Remember the Time: Protecting Michael Jackson in His Final Days
Page 18
“Oh! Okay, great. Let’s go.”
Bill: Before we got out of the car, Mr. Jackson asked me if I thought it was safe. I looked around. It was late. There weren’t many people out. It didn’t appear like we’d been followed. So I felt it was okay. He put a scarf on, wrapped it around his head. He was covered up but not to where it looked like he was trying to hide.
We walked up to the Lincoln Memorial. It was dark in the shadows of the trees and they could just stroll without being bothered. They just walked around, talked, took in the sights. Even late at night, the memorials are all lit up. She took some pictures. You could tell that it had been discussed that they weren’t going to take pictures of each other, just of the monuments.
After that, Mr. Jackson said he wanted to see the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. We walked over there, and they went up to the wall. They were talking and reading some of the names, and he was saying, “It’s a shame, just a shame. This is ridiculous. All of these innocent children dying.” He asked if she knew the song “What’s Going On” by Marvin Gaye. She didn’t seem familiar with it. He sang her a few bars as they walked along: “War is not the answer, for only love can conquer hate.”
From the Vietnam memorial we went back to the car. Mr. Jackson wanted to drive around, see some more of the sights, take her to see the White House. You can’t drive directly in front of the White House anymore, but we drove around the side, looked at the gate where you go in, circled around Lafayette Park, and just took them around that whole area.
It was really late by that point. Mr. Jackson was ready to go home. We were about to head back toward the highway, when all of a sudden, we heard a siren and saw all of these flashing blue lights behind us. Javon moved to the side, hoping the car would pass, but then it pulled in behind us. Then another car coming toward us in traffic pulled over and blocked us from the front.
I looked in the rearview mirror, and I saw a guy getting out of the car. He had on tactical gear: the boots, automatic weapon, bulletproof vest. Another guy posted up at the rear of the vehicle and a third guy was standing in front of us at the corner. They’d taken up strategic positions around the car. This wasn’t the police. This was the Secret Service. This was some kind of anti-terrorism thing. I didn’t know what they could possibly want with us, but I was nervous. Mr. Jackson and Friend were in the back behind the curtain. Javon was sitting in the driver’s seat, telling me, “Bill, you gotta handle this. Man, you gotta handle this.”
I put the window down. One of the agents came up to my side of the car. I said, “Evening, officer.”
He said, “Good evening. The reason we’ve stopped you is that you got Nevada plates and we found it somewhat suspect that a black SUV with tinted windows and Nevada plates is out here, circling the White House this time of night.”
“We’re just down here doing some sightseeing.”
“Uh-huh. I also ran your plates when I pulled you over. Are you aware of who this car is registered to?”
“Yes, I am.”
“Computer’s telling me it’s registered to . . . Michael Jackson?”
“Yes, sir.”
“At Neverland Ranch?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Okay, what’s that about?”
Javon piped in and said, “We’re doing a detail for a high-profile dignitary.” But I already knew these guys were having none of that. The agent looked at Javon, looked at me, and said, “Can I see your insurance and registration, please?”
“Yes, sir.”
I pulled it out of the glove box and gave it to him. He asked who was behind the curtain. I said, “My client is back there.”
“Who is your client?”
I paused. “May I get out of the vehicle, sir?”
“Sure.”
I stepped out and explained the whole thing to him, from A to Z, who was in the back, that we were here on vacation. He said, “You’re telling me that Michael Jackson is in the back of this car?”
“Yes, sir.”
He walked over and talked to the other agent for a minute. I was left there, standing on the side of the road, thinking about all the bad ways this could go, this woman in the backseat who no one on Earth is supposed to know about. I wasn’t feeling good about it. Then the agent walked back over, handed me the registration, and nodded for me to get back in the car. The other guy must have said something to him. It looked like they were going to let us leave. I climbed back in the car and, just as I did, he gave me the hand signal to say hold up. “One more thing,” he said.
“Yes, sir?”
“Do you think he’d mind giving us an autograph?”
“I’ll see.” I pulled the curtain back a bit. “Mr. Jackson, these gentlemen would like to know if you’d give them an autograph?”
“Oh, sure,” he said. “Just give me a pen.”
The agent gave me a pen and pulled off a piece of paper from his pad. Mr. Jackson opened up the curtain and took the paper and pen. This guy was totally starstruck. Mr. Jackson signed the paper and gave it to the guy. Then the other agent ran up, saying, “Whoa, whoa. Can I get one too?” The back window went down. Mr. Jackson said hello to the other guy and signed an autograph for him. They told us thank you and good night, and as they walked away, the second agent turned to the first and said, “Holy shit, man. We just met Michael Jackson. That was better than meeting the president.”
12
In the 1980s, as one of the wealthiest entertainers in the world, Michael Jackson spent money extravagantly—because he could. But even as he lavished enormous sums on building his own amusement park and other endeavors, Jackson was famous for watching every penny. He checked over invoices to make sure no one was taking advantage of him, and he fired anyone he felt he couldn’t trust. Somewhere along the way, that Michael Jackson ceased to exist. He stopped paying attention, started trusting the wrong people, and his fortune began to disappear.
After the Chandler scandal in 1993, Jackson’s income began to shrink, but his outsized expenses did not. In addition to the annual upkeep of Neverland, Jackson continued spending several million dollars a year on chartered planes, antiques, paintings, hotels, and other personal expenses. If extravagant spending had been his only vice, he likely could have afforded it. But the singer also continued to make significant investments in his own career.
To achieve his artistic vision in the short films for “Thriller” and “Bad,” Jackson had financed large portions of the projects himself—investments that had paid off in spades. In the 1990s, he continued the practice, sinking tens of millions of dollars into various film and video endeavors. Only now, with his record sales contracting, those investments no longer provided the same return. Various handlers and financial managers began inserting themselves more and more in the singer’s affairs, using his money in questionable deals that yielded more legal entanglements than profits. Though Jackson was still worth hundreds of millions of dollars on paper, he quickly found himself in a severe cash crisis.
In 1995, Jackson sold Sony a 50 percent stake in the ATV music catalog for $100 million. In 1998, his debts still growing, Jackson took out a loan from Bank of America for an additional $140 million, putting his stake in what was now the Sony/ATV catalog up as collateral. By 2000, Jackson’s line of credit with the bank had been upped to $200 million, and he was also deeply in debt to Sony, which had continued to advance him large sums against his future earnings—earnings that continued to decline.
By the time Jackson’s trial started, the payments to service his debt—never mind his living expenses or his legal fees—were costing him over $4 million a month. As the trial dragged on, Jackson missed several of his monthly installments to Bank of America, and the lender sold his loan to Fortress Investment Group, a hedge fund that specialized in distressed assets. By the end of 2005, Jackson was already delinquent on his newly refinanced debt, and Fortress threatened to call the loan, which worried executives at Sony. If the singer defaulted, his share in the Sony/ATV catal
og—now worth close to $1 billion, by some estimates—would be put up for auction and sold to the highest bidder, saddling the record label with a potentially unwelcome partner. That crisis was averted, momentarily, the following April. Fortress agreed to restructure the debt in order to allow Jackson to stay afloat. As part of the refinancing, he took out a $23 million mortgage on Neverland.
Even as he scrambled to cover his debt payments, Michael Jackson was still earning millions of dollars a year, mostly through the sales of his lucrative back catalog. But because his record label was one of his primary creditors, the money that Jackson earned was being withheld to cover what he owed to them. That left Jackson’s other creditors to go unpaid, setting off a daisy chain of legal actions that further crippled his financial standing. Producer Marc Schaffel, who loaned Jackson millions in cash during their partnership, sued the singer in the fall of 2004, eventually winning a settlement of $900,000. Prescient Capital, a financial group involved in brokering Jackson’s refinancing deal with Fortress, had recently sued, claiming it was owed fees from the transaction. Jackson settled with Prescient for $3 million in June 2007, just before leaving Las Vegas.
Other suits followed him to Virginia. Dieter Wiesner, Jackson’s manager in the years before the trial, had filed a suit claiming he was owed $30 million for deals he’d arranged while handling the singer’s affairs, forcing Jackson to spend days attending depositions at the offices of Venable, his law firm in Washington, D.C. Sheikh Abdullah of Bahrain, meanwhile, was threatening to sue over the $7 million he’d invested in Jackson during his time overseas.
For over a decade, Jackson’s creditors and handlers had enabled his excessive spending and his penchant for bad investments. Everyone endeavored to keep the singer propped up so they might continue to profit off him for one more day. But those years of mismanagement had finally brought Jackson to the brink. His billion-dollar financial empire was collapsing, being picked over by scavengers even as it decayed from within. Much to his new security team’s distress, Jackson was doing nothing to stop it.
Bill: Back in Vegas, our paychecks were slow in coming. They’d be late by a couple of days, maybe a week. But the minute we got to Virginia? They just stopped. From that day on, our payroll was completely cut off.
For the first couple weeks, it seemed like the normal delay. Then it was three weeks, a month, five weeks, six weeks. We’d call Raymone, and every time it was the same excuses. She’s waiting for some deal to close. Mr. Jackson’s money is held up right now. She doesn’t know how she’s going to pay her own staff. And so on. But to us it felt personal. Other people were being paid. Grace was being paid. The security at Neverland was being paid. I saw a lot of his financial documents moving back and forth, and his lawyers never stopped taking their five-figure retainers or collecting their six-figure fees. I found out later on that Raymone was paying herself something like thirty thousand dollars a month, plus the apartment she had rented for herself back in Vegas.
So there was money for all these other people, just no payroll for Bill and Javon, and here we were working around the clock for Mr. Jackson on the road. And the little bit of back pay that we were owed? It was nothing compared to what these other people were taking from the pile. Javon was a little more hot-tempered than me, quick to get agitated. He’d see these documents with these huge money transfers, and he’d say, “Shit, and we can’t get our bread? Our punk-ass money?”
Javon: All we had coming in was our per diem. It was seventy-five dollars a day, and that was supposed to cover the cost of our daily meals on the road. So you know what we’d do? We’d take that and we’d go buy Top Ramen, hot dogs, some sandwich bread. We’d get a bunch of that and live on that, and send the rest of the per diem home. It was all we could do.
Bill: The per diem wasn’t enough. By the middle of August, I had my daughter calling me up, saying, “Daddy, the lights got turned off.”
I had family and friends who stayed with her at the house whenever I traveled for work; they were taking care of her. But I also had a security system with cameras set up around my house so I could check online to make sure everything was okay. But with the power out, there was no visual. That worried me. There was also no air conditioning, and the temperature in Las Vegas was hitting 115 degrees. I told her, “Okay, baby, I’ll take care of it.” I called in some favors, did what I had to do.
Javon: My lights got cut off too, right after Bill’s. I had my newborn at home. By that point, Raymone had stopped answering our calls. It took me days just to get through to her. When I finally did, she said she could give me a credit card number to get the lights turned on, but there was nothing she could do about payroll. When I went to call the power company to turn the lights back on, the card she gave me was declined. A couple weeks after that, my car was repossessed. When I couldn’t make the payments, the bank came and repo’d it right out of my driveway.
Bill: When we drove back from Vegas and displaced Raymone’s team, I knew she was going to be pissed off. I got messages from Grace to that effect. She said to me, “Raymone’s not happy that you made those other guys leave; those guys took time off from their jobs to do security for the boss.”
I told her, “Too bad.”
Raymone never said, “Hey, I’m not paying you guys because you made me look stupid.” But we thought it was obvious that our pay stopped for that reason.
Javon: In Vegas, Mr. Jackson was always adamant about not reporting his movements to Raymone. Now, in Virginia, he was telling us to ignore her completely. He said, “If there’s something I want to tell Raymone, I’ll have you call her. Don’t answer her calls.”
She started trying to manipulate us with scare tactics. She’d call and say, “I’m getting a call from a radio station saying that Mr. Jackson was seen walking around in Chantilly in his pajamas. Why is he wearing pajamas? I need to know where you are so I can respond to this report.”
She’d be saying all this, and meanwhile I’d have Mr. Jackson in the car right next to me. He wasn’t in pajamas, and we were nowhere near Chantilly. She was just trying to get a reaction, to see where we were. I think she was always afraid that Mr. Jackson was taking business meetings without her.
Bill: Maybe me and Javon didn’t rank as high as Raymone, but she treated us like we were an obstacle to her being in control. All these petty games came down to one thing: whoever has Mr. Jackson’s ear is the person who controls the money.
So it was obvious to us what she was trying to do. We felt like she was trying to starve us out by not paying us. That was the leverage she had; she could make it so uncomfortable for us that we’d have no choice but to leave. She wasn’t even subtle about it. After a couple weeks of giving us her standard excuses, she came right out and said it. I called her about payroll, and she said, “You know, Mr. Jackson’s really putting you guys in a terrible situation. He’s put himself in so much debt. There’s no way in the world I would go this long without being paid. If I was you guys, I would just quit.”
To hear her say that? That we should just quit and walk away from him? I took that to mean that she wanted to get her own people back in. I told Mr. Jackson right away. He knew that our pay had been erratic in the past, and he’d always been very apologetic about it, but I don’t think he grasped the urgency of the situation, and we were reluctant to press the issue directly with him. Celebrities? They don’t sit down with calculators and go over time sheets. That’s what managers and accountants are for. You don’t talk money directly with the client. In a healthy organization, everything should have been handled between us and Raymone. Clearly that wasn’t working, and I felt that Mr. Jackson needed to know. One day, I was driving and I turned the radio down and said, “Sir, do you mind if I tell you something?”
“Sure, Bill. What is it?”
“We spoke to Raymone about when she thought we’d be getting paid, and she told us that you got yourself in some financial mess, and if she was in our position, she would just quit.”
That wasn’t the end of it. I’d receive emails and FedEx packages for him. A lot of this stuff, I didn’t look too deep into what it was. Whatever stuck out on that first page, I might scan it to see who it was from, so I could inform him of what it was. I’d see packages from Raymone on the regular, and while we were in Virginia, I got this one document from her, a loan application. It was for something like $300 million. She’d sent it to me to have Mr. Jackson sign off on it. She called me and said, “If you can get him to sign this, I can get you guys paid.”
When it came to things that required Mr. Jackson’s approval, he’d sign his name to whatever was put in front of him. His lawyers would say, “Mr. Jackson, this needs to be executed to do such-and-such for so-and-so.” He’d sign it. Didn’t matter what it was. It was rare that he asked who it was for or what it was about. I never once heard him say, “No, that’s wrong. I want to handle it this other way.” He’d just sign his name wherever he was directed. He wanted whatever they put in front of him to go away.
Out in Middleburg, nobody had access to him except me. I started to feel like Raymone was using our back pay as leverage to get me to try and influence Mr. Jackson’s business decisions in her favor. She and Greg Cross were still having the same loan argument they’d been having with Mr. Jackson at the Vegas house. I started getting documents from both of them, applications from different banks. Greg would send me something, and Raymone would call and tell me, “Don’t let him sign that, make sure he signs mine.”