Beachlover
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Please don't flame me for this article but I thought it very interesting for those who might want some background information on Murray. This is not meant to be taken as an article I enjoyed so much as one that gave me some insight into this man. Thats all it is for.
[B]Born in the ghetto, he has seven children by different women and a mountain of debts... the tawdry truth about the playboy 'quack' accused of killing
[/B]
Conrad Murray was first awakened to the squalor of drug addiction when he was growing up in a dirt-poor, crime-ridden district of Port of Spain, the capital of Trinidad.
As he and his barefoot pals played cricket in the potholed streets, they would be tempted to try a less innocent form of entertainment by a woman known locally as 'the Coke Queen'.
Desperate to escape the grinding boredom of life in El Socorro, a rat-infested ghetto where people lived in tin shacks and drew water from a communal pump, some of his group succumbed.
According to Murray's childhood best-friend, Wallace Leslie, however, the boy who was to become Michael Jackson's personal physician always refused to partake of the pusher's wares.
For even in those early years, the doctor's son harboured grandiose dreams of leaving Trinidad to become a wealthy and respected U.S. physician - and he wasn't about to allow his ambitions to be derailed by a descent into cocaine abuse.
So, as Dr Murray prepares to be charged with involuntary manslaughter, probably this week, for administering the powerful anaesthetic alleged to have killed Jackson, Mr Leslie can see the bitter irony.
'If anyone should have known better than to give drugs to Michael Jackson it was Conrad,' he told me, as we sat on his rickety wooden porch, near the simple brick-built house where Murray was raised.
'When I think how he grew up here and reached so far, just for this to happen, it just makes me sad. It's such a waste of everything he achieved.
'I keep asking myself why he would get mixed up in all this.
'I know he had problems paying maintenance for his kids (Murray has fathered at least seven children by a variety of women) so maybe he was trying to cover his debts quickly. Anyway, I feel sorry for him.'
Here Mr Wallace's wife, Saadia, angrily intercedes. 'Sorry for him? Why?' she cries. 'Anaesthetic should be used in hospitals. It's wrong!
'Maybe when you come from a poor background like this it affects you. Maybe you are always afraid of going back to the poverty you knew as a child. But that doesn't excuse it.'
Among Jackson's millions of fans, there are many who would agree with her.
Indeed, more than seven months after the singer died the hatred for his personal physician still runs so deep that he is expected to be advised to wear a bullet-proof vest during his Los Angeles trial.
An outwardly caring and professional cardiologist with practices in Texas, California and Nevada, Dr Murray first met Jackson in 2008, after being asked to treat one of his children for a cold.
For reasons that will doubtless form part of the prosecution's case, the singer quickly latched on to him, and some six weeks before his death enlisted Murray as his personal doctor.
Such was Jackson's dependence on his 'tame quack', as detractors describe him, that he installed Murray in his rented mansion in Holmby Hills, LA, and insisted the doctor accompany him on his proposed visit to London, where he was due to play a gruelling nine-month series of concerts.
But, of course, they never made the journey.
At precisely 12.21pm West Coast time, the emergency services received a call from Jackson's bodyguard, who said he had stopped breathing and could not be revived.
Paramedics performed cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) for 42 minutes at the house before removing Jackson to the Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Centre, where he was pronounced dead at 2.26pm.
His death sparked a wave of wild speculation that continues even now; yet from the outset Dr Conrad Murray's name has been in the frame.
Not only is he alleged to have administered the fatal dose of Propofol (a milky-white anaesthetic drug whose use is permitted only in hospitals, but on which Jackson had become so dependent that he referred to it as his 'milk') and two other sedatives, but if we believe various (apparently well-placed) sources - some of whom may be eager to shift the blame on to him - he behaved unprofessionally, from start to finish.
After sedating Jackson, he left him alone in his private chamber and spent 47 minutes on his mobile phone, according to records recovered by the police.
It has since been claimed that he was sweet-talking his young girlfriend, Nicole Alvarez. When, at last, he returned to the room, his frail, drug-ravaged charge was apparently in his final death throes.
Faced with the enormity of being held responsible for killing the world's biggest pop star, the prosecution are expected to allege, Dr Murray at first froze - and then panicked.
He is said to have wasted possibly vital minutes before calling Jackson's security office, and left him on the bed while performing CPR so that his body sank into the mattress when Dr Murray tried to press down on his heart.
Anyone trained in basic first aid would have first moved him onto the hard floor.
According to Jackson's family, Dr Murray later betrayed his guilt by behaving shiftily at the medical centre. When they tried to find him, they claim, he had fled the scene.
Through his high-powered team of attorneys, needless to say, 56-year-old Dr Murray - who faces a maximum prison sentence of four years - portrays a very different sequence of events.
They are not expected to deny that he gave Jackson Propofol, but to argue instead that he was perfectly justified and well qualified to do so - and that the dose was insufficient to kill him. To that end, a new lawyer has recently been co- opted onto Dr Murray's legal team. He is J. Michael Flanagan, who in 2004 secured the acquittal of a nurse accused of manslaughter after one of her patients died from the same anaesthetic.
'I'm probably the only attorney in town that has successfully tried a Propofol case involving death,' the silver-haired Mr Flanagan declares brashly.
His boast is just a foretaste of the legal circus we can expect when Dr Murray stands in the dock, almost certainly with live TV cameras capturing every moment of the drama.
But how did a boy from the ramshackle slums of Trinidad become its central figure?
His story starts on the neighbouring Caribbean island of Grenada, where his late father, Rawle Murray (also a doctor - albeit of more humble aspirations), met his mother, Milta.
Murray was born there, in February 1953, but when he was a small boy his mother returned with him to her native Trinidad and remarried a man named Lee Rush.
They had a daughter, Suzan Rush, whose BMW car Murray was driving - for reasons that have yet to be explained - on the day Jackson died. The vehicle was impounded and searched for clues.
Conrad Robert Murray is described by old friends in El Socorro as an engaging, sporty boy who kept wicket for the school cricket team.
Among his peers, whose education ended at 12 years old, he was also the only one bright enough to be given a place at high school.
Since his integrity is now being questioned, however, it is interesting to note that he is best remembered for an act of great honesty in his teens.
'He went to the drug-store to buy something one day, and a woman had left her bag there,' recalls former neighbour Krishndath Saroop, now 58, relating a story I heard repeated.
'When he brought it home and looked inside, he saw it contained $20,000 Trinidadian Dollars (about £2,000; then a colossal sum). Most boys would have kept it - but Conrad insisted on finding the owner and giving it back to her.'
His morals were evidently instilled by his mother, who still lives on the same street.
She also encouraged him in his stated boyhood ambition: to become a great doctor who could help poor Trinidadians unable to afford medical care.
Fatefully, however, as he grew older, his standards began to slip. On leaving school, he worked first as a customs broker, then in insurance, intending to save enough to pay his medical school fees.
These jobs meant he rubbed shoulders with Trinidad's wealthy elite - and soon he wanted to join them. Wallace Leslie recalls how he used to cruise around in a cream and brown Dodge Avenger car, picking up any pretty girl who caught his eye. To impress them, he would boast of being a junior doctor - even though his medical training had not yet begun.
One of his favourite weekend games was to check the local newspaper for wedding parties and gate-crash them, pretending to be an invited guest.
And on the dance-floor, he always made a bee-line for the best-looking woman.
At 6ft 4in tall and good-looking, with his Michael Jackson-style afro (***** was his favourite singer, even then), the young 'doctor' seemed quite a catch, and by his 20s he'd had countless flings.
By his mid-20s, when he emigrated to Houston, Texas - where his father was by then practising medicine - he had fathered at least one child on the island, says his friend Mr Leslie.
It was in the United States, however, that the pursuit of women and high-living really began to consume him. From the trail of costly - and sometimes unpaid - paternity suits that he has left in his wake down the years, it seems that Dr Murray has not always behaved responsibly towards his many lovers and their respective offspring.
They appear to remain remarkably loyal to him, however, for since the Jackson scandal broke, not one of them has kissed and told on him - despite the staggering sums on offer. One can only speculate as to why. And when I tracked down one woman who sued him for paternity money, a 43-year-old Hispanic-American named Nenita Malbiran, even she was fulsome in her praise for the Romeo doctor.
'It seems like people have been accusing him of things he has not done,' said Ms Malbiran, who once worked as a nurse in his practice. 'He's a good person and a brilliant doctor, and he wouldn't do anything like this.'
His latest girlfriend, Nicole, the mother of his seventh child, is no less supportive, even though she has been grilled by the police and forced to hide in the Santa Monica apartment she shared with Murray at the time of Jackson's death.
Then again, the 27-year-old beauty - who caught his attention four years ago when she was working as a stripper at a club he frequents - has good reason to remain loyal.
On the first night he took her home, he is said to have handed her £2,000 as a gift. 'I've hit the jackpot,' she cooed, as she wafted her new Sugar Daddy's cheque before a friend later.
Small wonder, then, that at the time he met Jackson, Dr Murray was reputedly up to his eyes in debt, with a string of legal judgments against him.
Court documents show that he owed $228,420 (£143,660) to a finance company, $135,302 (£85,110) to a leasing company (which may be why he was driving his sister's car) and $71,302 (£44.846) in school fees. Plus, of course, the many thousands he owed to the mothers of his children.
However, in the eyes of his defenders, many of them his loyal patients, there was a very different side to Dr Murray.
And this was the man he had once aspired to be.
His long-time Baptist pastor and close friend, Father Floyd Williams, told the Mail how the doctor would regularly leave his lucrative practice in Las Vegas and fly back to Houston to treat poor blacks who had no means of paying him.
He described Dr Murray as 'a humanitarian' and early last year, he says, when his friend told him excitedly that Michael Jackson had offered him a salary of $150,000 (£94,000) a month to be his doctor, he urged him to grasp the opportunity with both hands.
As he prepares to don his bulletproof vest for the biggest celebrity trial since O.J. Simpson cheated justice, how *****'s feckless doctor must wish he had ignored the pastor's best advice.
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbi...uack-accused-killing-*****.html#ixzz0eWp2rsaF
[B]Born in the ghetto, he has seven children by different women and a mountain of debts... the tawdry truth about the playboy 'quack' accused of killing
[/B]
Conrad Murray was first awakened to the squalor of drug addiction when he was growing up in a dirt-poor, crime-ridden district of Port of Spain, the capital of Trinidad.
As he and his barefoot pals played cricket in the potholed streets, they would be tempted to try a less innocent form of entertainment by a woman known locally as 'the Coke Queen'.
Desperate to escape the grinding boredom of life in El Socorro, a rat-infested ghetto where people lived in tin shacks and drew water from a communal pump, some of his group succumbed.
According to Murray's childhood best-friend, Wallace Leslie, however, the boy who was to become Michael Jackson's personal physician always refused to partake of the pusher's wares.
For even in those early years, the doctor's son harboured grandiose dreams of leaving Trinidad to become a wealthy and respected U.S. physician - and he wasn't about to allow his ambitions to be derailed by a descent into cocaine abuse.
So, as Dr Murray prepares to be charged with involuntary manslaughter, probably this week, for administering the powerful anaesthetic alleged to have killed Jackson, Mr Leslie can see the bitter irony.
'If anyone should have known better than to give drugs to Michael Jackson it was Conrad,' he told me, as we sat on his rickety wooden porch, near the simple brick-built house where Murray was raised.
'When I think how he grew up here and reached so far, just for this to happen, it just makes me sad. It's such a waste of everything he achieved.
'I keep asking myself why he would get mixed up in all this.
'I know he had problems paying maintenance for his kids (Murray has fathered at least seven children by a variety of women) so maybe he was trying to cover his debts quickly. Anyway, I feel sorry for him.'
Here Mr Wallace's wife, Saadia, angrily intercedes. 'Sorry for him? Why?' she cries. 'Anaesthetic should be used in hospitals. It's wrong!
'Maybe when you come from a poor background like this it affects you. Maybe you are always afraid of going back to the poverty you knew as a child. But that doesn't excuse it.'
Among Jackson's millions of fans, there are many who would agree with her.
Indeed, more than seven months after the singer died the hatred for his personal physician still runs so deep that he is expected to be advised to wear a bullet-proof vest during his Los Angeles trial.
An outwardly caring and professional cardiologist with practices in Texas, California and Nevada, Dr Murray first met Jackson in 2008, after being asked to treat one of his children for a cold.
For reasons that will doubtless form part of the prosecution's case, the singer quickly latched on to him, and some six weeks before his death enlisted Murray as his personal doctor.
Such was Jackson's dependence on his 'tame quack', as detractors describe him, that he installed Murray in his rented mansion in Holmby Hills, LA, and insisted the doctor accompany him on his proposed visit to London, where he was due to play a gruelling nine-month series of concerts.
But, of course, they never made the journey.
At precisely 12.21pm West Coast time, the emergency services received a call from Jackson's bodyguard, who said he had stopped breathing and could not be revived.
Paramedics performed cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) for 42 minutes at the house before removing Jackson to the Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Centre, where he was pronounced dead at 2.26pm.
His death sparked a wave of wild speculation that continues even now; yet from the outset Dr Conrad Murray's name has been in the frame.
Not only is he alleged to have administered the fatal dose of Propofol (a milky-white anaesthetic drug whose use is permitted only in hospitals, but on which Jackson had become so dependent that he referred to it as his 'milk') and two other sedatives, but if we believe various (apparently well-placed) sources - some of whom may be eager to shift the blame on to him - he behaved unprofessionally, from start to finish.
After sedating Jackson, he left him alone in his private chamber and spent 47 minutes on his mobile phone, according to records recovered by the police.
It has since been claimed that he was sweet-talking his young girlfriend, Nicole Alvarez. When, at last, he returned to the room, his frail, drug-ravaged charge was apparently in his final death throes.
Faced with the enormity of being held responsible for killing the world's biggest pop star, the prosecution are expected to allege, Dr Murray at first froze - and then panicked.
He is said to have wasted possibly vital minutes before calling Jackson's security office, and left him on the bed while performing CPR so that his body sank into the mattress when Dr Murray tried to press down on his heart.
Anyone trained in basic first aid would have first moved him onto the hard floor.
According to Jackson's family, Dr Murray later betrayed his guilt by behaving shiftily at the medical centre. When they tried to find him, they claim, he had fled the scene.
Through his high-powered team of attorneys, needless to say, 56-year-old Dr Murray - who faces a maximum prison sentence of four years - portrays a very different sequence of events.
They are not expected to deny that he gave Jackson Propofol, but to argue instead that he was perfectly justified and well qualified to do so - and that the dose was insufficient to kill him. To that end, a new lawyer has recently been co- opted onto Dr Murray's legal team. He is J. Michael Flanagan, who in 2004 secured the acquittal of a nurse accused of manslaughter after one of her patients died from the same anaesthetic.
'I'm probably the only attorney in town that has successfully tried a Propofol case involving death,' the silver-haired Mr Flanagan declares brashly.
His boast is just a foretaste of the legal circus we can expect when Dr Murray stands in the dock, almost certainly with live TV cameras capturing every moment of the drama.
But how did a boy from the ramshackle slums of Trinidad become its central figure?
His story starts on the neighbouring Caribbean island of Grenada, where his late father, Rawle Murray (also a doctor - albeit of more humble aspirations), met his mother, Milta.
Murray was born there, in February 1953, but when he was a small boy his mother returned with him to her native Trinidad and remarried a man named Lee Rush.
They had a daughter, Suzan Rush, whose BMW car Murray was driving - for reasons that have yet to be explained - on the day Jackson died. The vehicle was impounded and searched for clues.
Conrad Robert Murray is described by old friends in El Socorro as an engaging, sporty boy who kept wicket for the school cricket team.
Among his peers, whose education ended at 12 years old, he was also the only one bright enough to be given a place at high school.
Since his integrity is now being questioned, however, it is interesting to note that he is best remembered for an act of great honesty in his teens.
'He went to the drug-store to buy something one day, and a woman had left her bag there,' recalls former neighbour Krishndath Saroop, now 58, relating a story I heard repeated.
'When he brought it home and looked inside, he saw it contained $20,000 Trinidadian Dollars (about £2,000; then a colossal sum). Most boys would have kept it - but Conrad insisted on finding the owner and giving it back to her.'
His morals were evidently instilled by his mother, who still lives on the same street.
She also encouraged him in his stated boyhood ambition: to become a great doctor who could help poor Trinidadians unable to afford medical care.
Fatefully, however, as he grew older, his standards began to slip. On leaving school, he worked first as a customs broker, then in insurance, intending to save enough to pay his medical school fees.
These jobs meant he rubbed shoulders with Trinidad's wealthy elite - and soon he wanted to join them. Wallace Leslie recalls how he used to cruise around in a cream and brown Dodge Avenger car, picking up any pretty girl who caught his eye. To impress them, he would boast of being a junior doctor - even though his medical training had not yet begun.
One of his favourite weekend games was to check the local newspaper for wedding parties and gate-crash them, pretending to be an invited guest.
And on the dance-floor, he always made a bee-line for the best-looking woman.
At 6ft 4in tall and good-looking, with his Michael Jackson-style afro (***** was his favourite singer, even then), the young 'doctor' seemed quite a catch, and by his 20s he'd had countless flings.
By his mid-20s, when he emigrated to Houston, Texas - where his father was by then practising medicine - he had fathered at least one child on the island, says his friend Mr Leslie.
It was in the United States, however, that the pursuit of women and high-living really began to consume him. From the trail of costly - and sometimes unpaid - paternity suits that he has left in his wake down the years, it seems that Dr Murray has not always behaved responsibly towards his many lovers and their respective offspring.
They appear to remain remarkably loyal to him, however, for since the Jackson scandal broke, not one of them has kissed and told on him - despite the staggering sums on offer. One can only speculate as to why. And when I tracked down one woman who sued him for paternity money, a 43-year-old Hispanic-American named Nenita Malbiran, even she was fulsome in her praise for the Romeo doctor.
'It seems like people have been accusing him of things he has not done,' said Ms Malbiran, who once worked as a nurse in his practice. 'He's a good person and a brilliant doctor, and he wouldn't do anything like this.'
His latest girlfriend, Nicole, the mother of his seventh child, is no less supportive, even though she has been grilled by the police and forced to hide in the Santa Monica apartment she shared with Murray at the time of Jackson's death.
Then again, the 27-year-old beauty - who caught his attention four years ago when she was working as a stripper at a club he frequents - has good reason to remain loyal.
On the first night he took her home, he is said to have handed her £2,000 as a gift. 'I've hit the jackpot,' she cooed, as she wafted her new Sugar Daddy's cheque before a friend later.
Small wonder, then, that at the time he met Jackson, Dr Murray was reputedly up to his eyes in debt, with a string of legal judgments against him.
Court documents show that he owed $228,420 (£143,660) to a finance company, $135,302 (£85,110) to a leasing company (which may be why he was driving his sister's car) and $71,302 (£44.846) in school fees. Plus, of course, the many thousands he owed to the mothers of his children.
However, in the eyes of his defenders, many of them his loyal patients, there was a very different side to Dr Murray.
And this was the man he had once aspired to be.
His long-time Baptist pastor and close friend, Father Floyd Williams, told the Mail how the doctor would regularly leave his lucrative practice in Las Vegas and fly back to Houston to treat poor blacks who had no means of paying him.
He described Dr Murray as 'a humanitarian' and early last year, he says, when his friend told him excitedly that Michael Jackson had offered him a salary of $150,000 (£94,000) a month to be his doctor, he urged him to grasp the opportunity with both hands.
As he prepares to don his bulletproof vest for the biggest celebrity trial since O.J. Simpson cheated justice, how *****'s feckless doctor must wish he had ignored the pastor's best advice.
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbi...uack-accused-killing-*****.html#ixzz0eWp2rsaF
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