty years old.

*  *  *

The day Michael Jackson died, June 25, 2009,
Travis Payne, his longtime choreographer, had been on his way to the Carolwood house for their two
P.M.
one-on-one dance rehearsal. Kenny Ortega and the This Is It crew had begun their routines at the Staples Center. Payne’s mother called him. She’d seen reports of MJ’s death on the news. “I’m sure everything is fine,” Payne said. Rumors about Michael Jackson’s health were not unusual. Payne called Stacy Walker, an assistant choreographer for the tour, and asked if anything was up. “No,” she told him, “we’re rehearsing.” But before he arrived at Carolwood, Payne received another call—there was an emergency at the house, and Payne should report to Staples instead. Payne rerouted. When he showed up, the dancers were working on choreography for “Smooth Criminal.” Nearby, Ortega began to get phone calls—Michael had been rushed to the hospital. Most of the dancers took a break and returned to their dressing room, where they watched the news on Staples Center TVs and refused to believe it.
“People say things,” they told each other. Then Chris Grant, a dancer, received twenty texts on his phone. In another part of the arena, Abby Franklin, wardrobe coordinator, had been
meeting with the
tour accountant, who had to interrupt their discussion because he noticed AEG’s Paul Gongaware had called him a number of times in a row. The accountant reached Gongaware by phone, and when he turned back to Franklin, he informed her MJ was in the hospital for a heart attack. When TMZ broke the story of Michael Jackson’s death, at 2:44
P.M.
, everybody at Staples seemed to absorb it at once. Payne, Ortega, and choreographers Stacy Walker and Alif Sankey lingered near
the stage. Then Ortega received another call, from AEG’s Phillips and Gongaware. He paused, then said,
“Tell me something that will make me know it’s you, and that this is true.”
Ortega then collapsed, sobbing. Payne hauled him into a seat near the stage. Stunned, Payne went to a desk near the stage and began absent-mindedly typing on his laptop. Elsewhere in the arena, Jonathan “Sugarfoot” Moffett, Michael’s drummer since the seventies, was crying so hard friends had to hold him up. Michael Bush, MJ’s longtime costume designer, was in a similar state.

Security locked down the building. Nobody could come or go.

Walker went to the dancers’ dressing room and broke the news. The dancers split up, one moment a cohesive crew united in “Dirty Diana,” the next a disheveled, weeping mass spreading to different corners of the room, trying to figure out what to do with their hands. “It turned so quickly from all of us being happy and joyful, and we were getting ready to go on this tour, to it just being so dark and sad, and you just couldn’t believe it,” Grant says.
“No one knew what to do,” Walker adds. “We couldn’t leave. We ate dinner there.” Crews showed up—nobody knew from where—to tear down the stage, hauling out the pieces that, an hour ago, represented Michael Jackson’s triumphant comeback.

“So many deaths, really,” Walker says. “It was the end of Michael Jackson. It was the end of a show. It was the end of this family we had created. It was the end of a journey. There was no London. Everybody’s plans just shifted immediately. You’re done. Good-bye.”