There have bee so much speculation since June 25th 2009 in regards to John Brancas employment with Michael Jackson!
Bloggers have taken to the internet, all taking the pledge what THEY say is the truth and only the truth. They ask you to believe what they say when they have relied on newspaper articles such as “When our reporter called Mr Branca we had no response.”
They want YOU to take on face value that just because a reporter “called” Branca he MUST have been in Michael Jackson’s employ. They want you to IGNORE the “Hand delivered” letter to Brancas office firing him http://www.scribd.com/doc/101281102/john-branca-you-are-fired
They want you to ignore he was investigated and found to be having tight dealings with those that were trying to sabotage him (Sony) AND was stealing from him!! They give some gobble de goouch excuse like, well the PI company knew Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck was mad at Goofy, so Minne ,,,,,,,,,, You get where i am going…. they offer more speculations to verify what they are speculating,,, YET STILL IGNORING HARD EVIDENCE!!
Then there are other bloggers who say, Well Branca wrote a positive letter during the Goldman Sachs deal to defend Michael, to that we say. He was caught red handed, fired so he was desperately trying to leave a paper trial of himself being a good guy.. Too little too late buddy! http://www.scribd.com/doc/102043792/Interfor-Report-John-Branca
To be quite honest with you, we don’t blame these bloggers for the misinformation they have been regurgitated for the past four years. They had NOTHING to go on so grasping at straws is natural when you wanna defend someone who you know does not have a very good track record!!
Okay.. We have made you wait long enough, you are probably thinking “What is this evidence you have”….
Sorry i tend to get carried away a bit… Beside the fact Michaels mother told us Michael did not trust Branca because he believed he stole from him, besides the fact the siblings have been vocal, plus Michael father. Besides his colleagues, employers saying the same, we now have John Brancas own attorney say that Branca did not work for Michael for SIX years..
The following is a long excerpt from Randy Sullivans book “Untouchable.” We want to point out some parts of the book we do not believe in when the family are being bashed by third parties. Not very professional of anyone to do that… The following we belive to be “True Facts” because Weitzman is simply making an innocent statement in John Brancas defense regarding the “Fake Will.” Accidentally by mistake his gives us some information that is crucial in the hiring firing of Branca..
Some of the bloggers have read this info and probably feel foolish they invested so much time in bringing you misinformation. We all make mistakes, but whats more foolish is they have chosen to defend their foolish actions with bashing Mr Sullivan. Please read the excerpt we have here from his book and YOU decide, pay attention to the bold parts…. This is take from pages 560, 561, 562, 563:-
*In late August 2012, after sixteen months of refusing to answer any questions at all, despite multiple offers of the opportunity to do so, John Branca, through his attorney Howard Weitzman, agreed to respond to questions from me, if they were “put into context.” Essentially, Branca and Weitzman wanted me to reveal what I had. Despite the fact that this book had already gone into production, my publisher and I agreed and I responded with an e-mail to Weitzman in which I outlined the four major areas of question or controversy:
Questions involving the preparation and signing of the 2002 will;
Questions about the circumstances of Mr. Branca’s termination as Michael Jackson’s attorney in February 2003;
Questions about whether Michael Jackson, at the time of his death, actually wanted John Branca to serve as his executor;
Questions about whether JohnBranca was in fact rehired as Michael Jackson’s attorney in June 2009.
I also invited Mr. Branca to respond to the criticism of him by members of the Jackson family for the degree to which he had been personally enriched by his administration of the Michael Jackson estate.
Weitzman responded forcefully and persuasively to the question about whether Branca was rehired in 2009, first by arranging for a conference call with Michael Kane, who had been hired as Michael Jackson’s business manager shortly before his death and who continued to serve in that capacity for the estate. Kane told me that he had personally witnessed the meeting between Branca and Jackson at the Forum, and had in fact participated in some of it. Weitzman also arranged a conference call with Joel Katz, who had been hired as Jackson’s entertainment lawyer in the spring of 2009, and Katz told me he was certain that Branca and Jackson had met as claimed, because he had spoken to Michael Jackson about the meeting a short time afterward. He had asked Michael if he minded John joining the team, Katz said, and Michael had told him he did not. Not long after this, Katz said, he saw a document signed by Michael Jackson that approved a business plan that would be directed by John Branca. (But he was not “Reinstated as executor of the Will)
Members of the Jackson family and critics of John Branca retorted that
Kane and Katz were employees of the estate and allies of Branca. I see no legitimate basis for insulting Mr. Kane and Mr. Katz with the suggestion that they would lie at John Branca’s behest and I accept that Branca did in fact meet with Michael Jackson at the Forum and likely was rehired as one of Jackson’s entertainment attorneys. For me, that controversy has been settled in Mr. Branca’s favor.
Howard Weitzman had no real answers to offer, though, about the other three areas of question and controversy I submitted to him. On the question of why the will shows that it was signed in Los Angeles on July 7, 2002, a date when Michael Jackson was in New York City, Mr. Branca was choosing not to reply, Weitzman told me. Weitzman claimed that he himself had not been given an explanation for the discrepancy, stating that he had heard different stories from different people. Weitzman, of course, insisted the July 7 will was not fraudulent and was signed by Michael Jackson in the presence of three witnesses.
Unbeknownst to me at the time, Branca was talking to a reporter from Forbes named Zack O’Malley Greenburg, who had just written a story for his magazine that would be published even as Weitzman and I were talking. “The Scandalously Boring Truth About Michael Jackson’s Will,” the article was titled. In it, Greenburg explained that even if the 2002 will had been found to be invalid, there were two other Michael Jackson wills in John Branca’s possession, one executed in 1997 and the other in 1995, that would have become the successor documents. And both of those wills, as Greenburg reported, named John Branca as one of Michael Jackson’s executors. So Branca had absolutely no motive to submit a fraudulent 2002 will, Weitzman pointed out to me after he recited the facts that were the basis of the Greenburg article. What both Weitzman and Greenburg somehow ignored, though, was that in February 2003, when he was terminated as Michael Jackson’s attorney, Branca had been ordered to surrender “all” documents in his possession, not just the 2002 will, but the 1997 and 1995 wills as well.
If Branca had done what he was supposed to do, he would have had no Michael Jackson wills in his possession at the time of Michael’s death, a fact that renders both Weitzman’s argument and Greenburg’s thesis irrelevant. Weitzman had no reply to offer from Branca to the question of why he had failed to surrender the originals of Michael Jackson’s wills in 2003. Again Weitzman told me that his client was declining to answer any questions on that subject. When I pointed out that Branca’s refusals to answer questions about the problems with the will itself and about his failure to return it to Michael Jackson in 2003 were inevitably going to raise suspicions, Weitzman said he understood this, but had to obey his client’s instructions.
Weitzman did attempt at one point to suggest that perhaps Branca had simply handed off the 2003 termination letter from Michael Jackson to an assistant who had somehow failed to include the will (or wills) in the documents returned to Jackson. I pointed out that this was implausible. If the will had surfaced months after Michael’s death when files were being moved into storage or something such as that, then the story that the failure to return the will was an oversight by an assistant would perhaps be believable, I told Weitzman. But the fact was that Branca knew he had the 2002 will at the time of Michael Jackson’s death and immediately began the process of producing it for certification, then presented it to the court within a week of Jackson’s death. And if Branca knew he had the will, I pointed out to Weitzman, then he knew he had failed to do as he had been instructed to do by his former client back in 2003.
And that, by the standards of the State Bar, was not ethical. Weitzman didn’t like hearing this from me, but he had no answer for it, either. Weitzman quite reasonably pointed out that John Branca couldn’t be expected to respond to claims about the things that Michael Jackson had said about Branca during the more than six years that passed between his 2003 termination and Michael’s death. What startled me, though, was how exercised Branca and Weitzman were by the subject of the 2003 Michael Jackson will that named Al Malnik as executor.
Weitzman said he had spoken to Malnik and that Malnik had told him that will “was never filed.” Later Weitzman stated that Malnik had told him the will “never existed.” That was strange. My initial knowledge of the Malnik will had come from Marc Schaffel, who told me he had been one of the two witnesses to Michael Jackson’s signature at Malnik’s home in Florida. I would have been a little shaky if all I’d had to base my belief in the 2003 will was on Schaffel’s statements.
But I had discovered that on the day of Michael Jackson’s death, Malnik had given not one but two telephone interviews to journalists in the Miami Beach area in which he stated that, as of 2004, he was the executor of Jackson’s estate, on the basis of a document signed in 2003. The first interview was given to Palm Beach Post columnist Jose Lambiet and the second to a reporter at the CBS affiliate in Miami, Lisa Petrillo.
The Petrillo interview had been tape-recorded and played on the air during an evening broadcast. When I sought counsel from attorneys about what could be motivating Malnik to claim there never had been a 2003 will, if he was in fact saying that, two of them did bit of legal research for me and reported that, Malnik, as an attorney, had been obligated by the California Probate Code to produce any Michael Jackson will in his possession within sixty days of Michael’s death. If Malnik had possessed such a will and failed to produce it, he might face some legal consequences. What this all comes to I have no certain knowledge.
I am convinced, though, that the 2003 Michael Jackson will did exist and I told this to Howard Weitzman. Weitzman’s replies to the questions concerning whether Branca was rehired and to those who have criticized him for using his own law firm to prepare a will that named him as executor of the Michael Jackson Estate were incorporated into the text in an earlier chapter of this book.
In the letter that Weitzman sent to me and my publisher in John Branca’s formal reply to my questions, the attorney stated: “Mr. Branca and Michael Jackson had a long and multifaceted personal and professional relationship that, admittedly, was interrupted at certain points in their careers for various reasons. Those who harbor no bias or animus against Mr. Branca acknowledge his contributions to Michael’s career, and recognize his role and that of his co-executor in the stunning financial turnaround of the estate after Michael’s death.” No argument here. For the moment, it wouldn’t matter what questions remained about the will or the signature on the trust.
It wouldn’t matter whether John Branca failed to resign as the executor of the Michael Jackson estate as he should have or kept Michael’s will if he had an obligation to return it. It wouldn’t matter what had happened to the will that made Al Malnik the executor of the Jackson estate, or why Michael had asked in the spring of 2009 for the creation of a new will and trust agreement that made no mention of John Branca or John McClain.
It wouldn’t matter whether Branca really had been hired back as Jackson’s lawyer a week before Michael’s death.
All of those questions were moot because in the end the struggle wasn’t about right or wrong, good or evil, justice or injustice. It was about money, Michael Jackson’s money, and there was enough of that to go around for everyone— everyone except Michael himself, of course. There’d never been enough money for him because what he wanted and needed most, money couldn’t buy. Nearly as often as he lamented the childhood he lost to celebrity……………………………………………
So there you have it, Sadly there will still be blogs defending Branca because some people just dont like to be WRONG!!
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