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by brekin » Fri Apr 17, 2015 1:29 pm
by seemslikeadream » Fri Apr 17, 2015 1:39 pm
by Elvis » Fri Apr 17, 2015 3:17 pm
by IanEye » Fri Apr 17, 2015 9:51 pm
by zangtang » Fri Apr 17, 2015 10:03 pm
by 82_28 » Fri Apr 17, 2015 11:38 pm
by Nordic » Sat Apr 18, 2015 5:43 am
by brekin » Sat Apr 18, 2015 6:19 pm
Nordic wrote:The very first photo. Michael Jackson? Why? Or was it Whitney Houston? Same question -- why?
Or am I missing something?
The short answer, both, and for the $.
Long answers below.
With Jackson, it just seems strange that a super socially conservative billionaire wanted to team up with him, actually sought him out, when he seemed to be morally and artistically damaged goods. And his suspicious death through the very same companies hired doctor seems even stranger. Of course what doesn't seem strange is that the super socially conservative billionaire still made his money.
Whitney could probably just been drug debts and those who would benefit from her catalog and sales post death.
Might as well add Whitney's daughter who recently coincidentally had an accident in the bath like her mother and is now in a coma. Subtle guys, real subtle. Hopefully she pulls through. I hope neither were conspiracies but I remember watching a Genesis (the band) documentary and the first Genesis reunion happened because Peter Gabriels WOMAD festival didn't make any money. The event promoters started threatening Gabriel and his family violence if they weren't paid. And that was some tiny fringe world music festival not any Woodstock. The more money involved in the music world the more organized crime and drug cartels seem to move in. I don't have any grand theories but I have a few guesses why the caged bird sings.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bobbi_Kristina_BrownBobbi Kristina Brown (born March 4, 1993)[4] is an American reality television and media personality, singer, and heiress. She is the daughter of singers Bobby Brown and Whitney Houston. Following her mother's death on February 11, 2012, Brown was named as the sole beneficiary of her mother's estate.
2015 hospitalization
On January 31, 2015, Gordon and a male friend found Brown [Bobbi Kristina] face down in a bathtub in her Georgia home.[29] Gordon began CPR until emergency medical services personnel arrived. According to a police spokeswoman, Brown was alive and breathing after being transported to North Fulton Hospital in Roswell, Georgia.[15] She further stated they found no evidence to indicate the incident was caused by drugs or alcohol.[1] Doctors placed Brown in a medically induced coma after determining her brain function was "significantly diminished", and her family was told any meaningful recovery would be "a miracle".[30]So WAS Whitney Houston murdered? Private investigator claims he has video proving singer was killed by drug dealers
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article ... alers.html
Former police officer says 48-year-old died after racking up debts
Medical examiner ruled she accidentally drowned in a hotel bathtub
She had taken cocktail of cocaine, marijuana and prescription drugs
Paul Huebl believes troubled star was targeted by 'high powered' dealers
Says they sent thugs to collect $1.5million debt she owed for drugs
He claims marks on her body look like defensive wounds
By Tom Leonard
Published: 19:34 EST, 26 December 2012 | Updated: 02:55 EST, 31 December 2012
As Whitney Houston's drugs-ravaged body lay cold under a sheet in her suite at a Beverly Hills hotel, elsewhere in the building a Grammy Awards party was being thrown by her long-time mentor Clive Davis. Later, while guests including Britney Spears, Diana Ross, Jane Fonda and Sir Richard Branson were swanning out of the front entrance, Houston's corpse was being hustled ignominiously out of a side door.
It's difficult to imagine how the singer's demise — in a bath last February — could have been more melodramatic. But now startling new claims suggest an extraordinary twist.
Case closed: The Los Angeles County Coroner ruled Whitney Houston's death an accidental drowning after she was found dead in her bathtub
Tragedy: The singer' is carried to a hearse in a coffin after her funeral in Newark, N.J., in February
Tragedy: The 48-year-old singer's body is carried to a hearse after her funeral in Newark, N.J., in February
A Los Angeles private investigator, who has probed celebrity drugs cases and suspicious deaths, sensationally alleges that 48-year-old Houston was murdered by two thugs sent by high-powered East Coast drug dealers to collect on a $1.5 million debt.
Former police officer Paul Huebl says he has presented the FBI with what he insists is compelling evidence that Houston was targeted by the two men, who were part of a group of scruffily dressed hangers-on. He says the pair were unknown to most, but not all, of Whitney's huge entourage, which repeatedly visited her hotel room in her final days.
Incredibly, Huebl even claims the men were captured on the hotel's CCTV going into the singer's suite — No. 434 — at the luxurious Beverly Hilton around the time she died.
Whitney was discovered face down in a scalding bath by her assistant, who had left her for just 45 minutes while she went out to run errands. When paramedics arrived, Whitney was unresponsive. They performed CPR for about 20 minutes before declaring her dead.
A coroner ruled that the death of the greatest singer of her age had been due to accidental drowning, with heart disease and chronic cocaine abuse listed as contributory factors. An 'acute dose' of cocaine was found in her system as well as a cocktail of other drugs, including marijuana and prescription sedatives.
As theories swirled about Whitney's untimely death, it emerged she was in so much debt that she was having to ask for $100 handouts from her friends. (Her hotel suite had been paid for by Clive Davis.)
Tragic: The troubled star had a potent cocktail of cocaine, marijuana and prescription drugs in her system when she died at the Beverly Hilton hotel
But could her mountain of debt really have led to her death?
I phoned Paul Huebl at his California office yesterday and he explained the scenario he insists accounts for unexplained details in the official coroner's report.
He also told me about new evidence he has unearthed.
Huebl will not say who hired him to look into Houston's death but does confirm it is not Pat Houston, Whitney's sister-in-law and one-time manager who claimed the star was the victim of a murder conspiracy — only to suddenly, and unaccountably, change her mind.
Huebl tells me: 'Every indication is that it's a murder. I've got some evidence that is pretty glaring, and I've turned it over to the appropriate law-enforcement agency.'
Huebl says unnamed informants have told him that surveillance video footage exists of the two men he claims are involved, entering Houston's suite shortly after 2.45pm on the day she died — February 11 — while her assistant was out.
He believes they demanded the money she owed their bosses, and when she refused to give it to them, 'things got physical'.
Private investigator: Paul Huebl, the man who is making the claims about Houston's death, is a former police officer who became an actor
Although Houston's assistant informed police that the last thing she told the singer before she went out was to have a bath, Huebl thinks Whitney was thrown in the water by one or more assailants. And what might have started out as an attempt to scare her, ended in murder.
The evidence for the alleged struggle, he says, lies in the coroner's report. The coroner, for instance, noted that a large area of skin on Houston's lower back was burnt off — so-called 'skin slippage' — by the scalding bath water. The water was so hot that six hours after she died it was 33c (93.5f).
Even someone high on cocaine wouldn't 'willingly' get into a bath that hot, says Huebl, who adds: 'She obviously had “help”.'
As for the report's revelations that Houston had injuries on her forearms and hands, Huebl claims these are 'consistent with her having a pretty nasty struggle and consistent with classic defence wounds.
There were bruises on her arms and shoulders, a cut on her upper lip, scrapes to her nose and forehead, and lacerations to her scalp.'
In fact, the singer had so many injuries it looked as though she'd been in a boxing match, he says.
'Call this an accident if you want, but it doesn't make sense to me.'
He believes that after Whitney was killed, her assailants ransacked her suite, took money, drugs and jewellery, and left before her assistant returned.
Huebl, whose investigation was first reported in the National Enquirer, is by no means the first person to have been puzzled by Houston's death and her bizarre behaviour in her final days.
In the early hours of her last day, a stoned-looking Houston was seen on her hotel balcony, shouting: 'I'm tired of this s***!'
Some people have wondered if it was a cry of desperation from a superstar who realised her precious voice — with its famous three-and-a-half octave range — was gone for ever. But Huebl believes it was a cry from the heart over the harassment she was getting to repay the money she owed her drug dealers.
He says he was told by an informant that Houston had earlier taken possession of a new supply of cocaine and been partying with a small group of people, including her killers, in her suite until around 4am. When she refused to pay them, they left and returned later that day with fatal consequences.
As Huebl notes, Houston had a 'risky lifestyle' including heroin and crack-cocaine abuse, and inevitably surrounded herself with others involved in that criminal world.
As to the identities of her alleged killers, Huebl clearly has his suspicions. However, he will say only that Houston's alleged murder could have its roots in more than one state. He claims drug-world sources have told him that people from New Jersey and Georgia — states where Houston has lived — were involved.
He adds that he approached the FBI because it has no connection with the police force that undertook the original investigation and because it is responsible for cross-state crimes.
When I ask why Beverly Hills police have not acted on the allegedly damning hotel CCTV evidence, which presumably they must have seen, he pointedly says I should ask them. (Neither the FBI nor the Beverly Hills Police Department have commented on his claims.)
However, he told the National Enquirer he believed the police and coroner were 'happy to sweep Whitney's death under the rug, calling it accidental and closing their investigation'.
Huebl also believes that at least some of Houston's entourage 'know what happened'.
In April, Beverly Hills police concluded that foul play was not involved. Detectives based their decision on the coroner's findings that the singer's death was due to accidental drowning and, in part, the result of cocaine ingestion and a heart condition.
The 41-page coroner's report found that Houston was submerged in bath water for nearly an hour, and that her personal assistant had last seen her alive between 2.35pm and 3pm.
So should we give any credence to Paul Huebl's theory? Certainly, it's easy to dismiss it as the product of a fevered imagination, or cynical publicity-seeking. Except that in Houston's case, her life had become such a sordid train wreck that anything seemed possible by the end — including vengeful drug dealers prepared to maim and kill.
Her final public performance two nights before her death spoke volumes about how low she'd sunk from the days when the world and Kevin Costner swooned at every quivering note of I Will Always Love You in The Bodyguard film.
She staggered on stage at a tiny Hollywood club called Tru, drunk, puffy-faced and dishevelled, to sing a dreadful one-minute duet of Yes, Jesus Loves Me with soul singer Kelly Price.
Whitney ended up in a fight with another singer, then left with her hangers-on and blood trickling down her leg.
She spent the next night (her last) in the bar of her hotel, drinking heavily and treating staff and fellow guests to her trademark behaviour of wandering around, flailing her arms, doing handstands and burbling unintelligibly. The following afternoon she was dead.
Her long-time friend Robyn Crawford said afterwards: 'I don't know what kind of pressure she was putting on herself.'
While family members and close friends insisted Houston had shaken off drugs, others — including therapists who spoke to her relatives — claimed her loved ones had cynically ignored her drug abuse because they were relying on her as their breadwinner.
Houston was by her own admission 'no angel', however much her marketing people tried to manipulate her image.
Friends revealed that she was taking drugs before she even met Bobby Brown, the ex-gang member, convicted criminal and drug addict who became her husband and supposedly ruined her.
In 2006, a few months before the couple got divorced, Brown's sister Tina sold shocking pictures of Houston's bathroom in her mansion, which the star had turned into a crack den. Her teeth had fallen out from drug use, and she was so incontinent she was wearing nappies.
Associates told newspapers that Houston and Brown used to cruise the streets of New Jersey and Atlanta in chauffeur-driven limos, looking for crack.
In the Nineties, Whitney was reported to have paid $750,000 to one drug dealer alone.
According to U.S. tabloid Globe, she owed $1.5 million to drug suppliers when she died.
Whether or not the murder theory has any credence, Whitney's death was a particularly pitiful end for a star who, thanks to her legions of black and white fans across the world, represented a colour-blind showbusiness world.
Her demise became a polarising moment in much of America. Amid the national grieving, some commentators condemned Houston as a disgusting junkie who squandered her huge talents and deserved no eulogies.
So could it be possible, as the FBI is now being asked to consider, that a similarly damning attitude dissuaded investigators from spending more time examining her depressingly sleazy death?
Conservative Christian Billionaire Philip Anschutz and the Death of The King of Pop
Does Philip Anschutz, the conservative billionaire owner of Anschutz Entertainment Group (AEG) – a wholly owned subsidiary of the Anschutz Company -- and/or his company, an entertainment and sports empire, bear any responsibility in the death of Michael Jackson?
http://www.truth-out.org/buzzflash/comm ... ing-of-pop
Anschutz Entertainment Group’s AEG Live knew it could make a fortune if Michael Jackson‘s comeback tour was even mildly successful. During preparation for the “This Is It” tour, which might have been the biggest comeback tour in entertainment history starting with 50 shows in London and then possibly moving on to other worldwide venues, an out-of-shape, exhausted and prescription drug-dependent Jackson died of an overdose of drugs.
It is now four-plus years since Jackson died. Over that period, Philip Anschutz has made millions off the King of Pop.
These days, testimony is being heard in a Los Angeles courtroom in a wrongful death suit brought by Jackson family members against AEG. According to The New York Times, the suit “hinges on the narrow question of whether Jackson or the company was responsible for hiring Dr. Conrad Murray, who administered the anesthetic that killed Jackson in June 2009. Dr. Murray is serving a four-year prison sentence for involuntary manslaughter.”
During the Murray trial, Randy Phillips, the chief executive of AEG Live, told how the idea of the Jackson tour was spawned. As reported in the Los Angeles Times, Phillips said that the concert tour "grew out of a 2008 phone call from Philip Anschutz, …. [who] asked him to meet with Century City financier Tom Barrack, whose company had recently purchased a note on Jackson's Neverland ranch."
Whatever testimony might be elicited during the course of the current trial, it is doubtful that the Anschutz name will surface often, if at all.
The Anschutz Empire
Over the years, Anschutz has avoided the public spotlight while amassing his fortune and supporting conservative institutions, candidates and causes, including Colorado’s controversial anti-gay Amendment 2 campaign. He’s also supported the Discovery Institute in Seattle, a major proponent of Intelligence Design.Thus far this year, according to OpenSecrets.org, Anschutz has contributed $21,500 to the National Republican Senatorial Committee, $5200 to House Speaker John Boehner and another $15,000 to three other Republicans.
Over the years, he has also contributed to: Brent Bozell’s right-wing Media Research Center; the New York-based Institute for American Values; Enough is Enough, a conservative philanthropy-supported organization that campaigns for marriage and against single parenting, which claims to be “Lighting the way to protect children and families from the dangers of illegal Internet pornography and sexual predators”; and, Morality in the Media, established in 1962 “to combat obscenity and uphold decency standards in the media.”
On its list of world billionaires in March of this year, Forbes magazine had Anschutz ranked number 38 in the U.S. and number 109 in the world with a net worth of $10 billion. Although he has made “fortunes in oil, railroads and telecom,” these days, according to Forbes, “his biggest bets are in entertainment” .
In its profile of Anschutz, Forbes noted that: “Through AEG, he operates dozens of the world's greatest concert venues like the Staples Center and Nokia Theater in L.A., London's O2, and Shanghai's Mercedes-Benz Arena. He fills his halls with his own in-house entertainment, including the L.A. Lakers and NHL's L.A. Kings. His music division manages rock stars like Justin Bieber, Enrique Iglesias and Jennifer Lopez. His film division has produced the Chronicles of Narnia series. New deal: AEG partnered with Ryan Seacrest and Mark Cuban to rebrand HDNet as a new TV network called AXS. It will feature lots of live entertainment from AEG's venues. AXS is also the name of AEG's new no-fee ticketing venture to compete with Ticketmaster.”
Through his Clarity Media Group (CMG), Anschutz owns a number of media entities. In 2005, he started the free circulation Washington Examiner, a volubly conservative newspaper. In June of this year, CMG announced it was laying off 70 percent of the Examiner’s staff and scrapping local media coverage, focusing instead on plans to move the paper to an online business model with a weekly print magazine, which will focus on national political reporting and commentary.
CMG bought the neoconservative Weekly Standard in 2009. It also owns The Gazette newspaper in Colorado Springs, the state's second-largest daily newspaper, and The Oklahoman, the daily newspaper of Oklahoma City, and Red Alert Politics, which describes itself as “an online publication written by and for young conservatives.”
Anschutz has made his mark on Hollywood films as well. Last fall, Anschutz’s Walden Media produced “Won’t Back Down” – starring Maggie Gyllenhaal, Viola Davis, Oscar Isaac, Holly Hunter -- which, according the Campaign for America’s Future’s OurFuture.org, “portrays so-called ‘Parent Trigger’ laws as an effective mechanism for transforming underperforming public schools”.
“While Parent Trigger was first promoted by a small charter school operator in California, it was taken up and launched into hyperdrive by two controversial right-wing organizations: the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) and the Heartland Institute,” OurFuture.org reported.
The Anschutz Foundation is intimately tied to ALEC according to OurFuture.org: “In 2010, The Anschutz Foundation, gave ALEC $10,000 and his Union Pacific firm was an ALEC sponsor the following year. The Foundation funded three ALEC members who sat on the ALEC Education Task Force which approved the Parent Trigger Proposal: The Independence Institute, Center for Education Reform, and Pacific Research Institute.”
Walden is not a novice in pushing school privatization plans, as it was one of the producers of the pro-charter documentary film “Waiting for ‘Superman’.” Neither “Won’t Back Down” ($5.3 million) nor “Waiting for ‘Superman’,” ($6.4 million) performed well at the box office, but the latter received an enormous amount of publicity from tight-wing think tanks and the conservative media.
AEG on Trial
In previous legal proceedings, most notably the one against Dr. Conrad Murray, Anschutz escaped unharmed by any revelations. And even though Jackson died before the tour started, Anschutz’s company hasn’t lost money. During Murray’s trial, Westword.com's Michael Roberts questioned whether "the case's revelations [would] splash back on ... Anschutz, who stood to profit handsomely had Jackson been able to headline the tour he was financing?" Roberts also wondered whether Anschutz would take a financial bath because of Jackson's death.
According to Roberts, "Anschutz was able to turn these fiscal minuses into a plusses. By late October, he'd reportedly made back the $36 million the non-tour cost him by selling ‘This Is It’ rehearsal footage to Sony for over $60 million. And he also had a sizable piece of the ‘This Is It’ movie, which proved to be a cash cow as well." The film has grossed over $260 million.
Questions about Jackson’s comeback tour and death abound. Apparently he was motivated to make the comeback because of enormous financial pressures. The New York Times reported that “At the time of his death, Jackson was more than $500 million in debt and faced the loss of his financial lifeline: a 50 percent stake in Sony/ATV Music Publishing, which controls most of the Beatles catalog.”
According to KABC in Los Angeles, “AEG's defense says [previous drug incidents show] that Jackson developed a practice of using propofol years before he met Dr. Conrad Murray or contemplated a comeback tour. The plaintiffs say that AEG executives were aware of Jackson's stint in rehab and should have monitored him more closely.”
The Denver, Colorado-based and Kansas-born Anschutz is, as always, sitting in the catbird seat. His Los Angeles enterprises, his firm grip on the Denver business community, has his billionaire status has rendered him an untouchable. Nevertheless, it remains fair to ask: Did Anschutz’s AEG push an financially disabled, out-of-shape, drug-taking Jackson to the brink?
Phil Anschutz Is Off The Hook For Michael Jackson Death, But Thanks To Washington Shutdown, He's Still Having A Bad Week
http://www.forbes.com/sites/christopher ... ek-anyway/
CARSON, CA - JULY 24: Philip Anschutz, head o...
The Denver billionaire’s AEG Live was absolved from fault in Jacko’s demise, yet his Xanterra Parks & Resorts is losing millions from the federal shutdown. The jury in the Michael Jackson’s wrongful death case absolved concert promoter AEG Live from any responsibility for the King of Pop’s demise. This had to be a relief for Denver billionaire Philip Anschutz (who owns AEG Live, part of his giant Anschutz Entertainment Group).
It was Anschutz who five years ago made the decision to risk tens of millions of dollars on Jacko’s “This Is It” comeback tour. He only did it after sitting down with the King of Pop to talk with him, take his measure, and be convinced that Jackson could not only do the job, but do a great job. Anschutz wasn’t about to become friends with Jacko like he has over the years with another AEG Live artist Jon Bon Jovi. But he trusted the star enough to agree to put up scores of millions to back “This Is It.”
It’s not that he was at risk for losing big money to the Jackson family — it’s FORBES’ understanding that Anschutz had ample legal risk insurance in place to cover any potential damages. What’s more, Anschutz is believed to have more or less broken even off the Jackson saga — recouping some $40 million risked on the concert tour by selling rehearsal footage to Sony SNE -3.44% for $60 million and getting 10% of the proceeds from the “This Is It” movie (Jackson’s estate got 90%).
Rather, this whole tragic ordeal has been a sad distraction for the tycoon, who earlier this year called off his plans to sell the company. Now it’s finally over.
So after that relief, how come this week is a bad one for Anschutz? One of the tycoon’s other big holdings is Xanterra Parks & Resorts. The company operates more than 30 hotels and lodges with more than 5,000 guest rooms and 1,800 campsites. Its best properties are located in eight national parks — including Yellowstone’s Old Faithful Inn and the El Tovar Hotel perched on the rim of the Grand Canyon.
With the federal government shutdown this week, all those parks have been closed, and Xanterra has had to turn its guests away. In a statement, Xanterra says:
We remain optimistic that Congress will reach a resolution soon and that the national parks will reopen shortly. If this government shutdown impacts your stay at the national parks and you are unable to use our facilities or services that you have previously paid for, you will be refunded the unused portion of your trip. We will cancel the reservations and refund the applicable deposits for those reserved services/stays and notify you via email.
Thankfully the peak tourist season is over; yet the shutdown is costing millions for Xanterra (which has annual revenues estimated at around $400 million).
Xanterra has other options for determined vacationers turned away from the national parks. It’s fall foliage time at the Salt Fork Lodge in Ohio’s largest state park. And furloughed federal workers in Washington, D.C. might even consider taking a shutdown vacation to Xanterra’s Kingsmill Resort in Williamsburg, Va.
And then there’s Anschutz’s jewel: The Broadmoor Resort. Having acquired the one-of-a-kind Colorado Springs destination for several hundred million dollars a couple years ago, Anschutz has set about upgrading the Broadmoor with more than $100 million in improvements.
The Colorado Aspens are gold this time of year.
For more on Phil Anschutz, check out my 2010 Forbes Magazine feature on him. Follow me on Twitter @chrishelman.
by semper occultus » Sat Apr 18, 2015 6:37 pm
by Twyla LaSarc » Sun Apr 19, 2015 2:45 pm
by Nordic » Sun Apr 19, 2015 5:05 pm
by zangtang » Sun Apr 19, 2015 6:17 pm
by 82_28 » Sun Apr 19, 2015 7:09 pm
by Elvis » Sun Apr 19, 2015 10:13 pm
by brekin » Mon Apr 20, 2015 6:42 pm
Nordic » Sun Apr 19, 2015 4:05 pm wrote:Don't forget Bob Marley.
This week we turn our attention to the time Bob met a possibly more iconic icon, Michael Jackson, literally in his own backyard, in 1975. As they did with Marvin and Stevie, Bob and the Wailers shared the stage with the Jackson 5 at Jamaica’s National Stadium for a massive stage show that was the talk of Jamaica.
The following article originally appeared in the February 2002 issue of HIGH TIMES Magazine
Marley knew the drill – in Jamaica, at the height of his success, when music and politics were still one, before the fog of censorship rolled into the island, old wounds were opened by a wave of destabilization politics. Stories appeared in the local, regional and international press downsizing the achievements of the quasi-socialist Jamaican government under Prime Minister Michael Manley. In the late 1970s, the island was flooded with cheap guns, heroin, cocaine, right-wing propaganda, death squad rule and, as Grenada’s Prime Minister Maurice Bishop described it three years later, the CIA’s “pernicious attempts [to] wreck the economy.”
“Destabilization,” Bishop told the emergent New Jewel Party, “is the name given the most recently developed method of controlling and exploiting the lives and resources of a country and its people by a bigger and more powerful country through bullying, intimidation and violence.”
In response to the fascistic machinations of the CIA, Marley wove his lyrics into a revolutionary crucifix to ward off the cloak-and-dagger “vampires” descending upon the island. June 1976: Then-Governor-General Florizel Glasspole placed Jamaica under martial law to stanch the bloody pre-election violence. Prime Minister Manley’s People’s National Party asked the Wailers to play at the Smile Jamaica concert in December. Despite the rising political mayhem, Marley agreed to perform.
In late November, a death squad slipped beneath the gates of Marley’s home on Hope Road in Kingston. As biographer Timothy White tells it, at about 9 PM, “the torpor of the quiet tropical night was interrupted by a queer noise that was not quite like a firecracker.” Marley was in the kitchen at the rear of the house eating a grapefruit when he heard the bursts of automatic gunfire. Don Taylor, Marley’s manager, had been talking to the musician when the bullets ripped through the back of his legs. The men were “peppering the house with a barrage of rifle and pistol fire, shattering windows and splintering plaster and woodwork on the first floor.” Rita Marley, trying to escape with her children and a reporter from the Jamaica Daily News, was shot by one of the men in the front yard. The bullet caught her in the head, lifting her off her feet as it burrowed between scalp and skull.
Meanwhile, a man with an automatic rifle had burst through the back door off the pantry, pushing past a fleeing Seeco Patterson, the Wailers’ percussionist, to aim beyond Don Taylor at Bob Marley. The gunman got off eight shots. One bullet struck a counter, another buried itself in the ceiling, and five tore into Taylor. He fell but remained conscious, with four bullets in his legs and one buried at the base of his spine. The last shot creased Marley’s breast below his heart and drilled deep into his arm.
The survival of the reggae singer and his entire entourage appeared to be the work of Rasta. “The firepower these guys apparently brought with them was immense,” Wailers publicist Jeff Walker recalls. “There were bullet holes everywhere. In the kitchen, the bathroom, the living room, floors, ceilings, doorways and outside.”
There has since been widespread belief that the CIA arranged the hit on Hope Road. Neville Garrick, a Marley insider and former art director of the Jamaican Daily News, had film of “suspicious characters” lurking near the house before the assassination attempt. The day of the shooting he had snapped some photos of Marley standing beside a Volkswagen in a pool of mango-tree shade. The strangers in the background made Marley nervous; he told Garrick that they appeared to be “scouting” the property. In the prints, however, their features were too blurred by shadow to make out. After the concert, Garrick took the photographs and prints to Nassau. Sadly, while the Wailers and crew prepared to board a flight to London, he discovered that the film had been stolen.
Many of the CIA’s files on Bob Marley remain classified to the present day. However, on December 5, 1976, a week after the assault on Hope Road, the Wailers appeared at the Smile Jamaica fest, despite their wounds, to perform one long, defiant anthem of rage directed at the CIA – “War” – suggesting the Wailers’ own attitude toward the “Vampires” from Langley:
Until the ignoble and unhappy regimes
That now hold our brothers
In Angola, in Mozambique,
South Africa
In subhuman bondage
Have been toppled,
Utterly destroyed,
Everywhere is war…
Only a handful of Marley’s most trusted comrades knew of the band’s whereabouts before the festival. Yet a member of the film crew, or so he claimed – reportedly, he didn’t have a camera – managed to talk his way past machete-bearing Rastas to enter the Hope Road encampment: one Carl Colby, son of the late CIA director William Colby.
While the band prepared for the concert, a gift was delivered, according to a witness at the enclave – a pair of boots for Bob Marley. Former Los Angeles cinematographer Lee Lew-Lee [his camera work can be seen in the Oscar-winning documentary The Panama Deception] was close friends with members of the Wailers, and he believes that Marley’s cancer can be traced to the boots: “He put his foot in and said, ‘Ow!’ A friend got in there… he said, ‘let’s [get] in the boot, and he pulled a length of copper wire out – it was embedded in the boot.”
Had the wire been treated chemically with a carcinogenic toxin? The appearance of Colby at Marley’s compound was certainly provocative. [And so was Colby’s subsequent part in the fall of another black cultural icon, O.J. Simpson, nearly 20 years later. At Simpson’s preliminary hearing in 1995, Colby – who resided next door to Nicole Simpson on Gretna Green Way in Brentwood, a mile from her residence on Bundy – and his wife both took the stand to testify for the prosecution that Nicole’s ex-husband had badgered and threatened her. Colby’s testimony was instrumental in the formal charge of murder filed against Simpson and the nationally televised fiasco known as the “Trial of the Century.”]
Seventeen years after the Hope Road assault, Don Taylor published a memoir, Marley and Me, in which he alleges that a “senior CIA agent” had been planted among the crew as part of the plan to “assassinate” Marley. It’s possible that this lapse in security allowed Colby entrance to the compound. It’s clear that the CIA wanted Marley out of the picture. After the assassination attempt, a rumor circulated that the CIA was going to finish Marley off. The source of the rumor was the agency itself. The Wailers had set out on a world tour, and CIA agents informed Marley that should he return to Jamaica before the election, he would be murdered.
Taylor and others close to Marley suspect that it was more than a threat. Lew-Lee recalls: “I didn’t think so at the time, but I’ve always had my suspicions because Marley later broke his toe playing soccer, and when the bone wouldn’t mend the doctors found that the toe had cancer. The cancer metastasized throughout his body, but [Marley] believed he could fight this thing.”
British researcher Michael Conally observes: “They certainly had reasons for wanting to. For one, Marley’s highly charged message music made him an important figure that the rest of the world was beginning to notice. It was an influence that was hard to ignore, least of all because everywhere you went you saw middle- and upper-class white people sprouting dreadlocks, smoking spliffs and adopting the Rastafarian lifestyle. This sort of thing didn’t sit well with traditionalists and authoritarian types.”
The soccer game took place in Paris in 1977, five months after the boot incident, Marley took to the field with one of the leading teams in the country to break the monotony of the Wailers “Exodus” tour. His right toe was injured in a tackle. The toenail came off. At first, it wasn’t considered a serious wound.
But it would not heal. Marley was limping by July and consulted a physician, who was shocked by the toe’s appearance. It was so eaten away that doctors in London advised it be amputated. Marley’s religion forbade it: “Rasta no abide amputation,” he insisted. He told the physician, “De living God, His Imperial Majesty Haile Selassie I, Ras Tafari, Conquering Lion of the Tribe of Judah…He will heal me wit’ de meditations of me ganja chalice.” No scalpel, he said, “will crease me flesh… C’yant kill Rasta. Rastamon live out.”
He flew to Miami and Dr. William Bacon performed a skin graft on the lesion. The disease lingered undiagnosed and spread throughout his body.
Isaac Fergusson, a friend and devotee, observed the slow death of Bob Marley firsthand. In the three years separating soccer injury from cancer diagnosis, Marley remained immersed in music, “ignoring the advice of doctors and close associates that he stop and obtain a thorough medical examination.” He refused to give up recording and touring long enough to consult a doctor. Marley “would have to quit the stage and it would take years to recoup the momentum. This was his time and he seized upon it. Whenever he went into the studio to record, he did enough for two albums. Marley would drink his fish tea, eat his rice-and-peas stew, roll himself about six spliffs and go to work. With incredible energy and determination, he kept strumming his guitar, maybe 12 hours, sometimes till daybreak.” Reggae artist Jimmy Cliff observed after Marley’s death: “What I know now is that Bob finished all he had to do on this earth.” Marley was aware by 1977 that he was dying, and set out to condense a lifetime of music into the few years remaining.
The CIA Rocks Trenchtown
In 1975, US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, on a diplomatic junket to the island, had assured Prim Minister Manley in a private meeting that there was “no attempt now underway involving covert actions against the Jamaican government.” But in the real world, something of a Caribbean pogrom was underway, overseen, of course, by the CIA. As Kissinger croaked his denials to Manley, the destabilization push was already afoot. The emphasis at this stage was on psychological operations, but in the election year of 1976 a series of covert interventions – employing arson, bombing and assassination as required – completely disrupted Manley’s democratic-socialist rule.
An arsenal of automatic weapons somehow found their way to Jamaica. The CIA’s thugs, directed by a growing coven of pinstriped officers reporting to the US embassy in Kingston, quietly organized secret-police cadres to stoke political violence. Huge consignments of guns and advanced communications gear were smuggled onto the island. One such shipment was intercepted by Manley’s security patrols – a cache of 500 man-eating submachine guns.
The firearms were shipped to the island from Miami by the Jamaican Freedom League, a right-wing paramilitary faction with roots in Langley, financed largely by drugs. Peter Whittington, the group’s second-in-command, was convicted of drug trafficking in Dade County, Florida. The funds were laundered by the League at Miami’s Bank of Perrine, the key American subsidiary of Castle Bank, then the CIA’s financial base in Latin America. The bank was owned and operated by Paul Helliwell, bagman for the Bay of Pigs invasion, accused even by the conservative Wall Street Journal of involvement in the global narcotics trade.
A paramilitary force was mustered to quell the Rastafarian backlash, and the inevitable CIA-trained Cuban exiles beached in Jamaica. Among them was Luis Posada Carriles, once a secret-police official under deposed Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista, currently a full-fledged agent of the CIA.
The “duppies” [ghosts] policed dissent by incarnating the chemical-warfare tactics of the 1960s. In a year’s time, Marley saw the Rastafarian resistance disintegrate with the rise of a ruthless, highly organized narcotics syndicate, apparently from the Jamaican sand. The sudden abundance of hard narcotics in Jamaica wounded the Rastafarian movement with the burning spear of addiction. Marley and former Wailer Peter Tosh promoted ganja as an alternative to cocaine and heroin, a statement of independence and cohesion against the brutal stratagems of colonial rule.
For the first time in Jamaican politics, public figures roundly criticized the governing elite. Peter Tosh, in particular, split form his peers in the local music scene by serving up impassioned political “livalogues” at his public performances. Tosh pushed on, a cursing, joint-smoking, speechifying black militant, until his murder six years after the passing of Marley.
The suppression of Rastafarian protest escalated in the late 1970s, and grotesque human-rights abuses were commonplace. And the political climate in the Caribbean sweltered with the escalation of American covert operations well into the next decade.
The Nazi Doctor
In September 1980, Bob Marley suffered a stroke while jogging in New York’s Central Park. He was released by a physician the following day and recuperated in his room at the Essex Hotel. Rita Marley choked when she saw him. Her fears rose into uncontrollable sobs, “Wha’ has happened to you?” “Doctor say brain tumor black me out,” Marley told her. Isaac Fergusson had caught the dying rebel’s performance at Madison Square Garden a few days before, and had realized then that something was terribly wrong, even as Marley gripped his guitar “like a machine gun” and “threw his ropelike hair about,” a “whirlwind around his small black face. The crack of a drum exploded into bass, into organ.” Midway into the set, the Wailers stood back and Marley did a solo: “These songs of freedom is all I ever had…” Why, Fergusson wondered, was he singing this alone? Why the past tense?
“Emancipate yourself from mental slavery…”
Fergusson noticed that Marley “was always rubbing his forehead and grimacing while performing.” The following weekend, Fergusson stopped to visit Rita Marley and Judy Mowatt. He asked about Bob’s condition. “We don’t know for sure,” Rita told him. “The doctors say he has a tumor in his brain.” In a silent moment, Fergusson realized that Marley was dying.
He was convinced at last to seek medical treatment. Marley was admitted to the Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in Manhattan. Tests revealed that the cancer had spread to his brain, lungs and liver. The reggae legend received a few radiation treatments, but checked out when the New York papers let on that he was seriously ill. Marley consulted physicians in Miami, briefly returned to Sloan-Kettering, then to Jamaica, where he met with Dr. Carl “Pee Wee” Fraser, recommended to him by fellow Rastafarians. Dr. Fraser advised that Marley talk to Dr. Josef Issels, a German “holistic comprehensive immunotherapist” then practicing at the Ringberg Clinic in Rottach-Egern, a small Bavarian village located at the southern end of Tegernsee Lake.
Marley traveled to Bavaria and checked into the clinic. Dr. Issels met him, looked him over and allowed, without naming sources: “I hear that you’re one of the most dangerous black men in the world.”
The portrait offered by publicity releases from the Issels Foundation is imposing enough: Dr. Issels, born in 1907, founded the first hospital [financed by the estate of Karl Gischler, a Dutch shipping magnate] in Europe for comprehensive immunotherapy of cancer in 1951. He was the medical director and director of research.
All well and good… until it is considered that by this time, Dr. Issels was 44 years old. Certainly, his medical career did not begin in 1951. Why the unexplained gap in his bona fides? During World War II, it seems, Dr. Issels could be found plying his “research” skills for Hitler’s SS. Lew-Lee claims that Dr. Issels was assigned to the Auschwitz concentration camp, working alongside Dr. Josef Mengele. But author Gordon Thomas, in a long-out-of-print biography of Issels, contends that the doctor served in the SS only briefly. At any rate, he was indeed a member of the Nazi Party and served under Heinrich Himmler. Bob Marley, the “dangerous” black upstart, had placed his life in the hands of a Nazi doctor.
Lew-Lee recalls that Marley rejected conventional cancer treatments, “wanted to do anything but turn to Western medicine. This may have been a mistake.” Evidently so. “Dr. Issels said that he could cur Bob. And they cut Bob’s dreadlocks off. And he was getting all of this crazy, crazy medical treatment in Bavaria. I know this because Devon Evans [a musician then playing with the Wailers] told me that Bob was receiving these medical treatments.” Evans came by “every two or three months – 1979-80 – and told me: ‘Yeah, man, they’re killing Bob. They are KILLING Bob.’ I said, ‘What do you mean ‘they are killing Bob?’ ‘No, no, man,’ he said. ‘Dis Dr. Issels, he’s a Nazi!’”
Dr. Issels was one of the scores of Nazi practitioners to escape the attention of the Nuremberg tribunal. Michael Kater, a professor of history at York University in Canada, informs us that physicians of the Hitler period were steeped in Nazi racial doctrines at medical school, that many of them continued to practice undisturbed by war-crimes tribunals: “It was in a conventional medical culture, infiltrated from one side by a science alienated from humanity and from another by charlatanry, that young physicians in the Third Reich were raised to learn and prepare for practice, with many predestined to practice after 1945.”
Dr. Josef Issels first offered his alternative cancer therapies in a Nazi-fied atmosphere of ruthlessness and quackery. In the 1930s, chronic cancer patients consulted Dr. Issels and received his experimental “combination therapy,” a regimen of diet, homeopathic remedies, vitamins, exercise and detoxification, among other holistic approaches. Today, his clinic offers training in cancer immunization vaccines, UV blood irradiation, oxygen and ozone therapy, “biological dentistry” [tooth extraction], immunity elicitation by mixed bacterial vaccine, blood heating, and so on.
The medical establishment, particularly in the UK, has long rallied against some of Issels’ therapies. A former BBC producer reported in a televised documentary that Dr. Issels was arrested in September 1960. The police warrant alleged, “The accused claims to treat… cancer…. In fact [he] has neither reliable diagnostic methods nor a method to treat cancer successfully. It is contended [that] he is aware of the complete ineffectiveness of this so-called… tumor treatment.” It also called Issels a flight risk, noting that “he had prepared for all contingencies by depositing huge amounts in foreign banks.”
Marley, unaware of his physician’s past, was placed on a regimen of exercise, vaccines [some illegal], ozone injections, vitamins and trace minerals.
In time, Dr. Issels also introduced torture. Long needles were plunged through Marley’s stomach through to the spine. The patient-victim was told that this was part of his “treatment.” The torture continued until Marley foundered on the threshold of death.
Cedella Booker-Marley, his mother, visited him three times in the course of the “treatments.” She found Dr. Issels to be an “arrogant wretch” with the “gruff manners of a bully,” who subjected her dying son to a bloodless brand of “hocus-pocus” medicine. Booker-Marley: “I myself witnessed Issels’ rough treatment of Nesta [Marley]. One time I went with Nesta to the clinic, and we settled down in a treatment room. Issels came in and announced to Nesta, ‘I’m going to give you a needle.’” Dr. Issels “plunged the needle straight into Nesta’s navel right down to the syringe. [Marley] grunted and winced. He could only lie there helplessly, writhing on the table, trying his best to hide his pain. ‘Jesus Christ,’ I heard myself mumbling.” Issels yanked out the needle and strolled casually out of the room. Marley was left groaning with pain. “I went and stood at his side and held is hand.
“With every visit,” she recalls, “I found him smaller, frailer, thinner. As the months of dying dragged on, the suffering was etched all over his face. He would fall into fits of shaking, when he would lose all control and shiver from head to toe like a coconut leaf in the breeze. His eyes would turn in his head, rolling in their sockets until even the white jelly was quivering.”
Marley’s torment was aggravated by starvation. “For a whole week sometimes,” Booker laments, her son “would be allowed no nourishment other than what he got intravenously. Constantly hungry, even starving, he wasted away to a skeleton” – starved to death like an Auschwitz inmate. “To watch my first-born shrivel up to skin and bone ripped at my mother’s heart.” Marley weighed 82 pounds on the day of his death. The starvation diet must have devastated his immune system and rushed his demise, not prolonged his life as Dr. Issels and some biographers have contended. It also caused him intense pain. “It would drag on so, for one long painful month after the other, and every day would be a knife that death stabbed and twisted anew in an already open, bleeding wound.” The agony “wrapped him up like a crushing snake.”
Death finally claimed Marley on May 11, 1981. In Jamaica, May 20 was declared a national day of mourning. Marley’s wake at the National Arena was attended by some 30,000 mourners.
He was survived by his old partner Peter Tosh, who was shot to death in 1987. Marley and Tosh were not the only musicians murdered for political reasons in Jamaica. By the end of the decade, all Jamaican musicians were censored and subject to shell-casing politics.
The island’s Daily Gleaner reported in 1987 that Winston “Yellowman” Foster, stopped at a police roadblock and frisked for drugs, resisted detainment. One of the officers hissed, “You want to go like Tosh?” When Tosh went, there was nothing random about it. Witnesses and friends insist that he was a political hit. Two of the gunmen fled to New York to remain at large. The third was Dennis “Leppo” Lobban, an ex-con sentenced for the murder after an 11-minute trial.
Like Marley, Peter Tosh found the bloodshed and hypocrisy of death squad justice and CIA covert ops in the Third World unbearable. He was so obsessed with hidden evil and the upswell of violence in Jamaica that they visited him in his sleep. He had “visions” of “destruction [and] millions of people inside of [a] pit going down. And I… say, ‘bloodbath, where so much people come from?’ and looking in the pit, mon, it the biggest pit… but the way the people was crying, it was awful.”
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