Mike Brant: accident, suicide, assassination… How did the singer die?

There is “the club of 27”, these rock-stars who died at the age of 27, from Brian Jones to Jimmi Hendrix, from Jim Morrison to Janis Joplin, via Kurt Cobain. And then there’s Mike Brant, who died just as tragically at 28. It’s hard to accept the premature death of an artist. As nature abhors a vacuum, conspiracy theories have swept enough life into the legend of the Israeli singer to explain his death. Did he commit suicide? Did you help him? Is his defenestration the result of an unfortunate accident? Elements of answers on the occasion of the broadcast of a shocking documentary on France 3, Mike Brant, the shooting starthis Saturday, April 15 from 11 p.m.

The craziest rumors

On Friday April 25, 1975, when his new single was due to be released, which despite himself will be controversial, entitled Tell him, Mike Brant fell at 11:15 a.m. from the sixth floor of a building located rue Erlanger, in the 16th arrondissement of Paris. He resides, then, with a friend, Jeanne Cacchi, who was at the time of the tragedy in the bathroom of her apartment. Supported during the following minutes, the singer haunted by a heavy family secret died in the ambulance which transported him to the Ambroise-Paré hospital in Boulogne-Billancourt. He was pronounced dead there at 11:40 a.m. The suicide of Mike Brant, defenestrated, is, in the immediate future, no doubt. But some time later the most disturbing rumors will arise. The most insistent is that the singer was murdered. In question: the producer of the artist, Simon Wajntrob. A sulphurous character, with suspicious business relationships, who we saw and heard arguing violently with Mike and, more seriously, with the singer’s mother at the time of her son’s funeral. Wajntrob will be found dead in the Bois de Boulogne with a bullet in the heart and another in the neck, three years after the disappearance of Mike Brant. Also disturbing: the singer’s secretary, Alain Krief, committed suicide in 1984 by throwing himself under a subway train. All these suspicious deaths have given rise to other speculations, including a story of espionage linked to the Mossad without much more being known… Another possibility is that Mike Brant, while going to the balcony, has stumbled before tipping and then falling.

The Brother Theory

The suicide hypothesis remains, however, the most probable. It is reinforced by a first attempt on November 22, 1974, when Mike Brant, whose life had changed thanks to a simple telephone call, threw himself from the fifth floor of the Hôtel de la Paix in Geneva. Wounded, he had then been saved only at the heel of one of his shoes which would have slowed down and then stopped his fall, on the third floor of the establishment. In the documentary broadcast on France 3, Zvi, Mike’s brother, gives his opinion: “All my life I’ve been asked if Mike was murdered or killed himself. I sincerely believe that he committed suicide. No one really knows what happened in the apartment Mike was in the night he died..” About his friend Jeanne, with whom he was staying, Zvi says: “She explained to us that Mike was sleeping soundly. She was in the bathroom when she heard the phone ring and Mike pick it up. When she came back to the bedroom, he was gone. She rushed to the balcony and saw that he had pushed himself out of the window (…) Was his gesture linked to the call received? To his depression? No one understood, especially since that day his new title was released Tell him and that, two days earlier, they had agreed with Jean Renard to sign a new contract“Another element noted by Zvi is to be linked to the Yom Kippur War in 1973, during which Mike Brant, feeling guilty about making a career in France, returned to his country to go to the bedside of wounded Israeli soldiers. “I think he had never seen that. This is where he started to be afraid of the public, to be afraid of an attack, to be afraid that something would happen to him. Especially since the Israeli embassy had sent bodyguards from the embassy to protect him and that panicked him.“Overwhelmed by his success, by the hysteria of the fans at his slightest appearance, by his inability to assimilate the French language and which made him a stranger in Paris, did the depressive singer give in to the ultimate temptation? That of flight, which paradoxically demands the greatest of courage…