Jackson's troubles began when his van broke down on Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles in May 1992. Stranded in the middle of the heavily trafficked street, Jackson was spotted by the wife of Mel Green, an employee at Rent-a-Wreck, an offbeat car-rental agency a mile away. Green went to the rescue. When Dave Schwartz, the owner of the car-rental company, heard Green was bringing Jackson to the lot, he called his wife, June, and told her to come over with their 6-year-old daughter and her son from her previous marriage. The boy, then 12, was a big Jackson fan. Upon arriving, June Chandler Schwartz told Jackson about the time her son had sent him a drawing after the singer's hair caught on fire during the filming of a Pepsi commercial. Then she gave Jackson their home number.

"It was almost like she was forcing [the boy] on him," Green recalls. "I think Michael thought he owed the boy something, and that's when it all started."

Certain facts about the relationship are not in dispute. Jackson began calling the boy, and a friendship developed. After Jackson returned from a promotional tour, three months later, June Chandler Schwartz and her son and daughter became regular guests at Neverland, Jackson's ranch in Santa Barbara County. During the following year, Jackson showered the boy and his family with attention and gifts, including video games, watches, an after-hours shopping spree at Toys "R" Us and trips around the world -- from Las Vegas and Disney World to Monaco and Paris.

By March 1993, Jackson and the boy were together frequently and the sleepovers began. June Chandler Schwartz had also become close to Jackson "and liked him enormously," one friend says. "He was the kindest man she had ever met."

Jackson's personal eccentricities -- from his attempts to remake his face through plastic surgery to his preference for the company of children -- have been widely reported. And while it may be unusual for a 35-year-old man to have sleepovers with a 13-year-old child, the boy's mother and others close to Jackson never thought it odd. Jackson's behavior is better understood once it's put in the context of his own childhood.

"Contrary to what you might think, Michael's life hasn't been a walk in the park," one of his attorneys says. Jackson's childhood essentially stopped -- and his unorthodox life began -- when he was 5 years old and living in Gary, Indiana. Michael spent his youth in rehearsal studios, on stages performing before millions of strangers and sleeping in an endless string of hotel rooms. Except for his eight brothers and sisters, Jackson was surrounded by adults who pushed him relentlessly, particularly his father, Joe Jackson -- a strict, unaffectionate man who reportedly beat his children.

Jackson's early experiences translated into a kind of arrested development, many say, and he became a child in a man's body. "He never had a childhood," says Bert Fields, a former attorney of Jackson's. "He is having one now. His buddies are 12-year-old kids. They have pillow fights and food fights." Jackson's interest in children also translated into humanitarian efforts. Over the years, he has given millions to causes benefiting children, including his own Heal The World Foundation.

But there is another context -- the one having to do with the times in which we live -- in which most observers would evaluate Jackson's behavior. "Given the current confusion and hysteria over child sexual abuse," says Dr. Phillip Resnick, a noted Cleveland psychiatrist, "any physical or nurturing contact with a child may be seen as suspicious, and the adult could well be accused of sexual misconduct."

Jackson's involvement with the boy was welcomed, at first, by all the adults in the youth's life -- his mother, his stepfather and even his biological father, Evan Chandler (who also declined to be interviewed for this article). Born Evan Robert Charmatz in the Bronx in 1944, Chandler had reluctantly followed in the footsteps of his father and brothers and become a dentist. "He hated being a dentist," a family friend says. "He always wanted to be a writer." After moving in 1973 to West Palm Beach to practice dentistry, he changed his last name, believing Charmatz was "too Jewish-sounding," says a former colleague. Hoping somehow to become a screenwriter, Chandler moved to Los Angeles in the late Seventies with his wife, June Wong, an attractive Eurasian who had worked briefly as a model.

Chandler's dental career had its precarious moments. In December 1978, while working at the Crenshaw Family Dental Center, a clinic in a low-income area of L.A., Chandler did restoration work on sixteen of a patient's teeth during a single visit. An examination of the work, the Board of Dental Examiners concluded, revealed "gross ignorance and/or inefficiency" in his profession. The board revoked his license; however, the revocation was stayed, and the board instead suspended him for ninety days and placed him on probation for two and a half years. Devastated, Chandler left town for New York. He wrote a film script but couldn't sell it.

Months later, Chandler returned to L.A. with his wife and held a series of dentistry jobs. By 1980, when their son was born, the couple's marriage was in trouble. "One of the reasons June left Evan was because of his temper," a family friend says. They divorced in 1985. The court awarded sole custody of the boy to his mother and ordered Chandler to pay $500 a month in child support, but a review of documents reveals that in 1993, when the Jackson scandal broke, Chandler owed his ex-wife $68,000 -- a debt she ultimately forgave.

A year before Jackson came into his son's life, Chandler had a second serious professional problem. One of his patients, a model, sued him for dental negligence after he did restoration work on some of her teeth. Chandler claimed that the woman had signed a consent form in which she'd acknowledged the risks involved. But when Edwin Zinman, her attorney, asked to see the original records, Chandler said they had been stolen from the trunk of his Jaguar. He provided a duplicate set. Zinman, suspicious, was unable to verify the authenticity of the records. "What an extraordinary coincidence that they were stolen," Zinman says now. "That's like saying 'The dog ate my homework.' " The suit was eventually settled out of court for an undisclosed sum.

Despite such setbacks, Chandler by then had a successful practice in Beverly Hills. And he got his first break in Hollywood in 1992, when he cowrote the Mel Brooks film Robin Hood: Men in Tights. Until Michael Jackson entered his son's life, Chandler hadn't shown all that much interest in the boy. "He kept promising to buy him a computer so they could work on scripts together, but he never did," says Michael Freeman, formerly an attorney for June Chandler Schwartz. Chandler's dental practice kept him busy, and he had started a new family by then, with two small children by his second wife, a corporate attorney.

At first, Chandler welcomed and encouraged his son's relationship with Michael Jackson, bragging about it to friends and associates. When Jackson and the boy stayed with Chandler during May 1993, Chandler urged the entertainer to spend more time with his son at his house. According to sources, Chandler even suggested that Jackson build an addition onto the house so the singer could stay there. After calling the zoning department and discovering it couldn't be done, Chandler made another suggestion -- that Jackson just build him a new home.

That same month, the boy, his mother and Jackson flew to Monaco for the World Music Awards. "Evan began to get jealous of the involvement and felt left out," Freeman says. Upon their return, Jackson and the boy again stayed with Chandler, which pleased him -- a five-day visit, during which they slept in a room with the youth's half brother. Though Chandler has admitted that Jackson and the boy always had their clothes on whenever he saw them in bed together, he claimed that it was during this time that his suspicions of sexual misconduct were triggered. At no time has Chandler claimed to have witnessed any sexual misconduct on Jackson's part.

Chandler became increasingly volatile, making threats that alienated Jackson, Dave Schwartz and June Chandler Schwartz. In early July 1993, Dave Schwartz, who had been friendly with Chandler, secretly tape-recorded a lengthy telephone conversation he had with him. During the conversation, Chandler talked of his concern for his son and his anger at Jackson and at his ex-wife, whom he described as "cold and heartless." When Chandler tried to "get her attention" to discuss his suspicions about Jackson, he says on the tape, she told him "Go fuck yourself."

"I had a good communication with Michael," Chandler told Schwartz. "We were friends. I liked him and I respected him and everything else for what he is. There was no reason why he had to stop calling me. I sat in the room one day and talked to Michael and told him exactly what I want out of this whole relationship. What I want."

Admitting to Schwartz that he had "been rehearsed" about what to say and what not to say, Chandler never mentioned money during their conversation. When Schwartz asked what Jackson had done that made Chandler so upset, Chandler alleged only that "he broke up the family. [The boy] has been seduced by this guy's power and money." Both men repeatedly berated themselves as poor fathers to the boy.

Elsewhere on the tape, Chandler indicated he was prepared to move against Jackson: "It's already set," Chandler told Schwartz. "There are other people involved that are waiting for my phone call that are in certain positions. I've paid them to do it. Everything's going according to a certain plan that isn't just mine. Once I make that phone call, this guy [his attorney, Barry K. Rothman, presumably] is going to destroy everybody in sight in any devious, nasty, cruel way that he can do it. And I've given him full authority to do that."

Chandler then predicted what would, in fact, transpire six weeks later: "And if I go through with this, I win big-time. There's no way I lose. I've checked that inside out. I will get everything I want, and they will be destroyed forever. June will lose [custody of the son]...and Michael's career will be over."

"Does that help [the boy]?" Schwartz asked.

"That's irrelevant to me," Chandler replied. "It's going to be bigger than all of us put together. The whole thing is going to crash down on everybody and destroy everybody in sight. It will be a massacre if I don't get what I want."

Instead of going to the police, seemingly the most appropriate action in a situation involving suspected child molestation, Chandler had turned to a lawyer. And not just any lawyer. He'd turned to Barry Rothman.