Remember the Time: Protecting Michael Jackson in His Final Days by Tanner Colby, Bill Whitfield, Javon Beard Read Free Book Online

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: MP5fully 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.
    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