Remember the Time: Protecting Michael Jackson in His Final Days (26 page)

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.

That started to change a little after
Thriller
. You still loved Michael, but he was on a level now where you couldn’t identify
with him as much. You started to see him doing all these things. Odd things. He’s hanging out with Webster. He’s hanging out with Brooke Shields. Dude’s got a monkey. You knew that he was different, but I never thought he was different in a way that he would do anything to hurt a child. I never believed it the first time. I didn’t believe it the second time. But by the time that second accusation and the trial came about? It didn’t matter what you believed anymore. In the court of public opinion, it was already decided. He was looked upon as a freak, a weirdo.

Javon:
If you were an up-and-coming comedian and you needed some easy material, you just mentioned Mr. Jackson’s name and little kids and you’d get the first five rows to laugh, for sure. People didn’t realize just how sensitive he was about that sort of thing.

Growing up in South Central, I would have laughed at those jokes same as everyone. I wasn’t part of that same generation as Bill, where people had more reverence for the Jacksons. I was more of the hip-hop generation. We loved Mr. Jackson’s music, but we only knew him as this eccentric rock star. You loved his songs, but you’d laugh right along when it came to his personal life. But now? When I heard stand-up comedians joking about the boss, it wasn’t funny anymore. It made me angry. It was like hearing someone passing jokes about your friend or your mom.

Bill:
Javon was quick to get angry, quick to want to lash out. We caught a clip of Katt Williams making fun of Mr. Jackson one time, and Javon started yelling at the TV. He said, “If I ever see Katt Williams, I’m gonna slap the taste out his mouth for talking shit about the boss.” And that day at the mall in Virginia, when the guy yelled out “child molester”? The second it happened, Javon was in my ear on the two-way radio. “I can see the guy who said it. I see him. You want me to take him out?”

I had to say, “No, Javon.”

He was serious. And it was frustrating. That perception of him that people had was something beyond our control. It’s like with Friend and Flower. With anybody else, if you heard stories about a guy sneaking into hotels with hot European models, you wouldn’t even ask what that was about. But because it’s Michael Jackson, people still want to believe it’s something weird. But that’s not what I saw. What I saw was that beneath all the eccentric behavior, there was a regular guy desperate to get out and be a regular guy. Once you were around him on a personal level, you realized that all those rumors and allegations, it just wasn’t possible. As a father, if I ever thought he’d done anything harmful to a child, I’d have kicked his ass myself.

Javon:
Your perspective changed completely once you knew him up close. It was the same with his relationship with his own kids. The question we always get is, “Blanket looks more like him than Prince and Paris. Do you think they’re all his?” And when we first started working there, we’d ask ourselves a lot of the same questions. “What’s the deal? Are those really his kids?” But once you spent time with them, and you saw the way he was with them, you just stopped thinking about it. Those were his kids. He was their father. They were a family, end of story.

Bill:
Every day, all over the world, couples use surrogate mothers, donor eggs, frozen embryos. People go to all different lengths to have families, and nobody questions the legitimacy of those families. Nobody points a finger at those families and says, “Those aren’t really your kids.” But with Michael Jackson, people questioned his right even to be a parent. But from everything I saw, they were a better, more loving family than a lot of families I’ve seen. There’s really nothing else to say.

On one of the weekends that we took the kids to D.C., we decided to stay overnight at the Four Seasons rather than drive
back out to Middleburg. Mr. Jackson called me and said the kids wanted to go in the pool. So I contacted management and they agreed to close the pool for a couple hours so that Mr. Jackson could use it. Following protocol, we did a sweep to make sure the area was secure. There were three hotel security cameras around the pool. We went through and made sure all of them were unplugged and disconnected. Then we escorted Mr. Jackson and the little ones from their room and led them down a back staircase. The kids had their bathing suits, flip-flops, and flotation devices. Grace was with us too.

We got to the pool. Prince and Paris jumped right in; they knew how to swim. Blanket was waiting for Grace to blow up his floaties so he could get in too. While the kids swam, Mr. Jackson was walking around. He was singing, lost in a tune in his head. There was something about him that seemed a little odd. He seemed a little more excited than normal, a little more upbeat. He started out singing low, just humming a little bit. Then he was tapping out a little percussion and singing louder. I looked at Javon. Javon looked at me. We figured he was in his comfort zone and doing his thing. I left to make a pass through the locker room and the exercise room, just to make sure they were still empty and no one had accidentally walked in.