Wednesday 16 July 2014
Ronald Reagan and the Occult
Martin Lawrence
With a pistol in his pocket, comedian Martin Lawrence ran into traffic on busy Ventura Boulevard in Sherman Oaks on Tuesday, cursing and screaming at oncoming cars until he was taken away by police and hospitalized, authorities and witnesses said.
Lawrence, star of the television sitcom "Martin" and the films "Bad Boys" and "A Thin Line Between Love & Hate," was found in the middle of Ventura Boulevard at Tyrone Avenue about 12:30 p.m., said Sgt. Bert Mora of the Los Angeles Police Department.
After police restrained Lawrence, he was taken to Sherman Oaks Hospital and Health Center and later released to his personal physician, Dr. William Young of Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, Mora said.
A witness--who declined to be identified but who said he was an acquaintance of Lawrence--said the actor was cursing, waving his hands and yelling, "Fight the establishment!" He said Lawrence ran out of the street when police arrived and tried to fight them off when they attempted to restrain him.
Lawrence had a handgun in his pants pocket, and detectives will ask the city attorney's office to charge him with misdemeanor possession of a concealed firearm, Mora said.
Police said Lawrence may have had a seizure because he failed to take a prescribed medication, but a statement from Lawrence's publicist, Kim Jones, offered another explanation.
"[A doctor] has found Mr. Lawrence to be suffering from a case of complete exhaustion and dehydration," the statement said.
Lawrence, 30, made the leap from television to film last year when he co-starred with actor Will Smith as a police officer in the action-comedy blockbuster "Bad Boys," which grossed about $16 million. Lawrence recently made his directing debut in "A Thin Line Between Love and Hate," on which he was also executive producer, co-writer and star.
Lawrence's bawdy humor, often loaded with expletives, brought much controversy when the Motion Picture Assn. gave his concert film "You So Crazy" an NC-17 rating. After he delivered a monologue laced with sexual references on TV's "Saturday Night Live" in 1994, he was banned from the show.
His stand-up routine, mixed with modern attitude and street slang, has won praise from reviewers, and many in the entertainment industry have spoken of him as a potential successor to Richard Pryor and Eddie Murphy.
Times staff writer Greg Braxton contributed to this story.
Michael and The Mob
. . . Take General Maximo Overkill, for instance. That’s his soldier of fortune’s nom de guerre. His real name is Gordon Novel, and he moves in those spooky circles which he calls “high strange,” where conspiracies flourish and cloak-and-dagger investigations overlap. He cut his teeth working for former New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison on the J.F.K. assassination, and he boasts that he served as former attorney general Ramsey Clark’s “Doberman” at Waco. Several weeks before the trial began, I was put in touch with him through Steven Saltzman—the son of a James Bond–film producer—in Monaco, who told me that Michael Jackson’s brother Jermaine had been seeking Novel’s advice on how to stop the trial. According to Novel, the Jacksons believed that it was all a grand conspiracy, that the accuser’s mother was being paid by Jackson’s enemies, who wanted to take control of his major economic asset, the Sony/ATV Music catalogue, which holds publishing rights to 251 Beatles songs and works by scores of other pop artists. Jackson claimed that the main conspirators were Sony Records; its former president, Tommy Mottola; and Santa Barbara County district attorney Tom Sneddon, the prosecutor, who also investigated Jackson in 1993. The catalogue is held jointly by Jackson and Sony, and Jackson’s share is mortgaged for more than $200 million. If Jackson defaults, Sony has first chance to buy his half as early as this coming December. (A Sony spokesperson said, “We are not going to comment on any aspect of this.”)Jackson explained to Novel that the conspirators had introduced him to Al Malnik, a wealthy Miami attorney who had once represented Meyer Lansky. Malnik later helped Jackson refinance his loans. That was not what Jackson told Novel, however. According to Novel, Jackson said he was lured to Malnik’s house in Miami Beach by film director Brett Ratner to see a house so beautiful it would make him catatonic. He said that once he was there, however, Malnik, who Jackson claimed had Mafia ties, wanted to put his fingers in the singer’s business. Jackson also said he received a call from Tommy Mottola while he was there, which aroused his suspicion, but he did not tell Novel that he later put Malnik on the board of the Sony/ATV Music partnership. (Reached by telephone, Malnik scoffed at the idea of a conspiracy or of his having any Mafia ties. He said, “It does not make any sense.” Ratner confirmed that he took Jackson to Malnik’s house and that he considers Malnik a father figure.)Jackson and Mottola have been at odds for years. In New York in July 2002, Jackson staged a public protest against Mottola with the Reverend Al Sharpton, calling him a racist and “very, very devilish.” He called for a boycott of Sony, which is believed to have contributed to Mottola’s ouster from the company six months later. Jackson is reportedly so frightened of Mottola that one of the reasons he surrounded himself with Nation of Islam guards in 2003 was that he thought Mottola could put out a hit on him. (Mottola could not be reached for comment.)Jackson wanted Novel to find the links among these characters. Novel told me in March that “he believes he’ll get convicted. He believes the judge, the D.A., and the Sony guys are a conspiracy to take over his money.”On March 17, nearly a month into the trial, Novel went to Neverland to strategize. Maximo’s first thought was that Michael was in need of “an extreme makeover” of what he calls “imaggio.” Jackson drove him around the ranch in an old pickup truck. “He acted like he was scared silly,” Novel told me. His fear was “six foot thick. He kept asking me what prison was like. Can he watch TV and movies there? He wanted me to stop the show.” When I asked Novel what that meant, he related that Michael said, “‘I want this trial stopped.’ He said the judge and Sneddon had rigged the game.”The general was blunt with Jackson. “I told him, ‘Get rid of the weird persona. You look like the weird pedophile. I’m talking about the hair, lipstick, eyebrows. Just be yourself, and say why you’re doing it. Say that’s your show-biz personality. It’s just what you do to sell LPs.’ He said, ‘No. I just want to be me.’” The general also told him to find a female lover. “He didn’t want to go with girls, do the romance thing either. He didn’t want to come to Jesus; he thinks he’s already religious. I said, ‘Why didn’t you stop fooling around with kids?’ He said, ‘I didn’t want to.’”Novel told Jackson that he could walk away free if he would just submit to a lie-detector test, undergo hypnosis, and take truth serum, which Novel would administer in “a controlled environment.” While he was under the influence on video, Novel said, Jermaine could ask him questions, and they could distribute the video worldwide, proving his innocence. Jackson refused to take truth serum, Novel said, claiming it was against his religion.Novel told me that he was ready to go public with this information and sell it to the highest bidder, because Jackson had stiffed him on his $5,000 consultant’s fee. I told him that Vanity Fair does not pay for information, but he nevertheless related in detail a conference call he had had with Michael, Jermaine, and the Reverend Jesse Jackson. Many of the things he said they had discussed were echoed in an interview Michael gave Jesse Jackson on Keep Hope Alive with Reverend Jesse Jackson the following Easter Sunday.Michael said on the phone that what was happening to him was the result of racism. He told Jesse Jackson in the radio interview, “I’m totally innocent, and it’s just very painful. This has been kind of a pattern among black luminaries in this country.” He told him he got strength from the examples of Nelson Mandela, Jack Johnson, Muhammad Ali, and Jesse Owens. Novel told me he had said to Michael, “You can either be a victim or a warrior.” In his interview, Michael told Jesse Jackson, “I’m a warrior.”On the phone, Novel told me, Michael and Jesse had decided that telling the press they spoke with each other frequently was a good way to give a positive spin to Michael’s predicament. Sure enough, Raymone Bain, Jackson’s attractive spokeswoman, promptly told reporters that Michael woke up before dawn every day and spoke with Jesse for 15 or 20 minutes. She said, “They talk together and pray together.” In the interview Michael said, “I gained strength from God. I believe in Jehovah God very much.”Novel told me they had discussed the conspiracy at length on the phone. In the interview, Jesse Jackson asked Michael point-blank about the catalogue and what was in it. Michael said that “it’s a huge catalogue. It’s very valuable, it’s worth a lot of money, and there is a big fight going on right now as we speak about that.” He added, “I can’t comment on it. There’s a lot of conspiracy. I’ll say that much.” . . .
Whatever the final autopsy results reveal, it was greed that killed Michael Jackson. Had he not been driven – by a cabal of bankers, agents, doctors and advisers – to commit to the gruelling 50 concerts in London’s O2 Arena, I believe he would still be alive today.During the last weeks and months of his life, Jackson made desperate attempts to prepare for the concert series scheduled for next month – a series that would have earned millions for the singer and his entourage, but which he could never have completed, not mentally, and not physically.Michael knew it and his advisers knew it. Anyone who caught even a fleeting glimpse of the frail old man hiding beneath the costumes and cosmetics would have understood that the London tour was madness. For Michael Jackson, it was fatal.I had more than a glimpse of the real Michael; as an award-winning freelance journalist and film-maker, I spent more than five years inside his ‘camp’.Many in his entourage spoke frankly to me – and that made it possible for me to write authoritatively last December that Michael had six months to live, a claim that, at the time, his official spokesman, Dr Tohme Tohme, called a ‘complete fabrication’. The singer, he told the world, was in ‘fine health’. Six months and one day later, Jackson was dead.Some liked to snigger at his public image, and it is true that flamboyant clothes and bizarre make-up made for a comic grotesque; yet without them, his appearance was distressing; with skin blemishes, thinning hair and discoloured fingernails.I had established beyond doubt, for example, that Jackson relied on an extensive collection of wigs to hide his greying hair. Shorn of their luxuriance, the Peter Pan of Neverland cut a skeletal figure.It was clear that he was in no condition to do a single concert, let alone 50. He could no longer sing, for a start. On some days he could barely talk. He could no longer dance. Disaster was looming in London and, in the opinion of his closest confidantes, he was feeling suicidal.To understand why a singer of Jackson’s fragility would even think about traveling to London, we need to go back to June 13, 2005, when my involvement in his story began.As a breaking news alert flashed on CNN announcing that the jury had reached a verdict in Jackson’s trial for allegedly molesting 13-year-old Gavin Arvizo at his Neverland Ranch in California, I knew that history had been made but that Michael Jackson had been broken – irrevocably so, as it proved.Nor was it the first time that Michael had been accused of impropriety with young boys. Little more than a decade earlier, another 13-year-old, Jordan Chandler, made similar accusations in a case that was eventually settled before trial – but not before the damage had been done to Jackson’s reputation.Michael had not helped his case. Appearing in a documentary with British broadcaster Martin Bashir, he not only admitted that he liked to share a bed with teenagers, mainly boys, in pyjamas, but showed no sign of understanding why anyone might be legitimately concerned.I had started my investigation convinced that Jackson was guilty. By the end, I no longer believed that.I could not find a single shred of evidence suggesting that Jackson had molested a child. But I found significant evidence demonstrating that most, if not all, of his accusers lacked credibility and were motivated primarily by money.Jackson also deserved much of the blame, of course. Continuing to share a bed with children even after the suspicions surfaced bordered on criminal stupidity.He was also playing a truly dangerous game. It is clear to me that Michael was homosexual and that his taste was for young men, albeit not as young as Jordan Chandler or Gavin Arvizo.In the course of my investigations, I spoke to two of his gay lovers, one a Hollywood waiter, the other an aspiring actor. The waiter had remained friends, perhaps more, with the singer until his death last week. He had served Jackson at a restaurant, Jackson made his interest plain and the two slept together the following night. According to the waiter, Jackson fell in love.The actor, who has been given solid but uninspiring film parts, saw Jackson in the middle of 2007. He told me they had spent nearly every night together during their affair – an easy claim to make, you might think. But this lover produced corroboration in the form of photographs of the two of them together, and a witness.Other witnesses speak of strings of young men visiting his house at all hours, even in the period of his decline. Some stayed overnight.When Jackson lived in Las Vegas, one of his closest aides told how he would sneak off to a ‘grungy, rat-infested’ motel – often dressed as a woman to disguise his identity – to meet a male construction worker he had fallen in love with.Jackson was acquitted in the Arvizo case, dramatically so, but the effect on his mental state was ruinous. Sources close to him suggest he was close to complete nervous breakdown.The ordeal had left him physically shattered, too. One of my sources suggested that he might already have had a genetic condition I had never previously come across, called Alpha-1 antitrypsin deficiency – the lack of a protein that can help protect the lungs.Although up to 100,000 Americans are severely affected by it, it is an under-recognized condition. Michael was receiving regular injections of Alpha-1 antitrypsin derived from human plasma. The treatment is said to be remarkably effective and can enable the sufferer to lead a normal life.But the disease can cause respiratory problems and, in severe cases, emphysema. Could this be why Jackson had for years been wearing a surgical mask in public, to protect his lungs from the ravages of the disease? Or why, from time to time, he resorted to a wheelchair? When I returned to my source inside the Jackson camp for confirmation, he said: ‘Yeah, that’s what he’s got. He’s in bad shape. They’re worried that he might need a lung transplant but he may be too weak.‘Some days he can hardly see and he’s having a lot of trouble walking.’Even Michael Jackson’s legendary wealth was in sharp decline. Just a few days before he announced his 50-concert comeback at the O2 Arena, one of my sources told me Jackson had been offered £1.8million to perform at a party for a Russian billionaire on the Black Sea.‘Is he up to it?’ I had asked.‘He has no choice. He needs the money. His people are pushing him hard,’ said the source.Could he even stand on a stage for an hour concert?‘He can stand. The treatments have been successful. He can even dance once he gets in better shape. He just can’t sing,’ said the aide, adding that Jackson would have to lip-synch to get through the performance. ‘Nobody will care, as long as he shows up and moonwalks.’He also revealed Jackson had been offered well over £60million to play Las Vegas for six months. ‘He said no, but his people are trying to force it on him. He’s that close to losing everything,’ said the source.Indeed, by all accounts Jackson’s finances were in a shambles. The Arvizo trial itself was a relative bargain, costing a little more than £18million in legal bills.But the damage to his career, already in trouble before the charges, was incalculable. After the Arvizo trial, a Bahraini sheikh allowed Jackson to stay in his palace, underwriting his lavish lifestyle. But a few years later, the prince sued his former guest, demanding repayment for his hospitality. Jackson claimed he thought it had been a gift.Roger Friedman, a TV journalist, said: ‘For one year, the prince underwrote Jackson’s life in Bahrain – everything including accommodation, guests, security and transportation. And what did Jackson do? He left for Japan and then Ireland. He took the money and moonwalked right out the door. This is the real Michael Jackson. He has never returned a phone call from the prince since he left Bahrain.’Although Jackson settled with the sheikh on the eve of the trial that would have aired his financial dirty laundry, the settlement only put him that much deeper into the hole. A hole that kept getting bigger, but that was guaranteed by Jackson’s half ownership of the copyrights to The Beatles catalogue. He owned them in a joint venture with record company Sony, which have kept him from bankruptcy.‘Jackson is in hock to Sony for hundreds of millions,’ a source told me a couple of months ago. ‘No bank will give him any money so Sony have been paying his bills.‘The trouble is that he hasn’t been meeting his obligations. Sony have been in a position for more than a year where it can repossess Michael’s share of the [Beatles] catalogue. That’s always been Sony’s dream scenario, full ownership.‘But they don’t want to do it as they’re afraid of a backlash from his fans. Their nightmare is an organised ‘boycott Sony’ movement worldwide, which could prove hugely costly. It is the only thing standing between Michael and bankruptcy.’The source aid at the time that the scheduled London concerts wouldn’t clear Jackson’s debts – estimated at almost £242million – but they would allow him to get them under control and get him out of default with Sony.According to two sources in Jackson’s camp, the singer put in place a contingency plan to ensure his children would be well taken care of in the event of bankruptcy.‘He has as many as 200 unpublished songs that he is planning to leave behind for his children when he dies. They can’t be touched by the creditors, but they could be worth as much as £60million that will ensure his kids a comfortable existence no matter what happens,’ one of his collaborators revealed.But for the circle of handlers who surrounded Jackson during his final years, their golden goose could not be allowed to run dry. Bankruptcy was not an option.These, after all, were not the handlers who had seen him through the aftermath of the Arvizo trial and who had been protecting his fragile emotional health to the best of their ability. They were gone, and a new set of advisers was in place.The clearout had apparently been engineered by his children’s nanny, Grace Rwaramba, who was gaining considerable influence over Jackson and his affairs and has been described as the ‘queen bee’ by those around Jackson.Rwaramba had ties to the black militant organisation, the Nation of Islam, and its controversial leader, Louis Farrakhan, whom she enlisted for help in running Jackson’s affairs.Before long, the Nation was supplying Jackson’s security detail and Farrakhan’s son-in-law, Leonard Muhammad, was appointed as Jackson’s business manager, though his role has lessened significantly in recent years.In late 2008, a shadowy figure who called himself Dr Tohme Tohme suddenly emerged as Jackson’s ‘official spokesman’.Tohme has been alternately described as a Saudi Arabian billionaire and an orthopaedic surgeon, but he is actually a Lebanese businessman who does not have a medical licence. At one point, Tohme claimed he was an ambassador at large for Senegal, but the Senegalese embassy said they had never heard of him.Tohme’s own ties to the Nation of Islam came to light in March 2009, when New York auctioneer Darren Julien was conducting an auction of Michael Jackson memorabilia.Julien filed an affidavit in Los Angeles Superior Court that month in which he described a meeting he had with Tohme’s business partner, James R. Weller. According to Julien’s account, ‘Weller said if we refused to postpone [the auction], we would be in danger from ‘Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam; those people are very protective of Michael’.He told us that Dr Tohme and Michael Jackson wanted to give the message to us that ‘our lives are at stake and there will be bloodshed’.’A month after these alleged threats, Tohme accompanied Jackson to a meeting at a Las Vegas hotel with Randy Phillips, chief executive of the AEG Group, to finalise plans for Jackson’s return to the concert stage.Jackson’s handlers had twice before said no to Phillips. This time, with Tohme acting as his confidant, Jackson left the room agreeing to perform ten concerts at the O2.Before long, however, ten concerts had turned into 50 and the potential revenues had skyrocketed. ‘The vultures who were pulling his strings somehow managed to put this concert extravaganza together behind his back, then presented it to him as a fait accompli,’ said one aide.‘The money was just unbelievable and all his financial people were telling him he was facing bankruptcy. But Michael still resisted. He didn’t think he could pull it off.’Eventually, they wore him down, the aide explained, but not with the money argument.‘They told him that this would be the greatest comeback the world had ever known. That’s what convinced him. He thought if he could emerge triumphantly from the success of these concerts, he could be the King again.’The financial details of the O2 concerts are still murky, though various sources have revealed that Jackson was paid as much as £10million in advance, most of which went to the middlemen. But Jackson could have received as much as £100million had the concerts gone ahead.It is worth noting that the O2 Arena has the most sophisticated lip synching technology in the world – a particular attraction for a singer who can no longer sing. Had, by some miracle, the concerts gone ahead, Jackson’s personal contribution could have been limited to just 13 minutes for each performance. The rest was to have been choreography and lights.‘We knew it was a disaster waiting to happen,’ said one aide. ‘I don’t think anybody predicted it would actually kill him but nobody believed he would end up performing.’Their doubts were underscored when Jackson collapsed during only his second rehearsal. . . .
The slow dribble of news and rumors in the aftermath of Michael Jackson’s death continues, with reports that the L.A. County District Attorney’s Office is considering the case a criminal investigation, and that the LAPD is treating Jackson’s death as a homicide. . . .
Less than a year after Bertelsmann, the German media giant, exited the music business, it is taking a novel approach to get back in.The company said Wednesday that it would form a joint venture with the private equity firm Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Company to license and administer music rights.The new company will combine Bertelsmann’s existing BMG Rights Management unit with the financial muscle of K.K.R., which will own 51 percent of the joint venture, with Bertelsmann holding the rest.And while BMG’s indirect competitors will be the music publishing titans of the world, like EMI, Warner Music, Universal and Sony — companies that market the immense catalogs they own — BMG is counting on signing artists who are seeking someone who will administer their intellectual property without actually owning it.“Our financial strength combined with BMG’s sector expertise will create a unique platform for building up a global music-rights management business,” Johannes P. Huth, the European head of K.K.R., said in a statement.In August, Bertelsmann sold its stake in the music company SonyBMG to Sony for $900 million. As part of the deal, it retained the rights to 200 European artists, who, with 100 signed since October, form the core of BMG Rights Management, which is based in Berlin.Founded last October, BMG Rights Management is a relatively new business that acts as an agent for artists whose intellectual property can be licensed for uses outside of traditional recording. For example, the music can be broadcast through various media or used in movie productions.Its stable of artists includes Toby Gad, a German songwriter living in New York who has worked with artists including Beyoncé and Hannah Montana, and 2Raumwohnung, a popular German group.K.K.R. will put 50 million euros up front into the new company, drawing on its European investment funds, and another 200 million euros over five years as investment opportunities arise, according to Philipp Freise, a director of K.K.R. in Europe and member of its global media team.“We both want to broaden BMG’s global reach faster than originally anticipated,” Thomas Rabe, Bertelsmann’s chief financial officer, said.Hartwig Masuch, BMG’s chief executive and a veteran of its music publishing business, will keep that title in the new company.BMG has offices in six European countries, including Germany, Britain and Italy, and is now turning its gaze across the Atlantic to begin signing artists there. “With this joint venture, the main point now is to get active in the United States,” said Tobias Riepe, a Bertelsmann spokesman.Though its first priority is acquiring a stable of artists, another possibility for expansion would be for BMG to acquire control of music catalogs in its own right from other owners, or artists who sell them, Mr. Riepe said.The music world, for example, is now abuzz with speculation about what will happen to the catalogs controlled by heirs of Michael Jackson. The recently deceased pop superstar had his own music catalog, and a 50 percent interest in the Sony/ATV collection, which includes songs from The Beatles — assets the family could try to sell. . . .
To Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, music was “the universal language of mankind.” Money may be the lingua franca for the partners at the private equity firm Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, but a combination with music could make a pleasant tune for its investors.The fund run by Henry Kravis is teaming with the German media group Bertelsmann to pounce on some of the choicest bits of the music business — copyrights to songs. Given the turbulence in the recorded music sector, and the ownership of libraries like Michael Jackson’s up in the air, they’ll likely have a wealth of assets from which to choose.Widespread digital distribution of music has hampered the ability of companies like Warner Music Group and EMI to make money from their traditional activity of finding new artists and marketing their tunes. Yet, their copyright businesses continue to produce profit. In the quarter that ended in March, Warner’s publishing division posted 40 percent operating margins, four times those of its recorded music division.That has raised expectations that copyright owners like EMI, which is highly leveraged, may need to sell assets to pay down debt and fix their recorded music operations. Similarly, Warner may seek to monetize part of its library to finance a bid for the recorded music arm of EMI, should its owners at the buyout firm Terra Firma wish to sell.And copyrights owned by the estates of Michael Jackson and Allen Klein, the former Rolling Stones manager, may come on the block. The Jackson estate’s share of its venture with Sony, which holds the rights to most of the Beatles’ music, was valued at $390 million in a 2007 audit. . . .
First, Even Chandler–father of Jordan Chandler, the boy who first accused Michael [Jackson] of molestation–committed suicide by handgun, sparking speculation that he’d perhaps done so out of guilt over the whole child molestation scandal that arguably started the downward spiral of the fallen King Of Pop’s bizarre life. We shall never really know, and there was no suicide note at the scene. . . .
“Issuing more than 20 million volumes, Bertelsmann was the largest supplier to the army and supplied the SS.”
“When Bertelsmann applied after the war for a second publishing license, it was turned down by occupation authorities. [Bertelsmann patriarch Heinrich] Mohn had ‘forgotten’ to mention that he had been a ‘passive’ member of the SS, as well as a supporter of the Hitler Youth and a member of the prestigious National Socialist Flying Corps, according to de-Nazification files in the central state archive in Dusseldorf.”
“His book Roosevelt’s Way to War (Roosevelt’s Weg zum Krieg) was published in 1983. Rewriting history, he stated that Roosevelt, not Hitler had caused World War II. He also wrote that American Jews controlled most of the media,’ and he claimed they gave a false picture of Hitler. Did the book impress [Heinrich’s son Reinhard] Mohn, then the majority shareholder of Bertelsmann? The firm hired Bavendamm as its house historian, and in 1984 he completed a historical study, 150 Years of Bertelsmann: The Founders and Their Time—with a foreword by Mohn. A year later, Bavendamm edited the firm’s official history, which set forth the untrue story that the firm had resisted the Nazis and had been closed down by them. Mohn also asked Bavendamm to write the authorized history of the Mohn family, published in 1986 under the title Bertelsmann, Mohn, Scippel: Three Families—One Company. In a second book, Roosevelt’s War (published in 1993, reissued in 1998), Bavendamm accuses the U.S. President of enacting a plan to start World War II. In the same book he suggests that Hitler’s threats in early 1939 against European Jewry were a reaction to Roosevelt’s strategy against Germany. After the revelations about Bertelsmann’s Nazi past appeared, the company announced that it had asked ‘the historian and publicist Dr. Dirk Bavendamm to look at the new information and begin to reinvestigate the role the publishing house played in those days’ and defended his work.”