At the same time, Greg Cross was calling me, saying, “Whatever Raymone sends, don’t have him sign it. I need to look over it first.” Greg didn’t have direct control over our pay, but he would always say, “I’m trying to get you guys paid.”
As I understood it, this loan package was something necessary to resolve Mr. Jackson’s financial problems, and whichever one of them got him to sign their package was going to control the flow of these funds, millions of dollars.
This dragged on for weeks. In the middle of August, I got an email from Raymone saying that Mr. Jackson had authorized a $25,000 bonus for both me and Javon to make up for our troubles, and we’d get it as soon as “several major transactions” were finalized. It felt like a bribe. Here’s me and Javon, living on Top Ramen and hot dogs, and she’s all over me, saying, “Get him to sign this and everyone gets paid, and you get a $25,000 bonus.”
Javon: One day, Greg and Ms. Raymone would be arguing with Bill, then the next they’d be trying to butter him up. I stayed out of it. I was always raised to keep my mouth shut. Bill had to tolerate the bickering, but he’s not the type of guy to let you play with his integrity. He stayed out of it as much as he could too. These documents from Greg and Raymone? Bill would just take them and give them to Mr. Jackson with a sticky note on the front: This one’s from Ms. Raymone, and this one’s from Greg Cross. He didn’t try and influence the boss to sign one or the other. We always took the position that Mr. Jackson was a grown man. Let him decide which one to sign.
Bill: This issue of the loan kept dragging on, and it finally came to the point where I had to reach out to somebody to ask, “What’s going on? What am I supposed to do?” I talked to Grace. She agreed that I didn’t need to be in the middle of it. That’s when I was introduced to Peter Lopez.
Peter Lopez, he and Mr. Jackson went back some time. Lopez was a big-time attorney in the music business, married to actress Catherine Bach, who was Daisy in The Dukes of Hazzard. He was friends with Arnold Schwarzenegger, who appointed him to the California State Athletic Commission. Mr. Lopez was another one of these attorneys handling various parts of Mr. Jackson’s business. They would talk from time to time, but their relationship was more like a friendship than an attorney-client relationship. Their conversations were very personal, a lot of “How’s the kids? How’s the family?”
I knew Mr. Lopez was someone Mr. Jackson trusted, so I reached out to him and told him about the situation. Talking to him, I got the impression that this was not the first time something like this had happened in Mr. Jackson’s world. He said, “Bill, I know exactly what you’re going through. The best thing to do is to talk to Michael.”
But I’d talked to him already. We’d hinted at the problem to Mr. Jackson and nothing had been done.
Javon: He started to see that our morale was down. We were driving one day and he said, “Guys, is there anything you want to tell me? You don’t seem like yourselves right now.”
We opened up to him completely. We said, “Mr. Jackson, we’ve got bills stacking up. We’re loyal to you, we’re here for you, but this is taking a toll on our families back home.”
He said, “What? You guys still haven’t been paid?!”
“No, sir.”
“But I told Raymone to pay you. I told her! Bill, would you please get Raymone on the phone?”
He called her right there in front of us, put her on the speakerphone. She answered, and he said, “Raymone, my guys’ morale is down. What’s going on with their paychecks? When are you going to pay these guys?”
He really tore into her. She started getting all flustered, stammering her way through the same old excuses. “I’ll take care of it. We’re just waiting for some things to come through. I’ll take care of it.”
He started shouting over her. “Raymone . . . Raymone . . . Raymone! You have to pay these guys. These guys are protecting me and my family. Without me, this machine doesn’t run.”
She said, “I’m gonna pay ’em. I’m gonna pay ’em this week.”
“When this week? I have the guys right here, Raymone. They’re on speakerphone. When this week?”
This was on a Tuesday. She said, “I’ll pay ’em Thursday.”
Thursday came and no pay. We were like, Wow. Are you kidding me? That’s when we knew that Mr. Jackson really had no control over his own money. He was giving her direct orders and she was blowing him off. He’d apologize for it all the time. He’d say, “Guys, you know it’s not my fault.”
“Yes, Mr. Jackson. We know.”
“I told her to pay you. She says she’s going to pay you real soon. But you know it’s not my fault, right?”
Bill: He really meant it, that it wasn’t his fault. But on the flip side, I don’t think he understood the depth of the problem, what happens when people like us don’t get paid, the lights getting turned off, the phone getting turned off. He didn’t understand that.
Javon: You can tell when somebody’s bullshitting you and when they’re being sincere, and he was being sincere in that it really was out of his control. But we were still upset. We wanted to grab him and say, “But it could be in your control. Why don’t you take control? Why aren’t you in charge of your own people?”
Bill: At one point, he said to me, “It’s done. They’re closing a big deal, and you guys are getting paid this week.” That deal came and went. No paycheck. He called me and said, “Bill, I’m sorry. You guys would have gotten paid, but there’s something about my balance with Greg’s firm was bigger than I thought it was, so it applied all that money to the bill.”
I thought, What the fuck? The lawyers work for you. How does that money not come to you first for you to make the decision about how you want to use those funds? Greg did a job and he expected to be paid. I understood that. But we were in the same position, and we were flat broke.
Michael Jackson was a billion-dollar enterprise, running 24/7, and there was nobody in charge. There was no organization, no actual company, just different people in different pockets all jockeying for different agendas. He didn’t even have an office. His office was wherever he stood at. His business phone was whatever phone you put in his hand. Didn’t have an email address. Most of his correspondence would go to Raymone. People would send her stuff and she’d overnight it to me wherever we were. Fans who knew who I was would even send mail to my house.
Mr. Jackson thought that Raymone was running an official office for his company in D.C. One day when I had to go and pick up a package from her and I pulled up in front of her address. It was a house. She was running his business out of her house. I heard him talking one day about how Raymone managed his office for him. I said, “Sir, Raymone doesn’t have an office.”
“Yes, she does. She runs my office in D.C.”
“No, Mr. Jackson. She lives in D.C. She works out of her house.”
“You mean I don’t have an office?”
Not only did he not have an office, he didn’t know that he didn’t have an office. That’s how disengaged he was from his own affairs.
Greg and Raymone were the two people that I had the most interaction with, but there were lots of other people: lawyers, accountants, flunkies, assistants. Some of these people had the authority to write and sign checks. There were people out there entering into agreements and signing contracts on his behalf. But who reported to whom, who was accountable for what, it was never clear. It never made any sense.
Part of it, I think, was misplaced trust. He trusted the wrong people, and he wanted to believe in them and they took advantage of him. But part of it was apathy. He was so beaten up by that point. He wanted to be with his kids, do his creative projects, and beyond that, he’d checked out of a lot of it. I’d been handling his correspondence for months at that point. Nothing went to him that didn’t go through me. So I know for a fact he wasn’t getting any monthly statements or financial reports or anything like that. He didn’t have a checkbook. He wasn’t sitting down with his accountants on any regular b
asis, keeping tabs on what was being done.
He’d been so rich his whole life that I don’t think he really grasped the idea that he could go broke. He just thought there would always be more. He always had cash on him. He had hundreds of thousands of dollars stashed away in that house in Vegas, in little hiding spots, and I knew he had some of that cash with him in Virginia. To him, that was real money, money he could put his hands on to get whatever he needed right then. And as long as he had that, it was like he didn’t think about the rest of it, all his investments and publishing rights, none of it. And I got the impression that his handlers knew that, that if they kept a couple hundred grand in easy reach for him, he would never pay too much mind to what was going on with the rest. And he didn’t.
I was driving him in D.C. one day, and he was on the phone with Peter Lopez. I could hear parts of their conversation, and I heard Mr. Jackson say, “Peter, I don’t know where my money is. Or how much money I have. Can you help me?”
The fact that those words could even come out of his mouth was terrifying to me. And by ignoring his financial problems and trusting others to handle them, he’d created all sorts of legal problems for himself, too. Michael Jackson was like flypaper for lawsuits. At any given time, there were hundreds of lawsuits pending against him, literally. Some of them were frivolous. Paternity suits from stalkers, that sort of thing. But a lot of these suits were serious, multimillion-dollar claims. With his business coming apart and nobody in charge, people weren’t getting paid. Deals were being reneged on.
There was a whole cast of characters. Former managers and associates who claimed they were part of this or that and they hadn’t been paid or they were owed a piece of something. People who’d worked on his albums and music videos, claiming they weren’t getting their royalty payments. It was one problem rolling over into the next. I’d get these legal documents FedExed to me for his signature, so I saw how much money was going out the door. He’d settle for a quarter million dollars, half a million dollars, whatever it took. People usually sue when they think they can get something. And everybody knew that if you sued Michael Jackson, you’d get a settlement. He’d challenge the frivolous ones, like the paternity nonsense. He’d get those thrown out. But if you had any kind of claim that could justify going to trial? He’d just pay you to go away, because after what he went through in 2005, he was never going to set foot in a courtroom again.
Javon: While we were in Virginia, we took him to depositions at Greg Cross’s office in D.C. We’d done several of them back in Vegas, and there were a couple he had to do here. He dreaded going.
These depositions were all-day marathons. They’d put him in the chair, and the opposing attorneys would grill him for hours. There’d be a team of Mr. Jackson’s guys in that room too, all of them billing him at hundreds of dollars an hour for hours on end. Usually they’d provide lunch at these things, because they kept you there for so long. They’d take a conference room and lay out a bunch of sandwiches and snacks and fruit. At one point, Greg came out and offered us some food, and me and Bill went up to this room to grab something to eat. We were going through, making our sandwiches and talking. “Man, how long is this going to be? I’m ready to get the hell up out of here.” Then we heard a sound from the back of the room. We looked over and it was Mr. Jackson. He said, “Hey, guys.”
“Oh, hey! Mr. Jackson!”
I was caught off guard. They’d just left him in this room, sitting by himself, like a little kid off in the corner. It was like he was on a time-out. I swear that’s exactly how it looked, like his lawyers had put him in the corner for a time-out. Then, once lunch was over, they took him back to the conference room, put him back in the chair, and grilled him some more.
When we got in the car to go home, he just went off. He vented to us the whole way home. “I’m so tired of all of this shit. I’m tired of it. I’m tired of giving depositions. These guys are asking me the same stupid questions over and over again. I just wanna go home to my kids.”
Bill: You could tell when it got to be too much for him. The insomnia would get worse. In Middleburg, we did patrols around the property at night. There were no streetlights, just the light from the houses. His house and our house were pretty much the only ones in the immediate area, so it was usually pitch black. This one particular night, I was on a patrol around two-thirty in the morning. It was practically a full moon, so there was more light than usual. I was driving the property, and I saw someone walking. Couldn’t tell who at first. He was wearing a green jacket with a hoodie and pajamas underneath. I was thinking maybe a neighbor, someone who lived in the area. I drove along behind him for a minute, and then I put on the portable spotlight on him. Didn’t even turn around. He just kept walking with his hands in his pockets. So I pulled up alongside him and said, “Hello?”
The guy looked up from under his hoodie, and I saw it was the boss. Took me by surprise. I said, “Hey. Mr. Jackson? Everything okay?”
“Yes, I’m fine.”
I said, “You want a ride?”
“No. I’m okay,” he said. “This is good for me.”
I wasn’t sure what to do. I was surprised, certainly. But he was acting normal, so I figured he was fine. I said, “Okay, sir. Good night.”
I turned off the light and dropped back and watched him, just kept an eye on him until he got back to the house.
Javon: He always used to say to us, “You guys don’t know how lucky you are.” Or, “You guys don’t know how good you have it.” In the beginning, we’d hear him say that and we’d think, Huh? You’re Michael Jackson. But over time we saw what he was talking about.
We were driving outside Middleburg one day, and the kids saw a playground. They got real excited. They wanted to go play, and they begged their daddy to stop the car and come play with them. We said we didn’t think it was secure; there were a few kids and parents in the area, and we didn’t have masks for the kids and someone might snap a picture. Mr. Jackson told us to go ahead. He said he’d wait in the car so his kids could play and no one would recognize them. So we took the children and they went and ran and played in the park. Mr. Jackson stayed in the backseat, watching them from inside the car.
Bill: When you’re a father and you see that? When you think about having to watch your kids from behind tinted windows while they go and play with strangers? I wouldn’t trade what I have with my daughter for that. I wouldn’t have switched places with him for all the money in the world.
Javon: We were Michael Jackson’s personal security team. We’re supposed to be these big, macho bruisers, right? Just be tough. Don’t show your emotions and this and that, but it was hard sometimes. It was hard not to feel the pain he was going through. If I never knew him, and I heard somebody on the radio saying that Michael Jackson was complaining about how he couldn’t go to a playground with his kids, I probably wouldn’t care. I’d probably think he just needed to get over himself. But it was different seeing it firsthand and knowing what he was talking about.
It would always be the littlest things, too, that you’d notice about his life. We were in D.C. one day and we had some time to kill between appointments, so he asked us to drive him around to look at the city. We went out to Georgetown and wound up stopped at a red light in front of this bar, this Irish pub type of place. It was happy hour, everybody getting off work. Mr. Jackson was watching the people going in and out of the bar, and he said, “One day, I’m gonna walk into one of these places and sit down and say, ‘Bartender, give me a beer!’ One day, I’m just gonna do it. I’m just gonna walk in and do it.”
He said it the same way a twelve-year-old kid would talk about growing up to be an astronaut. Like it was this impossible dream and someday he was going to get there. After he said it, Bill and I were like, “It’s no problem, sir. We’ll grab a beer with you. No reason you can’t. Your money says ‘In God We Trust’ just like everybody else’s. You want to loosen up, let’s go. We’ve got your back.”
We were
encouraging him. But he was too scared to go in. He said, “Those people in there won’t let me.”
Bill: He didn’t trust strangers. Whenever he got caught in a crowd, he’d be real frantic and nervous. We were at a shopping mall in Virginia one afternoon. Javon had gone to get the car. I was waiting with Mr. Jackson by the exit with mall security. Somebody had recognized him and a small crowd had formed. He was signing a few autographs, waving to folks. It was a friendly situation, not a mob or anything. As Javon pulled up and opened the door for Mr. Jackson, this guy from the back of the crowd yelled out, “Fuckin’ child molester!”
I heard it, plain as day. I looked at Javon; he’d heard it too. We were just praying that Mr. Jackson had missed it. But after we got in the car and drove for a bit, he leaned forward and said, “Guys, did you hear somebody say something back there?”
“No, sir,” I said. “I didn’t hear anything. You hear anything, Javon?”
Javon shook his head. “No, sir.”
Mr. Jackson said, “I thought I heard someone say something very mean. I could have sworn. You guys aren’t lying to me, are you?”
“No, sir.”
We didn’t want to lie to him, but we knew what would happen if we confirmed it. Hearing someone call him a child molester? That would completely shut him down. He’d close the door and vanish into his room for at least a week, and we didn’t want that to happen.
We drove on with nobody saying anything for the next ten, fifteen minutes, and then out of the backseat he said, “I would never hurt a child. I would slit my wrists before I ever did anything to hurt a child.”
For me, I never believed any of that about him. As a lifelong fan of the Jackson 5 and of him, I just didn’t believe it. Growing up, I related to that family. His siblings, his father, were very similar to what my family was. They just seemed like the typical black family that was making it out of the ghetto, which is what we were all trying to do back then. I think a lot of black families felt that way about the Jacksons. We identified with them.
Remember the Time: Protecting Michael Jackson in His Final Days Page 19