Michael Jackson used to be one of the funkiest dudes on the planet. Then he became one of the weirdest.
So weird, in fact, that he had to ditch his home, also known as the Neverland Ranch theme park, and hightail it to Bahrain after molestation charges dogged him wherever he went in the United States.
It didn't help that he was annually blowing $30 million more than he took in, a crappy financial arrangement that eventually landed Neverland Ranch on the foreclosure list. But thanks to a stay of economic execution at the hands of Colony Capital Group, Neverland Ranch may skip the firing squad to live another day.
As a casino?
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According to the Los Angeles Times, a proposed auction of Neverland has been canceled, after Colony repurchased Jackson's loan debt from Fortress Investement Group. For those who may not remember, Fortress is the notorious hedge fund that once paid Democratic candidate John Edwards almost $500,000 for a part-time job after Edwards, in turn, invested $16 million in the company while it was foreclosing on distressed New Orleans properties during the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Not cool.
Colony Capital's deep pockets are stuffed with revenue generated from its hospitality and casino portfolio, which includes Hiltons in both Vegas and Atlantic City. Meanwhile, Fortress is making forays into gambling as well, announcing in 2007 that it would team up with Centerbridge Partners to acquire Penn National Gaming, which counts casino and horse racing venues among its holdings. It doesn't take a quantitative hedge funder to surmise that Neverland Ranch will end up in that same gambling portfolio at some point.
The place is already a ready-built theme park featuring what Wikipedia explains as "a zoo, Ferris wheel, merry-go-round, zipper, spider, sea dragon, wave swinger, super slide, dragon wagon kiddie roller coaster and bumper cars" packed onto 2,800 acres. And that's just the grounds: The house itself could easily function as a resort, and given Jackson's notoriety and artistry it wouldn't be a stretch to suggest that it would command no shortage of pop culture vultures.
Now that's what I call living off the wall.
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