Remember the Time: Protecting Michael Jackson in His Final Days (5 page)

Outside, tucked out of view from the street, sat the garage, reached via a driveway that split off from the courtyard in the front. It was here that Bill and Javon set up their base of operations—and they had their work cut out for them. While the opulent home may have seemed fit for a celebrity of Michael Jackson’s stature, his new security team quickly realized that it was anything but.

Bill:
Mr. Jackson didn’t choose the house; someone else made the arrangements on his behalf while he was overseas. From a security point of view, it was a nightmare, located on the wide-open corner of an intersection, exposed on two sides. The neighbors could see
directly into the backyard where the children played. And once word got out that Michael Jackson was living there? We had paparazzi climbing the trees, trying to get shots of him and the kids. The front doors were visible from the street, and they were glass-paned, which meant you could see straight into the house from outside the gate. We had to suggest that Mr. Jackson not use the front door unless he was receiving guests. For routine comings and goings, he went through the garage.

The house came with a security system. There were digital cameras covering the property, all wired to a room upstairs with a bank of monitors. I spent a day up there messing with all that gear, only to find that a lot of the equipment wasn’t even working. Out of fifteen cameras on the property, maybe four or five of them worked. That was horrible.

It was a horrible house. It was the kind of house where the garage had been designed with a space for a limousine, but the way the driveway was angled, you couldn’t actually drive a limousine into the garage. If you wanted to put a limousine in that spot you’d have to drop it in from the roof.

Javon:
It was a nice place to look at, eye-candy wise. Marble floors. Marble staircase. Big chandeliers. But the plumbing and everything? Terrible. There was this beautiful water fountain in front of the house. Mr. Jackson loved the fountain, but for some reason we could never figure out, all the water completely drained out of it every two days. Every time it emptied out, we’d have to go and fill it with the garden hose. Every time it rained, the whole side yard flooded, leaving this deep, mud-filled trench running the whole length of the house.

The plumbing inside wasn’t much better. Mr. Jackson’s bedroom flooded a number of times. We were only there a couple weeks when the water heater blew. Dead of winter and for several days there was no hot water. We had to pack Mr. Jackson and his
family up and make arrangements for them to stay at the Marriott until a new water heater was installed. Central heating didn’t work properly, either; we had to go out and get space heaters for the children’s bedrooms. If too many appliances were turned on at once, the breakers would flip and all the lights would go out.

This place was trying to be so fancy that it had an elevator. Mr. Jackson got stuck in the elevator. The kids came running outside one day, yelling, “Daddy’s stuck! Daddy’s stuck!” We went in, and he was trapped between floors. We had to go upstairs and lift him out. He thought it was his fault. He kept saying, “Did I push the wrong button? What did I do?” But it wasn’t his fault. That elevator broke down all the time.

Bill:
All kinds of stuff went wrong. Service technicians were always on the property. Mr. Jackson complained about it all the time. And it’s not that the house was chosen to save money. It had been on the market for about seven years. No one had ever lived in it, and Mr. Jackson rented it for six months for $1 million. One million for six months. What kind of bullshit is that?

We tried to make all the improvements we could. For the amount of work the security system required, I would’ve had to call a company to come in and install a whole new system. But if I did that, I’d be taking a risk of someone finding out personal details about Mr. Jackson living here. Plus, I really didn’t like an outside company knowing exactly what kind of security measures we had in place. So I decided it was best that we get it done inside the team.

The main piece of equipment we installed was what’s called an inground intrusion detection system. It’s these small sensors linked together on a fiber-optic network that runs underground. That gave us detection around every inch of the property. If so much as an empty tin can was tossed over the outside wall, we’d be alerted immediately.

Javon:
We had to lay wires all through the grounds and run every single one of them back to the garage. We installed lights with motion sensors, new cameras that covered the yard and the perimeter outside the fence. We quickly learned that money was no object for Mr. Jackson when it came to security. He would front any bill when it came to that. Cameras, weapons, whatever. We’d say, “We need to get this and it’s going to cost such and such amount.” He’d just pay it. He’d say, “Make that happen.”

Bill:
We bought a CPM-700 countersurveillance sweeper. Costs about five thousand dollars. It picks up electronic recording devices. We took that everywhere. Hotel rooms, conference rooms, restaurants. He was adamant about it. During his trial in ’05, someone had made a secret recording of a conversation between him and his lawyer and then tried to sell it. So he was concerned about that, being taped. If we went anywhere, before he’d even get out of the car, he’d say, “Did we scan everything?”

We never found any bugs. Not that we expected to, because people rarely knew we were coming. There were times when we detected something, some strange frequency, but we couldn’t find the source of it. He’d insist on having the room changed anyway.

Javon:
He was furious when we caught one of the drivers from the car service with a camera in their car. Most limousine services out here, even taxis, use cameras to record their passengers. It’s standard practice. The car service we were using, we told them to disconnect any recording devices in the vehicles. But we were in the car one day, and there was a red light on the visor. We saw it and said, “What’s that light?”

The driver said, “Oh, that’s the camera.”

“What camera? We told you no cameras. All this is being recorded?”

“Well, it’s—”

“No, no. We’re gonna need that tape. Give us the tape.”

So arrangements were made to get the tape back. And when Mr. Jackson got wind of it? If you even said the word “camera” to him, he was done. He started calling his manager. “I need my vehicles,” he told her. “Get my cars out here.”

About a week later, the vehicles showed up; they were shipped out from Neverland. He had three identical black SUVs, GMC Yukons, the same cars he used during his trial in Santa Barbara. They were all fitted with triple-tinted windows. We installed a privacy curtain between the front and backseat of the primary vehicle that Mr. Jackson rode in.

When the trucks arrived, a Bentley and a Rolls-Royce were delivered too. They were both black. The interior of one of them was 14-karat gold. It had been a gift for Mr. Jackson from some Middle Eastern prince or something. There was a minibar in the back of this thing. Even the ice bucket was 14-karat gold. Those two cars, the Bentley and the Rolls, they sat in the garage.

Bill:
He hated those cars. That’s when we really started to see that there was some friction between Mr. Jackson and his people, that they didn’t always understand his needs and wants. One night we were going on some detail, and Feldman said, “We’re gonna drive the Rolls-Royce tonight. Just you wait. He’s gonna love this.”

So we got the Rolls detailed. Mr. Jackson came out to the garage, we had this car all shiny and beautiful, and he just stared at it. He said, “What is this?”

Feldman said, “We brought it from Neverland, sir.”

“I know where it’s
from
,” Mr. Jackson said. “Why is it here?”

“I thought you wanted to keep driving them—”

“No, no, I don’t like these cars. These cars always break down. I was with Liz one night in the Rolls and it broke down and we were stuck.”

He didn’t like those cars. We drove the trucks.

Javon:
I was the primary driver. I took him everywhere he needed to go, kept the cars washed and cleaned. One thing I learned real quick was whenever we were driving him, he only listened to classical music. He’d send us to the store to buy it by the armload. He’d say, “I need some CDs. Classical. Get all the classical CDs you can find.” So one of us would go to the store, go to the classical section, grab a bunch, bring them home. If he got in the backseat and either me or Bill had the radio on an R & B station, one of us would quickly turn it to classical. Every now and then, he’d want to listen to the R & B, but otherwise it was classical pretty much all of the time.

Bill:
Typically, I was there until midnight or so. I’d wait and go home once the kids were in bed and everything was set for the night. Couple times a week, Javon or I would stay overnight, work through until morning, but we also hired three guys to come in to work the graveyard shift. Whole place would be locked down, alarms set. I gave them direct orders: if anyone breaches the wall, shoot first then call me.

Javon:
We were still working out of the garage, and there was very little space for us to maneuver or get comfortable. And you know, if it’s winter, the garage is the coldest part of the house. We were in there all night, on a twenty-four-hour shift, freezing our asses off. Thank God, a couple weeks later we got the security trailer.

Mr. Jackson’s manager was a woman named Raymone Bain. She’d been his publicist during the trial and now she was managing him. The first time Ms. Raymone came to the house, she saw us set up in this cold, cramped garage and she couldn’t believe it. She said, “Why don’t you get the trailer from Neverland?”

“Trailer? What trailer?”

“There’s a security trailer at Neverland.”

So we got the trailer out here. That was a blessing. Trailer had a sink, a shower, a bathroom, a full-size bed. It served as our
command center. We rerouted all the surveillance cables that had been running into the garage. We posted up a full blueprint of the interior layout of the house as well as a map of the entire city of Las Vegas. We surveyed every block of the surrounding residential area, mapped all the possible routes for ingress and egress. Given how exposed the house was, we did everything we could to compensate.

Bill:
We installed panic buttons in different rooms in the house—in his bedroom, in the family room. In the event of an emergency, Mr. Jackson or the kids could alert us right away. The alarm didn’t sound inside the house, just in the trailer, to alert us. And it was a loud-ass alarm, tell you that much. I remember the first time it went off. It was early one morning. I heard it and ran out of the trailer and around the back of the house. I got to the kitchen door, drew my weapon, and burst inside, like I was ready for some real shit to be going down.

They were all just sitting at the breakfast table, eating their cereal. They saw me and they froze: Mr. Jackson on the left, Paris at the head of the table, Prince sitting on my right, across from Mr. Jackson. I didn’t see Blanket. He was across the room by the TV, which was where the panic button was mounted on the wall. He was just walking around, hitting buttons. They all sat there at the table, staring at me, and then Blanket blurted out, “Bill, is that a real gun?!”

Little dude thought it was cool. Mr. Jackson did not. Pulling an automatic weapon in the family room with his kids eating breakfast? Oh, he got on me about that.

Javon:
He didn’t like the kids seeing weapons, but he did appreciate that we were well armed. We both carried semiautomatic Glock pistols with extended magazines. We had Tasers. Each of them delivered a charge of 1.2 million volts, powerful enough to take down a three-hundred-pound man. We had a cache of backup weapons: MP5
fully automatic submachine guns, military-style AR-15s, 12-gauge automatic shotguns, and concealable MAC-10s. We had three cases of ammunition, close to three thousand rounds for everything we had. We wore lightweight body armor under our suits at all times. Some may say it was overkill, but those people don’t know the kind of threats that Mr. Jackson received on a regular basis. We planned and prepared for the worst, but we hoped and prayed for the best.

Bill:
Anyone who came to the house—repairmen, service technicians, whoever—they all had to sign confidentiality agreements before they were allowed on the property. It was a contract that carried a $10 million penalty for disclosing any details about Mr. Jackson, his home, his children, any of it. If they didn’t sign, they didn’t come in. We also searched them and confiscated their cell phones. If they didn’t comply, they didn’t come in. Those that were allowed on the property had a member from the security team accompany them throughout the house until they were finished.

That was standard procedure for everybody, even the clowns we’d hire for the kids’ birthday parties. The clowns didn’t know whose party they were coming to perform at until they got there. They’d show up, we’d hit them with this industrial-strength non-disclosure form, and they’d go, “Huh?” Then we’d search ’em, wand ’em, and take their phones.

“We need to hold on to this phone until you leave.”

“But what if someone calls?”

“Do you want to be our clown or not?”

And they’d hand over the phone.

Mr. Jackson trusted no one. The man was paranoid, very paranoid. Didn’t sleep much. He was always going around the house at three, four in the morning, checking the locks on all the doors. The nights I stayed over in the trailer I saw him do it a number of times.