Irv Gotti habla de Michael
Irv Gotti
"I'm like, 'Mike, what's up, man? You got all the safaris and stuff. Where's the studio?' "
If and when Irv Gotti gets down to working with Michael Jackson, the Murder Inc. CEO will give him the classic material his fans have been calling for — just as celestial beings have predicted.
"I've got two spirits," Irv Gotti explained. "I'm gonna shout them out: Marcus Swaybe and Dolores V. Pearson. They're two people who passed away. They told me I'm gonna bring Mike back to his dominance.
"The spirits told me, 'Michael's coming, and we're gonna do his album,' " Gotti explained. "So I was going to game two of the [New Jersey] Nets series, when they was playing the Boston Celtics. My phone rings, and who's on it? Michael Jackson! He's like, 'Gotti, you're a genius and I gotta work with you.' "
Gotti began making arrangements with Jackson to discuss working together ("Michael's not signing with Murder Inc.," he clarified), but they had a difference of opinion as to whose territory they would meet on. While it didn't exactly rival the turf war between the Jets and the Sharks, Gotti lost out to the iron-willed Jacko and had to sail through mountain-flooded skies en route to the Neverland Valley Ranch in California — much to Gotti's initial dismay.
"I felt it wasn't a good playing field, because if I had to go tell him to go 'F' himself and 'You're an idiot,' I wouldn't be able to do it at Neverland 'cause he's got home-court advantage," he explained.
"You're in the helicopter and you're around nothing but mountains," Gotti recalled of the trip, which he took two months ago. "Then you just see the amusement park. Then you see horses running around. He's got 2,700 acres of land. The heliport is by the amusement park. You get out the helicopter, you get into the car and it's like a 5- or 10-minute ride to the front house.
"On his property, he's got statues of, like, little kids playing baseball," the Hollis, Queens, native continued. "There're elephants, camels and giraffes walking around like we got cats and dogs. You go inside, they give you a menu for the house! It's just off the chain."
So there Gotti was soon after, ready to chop it up face to face with the King of Pop. Shedding his boss-of-the-bosses persona, Irv was in awe.
"Going in, you don't know what to expect," Gotti went on, getting more animated than Woody Woodpecker as he finished weaving his story. "You're thinking he's a weirdo. He comes out, [and] for the first 5 or 10 minutes when you're looking at him you're a little bugged out, 'cause you look over and there's a picture on the mantel and he's black, and then when you look at him [in person], he's white.
"You heard all the stories, 'He's gotta have tape [on the bridge of his nose], his nose is gonna fall off,' " Irv added. "Nah, that's bull. After 5 minutes or 10 minutes, I swear to God, he's just Mike. It's just a normal conversation. This guy ain't no weirdo or anything like that. He's like a regular dude."
Two hours later, after having what he classified one of the best meetings of his career, Gotti was so inspired that he might have been able to convince M.J. to begin working that night — but there was a small problem. For all the excess in his crib, Mike didn't own the one thing that even B-level stars have.
"He has no studio in his house," Gotti said, almost still in denial. "Can you believe it? We played music for him on a little tiny radio. I'm like, 'Mike, what's up, man? You got all the safaris and stuff. Where's the studio?' "
For a feature interview with Murder Inc., check out "Murder Inc.: In Gotti We Trust."
—Shaheem Reid
Nos lo va a restregar por la cara (aunque en ese caso no creo que me importara del todo
