Remember the Time: Protecting Michael Jackson in His Final Days (21 page)

I stood there a moment, curious, thinking he was going to tell me what was in it. He didn’t. I didn’t want to pry, but I needed
a general idea of what I was going to be carrying. I asked him if it could be checked in at the airport. He said, “Oh no, you have to carry it with you at all times.”

The next day, I made the arrangements with Raymone and flew back to Vegas to start packing.

Javon:
The house was messed up. A lot of wear and tear. Crayons on the walls. You could tell Blanket had been busy with that. Mr. Jackson’s room was cluttered with fan mail, books. There were half-opened boxes everywhere, like they’d never really unpacked.

There wasn’t a lot of furniture to deal with; the house was furnished when he got there. But there was a lot of personal stuff from all his shopping trips. The library was the biggest hassle. There were so many damn books. Then there were all the little presents and cards that had been sent in by fans; there were boxes of that stuff. We had a good ten of us packing everything up; pulling up the wood floor in the studio; breaking down the kids’ trampoline in the back; unplugging all the equipment he had in the house, all the stuff that he’d bought at The Sharper Image. He loved that store. Gadgets, he loved gadgets.

When I went to pack up the kitchen, I opened up the pantry and that’s when I found the Tabasco sauce. A shitload of it. I stepped inside and there were just shelves and shelves of Tabasco sauce. There must have been a few hundred bottles in there, no lie. The green and the red. I couldn’t believe it. When I saw it, all I could think about was all the times we’d gone to the movies and forgot the Tabasco sauce, and how me and Bill would be running around like chickens with our heads cut off trying to find some. And he had crates of it in his pantry the whole time. Why would he not just bring it with him?

Bill:
I remember Javon calling me from across the house. “Bill! You ain’t gonna believe this!”

“What?”

“Just come to the kitchen.”

I went over and looked in the pantry, and the whole thing was nothing but hot sauce. You’d see things like that and it just made you stop and wonder.

Once the management company found out that Mr. Jackson wasn’t coming back to the house, they were pissed. That night, I got home and got a call from Raymone telling me that we had to have Mr. Jackson’s belongings out of the house by 5:00 p.m. the next day or he’d forfeit his fifty-thousand-dollar deposit. She said if we weren’t done on time, she’d be sure and tell Mr. Jackson that we were the reason the deposit was lost—like it was our fault this was all down to the wire. I knew we had to get back to that house the next morning and make it happen.

Javon:
There’s a place in Vegas called All Storage. It’s huge. We took the biggest units they had, car-sized units, big enough to put a mobile home in. That’s where we put the security trailer, the Bentley and the Rolls-Royce. It took us two days, all day, with a dozen or so guys, but we got it done. All told, we had five units worth of stuff. We were exhausted by the end.

Bill:
The silver briefcase, I retrieved that from his closet and kept it with me. It was heavy. I took it home, put it on the table in my living room. All night, I just kept looking at the thing. Mystery briefcase. Like out of the movies or something. I wanted to open it. I was dying to know what was inside. At the same time, I wanted no part of whatever it was. But if I was going to be going through airport security with this thing, crossing state lines, I decided I had to find out. I opened it.

Inside were two Academy Awards. At first, they just looked like generic Oscar statues; I’d never seen one up close. But then I looked more closely at them, and they both had
Gone with the Wind
on them. One was for Best Picture. I looked it up online.
Apparently, these two statues were the most valuable Oscars ever bought at auction; Mr. Jackson paid $1.5 million for them back in 1999. It’s in the
Guinness World Records
.

I sat there staring at these two things, like,
Damn
, I got a couple million dollars sitting on my coffee table. I didn’t sleep too well with that in my house. My brain kept turning over, wondering, What the hell does he want these for? The only reason I could think of was that they were collateral. The way he talked about the briefcase, he said he
needed
it, like he needed it “just in case.” His finances, something wasn’t right, and these statues were a hard asset. Why else would you need your
Gone with the Wind
Oscars with you at a horse farm in Virginia? I imagined I’d find out when I got back.

Raymone was supposed to make the arrangements for us to fly back to Virginia, but her office was not returning my calls. All I got was, “She’s not here. I’ll have her call you right back.” Then she’d never call. Two days went by like that. I called Mr. Jackson to tell him everything was wrapped up in Vegas, and we had a few conversations about Raymone’s security team. He sounded very concerned. He said, “Every time I’m outside with the kids, I hear them calling Raymone. I can tell that they’re reporting everything I do to her. I don’t like that. You know I don’t like that.” He said he felt that they were taking pictures of him. He said, “I don’t trust these guys. When are you going to be back here? You’re flying back, right?”

I said, “Yes, sir. I’m trying. But Raymone won’t return my calls.”

He told me to call Greg Cross, but I didn’t. I just didn’t like the sound in Mr. Jackson’s voice, him being so urgent about when I’d get back. I could hear it on the phone, his anxiety about having his kids surrounded by people he didn’t trust. When I was with him, if he said, “I need this,” boom, I could make it happen. But here I was, stuck in a situation where I could not make things happen. It was frustrating. So I just decided. I went to Javon and said, “You know what? We’re gonna do what we gotta do. We’re driving, man.”

Javon said, “Yo, I’m with you.”

We loaded up, hit the road. We took both SUVs, drove about sixteen hours a day. We’d get a motel room in whatever little town we were in, get up at 5:30 the next day and do it again. I never even told Mr. Jackson how we were getting back. I just told him that I would handle it. A day into the drive, I got a call from Raymone, being all apologetic. “Oh, sorry I couldn’t get back to you. We’ve been dealing with some financial matters. Let me give you an itinerary.” She started giving me all these details about flights. She didn’t know I was already on the road. I was just driving and saying, “Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Sounds good.”

I was done. Between the thing at the airport, bringing on all these new people, jerking me around about making plans to get back— I knew that us driving back like this, bringing Mr. Jackson’s vehicles, when she found out, it wasn’t going to be pretty. But we weren’t going to sit back and do nothing. So we got in the vehicles and we drove.

Part of it was our loyalty to Mr. Jackson, certainly. That was a huge motivating factor. But another part of it was that we just weren’t going to be treated like that. The safety and well-being of this man and his children, that was our responsibility. We had a professional responsibility, and we took that very seriously. So when she tried to push us aside, I just felt like . . . no. Uh-uh. I’m not going to let that happen. This is not where it ends.

11

Situated an hour west from Washington, D.C., Middleburg, Virginia, has long been a favorite retreat for the wealthy members of the East Coast elite. The rolling hills that surround the tiny village are dotted with idyllic farms and country estates. Its residents still enjoy rarefied sports like fox hunting and steeplechase. Promotional materials for the area proudly declare it “The Nation’s Horse and Hunt Capital.”

About a ten-minute drive outside of Middleburg sits the Goodstone Inn, where Michael Jackson had decided to spend his summer vacation. A former plantation, the Goodstone is a massive 640-acre estate of open pastures and forested walking trails bordered by a beautiful, winding creek. At the center of the complex is the plantation’s former carriage house, which now houses the inn’s restaurant and main offices. Radiating out across the property is a handful of historic homes and cottages, beautifully restored and converted into freestanding guest suites. The singer and his children were in the stately, four-bedroom Manor House, tucked away in the north corner of the complex.

For Michael Jackson, the best part of his new retreat was not the luxurious accommodations but the fact that he’d managed to disappear. When he left the Monte Cristo house, local papers reported that he’d moved into a different Vegas home. Other rumors spread that he was maybe somewhere on the East Coast. Random sightings were reported here and there in the D.C. area, but no
specifics about his location leaked out. He was completely off the map, which allowed him, finally, to relax and enjoy time with his family.

Bill:
We hit Middleburg around eleven-thirty at night. Normally, I wouldn’t call Mr. Jackson that late, but I called him and told him that we’d arrived. He said, “You’re back? Great. How was your flight?”

I said, “We didn’t fly, sir. We drove back, and we brought your vehicles.”

“You
drove
back?! Wow. That is so great.”

Javon:
The next morning, we went over to the main house. We drove up and Raymone’s security team was sitting outside in their trucks. When they saw Bill and me, they were clearly not happy. We went into Mr. Jackson’s house. He called the kids into the room and said, “Look who’s back!”

The kids all ran over and gave me and Bill big hugs, saying, “Welcome back, Javon! We missed you!”

“I missed you guys too!” I said. And I really had. I’d been worried about them.

Bill:
We’d brought the kids a lot of their favorite toys, some of the boys’ action figures, some of Paris’s dolls. So they were excited about that. I had the silver briefcase with me. That was the first order of business I wanted to take care of. All morning, I’d been thinking he was going to be really excited about getting it, but when I handed it to him, he acted like it was nothing. He just put it down, off to the side, like it was no big deal. He didn’t even check to see if the contents of the case were inside.

We talked about the trip. I told him how I’d decided to drive when I hadn’t heard from Raymone. That set him off. “These guys tell her everything,” he said. “I had them take me to the magazine
store and they were on the phone telling her my every move.”

Now that we were back with Mr. Jackson’s vehicles, he suggested that we didn’t need Raymone’s people anymore. He said, “Tell her they’re dismissed.”

I didn’t want to have that conversation with her. I really didn’t. I knew she was going to be furious about my upsetting her arrangement here. So when he asked me to do that, I kind of hesitated. He said, “You want me to tell her?”

“I’d prefer that, sir.”

“Okay, I’ll tell her.”

Javon:
We watched as her guys left the house. Those dudes walked off with an attitude; I tried to chat with them, but they wouldn’t speak to me. They went down and packed up the house they were staying in and left. Then me and Bill moved over to that house, and we went back to work. Simple as that.

Bill:
The Fourth of July celebration was just a few days away. There were fireworks stands on the side of the road, all throughout the county. Mr. Jackson was really excited about buying some, and he sent me out to get a bunch. I went and bought about five-hundred dollars’ worth. On the night of the Fourth and for several nights after, we’d see Mr. Jackson and the kids out in the fields after dark, setting off firecrackers and bottle rockets and Roman candles. We’d watch them from our house down the way.

Javon:
Most days, they didn’t do much. The kids would play outside in these big, open fields, and Mr. Jackson was taking it easy inside. We ate most of our meals in the restaurant, spent our mornings and afternoons patrolling the area, keeping everything straight, running errands or planning details whenever he wanted to go somewhere.

Bill:
The people at the Goodstone gave us a list of activities and points of interest in the area, things to do with the kids. There were several Civil War battlefields nearby that offered tours. We weren’t too far from Hersheypark, the amusement park in southern Pennsylvania. That was on the list along with a few other things, including a hot-air balloon ride. When I first saw the list, I figured the balloon ride was the last thing in the world that Michael Jackson was going to want to do. Turned out, it was the first thing he picked. He called and said he wanted to take the kids up in the hot-air balloon. I couldn’t believe it. I turned to Javon and said, “Hot-air balloon? He knows brothers don’t do that, right?”

Javon:
Bill let it be known he wasn’t going up in any hot-air balloon. I said, “I ain’t going up there neither. No way. Nuh-uh.” Neither of us wanted to do it, but one of us was supposed to be with Mr. Jackson at all times. So the whole time leading up to the trip we were thinking, Who’s it going to be? One of us was going to have to submit.

Bill:
We had to leave the house at five-thirty in the morning to get to the launch site by six-thirty. It was a husband-and-wife team operating the balloon ride. Per usual, they didn’t know who they were going to be taking. They thought it was just going to be a family of regular tourists. We arrived and they went through the whole drill, telling the kids about how the balloon worked, safety precautions, that sort of thing. There was a little breakfast spread arranged for them before the ride started.