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August 2, 2009

DOCTOR 'I FEEL GOOD!' - NY POST CONRAD MURRAY

DOCTOR 'I FEEL GOOD!'
By ISABEL VINCENT and JAMES FANELLI
SHADY: Michael Jackson's physician Dr. Conrad Murray also worked for drug-addled James Brown.

Michael Jackson's shady doctor was also a personal physician to the drug-addled Godfather of Soul James Brown, according to sources.

Dr. Conrad Murray, who is under investigation for Jackson's death, is among a coterie of "feel good" physicians with free-wheeling prescription pads who catered to celebrities in the 1990s, according to a former law-enforcement source.

"James Brown and Michael Jackson were inseparable and they used the same 'safe doctors' -- doctors who would get them anything they wanted," Brown's longtime producer and assistant Jacque Hollander told The Post. "If James Brown wanted drugs, he knew he could get them from these safe doctors in Dallas, Houston, Las Vegas and Los Angeles."

The Motown legend died of congestive heart failure in 2006 but was reportedly battling an addiction to painkillers and PCP at the time. Hollander said Brown's wife, Adrienne, was also Murray's patient when she died 10 years earlier in LA under mysterious circumstances. Her death came two days after she underwent liposuction at an unlicensed spa not connected to Murray, according to police reports.

The immediate cause of Adrienne Brown's death was PCP intake coupled with heart disease, according to her death certificate obtained by The Post.

Charles Bobbit, Brown's personal assistant and business manager in the last four years of his life, said he knew who Murray was before Jackson's death.

"Mr. Brown may have been sneaking around behind my back with this doctor," Bobbit said, but he added that he never saw Brown use drugs.

Murray has been under intense scrutiny since Jackson died June 25 of cardiac arrest and investigators removed drugs from the King of Pop's Bel Air estate.

In the last two weeks, LA police, the DEA and local law enforcement have also raided Murray's Houston practice and his Las Vegas home and office as part of their investigation. The doctor has also reportedly admitted to investigators that he injected Jackson with the potent sedative Propofol shortly after midnight on the day of the death.

Scandals have followed Murray since he was a student at Meharry Medical College in Nashville in 1985.

That year, Murray was arrested for "fraudulent breach of trust" after his then-girlfriend Patricia Mitchell made a complaint against him, according to Nashville court records. The records do not indicate the reasons behind the charges, but Murray was released on a $2,000 bond and the case was eventually dismissed.

At the time of the bust, Murray was dating and had a daughter with Mitchell, even though he was married to Zufan Tesfai, according to records.

Murray's four-year marriage to Tesfai, a pharmacist who now lives in New Jersey, ended in 1988, a year before he graduated medical school.

He later remarried, but those nuptials didn't stop him from earning a reputation as a doctor of love. The Post first reported a month ago that Murray had sired six children with five different women by 1998.

His brushes with the law have also continued. In 1994, he was arrested for domestic violence against one of his baby mamas, Janice Adams, while he was a cardiology fellow at the University of Arizona at Tucson, according to ABC News. He was later acquitted.

Bad medicine also seems to run in his family. His dad, Dr. Rawle Andrews, had his medical privileges restricted for five years in 1994 by the Texas Medical Board because he was prescribing drugs that were nontherapeutic in nature, according to documents.