Remember the Time: Protecting Michael Jackson in His Final Days (25 page)

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.”

He got
real
nervous. He said, “Bill, don’t do that. You can’t do that.” He said it with a sense of anxiety, like he thought we were actually thinking of leaving. He said, “You guys just hang in there. I’ll make sure you get paid.” It was quiet in the car for a few minutes, and then he started up again. “How
dare
she?! How
dare
she tell you to leave me and my kids?!” I watched him in the rearview mirror, shaking his head. He was livid.

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.”

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 basis, 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.