Hollywood Math

“You’ve got a lot of nerve

To say you are my friend.”

-Bob Dylan

Two days later, on Friday, November 4, 2016, I set up office in a shaded corner booth at the Beverly Hills Hotel pool. Larry Leavitt from Ed White’s office called and breathlessly said, “Joel Mandel filed to foreclose on Johnny’s home!” “Johnny’s home” actually meant four luxury properties in West Hollywood that he had acquired over the years, including his castle that I had just visited. This action came out of nowhere. I asked Larry to send me the papers.

In all that came next, it would never be remembered that Johnny hadn’t even launched the wars. The fuses were lit from the start by his opponents.

And when I received the filing, the Mandels claimed they had loaned Johnny $5 million. This raised doubts in my mind. If there were any financial improprieties, why would they be loaning Johnny money?

I called Johnny and told him his home was being foreclosed on. He was shocked to speechlessness. I filled the silence: “why did the Mandels loan you $5 million?”

“Huh?”

He said he had no idea that they had loaned him anything. Frankly, at that moment, I did not believe him. This made zero sense.

But I now needed to hire some California real estate lawyers to defend against the foreclosure. This accelerated matters considerably with the Mandels. I had planned to call Mandel to establish the facts, but I wanted to do more digging first. Now I would have to rush ahead with the call. I texted Johnny for permission to approach Mandel.

Johnny texted me November 10: “Hey, Adam … Good hearing from you!!! I’ve been worried that Joel is gonna catch us with our pants down!!! As to question 1 – YES, PLEASE!!! BY ALL MEANS, CALL MANDEL AND CONVEY TO HIM THAT WE ARE GOING TO HAND HIM HIS ASS!!!!! Respect … Johnny D.”

I remembered the Stalin statue in Johnny’s office. Did Mandel know when he gave it to Johnny that Stalin killed all of his advisors?

For the moment, the ass-handing was coming our way. To Johnny, the foreclosure action was a direct attack on his children and their future ownership of the home they grew up in. I wrote back proposing a different strategy for the Mandel call, opting instead to put Mandel at ease and hear his story. Johnny approved: “If you feel that is the way to approach him … fine. I’m not so sure that the guy has anything to rely on but the wind from his own bad breath against a fortified sandcastle!!!!!”

It took a few more days to obtain the papers. But when I did, the worm turned in my mind again. The Mandel brothers’ loan of $5 million was secured by more than $60 million worth of Johnny’s houses. Johnny never received the independent legal advice about the “loan” required by law for business managers and especially lawyers to loan money to their client. Johnny had the most powerful lawyers in Hollywood working for him. How was it possible that this multi-million dollar loan, with his homes as collateral, had not been reviewed by any of them? How could the Mandels have given him so much money without mentioning it to him? Why would they? Another odd feature of the loan was that it had language saying if Johnny ever fired or sued the Mandels, it would accelerate the loan and make it immediately due and payable. It appeared the Mandels had borrowed the money themselves from City National Bank, before loaning it to Johnny. What was going on here?

On November 10, 2016, sitting in an armchair at the Crosby Hotel in New York, I left a voicemail on Joel Mandel’s cell phone that I was Johnny Depp’s lawyer, and I was interested in discussing his situation and claims against Johnny. I put the phone in my lap and stared straight ahead. It took 90 seconds for my phone to ring.

It began friendly and remained that way until it wasn’t. I told Mandel that I was a fixer, not a fighter. A deal lawyer, not a litigator. I was calling to see what the problems were between him and Johnny, and to see if I could help find a resolution. “If there is a deal to be done, I’m here to help make it,” was the message. Then I let greed and the hustle take over.

Hearing what he wanted, Joel Mandel assumed I was there to negotiate a settlement of his threats. With his opening monologue, he began to dig his own grave.

Joel Mandel’s basic cover story was that Johnny didn’t make as much as he spent. He said, “Let me give you some Hollywood math,” and must have liked that turn of phrase because he repeated “Hollywood math” constantly. Mandel proceeded to explain how Johnny had “over 40 employees” (he had 12), flew everywhere on private planes (generally paid for by the Hollywood studios as part of his movie contracts), had a massive security apparatus, recklessly bought luxury real estate and fine art (just before luxury real estate and fine art markets skyrocketed in value) and was an impulsive wastrel. I understood this to be a defensive narrative, a victim-blaming “cover story.” I wanted to determine quickly whether there was a contract.

After an hour where Mandel did 95% of the talking, I said “we don’t need to solve this in one phone call.” I wanted to keep him at the card table. I asked him nonchalantly to help me prepare for our next discussion and get up to speed by sending me a few of the key documents just to get my bearings. For example, could he shoot me Mandel’s, Johnny’s agent Tracey Jacobs’ and Jake Bloom’s contracts? I held my breath.

“We never had any contract with Johnny.”

“None of you? Not even his lawyer Jake Bloom?”

“No. Never. That’s not how it’s done in Hollywood,” he sneered.

“Any chance Jake Bloom had a contract with Johnny that you didn’t know about?”

He laughed: “No chance. I deal with Jake Bloom almost every day. For decades. We have clients in common. Jake’s a close friend. We talk constantly. He’s great.” Mandel wasn’t interested in my contract question, he wanted to get back to talking about “his” money. “Johnny owes me $5 million and I want my money. Jake has his hands on everything, and he knows about everything. You should talk to Jake. He knew I was going to foreclose on Johnny’s home, but there was nothing he could do. That idiot new business manager Ed White refused to pay.”

“You told Jake Bloom in advance that you were going to foreclose on Johnny’s home?”

“Of course. He knows about everything. You should talk to Jake.”

This perked up my ears. Johnny’s own legendary lawyer Jake Bloom knew in advance Johnny’s former business manager was preparing to foreclose and didn’t warn him? Why would Jake Bloom hide something like that from a client? It suggested that the terminated business manager was somehow more important to Jake Bloom than his own client Johnny Depp. It didn’t make sense.

“You also need to talk to Christi.” Christi Dembrowski was Johnny’s sister. “Everything came and went through Christi. Christi is Johnny.”

I immediately understood where Mandel was going with this. He was working an “alter ego” narrative, trying to suggest that Christi stood in the shoes of Johnny and possessed Johnny’s authority. He did not mention that he possessed power of attorney granting him total control over all finances.

Now was the time for the one point I wanted to communicate. “Joel, you have a dispute with Johnny. He also has some concerns with you about a few things. Including that he didn’t even know you were loaning him that money that he never asked you for and using his homes as loan collateral. But nobody wants to have a discussion with a gun to their head. You need to put the gun down.”

He knew I meant the foreclosure action. “Nah! Forget it! I’m not dropping it. I filed that action so somebody would show up on the other end of the line. And here you are.” He added hopefully, “And I’m glad you’re here.” I made a mental note that he had not disputed Johnny’s ignorance about the $5 million loan.

“I would be here anyway. I’m not suggesting you drop anything. I’m suggesting you postpone the foreclosure action while we talk, which you can always pick up again later.” The 90-day clock was ticking on the foreclosure itself. Johnny would lose his homes soon. “You will only have lost one business day so far, and you can restart the clock again any time.”

“Nah. I’m not dropping it.”

“What about the taxes, Joel? We have a report that you didn’t pay Johnny’s taxes on time for 17 straight years. And that he paid almost $10 million in tax penalties alone as a consequence.”

He exploded. “That’s bullshit! We always paid his taxes on time!! And to the extent there was ever a late tax payment, that’s because he never had enough money to pay the taxes on time!”

“For 17 straight years?”

“Never!”

Hmm. First, he just said it was “bullshit” they didn’t pay the taxes. Then he implied it was sometimes true, with an excuse. Then he admitted that he never paid the taxes on time. Three different answers in 10 seconds on what turned out to be at least an $8.3 million issue. His story was that Johnny Depp made $650 million but never had enough to pay his taxes for 17 straight years? How did that Hollywood Math make sense?

Mandel and I had two more calls over the following few days. I paced around my house listening to his spin. It was pretty much a carbon copy of the first discussion, but as Mandel’s confidence grew with me, so did his yarns. I would politely ask him to drop his foreclosure action, and he would refuse.

He peppered our discussion with increasingly picturesque illustrations of “Hollywood Math,” and groused about what a crazed overspender Johnny was. I thought but didn’t say: If you were his business manager, and he was spending more than he made to the point of depletion over 17 years, you had an obligation to provide advice and guidance in return for the $35 plus million you paid yourself as “business manager.” So there must have been a lot of email and other evidence reflecting those interventions. Yet Ed White said there were no files, that Mandel claimed he kept all the financial files “in my head.” If Mandel and Bloom were in touch with each other every day, what was the dynamic here? What had happened over those 17 years to $650 million, and what role did these Hollywood suits - Mandel and Bloom - play?

On November 16 Johnny texted: “I’ve had a lightbulb go off and I have an idea of a person who should have quite a LOT of very pertinent information!!! Super important!!!”

The person Johnny had in mind, a guy who worked at his production company Infinitum Nihil, didn’t turn out to have lots of information. He had one critical piece.

On November 21, I called this guy, who told me there was a woman named Janine Rayburn who had worked for Joel Mandel’s firm The Management Group (“TMG”) on Johnny’s account. He thought Janine might have been Johnny’s day-to-day account manager. She was frequently complaining about bad practices towards Johnny. He vaguely recollected, although it was misty after a few years, that Janine was fired for these complaints, and might have been paid “hush money” on the way out.

Too good to be true, I thought.

As November 2017 drew to a close, I began to speak with Johnny every day over FaceTime. Sometimes our video calls lasted hours. He was an unusual combination of Bohemian and southern gentleman. He revered his recently passed mother, although she had savagely beaten him (and his father) throughout his childhood, and he said she was “the meanest woman I ever met.” He never spoke unkindly about any woman and rhapsodized tenderly about his former partners - from Kate Moss to “Noni” (Winona Ryder) to Vanessa Paradis - in what he termed his “serial monogamy.” He had lived an eventful life and he seemed nostalgic for it. He certainly didn’t seem to fit the profile of a wifebeater. He was as interesting as a person could be, and I liked everything about him. We were becoming friends.

​I was putting the pieces of Johnny together mentally. A shy man who had been beaten and damaged as a child by his violent mother. An accidental movie star who never wanted to be famous. A multi-millionaire with no interest in money or its machinery. Searching and finding in Marlon Brando and Hunter S. Thompson missing father figures, and in Keith Richards a surrogate musical brother. Uncritical judgments about people, to a fault. He seemed to me an easy mark as a victim - inattentive, artistic prey that an apex predator would cut from the pack. He did not metaphorically cut his own lawn nor did he monitor those who did. Infinitely more important than my psychological profile was evidence. I needed to look at his emails and texts. And I understood that a man who had lived most of his life hiding from the public would not like my rummaging through his data. I didn’t blame him, but it was necessary.

​“I can’t help you if I can’t see the evidence.”

​“Only you,” he said in agreement. “No one but you.”

​This was a burden for me. I would have to look at tens of thousands of communications myself, a job usually reserved for young lawyers who catalogue and then flag the most important ones – “hot docs” - for their seniors. But I agreed.

​Soon I could see why he was shy about them. There were deeply personal communications from those closest to him. He was certainly guilty of salty language and the purplest of prose. But I did not see any communications that cast him in an unflattering light. People came to him for money, for advice, and for his creative inputs. He always said yes.

A Washington lawyer named Ben Chew had been my closest friend for over 25 years; he had been best man at my wedding and was Godfather to my youngest daughter. Professionally, Ben was going through a rough patch and had bounced around firms. After getting fired from his last firm, he had recently joined a California-based law firm called Manatt Phelps. Ben was a tall, moppy-haired tennis player; an aww shucks kind of Washington, DC native. I played tennis with him a few times a week. He was also my personal lawyer. Because I trusted Ben, I hired him and Manatt Phelps, the third-largest law firm in California, to simply manage the straightforward real-estate aspects of the foreclosure action and to advise me so I could advise Johnny on our real estate issues. Marty Singer, Johnny’s other famous Hollywood lawyer, kept trying to push his way into the case. I texted Johnny suggesting we resist this.

In addition to needing his firm to serve as emergency California real estate counsel, I thought Ben might be helpful arms and legs to whatever direction the Mandel matter went. I viewed Ben as a “judge whisperer,” the kind of guy who exasperatedly says “goodness!” in court when the other side is being nasty and whom Judges liked, which was a useful advantage in litigation. Above all, I thought he was loyal and would follow my instructions, as he had done faithfully for decades.

​When a great Washington, DC athlete with young children that Ben and I knew was struck and rendered quadriplegic by a car that crushed him against a double-parked UPS truck, Ben took the case against UPS. It was unwinnable. Except Ben was a judge whisperer and UPS’ lawyers started lying lies they didn’t need to lie. Ben won a settlement that saved the financial security of the victim’s family. It made an impression on me.

I brought Ben in on many of my cases over the years. He was a self-described “ham and egg litigator,” not a high-profile lawyer. My referrals represented a significant percentage of his book of business. Ben’s greatest strength was that I could trust him.