How an African dictator's son used dirty money to build the world's largest Michael Jackson memorabilia collection, from cjcmichel's new book 'American Kleptocracy'
But there was, behind it all, an insecurity impossible for Teodorin to escape: A trembling lack of self-worth, which everyone around him could pick up on. A feeling that he could never quite measure up, either to his father or to the billionaires he met with, traveled with, or consorted with. Much of that insecurity came from the fact that Teodorin’s father, now the longest-serving dictator in the world, never thought much of his son.
There was one figure, though, who by the mid-1980s proved that the world of stratospheric wealth wasn’t reserved only for the lily-white:. The pop singer may have been American, but he —his reach and his status, his music and his model — was global. He was an icon in corners of the world that Americans had never heard of. That was especially true for the rising postcolonialgeneration emerging in sub–Saharan Africa.
As with plenty of other governmental initiatives, though, the difference between theory and practice couldn’t have been wider. The group identified potential candidates for investigation in the first few years, but ran into bureaucratic roadblocks and the difficulties that come with trying to pry open things like anonymous shell companies.
His California mansion was already humming with staff. Alongside the gardeners and the assistants, Teodorin began flying in a number of former police officers from Equatorial Guinea to provide security — including a “chase team” that followed Teodorin when he ranged around Malibu on his daylong benders.
Teodorin also developed a taste for things that float. For Christmas 2006, he spent some $700,000 to rent out Paul Allen’s 300-foot yacht, named, to fete his most well-known girlfriend, Grammy-winning rapper Eve. Taken with the boat, Teodorin promptly announced that he was going to build one of the world’s largest superyachts himself.
Few women, though, could compare to Teodorin’s favorite female flying guest: Janet Jackson. It’s unclear how exactly Teodorin and Janet first met. By the late 2000s, though, the two were clear friends, with Janet a “frequent visitor” to Teodorin’s Malibu palazzo. Other friends, according to one of the federal investigators I spoke with, were Tito and Jermaine, two lesser-known Jackson brothers. “The Michael Jackson family,” the investigator told me, were “frequent fliers” alongside Teodorin.
Or more simply: anyone can buy anything, for any amount, with any money, at any American auction house.THROUGH A TANGLE OF contacts in the music industry, the Los Angeles-based Julien’s Auctions landed the rights to distribute the lion’s share of Jackson’s estate. It was a natural fit for Julien’s, which had already helped drive demand for everything from Marilyn Monroe merch to Muhammad Ali swag to Barbra Streisand tchotchkes.
A flash on the television screen to her right reveals what she’s talking about. It’s an item anyone familiar with Michael Jackson lore will recognize: a white cotton glove, with a snap closure at its wrist, swathed in hundreds of hand-sewn Swarovski lochrosen crystals. It’s Jackson’s fabled “Bad” glove, the pinnacle of Jackson’s cultural imprint, the most garish, most inescapable legacy of Jackson’s celebrity.
The auction house was happy to comply. And in the span of just a few months, the bulk of Jackson’s mementos transferred directly from the pop star’s estate, via the auction house, into Teodorin’s possession for what amounted to, a year or so since the singer’s death, the most spectacular Michael Jackson collection in the world. All of it held by the heir apparent of the world’s longest-standing dictatorship.BACK IN MIAMI, around the same time, Rutherford had hit a wall.
The investigator promptly reached out to the company. He told them what he was looking for, and said that he was trying to trace any financial documentation about how Teodorin paid for the boat. The company rep told him they knew exactly who he was talking about. “And that’s when they told me, ‘Well, Robert, it’s not one boat — it’s three boats,’” Manzanares said. The company said they’d be happy to help.
Still, Manzanares told him, there would be a subpoena coming in order to track the details of how Teodorin was moving his money on the back end, and how he’d managed to fund the purchase of the glove. Julien said he’d be happy to help. But he wanted Manzanares to know one thing about Teodorin: “This is a good-paying client,” Julien claimed, according to Manzanares. The investigator thought for a moment. This was a conversation about a glove — a single, five-fingered Swarovski set.
The Kleptocracy Asset Recovery Initiative was just as it sounded: a new group dedicated to identifying, seizing, and recovering assets purchased with dirty money linked directly to brutal regimes. The process, known as civil asset forfeiture, had a lengthy history in the domestic context of the U.S., allowing authorities to seize ownership of assets purchased with corrupt or embezzled funds.
During the investigation, the two agents picked up hints of where Teodorin stashed his other assets across the U.S. After all, despite the anonymity when it came to how his money cycled through the U.S., Teodorin couldn’t help but place himself in the limelight whenever possible.
It was something of a catch-22 for Teodorin. If he’d kept his money circulating in the banks, it likely never would have been seized, and could have flowed anywhere he wanted. But as soon as it became somethingsomething outside of the bank, there for all to see — it was suddenly there for the taking. Or put another way: the dirty money in the banks could be shifted at a moment’s notice, but the supposedly “clean” assets in the real world were the ones at risk.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents inspect a Ferrari at Teodorin’s Malibu mansion during the execution of a search warrant. The U.S. seized more than $30 million in assets from him, and recently used the funds to purchase Covid vaccines for the people of Equatorial Guinea.But there were some items he couldn’t flee with. There was a $500,000 Ferrari, which, for reasons unexplained, Teodorin left parked in his Malibu garage.
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