June 24, 2004
ROLLING STONE Documents The Final Days and Hours Of Jim Morrisons Life
A rare look into the rock god's journals By STEPHEN DAVIS
The retired Hollywood lawyer who played golf with Max Fink -- the attorney who defended Jim Morrison on the 1969 Miami obscenity and indecent-exposure charges -- said in 2002 that he believed Fink might have received a warning concerning Morrison about a month before Jim left for Paris, which would have been in early February 1971. According to this attorney, who spoke on condition of anonymity, Fink was given a tip by an associate of Mickey Rudin, the prominent Beverly Hills attorney whose clients included Frank Sinatra and who had ties to the Nixon administration. This retired lawyer was given to understand that Fink was quietly told that his famous client would be neutralized in prison -- murdered or incapacitated -- and should get out of the country before his legal appeals were exhausted and his passport confiscated. France, which has no extradition treaty with the United States for so-called sex crimes, was suggested as a logical place for Jim to take refuge. No direct or documentary evidence for this warning exists, only the unverifiable word of a respected former associate of both Rudin and Fink. Whatever the accuracy of this account, within one month Jim Morrison was in Paris, living incognito as a lodger in an apartment house, under the assumed names of James Douglas and/or Douglas James.
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