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By Adam Waldman

A conspiracy is everything that ordinary life is not. It's the inside game, cold, sure, undistracted, forever closed off to us. We are the flawed ones, the innocents, trying to make some rough sense of the daily jostle. Conspirators have a logic and daring beyond our reach.

-Don DeLillo

Part I. Done in Hollywood

Chapter 1: He Came Here to Die

This story begins 9 years ago, with a simple request for a favor.

One sun-dappled early October afternoon in 2016, I was padding around my house in Washington, DC. On the other end of my mobile phone was the accented baritone of a sophisticated Saudi Arabian lawyer and good friend. His client was a prominent Saudi Prince, a client we had in common.

“Hey buddy,” he began. “Do you know Johnny Depp?”

I did not.

“We got to know Johnny well this summer in Spain … he is an amazing person, and frankly, the Prince loves him. We all love him. A favor to ask, my friend. Would you speak with Johnny? He is having some kind of financial problem. I don’t know more. We would be grateful if you would meet with him, look into it, and give him some advice. I will put you in touch with an intermediary who is with him. How quickly can you get to LA?”

The request was no idle inquiry. I had learned that in the Arab tradition, hospitality, favors and generosity to strangers were expressions of sacred duties. Declining their request for a “favor” was not an option.

“I would be happy to see him, and I’m going to LA anyway in a few days. What was Mr. Depp doing in Spain?”

My friend hesitated. “Honestly, I believe he came here to die.”

“What does that mean?”

“He had given up on life. The Prince looked after him.”

So much for the lawyer’s professional solace “it’s not a matter of life or death.” I assumed this ask would yield a common experience for everyone in my profession: listen to someone’s problem and dispense courtesy suggestions. And that would be the end of it. I could never have imagined where this innocuous question would lead.

I’m a lawyer who represents high profile people and situations. My Hollywood clients all knew Johnny Depp and had spoken highly of him.

But I only knew a few things about him. I knew that he was one of the best actors in the world, who spent decades creating unique and memorable characters. Unusually, in films he chose roles where he was not the guy who got the girl or carried the gun. An interesting Rolling Stone magazine article described him in Hemingway-esque terms – a hard-living Bohemian artist. I recalled he was friends with Keith Richards and had dated Kate Moss and Winona Ryder. I thought he might be a musician. I was aware of Depp’s association with “Gonzo” journalist Hunter S. Thompson, whom I idolized as a teenager and still do.

After hanging up the phone, I Googled “Johnny Depp.” But what popped up were not stories about his films or music. All the media headlines trumpeted one thing – that he had savagely beaten his ex-wife Amber Heard. I had no idea who Amber Heard was, nor that she had been married to Johnny Depp. I stared at her battered, downcast face on the cover of People Magazine from the previous June. “Inside Their Toxic Marriage” blared the cover story headline. The Hollywood trade press, and national and international media recounted a horrific marital tale that seemed to culminate in a violent attack on Ms. Heard by Mr. Depp earlier in 2016. Ms. Heard had claimed Mr. Depp “wound up his arm like a baseball pitcher” and threw her iPhone into her face “as hard as he could” the previous May. This grotesque behavior did not sound anything like the Johnny Depp I had heard about from my clients who knew him.

Should I go see him despite these hideous allegations? I could not abide men who beat on women. But sometimes representing controversial clients, I fervently believed in the principal of innocent until proven guilty. I looked carefully and saw that Mr. Depp had not been criminally convicted or even charged with anything. And in another article I read, the police oddly claimed that Ms. Heard was not injured when she summoned them to the scene of the crime.

I shrugged. I had only been asked to give a little advice on a mysterious “financial problem,” not domestic violence allegations from an ex-wife. I dialed the number of the “intermediary” my friend had given me, arranged to meet him soon in LA, and asked him two background questions so I could prepare for the meeting.

My first question was who were Johnny’s advisors? For the past 17 years, the legendary Jake Bloom at his renowned Hollywood law firm Bloom Hergott had served as Johnny’s entertainment lawyer. Bloom was a Hollywood superlawyer, counting Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Charlie Sheen, Bruce Willis, Demi Moore, Jerry Bruckheimer, and Nicholas Cage as part of a glittering client roster. Bloom was one of the most illustrious lawyers in Hollywood history.

Johnny’s business manager had been someone called Joel Mandel who ran a firm called The Management Group. Had been? Mandel, the intermediary told me, had been fired in March 2016, after 17 years as Johnny’s business manager. I wondered if the firing had something to do with the mysterious financial problem.

My second request was for “the file” - Johnny’s fundamental documents and his contracts with these advisors. These documents would give me a basic snapshot of how the Johnny Depp ecosystem operated, how the advisors were paid, and who reported to whom. The answer that came back surprised me.

“There is no file. There are no documents. And nobody has a contract with Johnny.”

That simply couldn’t be true.

The entertainment industry has its own ecosystem. Within that ecosystem, there is a clearly defined system to manage, advise and handle a Hollywood star. An entertainer, commonly referred to as “the talent,” has a core professional entourage comprised of business manager, lawyer, talent agent and publicist. The “personal assistant,” a uniquely important role in Hollywood with wider responsibilities than the job title suggests, rounds out the team.

On paper, the economic and other professional interests of this advisory group, with the entertainer at the center, would appear to be aligned. Divergence from the entertainer’s interests by anyone in the group should be easily discovered and punished. After all, the success of the entertainer leads to mammoth fees for the service providers. The host needs to stay alive, and the advisors need to remain attached to the host to feed. I assumed that in the case of Johnny Depp, contingent and other fees taken by advisors must have totaled tens of millions of dollars. That was a serious underestimation. Competition is fierce for these lucrative advisory roles, and everyone is replaceable.

There are legal rules that protect entertainers and the rest of the public from being defrauded by their advisors. In a normal industry, the inner team of advisors would also provide checks and balances on each other. No matter how professionally or personally friendly they become, fiduciary duties require one advisor who notices red flag behavior by another advisor to speak up. If the lawyer observes the business manager sneaking out the client’s back door with the family silver, it should be brought to the client’s attention. Maybe he was just taking it out to get it polished. Trust, but verify.

The penalty to an advisor guilty of any intentional malfeasance should not be limited to loss of the client and other legal consequences commensurate with the offense. In any other industry, professional malfeasance leads to a professional death sentence, creating a powerful check on behavior that discourages fraud.

But in Hollywood it doesn't work like that. It is a town with low behavioral expectations and few consequences for misdeeds. It is a town with no memory. Maybe Mafia DNA is to blame. The Chicago and New York mob and foreign crime syndicates have an inglorious and well documented history penetrating Hollywood from its early days, controlling and corrupting its labor unions, befriending its studio bosses and stars, fixing its problems, laundering its money and even producing its movies.

Over decades, the ecosystem of the “suits” in Hollywood has been warped by a permissive culture of rapacious greed coupled with ubiquitous conflicts of interest and a lack of self-restraint or regulatory oversight. Illegal behavior is normalized, accepted, and even expected. Successful entertainers often make the perfect victims. They have huge inflows and outflows of cash. They like to have money but are generally not interested in its machinery beyond possession. They are right-brained artists who are uniquely unprepared to exercise caveat emptor – buyer beware - against the cunning economic predators of Hollywood. Drugs and alcohol are prevalent in the artist community, adding gasoline to the fire of non-oversight of their money. Entertainers constantly work out of town. While the cat’s away, the mice will play.

Hollywood advisors often deploy a combination of friendship and flattery to perfect the art of manipulation and control of the talent. When the advisor is caught stealing from the artist, you hear the indignant refrain of betrayal from the advisor– “they were like family to me!” As one top business manager claimed in a Hollywood Reporter interview, “I’m a business manager-cum-father figure.” No, you’re an accountant. The client doesn’t need another father; they need law-abiding, market-priced, diligent and professional accountants, lawyers and agents.

I had worked in Hollywood for years. I had celebrity clients who had raised questions about their advisors. I had seen this movie.

Before I left for LA, I called my friend Ilene Feldman, a former talent agent and now manager to stars like Ryan Gosling and Angelina Jolie. I remembered Ilene had represented Johnny early in his career.

“I was his first agent, when he was doing ‘21 Jump Street’ back in the late 80s.” Ilene said.

“What’s he like?”

“Lovely. Smart. Shy. Sensitive. Sweet guy.”

“What was he like back then?”

“That was back then. I haven’t seen him in a long time.” She laughed, seeming to reminisce. “He did not want to be an actor. And he really did not want to be famous. He was a guitar player, and that’s how he saw himself. So I fired him as a client.”

It was my turn to laugh. “You fired Johnny Depp at the beginning of his career? Why?”

“He broke my one rule. I won’t work for somebody if I want it more than they do.” “It,” I understood, was fame.

On October 27, 2016, I boarded a flight from Washington, DC to LA to have dinner with Johnny and his new business managers Edward White & Company at Ed White’s Bel Air house. I paid $17 for WiFi on the 6-hour flight to LA to begin some digging around. It was a good investment. And it was the first of many discoveries and plot twists resulting from information hiding in plain sight.

I wanted to be prepared for the dinner meeting. What did I have? Nothing really, beyond the surely inaccurate hearsay that none of his advisors posessed any contract with Johnny Depp. So I began with the simplest question: weren’t lawyers required to have contracts with their clients?

The first thing I found online was a law review article that said it was “common practice” for entertainers and advisors to deal with each other in Hollywood on a handshake, with no contract. Did this practice start with Hollywood’s Mafia lawyers, who knew better than to write things down but also that violation of the handshake might yield your prize racehorse’s head in your bed? Anyway, so much for my theory. It seemed unlikely that every lawyer in Hollywood was violating the law.

I searched one more thing without much expectation: “Hollywood, contingent fees, handshake.” Looking back now, that simple Google search might have had more repercussions for the Hollywood entertainment law industry than any other. Hollywood business managers and lawyers commonly worked on contingency, taking a hefty percentage of their client’s earnings.

One of the first Google hits was an old marketing piece from a California law firm called “Do’s and Dont’s for Retainer Agreements: You Can’t Do It on a Handshake.” This sounded interesting. This slightly dated opinion seemed to suggest that contingent fees were “voidable.” Voidable meant a client could tear up the “arrangement” because it wasn’t really a legally binding arrangement at all.

My attention sharpened and my pulse jumped with the quickening thrill of the hunt. I was about to order wine. I ordered coffee instead.

With a few more clicks I found something called “Section 6147” of the California Code, in a section governing “Business and Professional Responsibility.” Section 6147 said that a written contract was required to take contingent fees. The law was stronger than just that. It also said even a written contract could be “voidable” (meaning fees returned) if there weren’t four paragraphs of precise “magic words” from the statute. These magic words were to protect people from their lawyers.

Perhaps I was too exuberant and getting over my skis. I didn’t even know what Johnny’s “financial problem” was. Nor was his intermediary certain about the fact that there were no contracts, nor about anything else.

This law would not help anyway with Mr. Depp’s business managers. Unless they were lawyers. I checked and to my surprise they were. I was staring at Joel and Rob Mandel’s bar licenses.

But was my theory that all of Johnny Depp’s contracts were illegal too good to be true? An entire Hollywood legal industry couldn’t be undertaking “no contract” practices that would cause a catastrophic rush for the exits the moment any Hollywood star successfully challenged it. I must be missing something. Time to read the caselaw.

Far from fueling my skepticism, the caselaw lit me up. After reading a dozen of the seminal cases, I knew I was on to something. There wasn’t a “Hollywood exception.” If you were a lawyer, and you read a movie star’s contract, no matter what profession you termed yourself, that was practicing law for purposes of this law. And as a lawyer, you were required to have a written contract, or the whole contingent professional and economic relationship was void. In that case, you might then be entitled to fair pay, or quantum meruit, for work you could prove by the hour, like a normal service provider. Not a percentage of the earnings. But if you defrauded your client, you were entitled to nothing.

I looked out the window and wondered what Johnny’s Depp’s “financial problem” was. If “it” was his advisors, I had just found a way out.