He lights up the first in a chain of cigarettes and speaks in a calm, measured and slightly distant manner. Las Vegas is behind them now, but Neil is still trying to figure out the hows and whys of the raid. Marcia, Jesse and his parents, Rose and Kieve Diamond, are inside. It had to be Vegas.ĭiamond is sitting on the patio outside his summer house in Malibu Colony. Not only would Diamond be drawing thousands – all five shows, at 7500 seats apiece, had already sold out, at $20 and $30 a ticket – but if all went well at the Aladdin, other stars might well turn away from the other hotels, with their 1500-seat banquet rooms and their 50-minute shows. Tickets are sold by box offices, and all the seats are good ones. First of all, the Aladdin is an actual theater, and not a showroom. He wondered if maybe it was someone in Nevada – and not some judge in Santa Monica or low-life informer in Hollywood – who was trying to shake him up.Īfter all, the Aladdin – through Diamond – was set to disrupt Las Vegas’s showroom way of life. Neil Diamond shook his head and thought again – for the first time in three hours – about Las Vegas. Diamond buzzed the gate open.įinally, “Psycho” turned to Diamond and, forcing a laugh, said, “Well, I guess you’re right,” and he led the troops out.

Diamond looked out a window and, sure enough, there was a man in the darkness, walking around with a flashlight. “We have reason to believe there’s a burglar on your premises, and we’d like to come up and check it.” “Psycho” had sent a plainclothes man onto the grounds. “This is the police,” the inspector – the other cops called him “Psycho” – said.

After refusing offers from almost every major hotel for years, he’d agreed to open up the brand-new, $10 million Aladdin Theatre for the Performing Arts.ĭiamond picked up the phone. Neil Diamond was home, preparing to leave the next day for Las Vegas and one of the most important engagements in his ten years as a performer.

A helicopter hovered overhead, ready with searchlights, while the head of the detail telephoned the house from the gate. But they had a search warrant, and the name on it was Neil Diamond.Īnd so, on June 30th at 10:30 p.m., a force of 50 men, a joint effort of the sheriff and police departments, arrived at the house in Holmby Hills. It didn’t sound exactly like that guy on all those album covers or, at that moment, on a huge billboard high above Sunset Strip. They had a description of a white male in his early 40s, graying. They had a tip: Cocaine in Holmby Hills, just outside Beverly Hills.

Neil diamond play me live