Remember the Time: Protecting Michael Jackson in His Final Days (11 page)

When you pull in to the complex, they have a guardhouse right at the front. I was used to giving Ms. Grace’s information to the guard. Then Ms. Raymone started giving her own apartment information, and pretty soon they were just waving her through. They knew her on a first-name basis. “Hey! How was your day, Ms. Raymone?” Everyone knew her, even the valets.

Bill:
Having contacts here in Vegas, I can usually get certain kinds of information when I need to. So I looked into it. Both of them, Grace and Raymone, had apartments in Turnberry Towers, but Mr. Jackson didn’t seem to know anything about it. He always talked like Raymone was still staying at the Marriott. He’d say, “Go pick up Raymone from the hotel.” Stuff like that.

I didn’t say anything to him at the time. I never felt comfortable going over those boundaries. His relationship with his manager? That was way above my pay grade. You don’t go to Michael Jackson after two months on the job and start giving him advice on how he handles his affairs. But if things were this messed up down at our level, if there was all this drama with simple things like payroll or sending Javon to run errands, you could only speculate about what was going on at the top of the organization, at the billion-dollar level, where all his record deals and financial affairs were being managed. How was that being handled? You wondered.

It hadn’t always been like this. That’s one of the things Grace and I would talk about. She told me how well things used to run. At Neverland, back in the day, it ran like a machine, like a real corporate business. Everybody was paid on time. People knew their place, played their position, and that was that. There wasn’t all this jockeying for control, because people knew who was in control. Michael Jackson was in control. Those days were over.

It was that trial. That trial destroyed everything, destroyed him. You could see it. He became very vulnerable, exposed. He got
a lot of death threats. Like, a lot. He was terrified. He trusted no one. The fear and the paranoia consumed him.

It started in the early 1990s, the first time he was accused of child molestation. Things started to unravel then. But the second time he got accused? He was here in Vegas when it happened, staying at the Mirage the day the sheriff’s department turned Neverland upside down looking for evidence. Grace told me, “Bill, they destroyed that house.” Mr. Jackson saw it, too. He went back after they raided it. He went back, once, saw what they’d done, and then he just turned around and left. After they destroyed Neverland, he was never the same person again.

Javon:
I’d actually been to Neverland, as a kid. I went with my church when I was fourteen years old. We had a program called Teen Fellowship, and Mr. Jackson would invite groups like ours to come and ride the rides and play with the animals and such. He actually wasn’t there the time I visited, but one of his staff members gave us a tour of the house and the property.

I remember you had to get on a train to even get on the estate. You parked a few miles away and then you’d ride the train up. It was beautiful. We went to the zoo. He had monkeys. He had flamingos. He had a pond with all these exotic fish in it. I can remember riding the carousel and the mini roller coaster. He had the teacups where you spin and turn. There was unlimited ice cream and candy and popcorn, too. The vending machines didn’t take money. You just picked whatever you wanted. No charge. It was real nice. It was a blast. We loved it.

Bill:
My only trip to Neverland was that March. There were some things Mr. Jackson wanted, some pictures, a few personal items, so he sent me to pick them up. The house had been abandoned for a while. The only person there was a security guard stationed at the entrance. I drove out and he let me in.

I got there at night, so I couldn’t see much, but you could tell that it was not being maintained. All the carnival rides just sitting there. Whole place dead quiet. Nothing lit up. No animals in the zoo. All the plants and trees overgrown. There was a lake near the house, a little pond, and it was dirty, real dirty, filled with algae.

The inside of the house looked ransacked. After the sheriffs went through there, nothing was ever put back into place. Drawers left open, boxes overturned, everything covered with dust. It was eerie.

I didn’t stay long. I didn’t want to be there. The whole time I kept thinking about what the guard told me at the gate on the way in. “Be careful,” he said. “There’s snakes.”

“Snakes?”

“Yeah. Rattlesnakes. Lots of ’em.”

PART TWO

WHY DON’T THEY JUST LEAVE ME ALONE?

7

In August 1968, the Jackson 5 made their industry debut at a private Beverly Hills party hosted by Diana Ross. Motown’s PR department issued a press release heralding the band’s arrival in L.A. In order to up the boys’ cuteness factor with teenage fans, the announcement deliberately shaved two years off the age of each member of the group. Michael was ten years old at the time, just three weeks shy of turning eleven. Motown’s press release said he was eight. The first thing America thought it knew about Michael Jackson was a lie.

From that very young age, Jackson learned how the public’s fascination with celebrity could be exploited to fuel commercial success. For a time, he embraced his fame and happily used it to reach the top. Starting with a single white glove, Michael Jackson the man carefully crafted the public spectacle known as the King of Pop. He studied magicians and the way they manipulated audiences, using the buildup of mystery to create big, jaw-dropping revelations. He studied the lives of iconoclasts like reclusive filmmaker Howard Hughes and circus impresario P. T. Barnum. After
Thriller
, Jackson gave his handlers copies of Barnum’s autobiography, telling them that he wanted his career to be the greatest show on Earth. Pretty soon, it was. In February 1993, to promote his
Dangerous
album, Jackson opened the gates of Neverland to television crews for the first time, granting a tour and interview to Oprah Winfrey. The singer discussed his personal relationships, his use of plastic surgery, and
the skin condition he suffered from, vitiligo, which had caused the lightening of his appearance in recent years. Over 90 million viewers tuned in.

Six months later, Jackson lost control of his public image and never got it back. That August, during the Asian leg of the world tour for
Dangerous
, British tabloids broke the news that the Los Angeles police department had launched an investigation based on allegations that he had molested a thirteen-year-old boy, Jordan Chandler. In the days that followed, Jackson collapsed backstage before a concert in Singapore. Citing a variety of health reasons, he began canceling performances.

Raised a devout Jehovah’s Witness, as a young man Jackson famously did not drink, smoke, or even curse. In 1984, while he was filming a Pepsi commercial, a pyrotechnic mishap set his hair on fire, causing second-degree burns to his scalp and nerve damage that left him in considerable pain. He started taking prescription painkillers and, in the years that followed, began using them with increasing frequency. The Chandler scandal pushed him over the edge. In November, Jackson canceled the remainder of his tour, checked into a London rehab facility, and issued a press release acknowledging his addiction to prescription pain medication. But rehab offered only a brief escape. Released the following month, Jackson was forced to undergo a strip search conducted by investigators looking for alleged “identifying marks” on his genitals that had been described by his accuser.

Jackson was humiliated, and the press gleefully reported his humiliation in every detail. The same revolution in broadcast technology that fueled Jackson’s meteoric rise on MTV had turned on him with a vengeance. The rise of twenty-four-hour cable news outlets fused the tabloid media and mainstream journalism together into a new industry built on a never-ending stream of sensational “infotainment.” The circus surrounding Jackson’s legal troubles—and, shortly thereafter, the murder trial of O. J. Simpson—set a template for the
obsessive, wall-to-wall coverage of celebrity scandal that has now, in the age of the Internet, become routine.

In 1994,
GQ
magazine published an article titled “Was Michael Jackson Framed?” that reported the results of an exhaustive investigation into the charges leveled against the singer. Reporters found that Jordan Chandler’s father, Evan, had made attempts to extort Jackson prior to going to the police. Also, the statements Jordan made about Jackson were only given after much prodding from his father and under the influence of a powerful sedative. Evan Chandler, a dentist, had given his son a dose of sodium amytal before having him interviewed; patients under the influence of the drug are highly suggestible. Prior to that interview, Jordan had always insisted that Jackson had done nothing wrong.

But
GQ
’s debunking of the allegations didn’t make for the same sensational headlines as the allegations themselves, and Jackson’s decision to settle the case out of court was perceived as an admission of guilt. Almost a decade later, in a misguided attempt to repair his reputation, Jackson gave British journalist Martin Bashir an all-access pass to film the now notorious documentary
Living with Michael Jackson
. Far from rehabilitating the singer’s image, Bashir’s report focused heavily on the singer’s relationship with thirteen-year-old Gavin Arvizo, a cancer patient whom Jackson had befriended and helped through treatment. The film sparked a new investigation by Tom Sneddon, the district attorney for Santa Barbara, and led, ultimately, to fresh accusations from the Arvizo family that Jackson had molested their son and had gone so far as to imprison them at Neverland to protect his secret—outlandish claims that directly contradicted previous public statements, all positive, that the family had made about their relationship with the singer.

When the Arvizo case went to trial in January 2005, it created a media firestorm unlike anything America had ever seen. Over 2,200 credentialed media descended on the tiny California town of Santa Maria, forming a twenty-four-hour encampment around the county
courthouse. During each day’s testimony, journalists reported every lurid and sensational claim about the singer, consistently failing to communicate that those same allegations were being routinely discredited by Jackson’s attorney on cross examination. The public’s perception of the trial bore almost no resemblance to what was transpiring inside, where it was gradually revealed that the prosecution’s case rested on little more than the uncorroborated testimony of one family—a family whose own motives came under suspicion and whose members repeatedly contradicted their own statements under oath. But the media coverage was so slanted that when the jury voted unanimously to acquit, the verdict was seen by many as a travesty of justice rather than the vindication of a man wrongly accused.

On the day they began working for him, Bill Whitfield’s and Javon Beard’s understanding of Michael Jackson was no different than that of most people. They were in awe of his celebrity, but after a lifelong barrage of gossip and innuendo about the singer’s personal life, those feelings of deference came with nagging questions. Who was this person they’d signed up to protect? Who was Michael Jackson, really? After three months on the job, that hadn’t changed. The new security team had learned much about Jackson’s world but very little about the man himself. They stayed at their post outside the house while Jackson, for the most part, remained a mysterious presence inside. Then, in April, Jackson made a change to his inner circle. The move would fundamentally alter Whitfield’s and Beard’s relationship to their new employer and allow them to see, up close and unfiltered, the real man behind the media hype.

Bill:
Late February, one Saturday night, we took Mr. Jackson and the kids to dinner and then to see Lance Burton, a magician who performs at the Monte Carlo. After the show, the family went backstage to meet Burton, and as we were leaving through the side door of the theater, there were three quick flashes. Boom, boom, boom!
This photographer snapped three quick pictures and then took off down Las Vegas Boulevard. Kids didn’t have on their masks or anything. Mr. Jackson freaked out. “He has pictures of the kids! Get him! Get him!”

Feldman turned to me and said, “Bill,
go
!”

I ran. Las Vegas Boulevard on Saturday night is packed with tourists. I was chasing this guy through all these people. I ran maybe three blocks and caught up to him and grabbed him from behind. It was a scene. People were stopping and watching. I grabbed his arm, wrested the camera out of his hand. Then I ran back to the car and gave Feldman the camera. I never saw what was on it. Mr. Jackson was so relieved. He kept saying, “Oh, thank God.” That was his biggest fear: exposing the kids to the press.

I thought that was the end of it. Then about two weeks later, I was at home, sitting in the living room with my daughter. There was a knock at the door. We weren’t expecting anybody. We looked at each other like, Who the hell is that? I’ve got cameras around my house, one on the front door. I turned and looked at the monitor and I could see these two dudes with a third dude standing in the background. Having been in law enforcement, I knew. They were cops. Plainclothes, but I could tell. I answered the door.

“Mr. Whitfield?”

“Yes, sir.”

“I’m Detective So-and-so and this is Detective So-and-so. We’re from the Las Vegas Metro Robbery Division. Do you work for Michael Jackson?”

“Yes, I do.”

“We are subpoenaing you to appear before a grand jury. You’ve been identified as someone that robbed a man of his camera.”