Remember the Time: Protecting Michael Jackson in His Final Days (34 page)

Bill
: They never set up the security trailer at the new house. The word was always, “He’s not going to be here that long.” Now, was I being told that because he really wasn’t going to be there that long or because they didn’t want us around? Were people trying to push us away? I would call Peter Lopez and ask, “What’s going on? What’s my job now? Do I still have a job?”

Peter would say, “Don’t worry, Bill. He loves you guys. Everything’s fine. There’s a lot going on right now, a lot of changes happening, but you guys are fine.”

I took a wait-and-see kind of attitude, but things were definitely different. All the faxes and emails I’d been getting? More and more, those documents weren’t coming at me anymore. A lot of that was now going to Michael Amir. Mr. Jackson and I never had a conversation about it. It was just that one day I was doing all that stuff, then it started to taper off, then all of a sudden I wasn’t doing it at all.

Michael Amir had become the new Feldman, and I was fine with that. I preferred it that way—I really did. I was cool with not being that dude. We’ve all had bosses that get on our nerves. Michael Jackson was my boss, and some days he got on my nerves. It was all the little things, the tedious stuff. The phone calls. “I want this.” “I need this.” “Find me a Ferris wheel.” I didn’t want to deal with his lawyers and managers anymore, either, all the politics and the backstabbing. If somebody else wanted to step up and do all that? Cool. Take it. Call me when you need me for security. If I got a call from Greg Cross or someone saying they needed to send or fax something, I’d just say, “Hold on. Let me get you Michael Amir’s number.” I wasn’t dealing with any of that anymore.

The mood wasn’t the same. The fans didn’t come back at this new house, and they’d been such a big part of what kept his spirits up. There were a few that came by from time to time, but not in the same numbers, not the way they did at the Monte Cristo house. This new area, this location, it wasn’t private. There was no strip of property outside the gate for them to camp out on. You also couldn’t have fans hanging out all day in front of an elementary school.

A lot of the fans didn’t even know where he’d moved. Since Raymone was gone, she wasn’t sending along any of the fan mail. And her address was the only one that a lot of the fans had. I didn’t know where the fan mail was going. There was no office. It was just getting lost, I guess. Some of the fans who knew me would reach out to me. They were hearing things about him doing a show. I didn’t
have much information to give them. They’d send me cards and ask me to pass them along. They’d say, “Tell him we miss him. Tell him we love him.”

I was also getting a lot of questions about the
Thriller 25
album. The anniversary of the actual release date had come and gone back at the end of November. All sorts of stuff had been planned, TV specials, appearances. None of it had happened because he wasn’t cool with it. As far as he was concerned, that album was perfect. You don’t go back and add hip-hop beats to
Thriller
. It’s a classic, and you don’t touch it. But they told him he had to.

Javon
: Sony had told him to get in the studio with some of these younger artists and do these remixes to make himself new and hip again. But he didn’t do it with enthusiasm. You could tell that. That’s why it was so down to the last minute with those sessions at the Palms. He kept putting it off and putting it off, and the remixes kept taking longer and longer to finish. The whole month we were at the Palms, Mr. Jackson basically never left the hotel because he was working with will.i.am in the studio the entire time. Me and Bill spent most of our time in the lobby of the studio with will.i.am’s security, keeping an eye on them while they were in there working.

Bill
: It wasn’t until after the album came out that Javon and I learned that Mr. Jackson had thanked us in the liner notes. He didn’t tell us he was going to do that; we learned about it from friends who bought the album and saw our names. When I got a copy of the disc and saw it, I was like, Wow! That got me excited. It felt good, after everything we’d been through, to be acknowledged like that. It felt like our small contribution was appreciated.

Javon
: When I saw my name in the liner notes? That was one of the most joyful moments of my life. Nobody can take that away from me. That album will never be duplicated. It will outlive my
kids’ kids’ kids’ kids. The way the Internet is, no one will ever sell over 100 million copies ever again, and that makes it the number one album in human history. So to have my name be a part of that? It was all worth it.

Bill
: When the album hit, it was a huge success. Went straight to No. 1 in the U.S. and in a lot of other countries. Outside, in the media and in the music press, there was all this hype about the twenty-fifth anniversary of this album, but inside the camp it barely registered. You’d think it might have gotten him excited, been a jolt in the arm or something. But honestly, he didn’t talk about it like it was a big deal. I heard more excitement in his voice talking about going to see
Spider-Man 3
than I ever heard when he was talking about
Thriller 25
.

It was not a happy time, those months after the Palms. On the surface, it was business as usual, but the mood in the house was kind of gloomy. The Monte Cristo house, as many problems as it had, there was at least an effort to make it a home, building the library and the dance studio, the classroom for the kids. At Palomino? There was no studio built in there, no classroom, no library. It wasn’t a home.

When the kids’ birthdays came around, there was no more going all out like before. No more clowns and jumpers. The people around him now, they just didn’t have the same vibe. I feel like Javon and I, being dads, we just brought more of a fatherly touch to doing that job. We knew all the things you need to know to raise kids in this town. If he wanted a clown, we went out of our way to find one. Trampolines and decorations and cakes, we did all that. The team that was with him now, most of them didn’t live in Vegas. They were from L.A. If Mr. Jackson said, “We need to find a clown,” they probably wouldn’t have known where to start.

Javon
: The new team hadn’t been around the family enough to know their likes and dislikes, their dos and don’ts. We knew what kind of cereal each of the kids liked, that sort of thing. But we weren’t around the house to help out and go that extra mile for them anymore. We were just handling transportation and protection whenever he left the house. And there weren’t nearly as many outings at that time, either. The nights we used to drive down the Strip and go people-watching? There were no more of those. He stayed in. Taking the kids to Krispy Kreme and Circus Circus? We maybe did that once or twice.

Bill
: His demeanor had changed. He was more quiet, more withdrawn. Three days would go by and I wouldn’t hear from him, and I used to hear from him four or five times a day, every day. So I’d call him and say, “Hi, Mr. Jackson. It’s Bill.”

“Hey, Bill.”

“Is everything okay?”

“I’m fine. Is there a problem?”

“No, sir. No problem. Just haven’t heard any communication in a while. Wanted to make sure everything’s okay.”

“Sure. Thanks for checking in.”

And that’d be it. I didn’t know what was wrong; I just knew something wasn’t right. You could tell by what was going on with the kids. Whenever he moved to an unfamiliar place or was surrounded by strange faces, he kept the kids closer to him. The freedom he allowed them at Monte Cristo or in Virginia, letting us take them out, going to playgrounds and such, those days were over. The kids were always under his wing now. That meant his guard was up.

I started to get an uneasy feeling about the direction everything was going. For a year, he didn’t make a move that I didn’t know about. Then one day, around late February, maybe early March, I got a call from Peter Lopez. He said, “Bill, Michael is wondering where you guys are.”

I said, “What do you mean ‘wondering where we are’?”

“Why aren’t you guys in L.A.?”

“He’s in L.A.?”

“Yeah.”

“Mr. Lopez, we didn’t even know he was in L.A.”

The other team had taken him to California without telling us. Peter seemed just as confused as I was. He said, “Bill, what’s going on here?”

I said, “I don’t know. Talk to Michael Amir.”

Couple days later, Mr. Jackson called me himself and said, “Bill, where are you guys? Why aren’t you in L.A.?”

It made me feel incompetent, but I didn’t know what to tell him besides the truth. I said, “Sir, I didn’t know you were in L.A. Nobody told me.”

“Oh. I thought they told you. Just speak to Michael Amir—and see if you can find out when I’m coming back to Vegas.”

Huh? Find out when you’re coming back? I wanted to say, “Why don’t
you
tell
me
when you’re coming back? How do you not know? How are you not the person who decides that?” But he wasn’t. He had no control over what was going on around him.

There were a couple more times that he disappeared to L.A. without me knowing. I found out later via Peter Lopez that whenever Mr. Jackson was asking for me and Javon, people were telling him that he couldn’t reach us. But I wasn’t getting any missed calls. Michael Amir had my number. He knew exactly where I was. He just didn’t call. Pretty soon, it reached the point where I didn’t have Mr. Jackson’s direct number anymore. The iPhones that I’d set up for him and his mother in my name? The bill on those was never paid. The charges had run up close to two thousand dollars, and they got disconnected. Mrs. Jackson called me because she couldn’t get in touch with him anymore. I had to give her Michael Amir’s number because that was the only way I had of reaching him.

Sometimes I would call Michael Amir myself and say, “Listen, I need to talk to the boss.”

He’d say, “Sure, I can give him a message for you.” And there’d be that tone in his voice, that tone you use when you’re just trying to get somebody off the phone.

I’d just say, “Fine. Have him call me.” But I’m sure he wasn’t putting any of my messages through.

It was weird. Michael Amir had taken on that same possessive attitude that Feldman had. Much as I was happy to let go of that gatekeeper role, I felt uneasy about not knowing everything that was happening. Things started to get fishy to me. I wanted to know what was going on. Maybe I was feeling a little jealous myself, but I knew that Mr. Jackson was easily influenced. I knew that somebody had his ear.

This had all started back at the Palms, because that’s when the money showed up. Right after Christmas, he’d made this deal. It was one of the last things I handled back when all the communication was still going through me. This huge transfer of cash came in. At the time, I thought it was maybe an advance on doing a concert or part of the
Thriller 25
deal. I found out later it was a loan. That big loan consolidation that Raymone and Greg Cross had been fighting about? That deal had finally gone through. That was the money that got him moved into the Palomino house. That’s what allowed me and Javon to finally get paid a little something. Not all of our money, but about three months’ worth. Enough for us to have some faith.

But even with this new loan, regular paychecks never came back. Two months would go by, and you’d get some of your money. Another month, a little more. There was still no organized management. I pushed it as far as I could with Londell and Michael Amir. It was like listening to Raymone all over again. They’d say, “Man, things are just so messed up. We’re trying to work on some things. We’re trying to get everyone paid.”

Whatever. I didn’t press it because I’d learned not to expect any different. But I don’t think they knew that I knew just how much money was going through the mill. One of the last documents I handled for Mr. Jackson as we were leaving the Palms was a fax he needed to sign, authorizing some wire transfers after this loan came through. This document was five pages long, just page after page of names—attorneys, managers, creditors, banks. Seemed like everybody that Mr. Jackson owed money to was on that form, and they were all lining up to get paid.

The biggest chunks went to make back payments on his loans. There was a $5 million wire transfer for Transitional Investors, $1.3 million for Signal Hill Capital. A lot of it was for lawyer fees. There was $1.35 million for Greg Cross’s firm. Londell’s firm, Dewey & LeBoeuf, they got $1.5 million, plus there was a transfer of $276,000 for Londell himself. Raymone’s consulting firm took $413,700, and Raymone personally got a lump payment of $487,570; that was the money she got to walk away. There was even a $775,000 payment to cover his back taxes from 2006—whoever was handling his money hadn’t been paying his taxes.

Over $56 million went out the door with one signature. And that was just one document on one night, so it had to be one little piece of what was going on. And it wasn’t like he was doing this with new income. This was coming from another loan. This was taking from Peter to pay Paul. It was all part of cleaning house. When Raymone got cut out, all these new handlers came in, and this was their plan: settle all the old business so we can get down to new business.

You started hearing a lot more talk about doing a show, how much a concert could generate, where’s the best place to do it. Those conversations had always been going on, but they were usually in the background. Now the talk was getting louder, more specific. Word started going around: Michael Jackson is going back to work. You started to see a lot more activity going on. This
machine was opening up. And as it opened up, more people were coming through. More faces. More phone calls. Kenny Ortega, the choreographer, suddenly he’s in the mix. This guy, Frank DiLeo, who’d managed Mr. Jackson back in the 1980s. I’d never even heard his name before, but now he’s back in the picture. There were new people coming on payroll. This guy needs a thirty-thousand-dollar advance to start working. That guy needs a fifteen-thousand-dollar retainer to come on board. The money is getting ready to be made now, and everybody wants a piece.