Remember the Time: Protecting Michael Jackson in His Final Days

by Bill Whitfield

  The plumbing inside wasn’t much better. Mr. Jackson’s bedroom flooded a number of times. We were only there a couple weeks when the water heater blew. Dead of winter and for several days there was no hot water. We had to pack Mr. Jackson and his family up and make arrangements for them to stay at the Marriott until a new water heater was installed. Central heating didn’t work properly, either; we had to go out and get space heaters for the children’s bedrooms. If too many appliances were turned on at once, the breakers would flip and all the lights would go out.

  This place was trying to be so fancy that it had an elevator. Mr. Jackson got stuck in the elevator. The kids came running outside one day, yelling, “Daddy’s stuck! Daddy’s stuck!” We went in, and he was trapped between floors. We had to go upstairs and lift him out. He thought it was his fault. He kept saying, “Did I push the wrong button? What did I do?” But it wasn’t his fault. That elevator broke down all the time.

  Bill: All kinds of stuff went wrong. Service technicians were always on the property. Mr. Jackson complained about it all the time. And it’s not that the house was chosen to save money. It had been on the market for about seven years. No one had ever lived in it, and Mr. Jackson rented it for six months for $1 million. One million for six months. What kind of bullshit is that?

  We tried to make all the improvements we could. For the amount of work the security system required, I would’ve had to call a company to come in and install a whole new system. But if I did that, I’d be taking a risk of someone finding out personal details about Mr. Jackson living here. Plus, I really didn’t like an outside company knowing exactly what kind of security measures we had in place. So I decided it was best that we get it done inside the team.

  The main piece of equipment we installed was what’s called an inground intrusion detection system. It’s these small sensors linked together on a fiber-optic network that runs underground. That gave us detection around every inch of the property. If so much as an empty tin can was tossed over the outside wall, we’d be alerted immediately.

  Javon: We had to lay wires all through the grounds and run every single one of them back to the garage. We installed lights with motion sensors, new cameras that covered the yard and the perimeter outside the fence. We quickly learned that money was no object for Mr. Jackson when it came to security. He would front any bill when it came to that. Cameras, weapons, whatever. We’d say, “We need to get this and it’s going to cost such and such amount.” He’d just pay it. He’d say, “Make that happen.”

  Bill: We bought a CPM-700 countersurveillance sweeper. Costs about five thousand dollars. It picks up electronic recording devices. We took that everywhere. Hotel rooms, conference rooms, restaurants. He was adamant about it. During his trial in ’05, someone had made a secret recording of a conversation between him and his lawyer and then tried to sell it. So he was concerned about that, being taped. If we went anywhere, before he’d even get out of the car, he’d say, “Did we scan everything?”

  We never found any bugs. Not that we expected to, because people rarely knew we were coming. There were times when we detected something, some strange frequency, but we couldn’t find the source of it. He’d insist on having the room changed anyway.

  Javon: He was furious when we caught one of the drivers from the car service with a camera in their car. Most limousine services out here, even taxis, use cameras to record their passengers. It’s standard practice. The car service we were using, we told them to disconnect any recording devices in the vehicles. But we were in the car one day, and there was a red light on the visor. We saw it and said, “What’s that light?”

  The driver said, “Oh, that’s the camera.”

  “What camera? We told you no cameras. All this is being recorded?”

  “Well, it’s—”

  “No, no. We’re gonna need that tape. Give us the tape.”

  So arrangements were made to get the tape back. And when Mr. Jackson got wind of it? If you even said the word “camera” to him, he was done. He started calling his manager. “I need my vehicles,” he told her. “Get my cars out here.”

  About a week later, the vehicles showed up; they were shipped out from Neverland. He had three identical black SUVs, GMC Yukons, the same cars he used during his trial in Santa Barbara. They were all fitted with triple-tinted windows. We installed a privacy curtain between the front and backseat of the primary vehicle that Mr. Jackson rode in.

  When the trucks arrived, a Bentley and a Rolls-Royce were delivered too. They were both black. The interior of one of them was 14-karat gold. It had been a gift for Mr. Jackson from some Middle Eastern prince or something. There was a minibar in the back of this thing. Even the ice bucket was 14-karat gold. Those two cars, the Bentley and the Rolls, they sat in the garage.

  Bill: He hated those cars. That’s when we really started to see that there was some friction between Mr. Jackson and his people, that they didn’t always understand his needs and wants. One night we were going on some detail, and Feldman said, “We’re gonna drive the Rolls-Royce tonight. Just you wait. He’s gonna love this.”

  So we got the Rolls detailed. Mr. Jackson came out to the garage, we had this car all shiny and beautiful, and he just stared at it. He said, “What is this?”

  Feldman said, “We brought it from Neverland, sir.”

  “I know where it’s from,” Mr. Jackson said. “Why is it here?”

  “I thought you wanted to keep driving them—”

  “No, no, I don’t like these cars. These cars always break down. I was with Liz one night in the Rolls and it broke down and we were stuck.”

  He didn’t like those cars. We drove the trucks.

  Javon: I was the primary driver. I took him everywhere he needed to go, kept the cars washed and cleaned. One thing I learned real quick was whenever we were driving him, he only listened to classical music. He’d send us to the store to buy it by the armload. He’d say, “I need some CDs. Classical. Get all the classical CDs you can find.” So one of us would go to the store, go to the classical section, grab a bunch, bring them home. If he got in the backseat and either me or Bill had the radio on an R & B station, one of us would quickly turn it to classical. Every now and then, he’d want to listen to the R & B, but otherwise it was classical pretty much all of the time.

  Bill: Typically, I was there until midnight or so. I’d wait and go home once the kids were in bed and everything was set for the night. Couple times a week, Javon or I would stay overnight, work through until morning, but we also hired three guys to come in to work the graveyard shift. Whole place would be locked down, alarms set. I gave them direct orders: if anyone breaches the wall, shoot first then call me.

  Javon: We were still working out of the garage, and there was very little space for us to maneuver or get comfortable. And you know, if it’s winter, the garage is the coldest part of the house. We were in there all night, on a twenty-four-hour shift, freezing our asses off. Thank God, a couple weeks later we got the security trailer.

  Mr. Jackson’s manager was a woman named Raymone Bain. She’d been his publicist during the trial and now she was managing him. The first time Ms. Raymone came to the house, she saw us set up in this cold, cramped garage and she couldn’t believe it. She said, “Why don’t you get the trailer from Neverland?”

  “Trailer? What trailer?”

  “There’s a security trailer at Neverland.”

  So we got the trailer out here. That was a blessing. Trailer had a sink, a shower, a bathroom, a full-size bed. It served as our command center. We rerouted all the surveillance cables that had been running into the garage. We posted up a full blueprint of the interior layout of the house as well as a map of the entire city of Las Vegas. We surveyed every block of the surrounding residential area, mapped all the possible routes for ingress and egress. Given how exposed the house was, we did everything we could to compensate.

  Bill: We installed panic buttons in different rooms in the house—in his bedro
om, in the family room. In the event of an emergency, Mr. Jackson or the kids could alert us right away. The alarm didn’t sound inside the house, just in the trailer, to alert us. And it was a loud-ass alarm, tell you that much. I remember the first time it went off. It was early one morning. I heard it and ran out of the trailer and around the back of the house. I got to the kitchen door, drew my weapon, and burst inside, like I was ready for some real shit to be going down.

  They were all just sitting at the breakfast table, eating their cereal. They saw me and they froze: Mr. Jackson on the left, Paris at the head of the table, Prince sitting on my right, across from Mr. Jackson. I didn’t see Blanket. He was across the room by the TV, which was where the panic button was mounted on the wall. He was just walking around, hitting buttons. They all sat there at the table, staring at me, and then Blanket blurted out, “Bill, is that a real gun?!”

  Little dude thought it was cool. Mr. Jackson did not. Pulling an automatic weapon in the family room with his kids eating breakfast? Oh, he got on me about that.

  Javon: He didn’t like the kids seeing weapons, but he did appreciate that we were well armed. We both carried semiautomatic Glock pistols with extended magazines. We had Tasers. Each of them delivered a charge of 1.2 million volts, powerful enough to take down a three-hundred-pound man. We had a cache of backup weapons: MP5 fully automatic submachine guns, military-style AR-15s, 12-gauge automatic shotguns, and concealable MAC-10s. We had three cases of ammunition, close to three thousand rounds for everything we had. We wore lightweight body armor under our suits at all times. Some may say it was overkill, but those people don’t know the kind of threats that Mr. Jackson received on a regular basis. We planned and prepared for the worst, but we hoped and prayed for the best.

  Bill: Anyone who came to the house—repairmen, service technicians, whoever—they all had to sign confidentiality agreements before they were allowed on the property. It was a contract that carried a $10 million penalty for disclosing any details about Mr. Jackson, his home, his children, any of it. If they didn’t sign, they didn’t come in. We also searched them and confiscated their cell phones. If they didn’t comply, they didn’t come in. Those that were allowed on the property had a member from the security team accompany them throughout the house until they were finished.

  That was standard procedure for everybody, even the clowns we’d hire for the kids’ birthday parties. The clowns didn’t know whose party they were coming to perform at until they got there. They’d show up, we’d hit them with this industrial-strength non-disclosure form, and they’d go, “Huh?” Then we’d search ’em, wand ’em, and take their phones.

  “We need to hold on to this phone until you leave.”

  “But what if someone calls?”

  “Do you want to be our clown or not?”

  And they’d hand over the phone.

  Mr. Jackson trusted no one. The man was paranoid, very paranoid. Didn’t sleep much. He was always going around the house at three, four in the morning, checking the locks on all the doors. The nights I stayed over in the trailer I saw him do it a number of times.

  We had thousands of dollars in surveillance gear covering every inch of this property, armed security guards patrolling the grounds, and still he was going door to door, checking the dead-bolts. I’d show up in the morning, and the overnight guys would give me a report. “Dude was checkin’ doors again,” they’d say. It just became normal to us.

  Javon: He’d frequently come outside in the dead of night to make sure we were in the trailer. He’d poke his head in and say, “Just checking that you guys are here.”

  We’d say, “Sir, we’re not going anywhere.”

  Bill: There was a direct phone line to the trailer, and only Mr. Jackson had the number. We’d get calls in the middle of the night. He heard something. He was worried about something. Didn’t take much to set him off.

  One night, we were on duty and, around two-thirty in the morning, we heard the door to the house slam and then all of a sudden there was this loud banging on the trailer door. We opened it and Mr. Jackson was standing there, holding the kids close to him. The kids were all half asleep and discombobulated, wearing pajamas, shivering in the freezing cold.

  Mr. Jackson had this look of panic on his face, his eyes wide open. “Somebody’s inside the house,” he said. “They’re trying to break into my bedroom through the terrace door.”

  My first thought was that we should leave, just take the cars and bounce. But Javon was saying, “Check the room! Let’s check the room!” So we stayed to investigate. We brought Mr. Jackson and the kids inside the trailer. Javon stayed with them. I drew my weapon, went into the house, and made my way upstairs to Mr. Jackson’s bedroom.

  The thought in the back of my mind was that someone must have climbed up the back balcony. Once I was inside his room, I could hear what he was talking about. There was this rustling sound coming from outside the door to the balcony, like someone trying to get in. I crept up and threw the door open and looked out. Nobody there. But now I could hear the sound better. Sounded more like flapping. I looked up and there was a wing sticking out of this vent, frantically flapping around. A pigeon. All this over a pigeon.

  I reached up and grabbed it. I pulled it out of the vent and threw it over the balcony. I couldn’t tell if it took off or what. I may have broken its wing. All I saw was the thing going straight down. I went back downstairs and told Mr. Jackson it was just a bird. Of course now he was all concerned about the bird. He was like, “You didn’t kill it, did you?”

  “No, sir,” I said. “Of course not. I just let it go.”

  “Oh, good.”

  Javon: By that point, it was well past three in the morning. Prince was like, “Da-ad, can we go back to bed now, please? We’ve got school in the morning, and I’m tired.”

  So they all shuffled back into the house to go to bed. As they walked in, Mr. Jackson said, “See, kids? Better safe than sorry.”

  Bill: A couple weeks later, maybe mid-February, about one-thirty in the morning, I got this frantic call from his manager, Raymone. She was all worked up, saying, “You gotta get Mr. Jackson out of the house!”

  “What’s the problem?”

  She wouldn’t tell me. She just kept saying, “Get him outta the house! I booked you a room at a hotel. Get him outta the house!”

  I figured it had to be something serious. I told Javon to get the cars ready, and I ran into the house. When I got upstairs, Mr. Jackson was running around in the dark. It was pitch black inside; he didn’t want the lights turned on, like he was scared somebody was going to see him. He had the kids going room to room with flashlights, getting their stuff together, packing to leave. He was whispering to them, “Let’s go! Let’s go! C’mon! No, we don’t need that! Just grab a few things!”

  I didn’t know what was happening. I said, “Sir, what’s wrong? What’s going on?”

  He wouldn’t say. He just said, “Raymone called. There’s a threat. We have to leave. We have to leave. Right now.”

  Javon: I had the cars ready, and I was outside in the security trailer. There was nothing on any of the monitors; none of the sensors had been tripped. Before we left, me and Bill checked the whole house. Nothing. We went to Mr. Jackson and said, “Sir, everything’s fine. The house is secure. Trust us, no one’s getting in here.”

  But he was in a full panic. He was almost incoherent, like he wasn’t even hearing a word we told him. He just kept saying, “We gotta go! We gotta go!”

  Bill: We had no idea what was going on, but we loaded the suitcases and the kids into the trucks and took everyone to the Green Valley Ranch, a resort nearby in Henderson. The manager was waiting for us at the loading dock when we pulled in. We crept up in there in the middle of the night, with no advance security check, nothing.

  We got him settled in his room, and we took the room across the hall. The next morning, I went over and talked to him. He was fuming. He said, “I shouldn’t have to leave my house fo
r nobody. I shouldn’t have to run from nobody. Isn’t that what I have you guys for?”

  I said, “Sir, who are you running from?”

  Finally he told me what was up. Raymone had received a phone call from this former security guard at Neverland, an employee that Mr. Jackson supposedly owed money to. This guy had called her up and he got real vocal and real threatening about what he was going to do to get his money. He said he was coming to Vegas and was going to climb the wall to Mr. Jackson’s house. So Raymone called Mr. Jackson and sent him into a panic.

  I said, “And that’s why we left? Mr. Jackson, you are safe in your house. We’re more than capable of protecting your family. If Raymone had told me what was going on, I would have taken care of it.”

  That caught him off guard. He seemed a little pissed off.

  We stayed at the Green Valley Ranch one more night, then packed everybody up and went back to the house. The kids were pretty worn out. Usually, they seemed to take this kind of stuff in stride; they were accustomed to the rhythm of their father’s life. Secret back doors, security alarms, panic buttons—that was their everyday. They were little troopers. But every now and then, you’d see the craziness take its toll. This was one of those times. Here they were, in a new city, living in a strange house. Then suddenly they’re leaving that house, running out in the middle of the night, popping into this hotel, then turning around and leaving the hotel. And no real explanation for any of it.

  As we drove back to the house, everyone was being real quiet in the backseat. Then Blanket looked up at his daddy and said, “Daddy, can we go back to the other house? Can we go back to Neverland?”

  Mr. Jackson shook his head and said, “No. We can’t ever go back there. That place has been contaminated by evil.”