JANUARY 6--While jury selection is scheduled to begin later this month, specific details of the criminal molestation case against Michael Jackson have been shrouded through a judicial gag order, heavily redacted legal filings, sealed court proceedings, and other secrecy measures. But now, for the first time, The Smoking Gun has compiled an authoritative, behind-the-scenes account of the prosecution's case against the

King of Pop, who was indicted last April on ten felony counts for the alleged sexual abuse of a Los Angeles boy in early 2003. This story (and the ones linked at right) are based on a review of confidential law enforcement and government reports, grand jury testimony, and sealed court records provided to TSG by sources. If the harrowing and deeply disturbing allegations in these documents are true, Jackson is a textbook pedophile, a 46-year-old predator who plied children with wine, vodka, tequila, Jim Beam whiskey, and Bacardi rum. A man who gave boys nicknames like Doo Doo Head and Blowhole and then quizzed them about whether they masturbated and if "white stuff" came out. A man who conducted drinking games with minors and surfed porn with them on a laptop in his Neverland Ranch bedroom, noting that if anyone asked what they were looking at, the kids should just say they were watching "The Simpsons."

A man who frequently talked sex with his little companions and explained that "boys have to masturbate or they go crazy." A man who told one pajama-clad boy that he wanted to show him how to "jack off." When the tipsy child declined the demonstration, Jackson announced, "I'll do it for you," and buried his hand in the boy's Hanes briefs, size small. And a man who emphasized to his little friends that these activities were

 "their little secret" and should not be disclosed to anyone, even if a gun was at their head. The heart of the Jackson prosecution rests largely on accounts provided to investigators by the teenage boy, his younger brother, older sister, and the children's mother (at the time of the alleged molestation, the victim, who had been diagnosed with a rare cancer in 2000, was 13, his brother was 12, and their sister was 16). In the documents reviewed by TSG, the brothers appear a potent one-two punch of first-hand accounts of alleged Jackson misdeeds. They corroborated many of each other's lurid stories, providing the Santa Barbara Sheriff's Department and District Attorney Thomas Sneddon with a stereophonic sleaze compendium. While their sister did not witness any sexual abuse--nor was she ever invited to stay in Jackson's bedroom--she told investigators that the entertainer provided her and her brothers with wine at Neverland and also said that her siblings each confided in her about Jackson's explicit sex talk. The older boy, she said, told her that Jackson gave them tequila and Skyy vodka and asked her not to tell their parents about his drinking (Jackson, the boys reported, often concealed the pair's wine (a/k/a "Jesus Juice") in cans of Diet Coke and Sprite). In addition, she told detectives that the older boy said Jackson would touch his behind outside his clothes, something that made her brother feel uncomfortable. According to the documents, the children's mother is a critical witness to the alleged conspiracy to imprison her family at Neverland in the wake of the February 2003 broadcast of "Living with Michael Jackson," the devastating Martin Bashir documentary. It was during that program that Jackson admitted--and strongly defended--sleeping with boys. At one point in the documentary--which first aired in England on February 3 and then in the U.S. three days later--the performer is seen with the 13-year-old accuser, who rests his head on Jackson's shoulder and talks glowingly about the singer.

The woman contends that Jackson and several business associates began

illegally scheming to keep her family caged up at Neverland the day after the Bashir documentary aired on Great Britain's ITV. Though Jackson is the only person charged in connection with this purported plot, five of his business associates were identified as unindicted co-conspirators in the performer's heavily redacted April 2004 indictment. Aides Frank Tyson and Vincent Amen, business managers Dieter Wiesner and Ronald Konitzer, and video producer Marc Schaffel are accused of helping Jackson orchestrate the conspiracy, which included plans to ship the family off for safekeeping in Brazil. Family members were repeatedly told by the Jackson camp that the foreign move was necessary because numerous death threats had been directed at the family, according to investigative records. In a bid to buttress the conspiracy claim, prosecutors elicited grand jury testimony from several Jackson associates, most of whom dealt with the family post-Bashir. Those witnesses included Neverland employees like security chief Jesus Salas, guards Christopher Carter and Brian Barron, public relations aide Ann Gabriel, and Schaffel cohort Christian Robinson, who testified with limited "use immunity" about the filming of the family's so-called rebuttal statement, a videotape they later told detectives they were strong-armed into making. Also, as they did during last year's grand jury presentment, prosecutors will display items seized from Jackson's ranch during a November 2003 court-authorized raid. Agents went in searching for pornography, underwear, and any material--photos, correspondence, etc.--further linking Jackson to the alleged victim. They left with more than they could have expected, netting items corroborative of the accounts provided to them by the two boys. The children's 36-year-old mother is, of course, a principal target of the Jackson defense team, which views her as a scheming grifter who has fabricated the abuse accounts, programmed these tawdry tales of masturbation and soiled underwear into her children, and, despite assertions that she is not chasing money, is expecting some kind of future financial windfall. The confidential law enforcement records also document how the family's story changed shortly after the mother hired legal counsel in mid-2003. Until that point, the family had vehemently denied any improprieties by Jackson in interviews with Los Angeles child welfare officials and Santa Barbara Sheriff's deputies. And they sang Jackson's praises in the rebuttal videotape shot by Schaffel's film crew two weeks after the Bashir documentary aired on ABC's "20/20." In addition, Jackson's lawyers have pointed out that, according to Sneddon, the alleged conspiracy to silence the family began more than two weeks before the first molestation incident is alleged to have occurred. The cover-up, Team Jackson argues, began before any crimes occurred. continued In mid-November 2003, investigators drafted a lengthy and remarkably thorough affidavit in support of their court request to raid Neverland, the Beverly Hills office of Bradley Miller, a private investigator working for Jackson attorney Mark Geragos, and the L.A. home where Jackson's accusers filmed their rebuttal videotape. Noting that Jackson's "three-year long interest" in the adolescent victim was "grossly abnormal" and, in itself, corroborative of the family's story, Detective Paul Zelis concluded that criminal probers had established "reasonable probable cause" to "believe Michael Joe Jackson is a pedophile and one with the means to inhibit disclosure of his offenses by bribery and intimidation." What follows is an inside account of how investigators came to that conclusion. * * * After being diagnosed with cancer in 2000, the gravely ill boy, then only ten, told his family that he would like to meet one of his favorite entertainers, specifically naming Michael Jackson and comedians Adam Sandler, Chris Tucker, and Jim Carrey. That kind of Make-a-Wish request was something Jackson had often fulfilled and he soon contacted the child by phone in a Los Angeles hospital. In short order, the pair--a world-famous entertainer and a grade schooler from East L.A. --became phone pals while the child remained hospitalized. Upon the boy's discharge, Jackson invited him and his family to visit Neverland in August 2000. Jackson sent a car to pick up the family in L.A. and later presented the boy with an Apple laptop. During that initial visit, the mother told detectives, she met Tyson, who was introduced as a longtime friend of Jackson's and who told her he handled "damage control" for the entertainer. The 24-year-old Tyson, whose actual surname is Cascio, is a scrawny New Jersey native who, the alleged victim and his family claimed, repeatedly threatened their lives during their 2003 imprisonment at Neverland.

The children returned to Neverland later that year, accompanied only by their father David, according to police interviews. Around this time, Jackson gave the family a white Ford Bronco, which they used to transport the sick child to medical appointments. Asked by investigators what transpired during those first two Neverland trips, the brothers recounted two unsettling incidents, though neither could pinpoint during which visit they occurred. The younger boy, 9 at the time, said that while he and his brother were riding in a golf cart with Jackson, the star asked them, "What's your favorite curse word?" The child also recalled being in Jackson's bedroom along with his brother, Tyson, Jackson, and the performer's son, Prince Michael, who was 3 at the time. Tyson, the younger boy told investigators, connected his brother's laptop to the Internet, "and Michael started searching for pornographic web sites," according to the Zelis search warrant affidavit. The child said Jackson typed in either www.pussy.com or www.teenpussy.com and he and his brother saw photos of "naked ladies." The boy "described seeing a female holding her shirt up and exposing her breasts and Michael commented,

'Got Milk?'" The boy said that Jackson's son was sleeping nearby and the entertainer "told Prince he was 'missing out.'" The older brother gave investigators a similar account of the web surfing, adding that Jackson told him not to tell his parents what they were doing. When the younger brother told his sister about the naked photos, the older boy "told her not to say anything because Michael would get mad. [He] told her everything is secret and that they can't say anything," according to Zelis. The girl told detectives that she was mostly excluded from joining her brothers when they were with Jackson at Neverland, and that days would go by without her seeing them. She was a decidedly third wheel and did not rate a Jackson nickname nor a sleepover invitation. She bunked with her parents in a separate guest house while her brothers stayed in Jackson's bedroom during those initial visits (the boys slept on the bed while Jackson and Tyson crashed on the floor in sleeping bags). In fact, during the early Neverland trips, the younger brother also apparently did not figure in Jackson's plans. In one interview, the older child said Jackson wanted only him to stay in the bedroom, but the boy insisted that his sibling be allowed to stay as well. Girls as second-class citizens is a well-established fact at Neverland. In fact, when agents raided the Los Olivos, California ranch in November 2003, they found a handwritten letter from a girl named Renia in a black leather case in Jackson's bedroom. A search warrant return reviewed by TSG notes that the missive "discusses boys sleeping with subject. She was not allowed into 'Apple Head Club' because she was a girl." That description of evidence item #361 was one of more than 40 entries wholly or partially redacted from a Neverland search warrant inventory released last year. [Click here to learn what else--porn, videos, erotic books--was found in Jackson's bedroom and bathroom] The older brother saw Jackson once more in 2000, around Christmas, when he spent time with the performer and his two children at the Hilton hotel near Universal Studios in Hollywood. Jackson and the kids watched a movie while lying in bed and "talked, hung out, and wrestled around," the boy told detectives. The child's mother said Jackson gave the boy a Nintendo or PlayStation unit and video games, but did not give his siblings any presents. While Jackson and the boy spoke for hours at a time on the phone, there were no Neverland visits in 2001 because the child was undergoing progressive chemotherapy for cancer and was too sick to travel. The disease, now reportedly in remission, cost the boy a kidney and his spleen. The boy's mother said that, during 2001, she complained to Jackson about the length of his telephone chats with her son--and that Jackson was upset with her criticism. Asked by investigators about her recollections of those calls, she said that her son mentioned things that struck her as "peculiar." For instance, Jackson's favorite color was the same as her son's favorite color. And "whatever [her son] liked, Michael liked as well." Her after-the-fact inference was clear:

 the adult Jackson was carefully cultivating her son. The woman added that soon after Jackson learned that the boy was sharing details of their phone calls with her, the boy began clamming up about the chats. Investigators contend that these "endless phone conversations" and other "extravagant attention" paid to the boy by Jackson mirrors the story told to authorities ten years ago by Jordan Chandler, another 13-year-old boy who once "caught the eye of Michael Jackson." The criminal investigation of Chandler's abuse allegations was stymied when the boy's family entered into a $20 million civil settlement with the pop star and declined to further pursue criminal charges against Jackson. Sneddon recently announced that he will seek to introduce evidence gathered from the Chandler investigation and a second early-90s probe to establish that Jackson engaged in prior acts of molestation. The original probe still casts such a shadow over Jackson that when Schaffel's Calabasas home was raided last January, deputies actually discovered a file folder titled "Chandler Statement." Inside was a printout from TSG of a sworn declaration by the boy, which we first posted in February 2003. [Click here for new revelations about the Chandler case, including Jackson's telltale body "splotches" and how Sneddon & Co.'s candid camera reportedly corroborated the teenager's tale.]

* * * While they often provided investigators with very specific accounts of Jackson's wrongdoing, the boy and his family are uniformly hazy when it comes to exact dates and times of these alleged transgressions, which could tend to undermine aspects of their expected future testimony. The accusers, who were interviewed separately by Santa Barbara Sheriff's detectives, said that they did not compare notes about their individual accounts. However, both boys and the children's mother explained away their temporal deficiencies almost identically: the trio claimed that since there were no clocks or calendars at Neverland, they simply lost track of dates. The younger boy claimed that Jackson kept him and his brother away from "clocks and dates." The older brother told investigators that he was "not allowed" to keep track of dates and times while at the entertainer's ranch. continued Forgetting for a moment that no family member apparently owned a wristwatch, their description of Neverland sounds more like a hermetically sealed Vegas casino floor. It is even stranger considering that a centerpiece of Jackson's estate is a gigantic outdoor clock built into a berm facing Neverland's main house, where the boys stayed. On the working clock's face, numbers are formed by flowers and shrubs and the word "Neverland" is spelled out in neat yellow shrubbery. In fact, the clock is so large that the time is easily discernible in aerial photographs of Jackson's residence. In addition, Jackson actually gave the older boy a watch in early-February 2003, right before the family's supposed imprisonment began. Jackson provided the Rado timepiece, the boy claimed, to keep him from telling anyone that he had been given

white wine (concealed in a Diet Coke can) by the entertainer. While actually valued at a fraction of the $75,000 Jackson claimed it was worth, the watch likely did tell time (and probably even had one of those revolutionary new date features). Chipping away at contradictions, memory lapses, and inconsistencies in the accounts of family members--especially the brothers--will be a crucial part of the Jackson defense. For instance, the boys both said that they saw Jackson nude on one occasion while watching television in the star's Neverland bedroom. But while the older child told a psychologist that Jackson "just stood there naked for a moment," his sibling provided detectives with a far more damaging account. The younger brother said that when they saw Jackson naked (except for a pair of socks), they quickly looked away. The boy then said Jackson sat down with them and said, "It's okay, it's okay. You guys should do the same." He then claimed that Jackson's penis was erect during the incident, but told investigators that he could not provide a description because he "only glanced at it." But, motioning with his hands, the child was able to offer an approximation of its length. The younger boy also claimed that, during an early visit to Neverland, he was groped by Jackson while the two were in a golf cart. The child, who said he was driving at the time, told investigators that Jackson reached over with his left hand and touched his "testicles and penis" over his clothes. According to the boy, he continued driving and said nothing to Jackson. In a July 2003 interview with detectives, the child also claimed that, on one occasion, Jackson wanted to give him and his brother sleeping pills, directing the younger boy to get the drugs from a Neverland chef. However, according to an investigative report, "somehow the subject changed and the pills were forgotten." The child, though, kept the "sleeping pill" and later turned it over to his family's civil attorney. A subsequent government analysis of the pill showed it to be an over-the-counter cold capsule. The younger boy's accounts of his family's experiences with Jackson and the star's aides, are notable for their detail and the child's uncanny ability to directly quote Jackson, as he did when describing how, during a flight from Miami, the singer made crank calls from the plane, asking those who answered the phone, "Does your pussy stink?" His exact recollection of which porno urls were surfed from Jackson's bedroom--not to mention the star's "Got Milk?" quip--is striking (and probably seen as incredible by defense lawyers). While some of the youngster's tales can't be corroborated, the child provided investigators with a spot-on description of Jackson's two-level bedroom, recalled the four-digit code for the suite's combination lock, and pinpointed for detectives the location of a black suitcase that, he said, held porno magazines like Playboy and Hustler. When Santa Barbara Sheriff's Department deputies raided Neverland in November 2003, they found a black Samsonite briefcase containing several porno magazines in a closet directly below Jackson's bedroom. Of course, the child's accounts (and those of his older brother) have been deemed credible enough by Superior Court judges who have signed off on search warrants and Jackson's arrest warrant, which relied largely on the pair's statements to law enforcement officers. Additionally, a Santa Barbara county grand jury indicted the singer on serious felony charges, most of which hinge entirely on the pair's sworn testimony. The nature of those charges--and the timeframe in which they are alleged to have occurred--has shifted since prosecutors first filed charges against Jackson. A December 2003 criminal complaint accused the performer of committing seven separate lewd acts upon the body of the older boy. Jackson was also hit with separate felonies for allegedly providing the child with booze on two occasions. Those counts tracked with charges the brothers made in police interviews in July and August 2003 (the boys met with detectives at an L.A. hotel and at the headquarters of CALM, a Santa Barbara child abuse prevention group). During those sessions, the older boy answered general questions about school and his favorite sports. He provided a chronological account of his relationship with Jackson, which mirrored his brother's claims of viewing pornography and drinking wine at Neverland. When Sgt. Steve Robel asked him if Jackson had ever touched him inappropriately, the child' s demeanor changed, he "sighed, became quiet, lowered his head, and took some time to answer," according to one sealed affidavit. The boy then described what he said was his first sexual encounter with Jackson in the celebrity's bedroom. After drinking alcohol that left him feeling "kinda drunk," the child said Jackson told him that boys have to masturbate or they go crazy, and related a story about a boy who had sex with a dog. Jackson, he said, then told him he wanted to show him how to masturbate. "He told Michael, 'No,' but Michael said, 'I'll do it for you' and 'I'll show you,'" according to the affidavit, which continued, "Michael then grabbed him in his private area. [The boy] said that both he and Michael were wearing pajamas and lying on Michael's bed. Michael placed his hand down the front of [the boy's] pajamas and started masturbating him. [The boy] said he told Michael he didn't want to do it, but Michael kept masturbating him.

Michael told him, 'It's okay' and 'It's natural.' Michael did not stop masturbating him for a long time. [The boy] added that Michael asked him, 'If you masturbate, does white stuff come out?' [The boy] could not recall if he ejaculated." The child said the molestation occurred during his final stay at Neverland, between mid-February and early-March 2003, when, following the broadcast of the Bashir documentary, his family members were supposedly being held against their will at the California ranch. The boy told investigators that Jackson similarly masturbated him on succeeding nights when his younger brother was not also sleeping in Jackson's bedroom. The boy claimed that after he ejaculated in his pants, Jackson directed him to place his soiled underwear into Jackson's hamper before showering. The Hanes garments were not returned, he reported, and Jackson provided him with new underwear. When sheriff's deputies raided Neverland in November 2003, a search warrant authorized them to seize underwear belonging to the alleged victim, "described as white cotton 'Hanes' brand briefs, size 'small.'" A nine-page inventory of items seized from Jackson's home--which TSG has reviewed--reveals that agents confiscated white boys Hanes underwear from the bathroom of Paris Jackson, the entertainer's six-year-old daughter. According to the teenager, he did not masturbate Jackson, nor did he see the entertainer's penis during these alleged Neverland encounters. During the course of an August 2003 police interview, the boy alternately said that Jackson molested him "less than five times," "a total of five times," and "about seven times," according to a law enforcement account of the Q&A. Based on the December 2003 criminal complaint, it appears prosecutors settled on five as the number of times Jackson masturbated the child. However, when Jackson's indictment was unsealed four months later, the number of molestations claimed by the child had been reduced to two. The prosecution's tailoring of its case with regard to these alleged masturbations has not been addressed in court filings made public, though it will surely be raised at trial by Jackson's defense team. What has not changed between the criminal complaint and the indictment is the number of separate incidents of molestations that the younger boy said he witnessed in Jackson's bedroom. In police interviews and grand jury testimony, the younger boy told of

two instances in which his brother was fondled by Jackson while the older child was either asleep or drunkenly passed out on the entertainer's bed. According to the boy, he was walking up a staircase leading to Jackson's bedroom when he saw the singer and his pajama-clad brother lying on the bed on top of the sheets. Jackson, he said, was wearing a t-shirt, underwear, and socks, and had his left hand under the front of his bother's pajama pants. Jackson, the boy said, was "jacking off" under his underwear with his right hand. The child said he then left the room to sleep in Neverland's guest quarters. On a second occasion, the child testified, he was again walking up the staircase when he spotted Jackson with his hand in the older boy's pajama pants....

 OH WELL,

IT'S ALL OVER NOW,

RIGHT?