Remember the Time: Protecting Michael Jackson in His Final Days (27 page)

Javon:
Everything was fine until all of a sudden Mr. Jackson looked up and saw one of these security cameras. He completely lost his mind. He started yelling. “I told you guys about this! I fucking told you!” It was like something in him snapped. He ran over to this camera and he jumped up and grabbed it and started yanking on it, like he was trying to tear the thing down.

Bill:
I heard Grace screaming, “
Bill! Bill!
” and I came running around the corner. Mr. Jackson was literally halfway up the wall, hanging off this camera, jerking it and pulling on it. I ran over toward him, yelling, “Mr. Jackson! It’s disconnected! It’s not on! It doesn’t work!”

“I don’t care! I don’t care!”

He’d torn the bracket loose and this camera was only hanging by a few wires, and he jumped up one more time and gave it one more snatch and he just ripped the whole thing right out of the wall. Just ripped it out with his bare hands and then took it and hurled it down and smashed it on the floor. He was yelling at it, screaming, “
I hate you! I hate you!
”

I ran over to him. He looked up at me. His eyes were bloodshot red. There was blood on his hands, deep lacerations in his fingers from where these metal wires had cut into him. He started screaming at me. “You guys have to watch for this! You guys have to take care of this! These are my children! I don’t want people taking pictures of my children!”

I tried explaining again about the camera being off. Nothing I said mattered. It really freaked me out, the way he was acting. My immediate thought was that maybe he was on something. His demeanor was very different from anything I had ever seen before. This was new to me, and kind of scary.

Javon:
Everybody got quiet and shut up. We were speechless. We didn’t know what to do, how to respond, how to handle it. He eventually calmed down and decided to stay at the pool. Bill went and brought the first-aid kit down to get some gauze and peroxide and a Band-Aid for his hand. The hotel ended up charging him eight thousand dollars for the camera.

We felt bad at times like that. We actually felt bad a lot of the time. Because it was our job to protect him, but we couldn’t protect him from the things that had already happened, the things that had already hurt him.

Bill:
There was this one night he called me while we were in Virginia. Earlier in the evening, he’d asked me to bring him a bottle of wine. I’d brought it up to his room, and that was pretty much the last
thing I did for him before I turned in. Then, around three in the morning, my phone rang. It was Mr. Jackson’s room number on the caller ID. I answered it, thinking there might be some kind of emergency. He said, “Bill, are you asleep? I hope I didn’t wake you.”

“I’m fine, sir. Is everything okay?”

He said he was just calling to talk, so we talked. About his kids, about Raymone. He said, “Sometimes I just get sick of it.”

“What’s that, sir?”

“All of it,” he said. He sounded like he was trying not to cry, like he was choking back tears. “Why can’t people just leave me alone? I’m not a circus act. I’m not an animal at the zoo. I just want to be left alone. Why can’t people understand that?”

It wasn’t really a back and forth kind of conversation. He spoke. I listened. A lot of the things he was saying, I didn’t really have responses to. I’d never dealt with most of the things he was dealing with, so I wasn’t going to sit there on the phone and pretend that I could relate to him on that level. And I knew he wasn’t really calling me to get my thoughts and opinions on any of it. He was calling to vent.

“I just want my kids to have a better life than me,” he said. “I never want them to go through what I had to go through. How would you guys feel if your kids asked you for something and you had to send someone out to get it? I appreciate what you guys do for my kids, but
I’m
their father. I should be the one doing those things, but I can’t just get in the car and go. There are so many things I can’t do for them because those people out there won’t let me. You have no idea how that feels. You really don’t. I just wanna live my life with my kids.”

I said, “I understand, sir. You deserve that.”

I can still remember standing there in my room, looking at myself in the mirror and not really believing that this was happening, that I was listening to Michael Jackson unburden himself to me on the phone. It was hard for me to hold back my emotions. It
was a good thing we were on the phone, otherwise he’d have seen his security having a weak moment.

I was just feeling the weight of everything he was going through. By that point, guarding him had become my life. I wasn’t in Virginia because I wanted to be in Virginia. I was there because he was there. If he wanted to go to Maryland tomorrow, we’d go to Maryland tomorrow. I went where he went. His reality had become my reality. And I can’t say that it was a pleasant ride, his life. It was not fun. We had fun moments, but it was not fun. It was not joyful. There was a lot of turmoil, a lot of tug of war. The constant anxiety. Never knowing who to trust.

The fact that he was calling his security guard at three in the morning says a lot about it. If he was calling me, then he really had no one else to call. Javon and I felt that, too: the isolation. He and I could at least talk to each other, share our frustrations. But we couldn’t talk to our families, to our friends. We had to make excuses about why we weren’t getting paid. Everything had to be locked up, kept secret. You carry that stuff around inside you and it just eats at you. So when he was talking about how he was sick of it, I understood where he was coming from. I’d only been living like this for seven, eight months, and it was already wearing me down. He’d been doing it since he was ten years old.

We talked a little while longer. He kept apologizing for having called. He said, “I don’t mean to bother you with this, Bill. I’m sorry. I’m really sorry.”

“It’s okay, sir.”

“Thank you. I’m going to go to sleep now. Good night.”

13

By the end of August, Michael Jackson’s handlers were engaged in a frantic, behind-the-scenes effort to stabilize his finances, and Jackson himself was busy leaving Virginia for New York. Raymone Bain had arranged for the singer to do photo shoots for two different magazines, Italian
Vogue
and
Ebony
; the
Ebony
shoot was to be part of a cover feature to commemorate
Thriller
’s upcoming twenty-fifth anniversary.

For his time in the New York area, Jackson decided to stay at the New Jersey home of his close friends Dominic and Connie Cascio. Dominic first met Michael Jackson in the early 1980s, when the singer was a regular guest at Manhattan’s Helmsley Palace Hotel, where Cascio worked as general manager. The two became friends, and soon the singer was a regular visitor at the Cascio home, dropping in whenever he made appearances in the city. He also invited the Cascios and their children out to Neverland for Christmas and other holidays. Frank Cascio, the family’s eldest son, grew up to work as Jackson’s personal assistant in the late 1990s. The second-oldest, Eddie “Angel” Cascio, encouraged by Jackson to pursue a career in music, had become a record producer; he’d built his own recording studio in the family rec room in the basement.

When Jackson arrived in the fall of 2007, the family added a dance floor to the studio and curtained off a corner of it to serve as the singer’s bedroom; Prince, Paris, and Blanket took the guest bedrooms upstairs. Being at the Cascios offered Jackson something he
had nowhere else: a window onto a normal life. Over the years, their home had become one of his favorite retreats, one of the few places he could truly be himself.

Bill:
Late August, I got a call from Raymone telling me she’d rented a luxury van with a driver to take Mr. Jackson and the kids to New York. Javon and I would follow them up in the SUVs, and the two of us would be staying at a hotel about a mile or so from the Cascios. Grace wasn’t with us. She met us later in New Jersey. The teacher met us there too. Summer vacation was over, and it was time to start school again.

Before we left, we had to pack up the house in Virginia. All of this movie equipment he’d bought. At least four- or five-thousand dollars’ worth of books. That giant
Simpsons Movie
display. We packed all that up and put it in a storage unit. Michael Jackson had things in storage all over the world. He had stuff in London, stuff in California. He had four airplane hangars in New Jersey full of props from his short films and live shows. There were the units we packed up for him in Vegas, now Virginia. He’d just buy too much stuff. I guarantee you, there are still people with stashes of Michael Jackson’s belongings all over the world, because he would just buy stuff here and there and then leave it.

When we got to Jersey, there was no word on how long we were going to be there, if we were headed back to Vegas, nothing. But by that point, it had just become our routine. This is where we’re going today. Tomorrow, whatever.

Javon:
The Cascios lived in this little town called Franklin Lakes, right off Route 4. Just your typical suburban family house. They were real warm, real nice. We’d met Angel before, in Vegas, but this was our first time meeting the whole family. We brought the kids and Mr. Jackson in, unloaded the little bit of luggage they’d brought.
Mrs. Cascio offered us a meal. We declined. Mr. Jackson said that he’d be fine alone at the house, so we went on to our hotel.

Bill:
There was this one night before we left Virginia, late, maybe around two-thirty in the morning, I saw two cars drive up to the house where Grace was staying. It seemed odd, so I jumped into one of the trucks and drove over. By the time I got there, I could see people walking into the house. I called Grace and said, “Grace, what’s up?”

She said, “Nothing.”

“Everything cool?”

“Everything’s fine. Why?”

“I see a couple cars here.”

“Oh, I have some friends coming through.”

She sounded a little defensive, but I didn’t press it. The next morning, Javon and I were eating breakfast in the restaurant, and I saw this tall, white dude in there, eating by himself. I’d never seen him before. He looked out of place. Didn’t really look like a guy who’d be on vacation out in horse country. I just made a mental note of it.

Couple weeks later, when we got to New Jersey, Mr. Jackson came to me and said he knew we’d been under a lot of strain lately, and Raymone had suggested bringing on a third team member, this guy named Mike LaPerruque. He used to work as security at Neverland. Mr. Jackson said it wasn’t going to be like those other guys in Virginia. He said, “Mike’s not coming to take over. He’s coming to help you. He used to work for me and he knows how I like things.”

I didn’t think we needed it, but if it’s what Mr. Jackson wanted, okay. I said, “No problem, sir.”

When this Mike LaPerruque guy got in, he called me and said he’d like to meet. So I went to go meet him for breakfast, and he walks in and damn if he’s not the same tall, out-of-place-lookin’
white dude I’d seen hanging around the Goodstone Inn. I didn’t tell him that I’d seen him in Virginia, and he didn’t mention that he was in Virginia, but I knew it was him.

What I later pieced together after talking to Mr. Jackson was that, unbeknownst to myself and Javon, Raymone had been waging a verbal assault against us since the day we pushed her security guys out. Mr. Jackson said that she was constantly in his ear, telling him that he couldn’t trust us, and she had brought Mike LaPerruque out to Virginia that night to meet with Mr. Jackson. She wanted to convince him to get rid of us and bring this guy back on as head of security, overseeing her team of guys. Mr. Jackson said he told her no. But he did think it was a good idea to bring Mike on to have an extra set of hands around.

Once we started working together, I could tell this guy had been told a lot of stuff about Javon and me. He talked as though he was there to fix things. If he was there to fix things, then someone must have told him that things were broken, and again that had to be Raymone. If he was there to spy on us, he wasn’t very subtle about it. He would say things like, “You know, managers are so important. They need to know when the client is doing certain things so they can keep it out of the media.”

Whatever. I’d tolerate the guy if Mr. Jackson insisted on it, but this whole time, we still hadn’t been paid. How Raymone explained hiring a third man when she couldn’t pay the first two, how she could pay to fly him out to Virginia while Mr. Jackson’s money was “tied up,” your guess is as good as mine. In the meantime, Javon and I were still living off our per diem.

Javon:
Then the per diem got cut off. Three days after we checked into the hotel in New Jersey, it just stopped coming. We called Raymone and said, “What’s going on? How do you expect us to eat?”

She said, “Don’t worry about it. If you need anything, just charge it to the room.”

But we weren’t in some extravagant hotel with room service. It was more like a Marriott Courtyard–type hotel. The only food they had was soup and sandwiches. That’s it. That’s all we had to eat every day, soup and sandwiches and cold cereal for breakfast.

Without the per diem, we didn’t even have petty cash on hand to do our jobs right. We used to take the trucks to get them professionally washed and detailed every week. Didn’t have money for that anymore. We started going to those little do-it-yourself car washes where you pump in a bunch of quarters and wash and dry the car yourself. Some weeks, we couldn’t even do that. Mr. Jackson and the kids would get in the car and there’d be dirt and food crumbs in the seats. We couldn’t get our suits cleaned and pressed, either.