5 years after death of Michael Jackson: bodyguards recall craziness of protecting him

Michael Jackson was so broke before he died he had one of his bodyguards carry around two Oscar statuettes in a briefcase in case he had to pay a bill.

“The Oscars were in a silver briefcase and I had to carry them with us at all times,” Bill Whitfield, the King of Pop’s security man told The Telegraph. “They were for Gone with the Wind and he’d bought them in 1999 for $1.5 million. It was a bit surreal and I felt uncomfortable carrying these things, but after a while you realise this is Michael Jackson, this is how it goes.”

Whitfield, a former police officer, guarded Jackson between his return to the US from living in Bahrain in early 2007, and his death on June 25, 2009 in Los Angeles. The singer’s second bodyguard was Javon Beard, a 6ft 5ins former basketball player.

Towards the end, as Jackson’s debts mounted to an estimated $500 million, the men’s wages stopped and Whitfield found himself paying for petrol out of his own pocket as they drove Jackson around.

“I didn’t mind doing it. We stayed with him out of loyalty,” he said. “But there were times we were in hotels and credit cards were being maxed out and management were about to ask us to leave. This was Michael Jackson and I was thinking ‘How is this happening?'”

-telegraph.co.uk

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ABOUT: Nana Kwesi Coomson

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An Entrepreneur, Corporate Social Responsibility, Corporate Communications Executive and Philanthropist. Editor-in-Chief of www.233times.com. A Senior Journalist with Ghanaian Chronicle Newspaper. An alumnus of Adisadel College where he read General Arts. His first degree is in Bachelor of Arts - Political Science (major) and History (minor) from the University of Ghana. He holds MSc in Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and Energy with Public Relations (PR) from the Robert Gordon University in the United Kingdom. He is a 2018 Mandela Washington Fellow who studied at Clark Atlanta University in USA on the Business and Entrepreneurship track.

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