Hollywood business managers are typically invisible, and the Mandels have in the past stayed below the radar. Before Depp, they had never been sued by a client, their attorney insists. William Morris Endeavor co-C.E.O. Ari Emanuel calls them “true, honest, loyal brokers who aren’t afraid to take a position with a client on what you should and shouldn’t do.” Emanuel says he has entrusted his financial life to them since he was a “baby agent.” Another longtime TMG client says, “Rob Mandel has been one of the executors of my estate for 30 years, and Joel Mandel is designated as one of my executors and trustees in the event that Rob can’t serve. That includes overseeing my kids.”
Of the various allegations by Depp’s lawyer, TMG’s attorney Michael Kump responds, “For 17 years, TMG timely filed Depp’s tax returns and, funds permitting, always timely paid Depp’s income taxes.” Any taxes paid late have “everything to do with Depp’s over-the-top spending and had nothing to do with TMG’s negligence,” he says. Regarding allegations over disbursements and loans, he says, “Over a 17-year period, TMG did not make a single distribution of Depp’s funds without authorization by Depp and/or his sister and personal manager, [Christi] Dembrowski,” and did not negotiate or dictate the terms of any high-interest loan for Johnny Depp.
Was Johnny Depp an innocent fleeced at the hands of Hollywood hucksters or a scheming artful dodger attempting to sue his way out of his wastrel lifestyle and outrageous spending and any remaining debt to his former business managers? Both sides are demanding a jury trial, currently set for January. Depp is asking for at least $25 million, while his former business managers are demanding $560,000 in damages and a court declaration that states “Depp caused his own financial waste.”
“Money doesn’t change anybody,” Johnny Depp once said. “Money reveals them. . . . I’m still exactly the guy that used to pump gas.”
He arrived in Hollywood at 19 in 1983, a guitarist in a rock ‘n’ roll band, whose fortunes soon failed. A high-school dropout and juvenile delinquent, Johnny was dead broke, living in a seedy apartment and filling out job applications at stores on Melrose before turning to telemarketing—“selling pens over the phone in order to eat,” he has said—in a sweatshop at Hollywood and Vine. His first wife, Lori Anne Allison, introduced him to actor Nicolas Cage, who “wanted to hook me up with an agent,” Depp once remembered. “You should try being an actor,” Cage advised him.
Depp was promptly cast in Wes Craven’s 1984 horror film, A Nightmare on Elm Street, then in Oliver Stone’s Oscar-winning war film, Platoon, and subsequently as an undercover cop on the TV series 21 Jump Street. But he got stuck as a “TV boy,” in his words, until a new agent, Tracey Jacobs, rescued him with an odd movie script: “It was the story of a boy with scissors for hands—an innocent outcast in suburbia,” Depp wrote. “I read the script instantly and wept like a newborn.”
Director Tim Burton’s Edward Scissorhands was a 1990 smash, and it made Depp a movie star. By 1999, having starred in three equally quirky films—What’s Eating Gilbert Grape, Ed Wood, and Don Juan DeMarco (with Marlon Brando and Faye Dunaway)—he was living large, in “Dracula’s Castle,” a vast Hollywood fantasy of turrets and towers, built in 1927, just above Sunset Boulevard.
In 1999, Depp and his sister, Christi Dembrowski, hired the Mandels, whose TMG was then 12 years old. The brothers operate a family shop: Robert is a tax attorney, and Joel is a transactional attorney, although they don’t represent their clients as attorneys, they say in court filings. Rather, they are full-service business managers, and their powerful clients rely on them for pretty much everything financial: collecting their payments from studios and other entities, paying their bills, filing and paying their taxes, balancing their books. (Dembrowski did not respond to requests for comment.)
For their first meeting, Joel, who would be the point man on Depp’s account, drove down Sunset and through the gates to the 7,430-square-foot Castle. In a scene straight out of Sunset Boulevard,he was ushered into the Gothic manse, whose walls and floors were covered with hundreds of pieces of art. Johnny, then 36, greeted him from his desk in an office filled with books, collectible guns, guitars, and memorabilia. Well read, much traveled, and intelligent, Depp was pleasant, personable, prepared, and a great listener. He had previously relied on his sister for many of his business dealings. Now Joel Mandel would take over.
In turning over his finances to a professional business manager, the actor was asked to consult with Joel Mandel before spending his hard-earned money, according to a source close to TMG. Not that anything seems to have been denied. Because, in 2003, Depp starred in the first of five Pirates of the Caribbean blockbusters, and it was his character—the mumbling, bumbling, dreadlock-and-bead-festooned Captain Jack Sparrow—that turned Pirates into box-office gold. Depp was paid $11 million for the first installment, and $20 million per sequel, with reportedly more than $40 million in back-end payments.
