I've just read your piece on Leonard Cohen. I would like to ask you to remove the entirely slanderous and defamatory remarks about me. Leonard Cohen and I parted ways after he heard I was reporting his tax fraud to IRS. After spending months attempting to coerce me into a deal (that involved providing testimony that he was defrauded by his representatives which is not what I witnessed), including an offer of 50% community property, Leonard Cohen came up with a novel defense: to falsely accuse me of misappropriating monies in excess of my fees as his personal manager. This is a fraudulent allegation. Leonard Cohen has willfully disregarded my ownership interest in his intellectual property and numerous corporate entities. He did not serve me his lawsuit and I am attempting to have the fraudulent default judgment vacated. I am also asking the Court to refer Cohen and his lawyers to the proper authorities for perjury prosecutions and disciplinary actions. They have a tactic they like to use: refusing to speak with me, provide me with necessary information, and then screaming harassment. It is shameful and unprofessional conduct. However, LA Superior Court seems to condone this conduct. Cohen is, after all, a celebrity.
Leonard Cohen owes me millions of dollars. He personally borrowed approximately $6.7 million from his alleged retirement account and refuses to address that situation. Those funds were to be repaid with interest within 3 years. Leonard Cohen obtained a default judgment using fraud and perjury. He concealed pertinent information and the judge decided to disregard corporate ownership interests. The IRS continues to view me as a partner on those entities so there are ongoing legal issues. Cohen would prefer to silence me and intentionally bankrupted me when I refused to assist him.
Cohen also wasn't broke when we parted ways. He had just received $1 million advance from Sony. I was working on a mutli-million lithograph deal he pursued (and never paid me for my services); and, we had received an offer for a third sale of intellectual property. Cohen demanded these sales. His own consultant, Greg McBowman personally met with Cohen (in my presence) and advised him not to sell the Intellectual Property. Leonard Cohen has simply come up with an entirely fabricated and vicious narrative. He has falsely accused me, my family members, and targeted my children.
For more details, please see this article or the attached declaration that has been filed in the legal case Cohen brought against me. That was retaliation for my reporting allegations that he committed criminal tax fraud to IRS and other authorities. He used me horrendously.
Leonard Cohen's lawyer threatened Ann Diamond over this article although it is an accurate representation of what has unfolded. I have provided IRS, FBI, DOJ, Treasury, and others, with an abundance of evidence. Ann Diamond's article misstates a few facts: I was His Holiness Kusum Lingpa's assistant and am his lineage holder; Leonard Cohen (or someone at his home address) attempted to change the address on mail I received at my home to his home address (that is mail fraud), and I was not his lover. Leonard Cohen and his lawyer also went into my younger son's office and advised him (as their first line of defense evidently) that I had sex with Oliver Stone. I did not and believe they intended to stir up a custody matter. I am not alone in that assessment. This man has behaved in the most shameless and vile manner possible. For Steven Machat's views on Leonard Cohen (which I completely agree with), please see excerpts below.
I would appreciate a response.
Gods, Gangsters & Honour by Steven Machat
Excerpts:
Leonard was desperate to get rid of this two managers, Judy Berger and Mary Martin, who he believed had stolen the rights to his songs and records early on in his career. Even back then, Cohen was convinced that women were ripping him off. He signed an agreement, and when he wanted to get rid of the contract, he accused everyone of ripping him off. You could say it became repeat behaviour. My father duly got rid of Berger and Martin, set up a new company called Stranger Music for Cohen and agreed to manage Leonard for 15% as well as 15% of Stranger. The idea of the company was twofold: one, to maintain ownership of the copyrights duly created; and two, to minimise Leonard’s exposure to American tax, just like any other rich individual trying to minimise their tax liabilities.
I’ve no problem with people trying to avoid tax, but as the years have passed, I couldn’t help but smile at the apparent contradiction between Leonard’s public persona and his private business arrangements. This was a supposedly devout Buddhist with no interest in material possessions, who was all the same happy to put his trust in business managers and companies he created with his knowledge and consent whose sole aim was to minimise tax liability.
Leonard then sold Stranger Music for a small fortune and I’ve seen nothing from Cohen.
Cohen controlled his copyright, not my father. The irony was that Cohen had total control over my father … Do you know what happened to the $400,000 worth of bearer bonds in my father’s office? Bearer bonds are just unregistered bonds or paper money that are used to conceal ownership and, with it, tax liabilities. Cristini told me (who knows if this is true?) that he had found the bonds in my father’s office hours after he had died but the next day they disappeared.
Cohen denied any knowledge of these bonds. I was unsure if they existed or were part of my father’s schemes cooked up to conceal Leonard’s money.
Cohen said: “Steven, you remember the 1988 tour? Flemming extorted $100,000 from me. He wanted 20% managerial commission, in addition to his promoter’s fees. He thought he was doing extra work for me and wanted me to pay him.”
Far from being the poet of the spirits, Leonard was a hustler using Buddhism as a facade.
The next time I would see Leonard … We’d just seen The Hand That Rocks The Cradle where Rebecca De Mornay plays the psychopathic nanny who stalks this family. Who should walk along but Cohen, who was holding hands with DeMornay, his girlfriend at the time. Cohen was extremely uncomfortable because he knew he had stolen from me and it was clear he couldn’t get away quick enough. Neither could my son, because he took one look at DeMornay and ran. He was terrified because he thought she was the nanny in the film!
It was clear that Leonard was also wary of me because, I guess, he thought I might be planning to sue him.
Leonard told me that when he had gone off on his Buddhist retreat Kelley was left managing his business interests. He said: “She started believing this money was hers and she started spending it. All of it. When I got back from my pilgrimage, I went to withdraw money left in the account to cover the draft. I was speechless. I didn’t know where to look, where to turn or what to think.”
Then Leonard told me that Kelley had bought a multi-million dollar house in Mandeville Canyon with his money … Leonard said: We didn’t even get the house back. Kelley stopped paying the mortgage so the house got repossessed and the mortgage company took everything in the house as well.
Lynch had been sending out long and bizarre emails to his friends, journalists, and the authorities denouncing Leonard for a million and one sins, which would have worried me if I was their target.
The whole scheme was so ridiculous [Leonard Cohen’s attempts to limit his liabilities on the deals] from the start. All Leonard had to do to avoid U.S. taxes was tear up his green card, and stop living in and using the U.S. as his base.
It’s no secret that Leonard has also made a killing on the art market by selling his paintings, plus his touring of the last two years … If that’s true, it doesn’t really tally with the clear implication from Cohen that he is a man who has been robbed of everything.
Leonard told me before I left that he had actually offered Kelley a settlement …
It’s clear that Cohen and his lawyers want to heap the blame on Kelley’s shoulders for more than just revenge. Because Cohen’s pension assets were cashed in … ahead of schedule they are liable to tax so they need to establish that this situation is her fault. The penalties could actually be greater than the tax itself.
Leonard has cast himself into a hell of his own making.
Leonard Cohen at 80
Mark Ellen
The Times
Last updated at 12:01AM, September 19 2014
As Leonard Cohen turns 80, and his new album gets rave reviews, Mark Ellen recalls their chats about songs and lovers
Was there a more compelling image in 1969 than the picture on the back of the album Songs from a Room? An impossibly beautiful girl called Marianne sits typing at a rickety wooden desk on the Greek island of Hydra. She’s wrapped in a towel, the hot sun through gaps in the shutters giving the place the louche air of a boudoir, and she’s turning to smile fondly at the photographer — clearly Leonard Cohen.
The message was unambiguous: write dark and deathless verse plumbing the depths of the human condition, performed to an acoustic guitar in a voice like warm gravel and women of skull-cracking pulchritude might fall in love with you. And maybe climb out of a bath and type out your latest masterpiece.
He’s 80 years old on Sunday — with a magnificent new album (see Will Hodgkinson’s review) — and the generation discovering him in the late Sixties thought he held the world in the palm of his hand. We hadn’t the faintest idea that he’d made his first record, Songs of Leonard Cohen, at the unthinkable age of 35 and that this sidestep into the music industry had been a last-ditch manoeuvre to wring some money from a doggedly unsuccessful career.
All his life, in fact, he’s seemed to wait until events made him take some action. I remember him promoting his 12th album in a Mayfair hotel room in 2012 and telling a touching story — in his soft, shrugging, lugubrious manner — about the time in 1959 he was living in Gayton Road, Hampstead, already 25 years old, and how his disapproving landlady had asked him what he actually did in his room all day. Cohen said he wrote three new pages of a novel. “She told me sternly that I had to show her my book every night and ‘If you haven’t written three pages — and carried coal up — then I won’t allow you to stay here.’ It was under the fierce, compassionate surveillance of Sheila Pullman,” he smiled, “that I wrote my first book.”
By the mid-Fifties he’d left university and law school and published several slim volumes of verse but Cohen’s work ethic was painfully slow. Most songwriters are fearfully pragmatic, Lennon and McCartney famously agreeing times in their diaries when they’d meet to write the song they were booked to record the day after. But in the dusty, delightful and exquisitely romantic manner that’s characterised his entire career, Cohen still waits humbly for the muse to visit him, as if he is merely the chosen mortal conduit transferring songs from some celestial soundcloud.
In 1968 he described the process of his first album as if it were beyond his control — “like a bear stumbling into a beehive or a honey cache: I’m stumbling right into it and getting stuck, and it’s delicious and it’s horrible and it’s not very graceful and it’s very awkward and it’s very painful and yet there’s something inevitable about it.”
It’s impossible to overstate the influence of his early records. Any party in the late Sixties featured a moon-eyed hippy with a gut-stringed guitar playing So Long, Marianne or Sisters of Mercy or Bird on the Wire, stately mesmerising tracks that were hard to master since their rich Mediterranean flavours sometimes required complex flamenco finger-picking — highly original at a time when popular culture was so powerfully coloured by America. His songs were filled with echoes of his vast religious, historical and literary knowledge, some set in the biblical East, some in cheap hotel rooms, some simply timeless hymns to freedom or the doomed pursuit of truth and beauty. One magical work, The Partisan, was Cohen’s version of a song set in the French Resistance of the Second World War.
The release schedule remained gloriously sporadic, songs chiselled to perfection and sustaining a world audience through an extraordinary depth and resonance, 1988’s I’m Your Man featuring a shift to electronic instruments and tracks of the magnitude of Ain’t No Cure for Love, Take This Waltz and Tower of Song, occasionally embellished on the concert circuit by Cohen’s self-mocking single-finger keyboard solos.
But then came the mysterious disappearance. In 1994, apparently disillusioned with showbusiness, Cohen had enrolled at the Mount Baldy Zen Center high in the forests of the San Gabriel Mountains near Los Angeles and remained there in meditative seclusion for five long years, eventually ordained as a Rinzai Zen Buddhist monk and adopting the Dharma name Jikan (meaning “silence”).
This stress-free reverie was, however, brought back to terra firma with a resounding thud when he was forced to take legal action against his longtime friend and business manager Kelley Lynch over the misappropriation of $5 million dollars from his bank accounts, a miserable episode from which we were the beneficiaries: it returned him to cash-earning live performance. The subsequent tours were a phenomenal success, rebooting his relationship with his early adopters and recruiting generations of awestruck new admirers.
All of which seemed a surprise: when I ran a Cohen cover story in The Word magazine before he was back on the road he sent me a genuinely humble personal email: “Very kind of you to have devoted so much space to my shabby career — LC”.
I interviewed him in 2007 and everything he said was wry and wise, clever and poetic. I asked him about his love affair with the enviably prolific Joni Mitchell in the late Sixties and he gave a softly competitive laugh: “How would you like living with Beethoven?” I asked about the song that had secured his immortality, the magnificent Hallelujah — then already covered by Jeff Buckley, John Cale and kd Lang — and he told me its 80 available verses had taken five years to complete, as if releasing a polished statue from a block of raw marble and, at one point, reducing him to sitting in his underwear on the carpet of a room at New York’s Royalton Hotel, filling notebooks and banging his head on the floor.
Why had it stuck such a universal chord? Had we trained ourselves as a society to believe that melancholy produces better art? “We all love a sad song,” he told me. “Everybody has experienced the defeat of their lives. Nobody has a life that worked out the way they wanted it to. We all begin as the hero of our own dramas in centre stage and inevitably life moves us out of centre stage, defeats the hero, overturns the plot and the strategy and we’re left on the sidelines wondering why we no longer have a part — or want a part — in the whole damn thing. Everybody’s experienced this, and when it’s presented to us sweetly, the feeling moves from heart to heart and we feel less isolated and we feel part of the great human chain which is really involved with the recognition of defeat.”
What was the best song line he’d ever heard? “‘The moon stood still on Blueberry Hill’,” he said. “You just see that full moon suspended. You just want to gaze at it. It stops the mind spinning. I think what we like about music — and what we like about art in general — is that enterprise that stops our minds from spinning. Because we’re all over the place. A good song is a movie: it will focus and calm and confer significance on this completely bewildering reality we all live in.”
