Remember the Time: Protecting Michael Jackson in His Final Days (6 page)

We had thousands of dollars in surveillance gear covering every inch of this property, armed security guards patrolling the grounds, and still he was going door to door, checking the dead-bolts. I’d show up in the morning, and the overnight guys would give me a report. “Dude was checkin’ doors again,” they’d say. It just became normal to us.

Javon:
He’d frequently come outside in the dead of night to make sure we were in the trailer. He’d poke his head in and say, “Just checking that you guys are here.”

We’d say, “Sir, we’re not going anywhere.”

Bill:
There was a direct phone line to the trailer, and only Mr. Jackson had the number. We’d get calls in the middle of the night. He heard something. He was worried about something. Didn’t take much to set him off.

One night, we were on duty and, around two-thirty in the morning, we heard the door to the house slam and then all of a sudden there was this loud banging on the trailer door. We opened it and Mr. Jackson was standing there, holding the kids close to him. The kids were all half asleep and discombobulated, wearing pajamas, shivering in the freezing cold.

Mr. Jackson had this look of panic on his face, his eyes wide open. “Somebody’s
inside
the house,” he said. “They’re trying to break into my bedroom through the terrace door.”

My first thought was that we should leave, just take the cars and bounce. But Javon was saying, “Check the room! Let’s check the room!” So we stayed to investigate. We brought Mr. Jackson and the kids inside the trailer. Javon stayed with them. I drew my weapon, went into the house, and made my way upstairs to Mr. Jackson’s bedroom.

The thought in the back of my mind was that someone must have climbed up the back balcony. Once I was inside his room, I
could hear what he was talking about. There was this rustling sound coming from outside the door to the balcony, like someone trying to get in. I crept up and threw the door open and looked out. Nobody there. But now I could hear the sound better. Sounded more like flapping. I looked up and there was a wing sticking out of this vent, frantically flapping around. A pigeon. All this over a pigeon.

I reached up and grabbed it. I pulled it out of the vent and threw it over the balcony. I couldn’t tell if it took off or what. I may have broken its wing. All I saw was the thing going straight down. I went back downstairs and told Mr. Jackson it was just a bird. Of course now he was all concerned about the bird. He was like, “You didn’t kill it, did you?”

“No, sir,” I said. “Of course not. I just let it go.”

“Oh, good.”

Javon:
By that point, it was well past three in the morning. Prince was like, “
Da-ad
, can we go back to bed now,
please
? We’ve got school in the morning, and I’m tired.”

So they all shuffled back into the house to go to bed. As they walked in, Mr. Jackson said, “See, kids? Better safe than sorry.”

Bill:
A couple weeks later, maybe mid-February, about one-thirty in the morning, I got this frantic call from his manager, Raymone. She was all worked up, saying, “You gotta get Mr. Jackson out of the house!”

“What’s the problem?”

She wouldn’t tell me. She just kept saying, “Get him outta the house! I booked you a room at a hotel. Get him outta the house!”

I figured it had to be something serious. I told Javon to get the cars ready, and I ran into the house. When I got upstairs, Mr. Jackson was running around in the dark. It was pitch black inside; he didn’t want the lights turned on, like he was scared
somebody was going to see him. He had the kids going room to room with flashlights, getting their stuff together, packing to leave. He was whispering to them, “Let’s go! Let’s go! C’mon! No, we don’t need that! Just grab a few things!”

I didn’t know what was happening. I said, “Sir, what’s wrong? What’s going on?”

He wouldn’t say. He just said, “Raymone called. There’s a threat. We have to leave. We have to leave.
Right now
.”

Javon:
I had the cars ready, and I was outside in the security trailer. There was nothing on any of the monitors; none of the sensors had been tripped. Before we left, me and Bill checked the whole house. Nothing. We went to Mr. Jackson and said, “Sir, everything’s fine. The house is secure. Trust us, no one’s getting in here.”

But he was in a full panic. He was almost incoherent, like he wasn’t even hearing a word we told him. He just kept saying, “We gotta go! We gotta go!”

Bill:
We had no idea what was going on, but we loaded the suitcases and the kids into the trucks and took everyone to the Green Valley Ranch, a resort nearby in Henderson. The manager was waiting for us at the loading dock when we pulled in. We crept up in there in the middle of the night, with no advance security check, nothing.

We got him settled in his room, and we took the room across the hall. The next morning, I went over and talked to him. He was fuming. He said, “I shouldn’t have to leave my house for nobody. I shouldn’t have to run from nobody. Isn’t that what I have you guys for?”

I said, “Sir, who are you running
from
?”

Finally he told me what was up. Raymone had received a phone call from this former security guard at Neverland, an employee that Mr. Jackson supposedly owed money to. This guy had called her
up and he got real vocal and real threatening about what he was going to do to get his money. He said he was coming to Vegas and was going to climb the wall to Mr. Jackson’s house. So Raymone called Mr. Jackson and sent him into a panic.

I said, “And
that’s
why we left? Mr. Jackson, you are safe in your house. We’re more than capable of protecting your family. If Raymone had told me what was going on, I would have taken care of it.”

That caught him off guard. He seemed a little pissed off.

We stayed at the Green Valley Ranch one more night, then packed everybody up and went back to the house. The kids were pretty worn out. Usually, they seemed to take this kind of stuff in stride; they were accustomed to the rhythm of their father’s life. Secret back doors, security alarms, panic buttons—that was their everyday. They were little troopers. But every now and then, you’d see the craziness take its toll. This was one of those times. Here they were, in a new city, living in a strange house. Then suddenly they’re leaving that house, running out in the middle of the night, popping into this hotel, then turning around and leaving the hotel. And no real explanation for any of it.

As we drove back to the house, everyone was being real quiet in the backseat. Then Blanket looked up at his daddy and said, “Daddy, can we go back to the other house? Can we go back to Neverland?”

Mr. Jackson shook his head and said, “No. We can’t ever go back there. That place has been contaminated by evil.”

4

In May 1970, the Jackson 5 flew into Philadelphia to kick off their first national tour as an official Motown act. They had signed with the famous Detroit label just two years before, and their debut single, “I Want You Back,” had been released the previous fall, shooting straight to No. 1 on the
Billboard
charts. That feat would be matched by each of their next three singles, making the Jackson 5 the first recording act in history to have four consecutive debut songs reach the top of the charts. Through record sales and radio play, the group’s popularity had been building, and when their plane landed at Philadelphia International Airport, over three thousand fans mobbed the terminal. The following night, during their performance, a cordon of one hundred police officers was required to keep the crowd of sixteen thousand from rushing the stage.

Michael Jackson was only eleven years old, but the script of his life had already been written. For the next four decades, massive crowds would shadow his every public move, laying siege to his hotel rooms and camping outside the gates of his homes. When
Thriller
was released on November 30, 1982, the adulation he’d experienced as part of the Jackson 5 was eclipsed by a level of fame unprecedented in the history of entertainment.
Thriller
stayed in the
Billboard
Top 10 for eighty weeks. Thirty-seven of those weeks were spent at No. 1. Seven of its nine tracks became Top 10 singles. The album won eight Grammys out of a record-setting twelve nominations. In its first
year alone,
Thriller
sold over 22 million copies. As one Jackson observer noted,
Thriller
transcended its status as a mere musical album and became something more like a household appliance—it was something that everybody just had.

Pop superstars had existed before Michael Jackson, of course. Frank Sinatra, Elvis, and the Beatles all dominated the music scene in their respective eras. But Michael Jackson appeared at a propitious—and, in hindsight, fleeting—moment in the evolution of both music and technology. Broadcast and satellite television were just cementing their hold on the international media landscape, and the rapid digital distribution of the Internet age had not yet fragmented that landscape into a million little niches. It was a brief window in which the world was uniquely primed for a global commercial phenomenon, and that phenomenon was Michael Jackson, the newly crowned King of Pop.

When
Thriller
’s follow-up,
Bad
, was released in August 1987, it became the No. 1 album not just in America but in a record-setting twenty-five countries. It generated five No. 1 singles and sold 17 million copies in its first year, two-thirds of those sales coming from outside the United States.
Bad
would also launch Jackson’s first-ever solo tour. He put on 123 concerts in fifteen countries on four continents, playing to a total audience of 4.5 million and grossing a total $125 million, making
Bad
, up to that point, the most highly-attended and highest-earning tour of all time. In every city Jackson played, he moved through the streets with an armed motorcade fit for a head of state.

By the turn of the century, Jackson’s popularity had dimmed somewhat. When his last studio album
Invincible
was released in 2001, many considered it a commercial disappointment compared to his earlier work. Still, it sold 11 million copies worldwide, more than most artists could dream of. Even if casual listeners had moved on, Jackson still had a passionate fan base. This was particularly true outside the United States, where the allegations made against him were given far less credence in the popular media.

Indeed, the more Jackson was attacked in the tabloids, the more devoted his community of fans became; loyalty to the singer in the face of adversity became its own badge of honor. Millions of listeners in dozens of countries formed an elaborate network of clubs and groups, publishing newsletters, trading memorabilia. The most die-hard among them followed Jackson from country to country, wherever he went. And during his months-long trial in 2005, hundreds of them converged to stand vigil outside the courthouse, cheering his every coming and going and praying for his acquittal.

What made the phenomenon of Jackson’s fan base unique was not just their devotion to him, but his reciprocal embrace of them. As much as the singer would come to despise the prison that fame had put him in, he never lost his love for the people who had made him famous. The fans, Jackson believed, not the record execs and the concert promoters, were the ones responsible for his success. He felt personally indebted to each and every one. Their steadfast loyalty was something the singer had rarely experienced in his private life. And because his fans never lost faith in him, Michael Jackson never forgot about them.

Bill:
For the first couple weeks, everything was quiet. Then we started to see cars. People would drive by the house. Some would linger, stop and look, and then drive off. There was this one car, a red car that would park across the street from the house and just sit there. I’d watch it through the security cameras. This was at least a couple times a week. Sometimes daily.

Eventually I got a glimpse of the driver. It was a woman, petite, with light-brown hair. She would get out of the car and she would just pace. I’d heard about the kind of fans who were attracted to Michael Jackson. They were in love with him. From a security standpoint, I perceived them as a threat at first. When you see a car parked outside the gate, you don’t know if it’s just a fan or someone
worse, a stalker, someone who’s completely unhinged. I’d never seen this person before, so one afternoon I went out to the car and talked to her. She was from California. She said she didn’t live far from Neverland. She said she knew Michael and that she was a friend of his. I said, “So you’re just gonna sit out here?”

She said, “It’s okay. He knows.”

Whenever we went on a detail, this girl would get out of her car and stand up to be seen, hoping he’d notice her. It was usually just me or Javon in the car and we wouldn’t stop. The first time we were leaving the house with Mr. Jackson in the back, she stood up out of her car and I said, “There’s that girl again.”

Mr. Jackson looked up and said, “Who?”

I said, “That girl right there.”

He said, “Oh, yes. I know her. Slow down.”

We stopped and he put the window down and they had a conversation like they were old pals. “How are the kids doing?” “How do you like Vegas?” “Are you going to stay here long?” Hearing them speak, I didn’t get the feeling that she was a stalker. She was just a real, dedicated fan. The conversation sounded innocent, friendly, trusting. A little flirtatious, to be honest. They just talked. It came to the point I had to remind him, “Sir, we have to go.”