Remember the Time: Protecting Michael Jackson in His Final Days

by Bill Whitfield

  Joe said, “This is not the place. What the hell are you doing?”

  Joe finally convinced Randy to leave, and they drove off. Mr. Jackson’s bedroom was right above the driveway. He had to have heard a lot of it. By that point, it was too late to make the party. We tried to make arrangements for him to see Ms. Taylor while she was in town, but she was already leaving that next morning. So they talked on the phone and that was it.

  Javon: After that, he didn’t leave the house for three days. We didn’t hear from him. No phone calls, no communication, nothing. He just shut down.

  Bill: A week or so after that, the whole family showed up—all of them. We’d had a long day taking Mr. Jackson to the studio at the Palms, where he was in a recording session with will.i.am from the Black Eyed Peas; they were working on the Thriller 25 album together. Around midnight, I’d wrapped up my shift and was just getting back to my house when the team called me on the radio. “Bill, his family’s here!”

  Again? I called Javon. He’d already left the house too. I told him to turn around immediately.

  I raced back. Took about fifteen minutes from my place. I went in through the side entrance, met up with Javon. We walked out to the front and saw a bunch of people standing outside the gate. There were a whole lot of familiar faces. Looked like everybody except Randy and Marlon. For a minute it was like I was looking at some kind of Jackson reunion special.

  Javon: They all had on hats and sunglasses. It was very incognito. It was so late and so cold that there was only one fan camped out on the street, and there were no paparazzi or anything to make a scene. Which made it even more strange. This big family of famous people standing out on the sidewalk in the middle of the night, and quiet all around.

  Bill: I walked up to the gate, asked them what their business was this time of night. They said, “We heard our brother’s sick. We came to make sure he’s okay.”

  I told them I hadn’t seen any signs that Mr. Jackson wasn’t okay. They told me they wanted to see for themselves and weren’t leaving until they did. So now I was in a jam. We had strict instructions from Mr. Jackson not to bother him, but at the same time we couldn’t just leave the entire Jackson family standing in the street at one in the morning without it turning into a scene, which Mr. Jackson also wouldn’t want.

  I told them to hold on. I went back to the house, rang the doorbell, waited for Mr. Jackson to come down. The whole time I was thinking, This is not going to go well. When Mr. Jackson came to the door, I said, “Sir, your family is out front, and they insist on seeing you.”

  He was not happy. He was pissed, and I could tell he was pissed at me for not handling the situation myself. I said, “They heard you were sick and they want to know if you’re okay.”

  “I’m fine, I’m fine,” he said. “Tell them I’m fine.”

  “Sir, they’re not leaving until they see you.”

  He went quiet for a moment, then said, “Okay, I’ll meet with them. But I don’t want them in the house.”

  “I can bring them over to the security trailer. You can talk to them in there.”

  “Fine. But I’ll only speak to my brothers.”

  Then he asked if Randy was there. I said I didn’t see him. “Good,” he said. “I don’t want to see Randy.”

  I went back to the gate and said, “Mr. Jackson just wants to see his brothers.”

  This voice from the back said, “What about me?”

  At first I couldn’t see who it was. Then I realized it was Janet. Part of me wanted to yell, Wow! That’s Janet Jackson! But I just said, “Sorry, ma’am. He said only his brothers.” She was not happy about that.

  The brothers came in. I escorted them over to the trailer, and they stepped inside. Then I called Mr. Jackson and he came down and joined them. They closed the door and talked for about twenty minutes. Mr. Jackson came out first. Walked straight into the house. Didn’t say anything. The brothers came out, walked to the gate, and that was it. What they talked about, I don’t know.

  Javon: Later on, we found out that they’d come because of a rumor they’d heard. There were always rumors going around about Mr. Jackson. Sometimes it was completely made up and sometimes it was sort of half true.

  This particular time, they’d heard that their brother was sick, but Mr. Jackson wasn’t sick. The kids were. Back in January, they’d all come down with colds. Arrangements were made to see a private doctor at his office one evening, after regular hours. The receptionist in that office leaked the story that Michael Jackson had come in, and the family had heard about it. It seemed suspicious to them. They heard he was seen going to a doctor’s office in the middle of the night, and they wanted to make sure he was okay.

  Bill: That was the difficulty of being Michael Jackson and trying to move around in the world. Just to take his kids to the doctor required days of planning and advance work. You’d use every precaution, and all it took was fifteen seconds walking past the wrong person, some nosy receptionist, and all of a sudden you’ve got this rumor circulating.

  Paris didn’t get better. Her cold wouldn’t go away, and Mr. Jackson was worried she was coming down with the flu. We couldn’t go to the emergency room, and Mr. Jackson didn’t trust going back to some strange office. He wanted a doctor who would come to the house. So the word was put out there to find a private physician who made house calls. Jeff Adams, my associate and Javon’s cousin, who’d first brought us onto the detail, said his family doctor would stop by as a favor. I was given a name and told when to expect him. On the scheduled night, this silver BMW 745i pulled up to the driveway and a tall, slender gentleman stepped out. He was wearing light blue medical scrubs. He walked up to the gate and introduced himself. “I’m Dr. Conrad Murray,” he said. “I’m here for a visit.”

  I told him he was expected, opened the gate, and directed him as to where he could pull his vehicle in. He drove in, parked, and got out.

  I had a confidentiality form waiting. Before I pulled it out, I asked him if he knew who he was here to see. He said no. I told him he’d need to sign the agreement before I could allow him to go inside. He said sure. I pulled it out, and he glanced at the heading on the document and saw the name Michael Jackson. His eyebrows raised up and he gave me this look, like, Are you serious?

  I gave him a nod. He signed his name. We walked to the front of the house, and I rang the bell and we waited. I could see the silhouette of Mr. Jackson through the glass as he came over toward us. He opened the door, and I said, “Mr. Jackson, this is Dr. Murray. Dr. Murray, this is Mr. Jackson.”

  6

  In the fall of 1979, after the success of Off the Wall made him independently wealthy, Michael Jackson began putting the pieces of his solo career in place. His first move was to hire John Branca to serve as his legal counsel. A corporate tax attorney with considerable experience in the music industry, handling everyone from Bob Dylan to the Beach Boys, Branca renegotiated Jackson’s contract with CBS, securing him a royalty rate equal to that earned by the top talent in the business. Branca also succeeded in severing Michael’s recording contract from his brothers’. Now, Jackson would only have to record or perform with his family if and when he chose to; the label couldn’t make him. In 1983, at the peak of Thriller mania, Joe Jackson’s managerial contract with his sons came up for renewal, and Michael wanted a professional divorce from his father as well. Always averse to dealing with conflict himself, to avoid having to fire his father directly, Michael had severance papers drawn up and delivered to his dad by messenger.

  John Branca had drafted the papers; he was now Michael’s closest and most trusted adviser. Riding alongside Jackson and Branca during these years was Frank DiLeo, Jackson’s manager, hired shortly after Joe Jackson was let go. DiLeo had been the head of promotions at Epic Records during Thriller’s release, and Jackson gave him considerable credit for the album’s success. As Jackson’s manager, DiLeo served as executive producer for the full-length movie Moonwalker, negotiated Michael’s landmark end
orsement deal with Pepsi, and managed the record-setting world tour for Bad.

  Michael Jackson’s team was, for a time, unstoppable. In 1984, John Branca negotiated Jackson’s purchase of the ATV music catalog, which contained the publishing rights to thousands of songs, including hundreds written by the Beatles. Jackson purchased the catalog for $47 million, but it would soon grow to be worth considerably more, becoming the bedrock of the singer’s vast personal fortune. Five years later, in the fall of 1989, Branca negotiated Jackson’s contract renewal with Sony, the new corporate parent of CBS/Epic Records. Sony agreed to give Jackson a record-setting $15 million advance for each album. By contrast, Bruce Springsteen’s advance was just $2.5 million. Billy Joel earned $1.7 million. Branca also negotiated for Jackson to receive a royalty rate of 25 percent; most acts earned only 12 percent. The new deal with Sony was the most lucrative recording contract in the history of the music business. At the peak of his success, Michael Jackson was worth an estimated $700 million.

  Jackson’s talent—and the unlimited earning potential it represented—served as a magnet, drawing the most powerful people in the business to his side. When the singer surrounded himself with the right people, he flourished. When he surrounded himself with the wrong people, he faltered. By the late 1990s, more and more of the wrong people started coming around. In 1989, Jackson had abruptly fired Frank DiLeo, accusing him of mishandling funds. As the decade progressed, Michael’s relationship with John Branca went through ups and downs as well, and Branca would eventually get his walking papers in 2003. The accusations of child abuse that hit Jackson in 1993 left him emotionally devastated, vulnerable. A scrum of celebrity lawyers latched onto the singer, jockeying with each other to be the lead attorney on what promised to be the trial of the century. Those same attorneys would ultimately convince Jackson to settle the case, causing irrevocable damage to his life and career.

  By the turn of the century, estranged from his family and the team that backed him during Thriller, Jackson had lost the anchors that kept him grounded. His affairs were being managed not by a recognized industry heavyweight but a little-known German businessman named Dieter Wiesner, who was steering the singer’s career in odd directions, such as launching a Michael Jackson–branded energy drink in Europe. Jackson also launched a number of business endeavors with a financier named Marc Schaffel, who had a history as a producer of pornographic films—hardly the best association for a performer whose public image had been tarnished by allegations of sexual misconduct.

  After Randy Jackson’s brief spell as Michael’s manager had torn the two brothers apart, Jackson turned to the woman Randy had hired to serve as his publicist, Raymone Bain. Bain, a relative outsider in the music business, was primarily known as the political crisis manager responsible for resuscitating the scandal-ridden career of former Washington, D.C., mayor Marion Barry. During the summer of 2006, Jackson put out a press release announcing that Bain would be taking over as general manager and CEO of The Michael Jackson Company, a new corporate umbrella that would consolidate the singer’s increasingly disorganized empire.

  Through all of this, Jackson’s only constant was Grace Rwaramba, the children’s nanny, who stayed with him for seventeen years. Rwaramba, a native of Uganda raised in the United States, started working for Jackson in 1992, handling personnel issues for his Dangerous tour, and the two became close. When Jackson’s children were born, she was promoted to serve as their primary care-giver. But her real role in Jackson’s life went far beyond that. Despite ongoing health concerns that caused her to be away at times, she was the gatekeeper through whom everyone else was granted access. Her relationship with the children gave her leverage that no one else in Jackson’s universe enjoyed.

  By the time Michael Jackson relocated to Las Vegas, this small crew of people—Grace; Raymone Bain; his assistant, John Feldman—were the only associates tending to his daily affairs. As the newest members of that team, Bill and Javon tried their best to understand the various personalities and office politics shaping their employer’s world. What they slowly came to realize, much to their own discomfort, was that the team around Michael Jackson was even more dysfunctional on the inside than it appeared from the outside.

  Bill: Mr. Jackson’s manager, Raymone Bain, came out to Vegas in February. She and a couple of her staffers drove out from D.C. They didn’t fly because she was bringing Mr. Jackson a briefcase that had a couple hundred thousand in cash in it. You can’t take that kind of money through airport security without having to answer a lot of questions. So she drove.

  Her car pulled into the driveway; Feldman came out and got the briefcase, leaving her in the car, and took the case into the house. She and I sat outside and talked a little while. She kept saying she felt she knew me from somewhere, but I didn’t remember meeting her. I think she was just trying to make me feel like we had a connection.

  We were out there for a good thirty, forty-five minutes, and by then it was pretty clear that Mr. Jackson wasn’t going to ask her to come into the house, that he didn’t even want to see her. She tried to play it off like it wasn’t embarrassing. She was like, “Okay! I guess I’m gonna get back on the road. You guys take care. Tell Michael to call me if he needs anything.” Then she left.

  His own manager drives across the country to see him after he’s been overseas for months, and they don’t even speak? That made me wonder what the hell was going on with his business arrangements. I thought it was strange. But at the same time, everything that was happening was new to me, so I just figured maybe that’s how their relationship was.

  As Mr. Jackson’s manager, Raymone was the point person. She kept the schedule, organized his affairs. Most mornings, she would send an itinerary over: go here, go there, call this person, etc. Sometimes Mr. Jackson would go through that schedule and follow it to the letter. Other times, he’d look at some appointment she’d made and say, “Oh, she has an ulterior motive for that. We’re not going there.”

  We started to feel uneasy about their relationship. It was not a trustworthy one. He didn’t speak highly of her, yet here she was handling his business. In the beginning, like that time we talked in the car, she was very nice to me. Very nice. Our security trailer? Like an oven. The air conditioning didn’t work. She called me up on her own and said, “Bill, I’m gonna send you guys some extra money to get an air conditioning unit for the trailer.”

  She was always calling to make sure I had everything I needed. At the time, I thought, Hey, she’s good like that. We’re cool.

  Javon: Ms. Raymone wanted to know Mr. Jackson’s every move, but Feldman would never tell her anything. I’d think to myself, Damn, she’s his manager. She should know what’s going on. But Feldman would totally stonewall her, shut her out. So she wanted me and Bill there to be her reporters.

  For a while, she’d call me or Bill and we’d let her know where we were going, what we were doing. We didn’t know to do any different. But Mr. Jackson, when he found out we were telling her about his movements? He said, “Don’t tell Raymone where we’re going. I know you guys are just doing your job, but if there are things I want her to know, I’ll call her and tell her.” He was adamant about it. He told us, “You guys report to me. If you ever tell her where I’m going and I find out about it, I will fire you myself.”

  Every time Raymone came to town, I was the one who had to pick her up from the airport and bring her to the house. While we were driving, she’d ask, “How’s the boss? Where have you guys been? What did he do today?”

  I’d say, “We really didn’t do much. I’m sure you can talk to Feldman and find out more.”

  She’d get upset that we didn’t report everything to her, but we were just doing as we were told. It put us in an awkward position, because Ms. Raymone was the one who handled our paychecks. Our pay was never on time. If we were supposed to be paid on the 3rd and the 18th of every month, we might get paid by the 7th or the 23rd. Maybe. It was never consistent.

  Bill: Mr.
Jackson had several different corporations set up for various purposes. Sometimes we’d get checks drawn on MJJ Productions, sometimes we’d get checks drawn on The Michael Jackson Company. The money just seemed to come from wherever. There was no dedicated account for payroll. There were no systems in place.

  Javon: You’d hear things in the media about his finances, but from where we stood, there was just no way a man like Michael Jackson could be broke. He had stashes all over the place, stacks of cash hidden away. Like that briefcase Ms. Raymone brought him. The same day our pay was late, we’d be going somewhere to spend twenty thousand dollars on something. He’s flat broke and he’s worth millions at the same time? That’s what we never got.

  Since he didn’t trust Ms. Raymone, we just assumed that there was no way that she had access to every dime of his money. It seemed as if this one area of his finances, his payroll, was being mismanaged, but he was obviously still incredibly wealthy. That’s what it looked like. I mean, how else was he paying all of these lawyers? These attorneys would call all the time, charging him six hundred dollars just to be on the phone with him for an hour.

  Bill: It only took about a month for the lawyers to show up. Late January, this attorney, Greg Cross, started coming around. Greg was with Venable out of D.C. Big, high-end law firm. He was a tall, skinny white guy with glasses. Looked like Ichabod Crane.

  We often took Mr. Jackson to meetings and depositions at hotels, but Greg was the only lawyer coming to the house. He visited maybe once a month. Greg was always cordial and respectful. I could tell Mr. Jackson trusted him. Feldman didn’t seem to like him. There were times that Greg would call and he’d ask to speak to Mr. Jackson and Feldman would say, “He’s busy right now. I’ll have him call you back.” If it was me, and the boss’s six-hundred-dollar-an-hour attorney was on the phone? I’d check to see if he wants to take it. That was another power struggle there.