Sorry, LaToya, But I Think Your Crazy Ass is Wrong This Time

LaToya Jackson still maintains that her brother Michael Jackson was murdered. And she’s going on a national media tour, showing up on The View, and appearing on 20/20 with Barbara Walters to prove it.

I’ve said before that any one setting great store by LaToya’s or Joe Jackson’s brainless meanderings about someone conspiring to kill Michael need their own heads examined. This isn’t about Michael. It’s about Michael’s money.

Bryan Monroe, former Ebony Magazine editor, who conducted the last official interview with Michael Jackson, has this to say:

In the days after Jackson’s June 25 death, I was inundated with questions and concerns from many who were close to the superstar throughout his life and career. They killed him, they would say to me. They finally did it.

What did they mean? Who were “they?” And who would stand to gain at the death of a legend?

Who indeed? Michael was cash-poor, it is true, but he was NOT a poor man by a long shot.

[…]

Dick Gregory, the civil rights activist and natural health proponent who had been an advisor to Jackson for years, told me that singer was often concerned for his own privacy and safety. In the days before Jackson’s 2005 trial ended, Gregory was abruptly called to come and look after Michael’s deteriorating health. The once-regal superstar was noticeably exhausted, dehydrated, worn out.

“Michael’s mother sent word to me, come quick,” Gregory recalled to me two days after Jackson died. “When I got there, Michael told me, ‘Dick, don’t leave me, they’re trying to kill me.” He never said who “they” were.

Gregory and Jackson ultimately checked into a nearby hospital, after taking a circuitous route that originally had the two driving toward San Francisco, nearly three hours away. “When we got there, they rushed him straight to the emergency room,” Gregory said. “At 5 p.m., they hooked him up to IVs. At 5:15 a.m. the next morning, they were still putting fluids in him. He was fighting for his life. They said if we had waited 12 more hours, he’d have been dead.”

I doubt whether this episode was engineered by John Branca, Frank DiLeo or the others involved as attorneys, executors or managers for Michael Jackson. It’s also identical to an episode I mentioned in an earlier post in which Jackson was said to have nearly suffered an OD. I think the “they” were Jackson’s hangers-on or members of his entourage.

As one reader has written, quoting John Lennon, it is always the courtiers who kill the king; that is, it is always the people immediately surrounding people like Michael Jackson, for whom the word no was in a foreign language, who can inadvertently or not kill or injure a star/celebrity. Just like would-be courtier Dr. Conrad Murray, who keeps repeating that he did nothing wrong. Except to accede, despite common sense, to every manipulation and command Michael Jackson gave, to the point where Michael was infantilized and nearly unable to make a life-saving decision on his own.

How? I remember reading a passage from the writer Eduardo Galeano’s trilogy, Memory of Fire, that one 17th century Spanish Hapsburg king, the product of centuries of inbreeding, died literally on the throne as the nobility around him watched. Why? Because the protocol-bound grandees were forbidden to touch the royal person unless he or she was specifically asked to do so, even as the mentally-retarded monarch convulsed and choked his way into oblivion.

Few of you Gen X, Y, Z remember how the last days of billionaire Howard Hughes were depicted. No, not in the film The Aviator with Leonardo di Caprio. The true Howard Hughes ended his life as a grey-haired, emaciated old man who had long hair and a long beard like Sir Ian McKellen’s Gandalf, but who didn’t bathe or clip his nails and was obsessed with germs. Hughes was showing signs of mental breakdown even when he was married and chasing skirt, including Katherine Hepburn’s, in the 1930s. By the 1950s, sex ended for Hughes, as contact with another human being meant that he had to meet up with germs as well.

Ultimately, he was surrounded by Mormons who gave in to his almost every whim, which were partly fueled by obsessive compulsive behavior. The “Mormon Mafia,” as they were called, allowed him to continue his addictions to codeine and morphine, instead of getting him medical and psychological treatment that he needed. Such treatment would have indeed thrown them out of their jobs, and transferred the Hughes billions to a less pliable relative. Particularly in the case of Hughes, some people still believe that the Mormons surrounding the billionaire were hopeful that he would eventually tithe his billions to their already very rich and conservative and weird American church. So they let him do whatever he wanted.

I am going to say it: Michael Jackson follows the behaviors and situations of both these men, even Elvis. He died just about by his own hand, assisted by incompetents and sycophants.

Michael Jackson was also a drug addict, surrounded by courtiers who would do anything for him. as long as they were able to bask in his presence. That included his pick for personal physician Murray, that shady dermatologist Dr. Arnold Klein, and others who haven’t yet been exposed to public view. This is only the tip of the iceberg.

Now, just because one is a recurring drug addict, doesn’t mean that s/he would always make mistakes. For example, I don’t think Michael made a mistake in drawing up his will, a will that some in the Jackson family would like to see broken in their favor. I include LaToya Jackson and her father in that picture. They’re pissed because the money didn’t come to them. They only want their mitts on the cash. Frankly, these people shouldn’t measure someone else’s supposed greed on their own grasping.

Let me tell y’all something. I can truly believe that there was conspiracy involved with John and Robert Kennedy’s shootings, and with those of Malcolm X and Martin King. The Sixties, for all of its wonders and triumphs, was a dirty, violent, and turbulent time as well. I can only hope that I live long enough to see and hear what is the truth behind all of these slayings before I leave this lifetime. We needed all of these men; I wish the Universe had spared all their lives.

But you can’t go on just a feeling. Conspiracy is hard to connect and hard to confirm. That’s why there is not just one, but several conspiracies involving all these Saints of the Sixties. LaToya Jackson, from what I understand, didn’t complete higher education. Compared to Janet, her singing career hasn’t followed the same trajectory. Her only claims to fame is that through her book, LaToya, she put the kibosh on all that PR about the Jacksons being a happy family; and that she was close to being pimped out by her manager, Jack Gordon, a representative that her own father, to his detriment, chose for her. Later, Gordon forced LaToya to marry him and physically and emotionally abused the woman. She’s since survived to reinvent herself, but it’s here is where to reverts back to the old LaToya. The only things, I believe, LaToya still has in her favor about this conspiracy-murder theory is a vivid imagination, and how much she wants to show that she’s in with the family. Otherwise, the scenario that LaToya lays out just does not add up.

In order to prove conspiracy, LaToya has to have at her disposal motive(s), names of possible conspirators, phone records, proofs of payoffs, faxes, phone messages, wires. bank statements, records of or witnesses to clandestine meetings, etc., and et al. Particularly, credible witnesses. I don’t think she has access to this kind of thing at all that the cops would be interested in pursuing, unless she really has something up her sleeves. And then again, she would be accused of withholding evidence if she did. I don’t think that she was privy to how Michael drew up his will. I don’t think that she was privy to every change in his household or with his hangers-on.

I know she, like her father, wishes to accuse the executors of Michael’s estate and the AEG people who set up the concert tour. But wishing is not the same as hard facts and reality. Bryan Monroe goes on to say:

Secrecy was also part of the life Michael lived. His close friend and attorney, John Branca, who is also co-administrator of Michael’s estate, recently recovered $5.5 million that the artist had secretly squirreled away with occasional financial advisor Dr. Tohme Tohme, money Jackson wanted hidden away for a rainy day, perhaps to buy his next home.

“He said, ‘Don’t tell anyone about this money,'” Tohme told the Associated Press earlier this month. “But when he passed away, I told them I had this money, and I gave it to them.”

That’s why LaToya was unable to find those garbage bags full of money that Michael used to have at his residences. I think they were long gone, that it was a phase. He changed. Michael no longer needed to have all that cold cash around to prove to himself how powerful or rich he was.

Third, Michael shared something in common with most druggies. He was paranoid. But it wasn’t the CIA or the FBI that was after Michael; at least, not yet that we know of. It was those yes-people close at hand who kept acceding to him until he could only call out for help to someone outside that claustrophobic circle, as with Dick Gregory. It was this same circle and lifestyle that Michael himself helped to create and to whom he returned time and again. He would clean up, and then relapse; rehabilitate himself, and then regress into addiction once more.

Think about how many celebrities and actors and such haven’t been able to get over their addictions, landing back in rehab time and again. La-La Land, Lotos Land or Los Angeles–it’s still a dangerous place in which to be.

I’m sure LaToya stands to gain exposure and money from all these appearances and speechifying. Maybe she really believes what she believes. Maybe she can convince people that there are others who participated in a sinister cabal against her brother. But unless more credible evidence emerges, Michael Jackson is just as much a participant in his homicide as the incompetent Dr. Murray is. Not murder one, but manslaughter. Not conspiracy, but perfectly logical and predictable steps towards oblivion.

As impatient and demanding as a infant, the fifty-year-old Michael told Dr. Murray he wanted his ‘milk,’ which is what he called Diprivan/Propofol.

He got it.

~ by blksista on August 25, 2009.