Bill Whitfield, the personal security guard of Michael Jackson, recalls how the king of pop protected his kids from baffled paparazzi and the frenzied world amid his controversial life
late February, one Saturday night, we took Mr Jackson and the kids to dinner and then to see lance Burton, a magician who performs at the Monte Carlo. After the show, the family went backstage to meet Burton, and as we were leaving through the side door of the theatre, there were three quick flashes. Boom, boom, boom! This photographer snapped three quick pictures and then took off down las Vegas Boulevard. Kids didn’t have on their masks or anything. Mr Jackson freaked out. “He has pictures of the kids! Get him! Get him!”
Feldman turned to me and said, “Bill, go!” I ran. las Vegas Boulevard on Saturday night is packed with tourists. I ran may be three blocks and caught up to him and grabbed him from behind. I grabbed his arm, wrested the camera out of his hand. Then I ran back to the car and gave Feldman the camera. Mr Jackson was so relieved. He kept saying, “Oh, thank God.” That was his biggest fear: exposing the kids to the press.
I thought that was the end of it. Then about two weeks later, I was at home, sitting in the living room with my daughter. There was a knock at the door. They were cops. Plain clothes, but I could tell. I answered the door. “Mr WhitfieldIJ” “Yes, sir.”
“I’m Detective So-and-so and this is Detective So-and-so. We’re from the las Vegas Metro Robbery Division. Do you work for Michael JacksonIJ”
“Yes, I do.”
“We are subpoenaing you to appear before a grand jury. You’ve been identified as someone that robbed a man of his camera.”
They hit everybody with subpoenas. Me, Feldman, Raymone, Greg Cross. This photographer had gone and hired a lawyer and told the police, “Michael Jackson and his bodyguards mugged me and took my camera.” Feldman was freaking out. He kept saying, “They’re gonna indict the boss for robbery. He’s going to go to jail!” The next day at work, we told Mr Jackson what was going on. He said, “Get rid of it. Give him back his camera.”
I figured it was simple. Erase the photos and give it back. But Feldman said he didn’t have the camera. He said he’d destroyed it. Why would you do that when all you have to do is pull out the memory cardIJ It was an expensive one, too.
Me, there’s two things I’m not doing. One, I’m not testifying against a client. Two, I’m not lying under oath. So I was wondering if I was going to have to make myself scarce until this whole thing blew over. Raymone got in touch with a lawyer, this big-time celebrity attorney in Vegas. He started working out a settlement.
While all this was going on, in early March, Mr Jackson had to go to Japan. He was appearing at this event where people were paying thousands of dollars each just for the chance to say a few words to him and get their pictures taken. Feldman told us that Mr Jackson wanted me and Javon to stay and watch the house. He was going to reach out to a local team in Japan that had handled security for Mr Jackson over there before.
It was very quiet once they left. I worked days. Javon came and stayed overnight. Mr Jackson and the kids were away for four or five days. During the trip, Feldman called me from Japan, still worked up about the camera thing. He said, “It looks like the boss is going to be arrested as soon as we get back to the country.”
I thought he was crazy. People like Michael Jackson don’t get arrested because of things like this. SuedIJ Yes. ArrestedIJ No. But Feldman was all hyper about it. They flew back into lA a few days later, stayed a few days in los Angeles, and then drove back and met us in Vegas. The legal situation with the photographer was settled soon enough. The lawyer worked out a deal and the guy agreed to go away for some amount. I think it was around $75,000. For a $3,000 camera. The guy said he was roughed up. I just got the camera. But this wasn’t about me; it was about Michael Jackson. Whatever the final amount was, it got settled. But by then Feldman was gone.
Normally, Feldman communicated with Mr Jackson every day, but after Japan and this camera business, his relationship with Mr Jackson took a real turn for the worse. Feldman would come out with our schedules and tell us what we were doing. Then Mr Jackson would come out and say, “Oh no, we’re not doing that today. I’m staying home.” They weren’t communicating.
Then one day Feldman was just gone. This would’ve been in early April. There was no word from him. After he left, three days went by without any sign of Mr Jackson. The chef would come and deliver the family meals; we’d leave the food at the rear patio door and go back to the trailer. Then a few minutes later, on the security monitor, we’d see Prince come out, retrieve the food, and close the door behind him. For three days, other than that, we had no communication from inside the house.
Feldman was our primary contact with Mr Jackson. With him gone, we were in limbo. Mr Jackson didn’t leave the house. We barely saw him. Grace became the go-between. She started sending us on certain types of errands, things that Feldman normally would’ve done — that’s when we started getting the impression that he definitely wasn’t coming back.
Then Grace came to me one afternoon and said, “Bill, you’re going to get a call tonight. Somebody wants to speak to you.” Up to that point, I had never really talked to Mr Jackson. There were “Good mornings” and “Good afternoons,” small talk about the day’s errands, things like that. But no real steady conversation. Pretty much everything had gone through Feldman. Grace said, “Just be yourself and talk to him like he’s a regular person. Don’t be nervous.” She made me nervous just by saying that.
late that night, around eleven-thirty, my cell phone rang, but I didn’t get to it in time and the caller didn’t leave a message. So I dialled it back. After several rings somebody picked up and said, “Hello, who’s calling pleaseIJ”
The voice was real deep and heavily distorted, like someone talking through an electronic voice changer. I was thrown. “Who is thisIJ” I asked. “May I help youIJ” “You called me first, asshole.”
Then I hung up the phone, a little confused and pretty pissed off. Seconds later, my phone rang again. I picked up the phone and said, “Who the fuck is thisIJ”
“Bill, it’s me! It’s Mr Jackson.”
It was his regular voice, with no distortion. I froze. “I’m sorry, sir. I’m so sorry. I thought it was a prank call.” He kept apologising too. He said, “Yeah, I get that all the time. I have to disguise my voice because people always get my number somehow, and they call and say very mean things. You have no idea how many times I’ve had to change my number.”
He sounded like he was a bit nervous himself. He said, “listen, I’m going to be taking a trip back east, and — you know that Feldman’s no longer with us, rightIJ”
“Yes, sir.”
“Right. So what I need you to do is — Bill, I can trust you, rightIJ I can trust youIJ”
“Yes, Mr Jackson. You can trust me.” “Good. Okay.” He told me that Feldman was gone and that Grace had told him I was okay. She and I had built up that rapport, and the good things she told him about me must have been enough for him to believe that I could be trusted. He started telling me all these things he needed me to do. He never came out and said, “Bill, you’re the new head of my security team.” Those words were never spoken. He just started talking to me in a way that conveyed a sense of “You’re handling this stuff from now on.”
He asked me, “Do you have a computer hereIJ”
“No, sir. I don’t.”
“Okay, I need you to go out and buy a laptop. I’ll give you the money. How much do you think one’s going to costIJ”
“About five to six hundred dollars, sir.”
“Okay, I’ll leave you a thousand. Raymone is going to send you some pictures, and I want you to put them on the laptop and show them to me.”
“Yes, sir.”
He left the money in an envelope at the back door and I went to Best Buy and bought a laptop. Raymone emailed me some pictures. I gave him a call to let him know I was back. He let me in the back door and I opened up the laptop and we looked at the pictures together.
It was a strange feeling, being in there. This was my first time just being alone with him, talking to him. I’ve been around a lot of different celebrities. But this was Michael Jackson. You’d get tongue-tied. You’d go to address him and you almost wanted to say, “Yes, your Highness!” The first time I met him, I didn’t know whether I should bow down or shake his hand like a normal person. That’s just how it felt. We sat there going through this little slideshow. It was pictures of all these houses and mansions in Virginia, Maryland, Connecticut, New York. He’d look at one, nod, and I’d hit the button to go to the next. I was looking at the price of the houses going by: $6 million, $7 million, $12 million. We finally got through them, and he pointed at the screen and said, “Tell her I like this one.”
I called Raymone and told her which house he liked, and she said, “Okay, I’m going to be arranging for you guys to come out here this summer. Mr Jackson is going to be taking the kids on a summer vacation.”
Over the next few days, Raymone started calling me more frequently to handle this or handle that. More and more, I’d hear Mr Jackson on the phone with his lawyers and other people. He’d say, “Call Bill” or “Talk to Bill” or “Have Bill set that up.” I started getting faxes, emails, things for him to read, things for him to sign, appointments that needed to be scheduled. All that started coming to me. I didn’t ask for any of it, and I certainly hadn’t expected it. Three months earlier, I was just a guy freezing my a*** off in this man’s garage. Now, all of a sudden, I’d become the gatekeeper for the King of Pop.
Excerpts from Remember The Time: Protecting Michael Jackson in His Final Days with the permission from HarperCollins India