For the last two and a half years of his life, two men were with Michael Jackson almost around the clock. Bill Whitfield, a former police officer who had run security for Sean Combs, and Javon Beard, a rookie. They were hired in 2006, when Jackson returned to America after living abroad, and they stayed until he died in June 2009.
They were not fans. They were employees. And the thing they both keep coming back to is the silence.
Beard put it as plainly as anybody has managed: “Never in the whole time I worked for the man did I hear anybody just call him up to say, ‘Hey, guess what movie I saw?’ There was nothing like that going on. It was just business.”
The Man Who Protected Michael Jackson – The King of Pop!
Whitfield described Jackson’s arrival back in the United States in 2006, and there was no welcoming committee at the airport. No publicist. No family. No friends. Just his new bodyguard and the cold. Sometimes, late at night, Jackson would ring one of them to have somebody to talk to.
The most unexpected part of their account is what he actually wanted protecting from. Whitfield has said it directly: his previous work focused on external threats—stalkers, paparazzi. Jackson’s fear was different. “What Mr. Jackson was really paranoid about, the thing he felt he needed most from us, was protection from the people who were already in his life.” He wanted them there so he could hide his movements from his own lawyers and managers, and as a buffer between himself and his own family.
When he hired them, he gave them a warning: “Watch — now the vultures are going to start to show up.”
Michael Jackson’s Security Opens Up | Bill Whitfield
But the picture they paint isn’t all bleak, and that is why fans love their book. They describe a genuinely hands-on father — helping with homework, checking the children were eating properly, putting them to bed. Whitfield’s summary of the job is the best line in the whole thing: “We worked for Mr Jackson, we didn’t work for the ‘King of Pop.’”
And the money had gone. There were stretches when credit cards were declined, and hotels were threatening to ask them to leave. Whitfield ended up paying for petrol out of his own pocket. He stayed anyway.
“I didn’t mind doing it. We stayed with him out of loyalty.”