Who spends $1.8 million on a lightly used red and black leather jacket? Formerly low-profile Austin businessman Milton Verret, who plans on leveraging the outfit Michael Jackson wore in the 1983 video “Thriller” for children’s charities.
“In my mind, I wasn’t going to pay more than $1.2 million,” Verret said Friday about the Beverly Hills, Calif., auction Sunday. “And that’s high. Then I thought I’d use it to raise money for little kids. So it became a kind of mission.”
Verret is a lifelong collector — of cars and guitars, especially — and an astute trader, having made millions of dollars in the gold business.
A recent visit to Dell Children’s Medical Center of Central Texas, however, rededicated the former television crewman to kids’ causes.
“I collect memorabilia, but I also make money from it,” he said.
His interest in the Jackson collection came late in the superstar’s life, when Julien’s Auctions, then a small California house, was handling a huge cache of his personal belongings. Verret flew out to Hollywood to view all the items and was prepared to purchase half of them, he said. At the last minute, Jackson was able to purchase them back from the auction house.
After his death in 2009, however, MJ memorabilia trickled out. Verret bought the jacket from the “Bad” video and a platinum album for “Thriller.” But nothing matched the tense auction for the “Thriller” jacket, one of two in existence (the other, scuffed, remains in the Jackson estate). A gallery of bidders battled counteroffers coming in over a dozen phones.
“The bidding was fierce,” Verret said, “but the jacket gives this drive for children’s charities more momentum.”
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