It was a lovely night for a difficult meeting.

Late last October, Johnny Depp sat for dinner with two forensic accountants and his business manager of six months, Ed White, in the bucolic backyard of White’s house, in Bel Air, California. Also present was a guest from Washington, D.C., Adam Waldman, a lawyer whose clients reportedly include Angelina Jolie and Cher. Waldman recalls there were vintage wines from White’s cellar and a catered meal served by a team of waiters. But behind the pleasantries lay a disturbing topic of conversation: the condition of Depp’s finances.

Depp professed to be in shock. After all, he is paid up to $20 million a picture. How could he possibly be so strapped for cash that his former business manager, Joel Mandel, had told him it was necessary to sell major assets, such as his château on the French Riviera? Dressed in his trademark quasi-pirate attire—heavily pinned leather jacket and an assemblage of scarves, bangles, rings, and tattoos—and rolling his own smokes, Depp told Waldman, “I’m not a lawyer. I’m not an accountant. I’m not qualified to help my 15-year-old son with his math homework. . . . I’ve always trusted the people around me.”

White’s accountants claimed to have found anomalies in the handling of Depp’s finances by his former business managers, Robert and Joel Mandel, and their firm, the Management Group (TMG). These, Waldman would later charge, included late payment of income tax and disbursing nearly $10 million to “third parties [including Depp’s sister] close to or who worked for Mr. Depp, without Mr. Depp’s knowledge or authorization.” These transgressions and others caused Depp to borrow tens of millions of dollars at high interest rates, with his film residuals as collateral, according to Waldman. The charges were vigorously denied by the Mandels and TMG, which called them “fabricated and replete with demonstrably false allegations.”

“What’s the amount that Johnny has made [over the 17 years the Mandels represented him]?” Waldman asked White at the backyard dinner.

“Six hundred and fifty million dollars,” White replied. From that sum TMG had been paid 5 percent, and Depp’s attorney Jake Bloom got another 5 percent, for a total of around $65 million.

At the conclusion of the dinner, Waldman remembers Depp asking, “Will you represent me? Will you get to the bottom of this and give me some advice?”

On January 13, after Waldman had worked with White and eight additional lawyers to sift through about 24,000 e-mails, Depp’s attorneys filed a scathing lawsuit against TMG, seeking $25 million in damages for negligence, fraud, unjust enrichment, and breach of fiduciary duty, among other things. Eighteen days later, TMG responded with a blistering 31-page cross-complaint, claiming that Depp was a spendthrift of epic proportions, who, despite his manager’s constant warnings, refused to curb his “selfish, reckless, and irresponsible lifestyle.”