It’s 6am and Bill Whitfield is making coffee at his home in Las Vegas before he drives to work as a high school security guard. Few of the students he now protects know that the big guy in uniform was Michael Jackson’s bodyguard for the last two and a half years of the singer’s life. “Oftentimes I was the last person he spoke to at night and the first person he spoke to in the morning,” he says on the phone, seven years after Jackson’s fatal heart attack. “You couldn’t get to Mr Jackson unless you went through me.”
Whitfield remembers the after-hours visits to bookshops, when Jackson would buy everything. He talks about taking the singer’s children to theme parks without the veils they wore in public with their father. He remembers the fake names used to book hotel rooms (“we used Barney Rubble for a while”) and the decoy SUVs he deployed to keep fans away. And he recalls the descent of the “vultures” after Jackson agreed to a farewell tour.
There were only a few narrow escapes. “On three different occasions we received calls from hotel managers to say that someone had made a threatening call,” Whitfield says. “So in the middle of the night we would need to leave and one of the ways we would do it – and I’ve never really talked about this – was to smuggle Mr Jackson out in a room-service trolley.”
Whitfield, now 50, hasn’t exactly chosen the quiet life. His school is prominent – it is named after its founder, the Vegas-born tennis star Andre Agassi – and he is alert to the threat of shootings. But he doesn’t miss guarding famous people, a job he did for more than a decade after starting out as a Connecticut cop. “It’s a lot harder now because of the way celebrities publicise their wealth,” he says. “You know the record Biggie and Puffy made, Mo Money Mo Problems’? It’s never been more true.”
Just ask Kim Kardashian. Last week, armed thieves entered the reality TV star’s rented apartment in Paris and fled with belongings worth £8.5m. The haul included a £3.2m diamond ring bought by her husband Kanye West with money he had secured from an Adidas deal. She had shared a picture of the ring with her 85 million Instagram followers three days before the heist, tagging its maker, the American jeweller Lorraine Schwartz. Kardashian’s bodyguard, Pascal Duvier, was reportedly in a nightclub guarding other members of the family when the heist took place.
The theft – the latest in a string of high-profile breaches – has triggered a debate inside the booming security industry about the role of the bodyguard in the modern era of social media and random acts of terror. In August, an unnamed member of Saudi royalty claimed to have been robbed of belongings worth €1m on a Paris pavement. Weeks earlier, Bernie Ecclestone’s mother-in-law was freed after being kidnapped in São Paulo.
“With the increase in domestic and international terrorism we have seen a big spike in requests for services,” says Shamir Bolivar, a Miami-based bodyguard who has protected Sean “Diddy” Combs and Gwyneth Paltrow as the founder and boss of The Shadow Group. Bolivar can bench press almost 500lbs (225kg) and can’t help but talk like he is in a film; when I ask if he finds glamour in his work, he says he doesn’t, adding: “Glamour would be when we put a flag over our coffin and in the legacy we leave for our children, knowing that we did a good job.”
Duvier is “one of the best agents in the game”, Bolivar says. But he and almost a dozen other industry insiders I speak to agree that the game has changed. As threats – real and perceived – grow, celebrities haven’t wised up. Moreover, they have taken to broadcasting their assets. “It’s bad enough that the paparazzi are on our tail 24/7, but you don’t want to make it so easy by updating your location every five minutes,” Bolivar says. “You wouldn’t withdraw $1m from the bank and say, ‘Hi, I just took this money out and I’ll be staying at the Waldorf Astoria should anyone want to come and find me.’”
Phones have been ringing for days as top-tier celebrities begin investing in the kind of beefed-up security that has traditionally been the preserve of drug lords and oil executives visiting conflict zones. “I’m just about to have a meeting with a high-profile female client to discuss her security after Paris,” says Shawn Engbrecht, a US Army special operations agent who founded CASS Global Security in 1998. “A lot of these people are so adored they thought things wouldn’t happen to them.”
When Engbrecht travels with a prominent client to, say, Paris, he takes no chances. He sends an advance team to hook up with local agents. They sweep the hotel, prepare routes and install their own cameras and motion sensors, wired to an operations room in a neighbouring suite. At least four bodyguards are deployed, including one or two off-duty Paris police officers with arresting power. The principal, as clients are known, carries a panic button at all times and is never allowed to be more than eight seconds from rescue. “When you want to rob someone of $10m in jewellery and you realise you’re gonna have to kill a French police officer and two security to get to it, that changes the equation a bit,” Engbrecht says.
James Glancy, a former Royal Marine and London-based security consultant, says the heavy who clears a path through a sea of fans should be the “cherry on the cake” of a close-protection detail. Another British close-protection officer, who did not want to be named but is a manager at Close Protection World, a forum for bodyguards, compares that experience with war (he is a former military police officer). “You come out of a lift and it’s silent, then – bang! – you’re almost blinded by the lights,” he says. “You have cheering, shouting fans fighting among each other. It’s the same sensory overload, and the adrenaline courses through you.”
Glancy’s firm, AnotherDay, concentrates on the prevention and planning required to back up the man on the ground. He vets staff and commissions duplicates of valuable objects. He advised one British client to make replicas of a pair of Purdey shotguns. The copies cost about £5,000 – a fraction of the real guns’ value – and stand inside a conspicuous cabinet; the antiques are stashed elsewhere. His team trains clients to be convincing while handing over the decoys. “If an organised crime network really wants to get an individual, they will, but imagine the psychological victory if Kardashian had given these guys a fake ring,” Glancy says.
The mores of the super-rich are partly to blame for an explosion in the close-protection industry centred on London. A Mayfair car showroom that opened last year sells armoured Lamborghinis. Paradoxically, a hulking bodyguard is sometimes deployed as a wealth-signalling accessory. The Security Industry Authority, which regulates the industry for the Home Office, reports that in 2007 there were 2,000 valid close-protection licences in circulation (anyone working as a bodyguard in the UK is legally required to undergo training before applying for one). There are now more than 15,000, each bodyguard charging anything from £300 a day up into four figures depending on their background (ex-special forces sit at the top of the tree).
As Whitfield found with Michael Jackson, the trust required to preserve a life means the role can quickly expand to combine the duties of a confidante, gatekeeper, childminder, PA – and friend. “We’ve had clients for whom we’ve had to draw chalk marks on the street at the Cannes festival so they know where to stand,” says Engbrecht. “We had a billionaire who only communicated by Post-it notes and once informed us there was too much dust under the toaster by writing on a Post-It – and putting it under the toaster. We had one of the most powerful women in the world, who wasn’t known in America and would come to New York to be treated as a human. We’d walk down Fifth Avenue and I’d be thinking: ‘You’re worth umpteen billions and God knows how many heads of state you’ve got on your cell phone.’”
Violence remains rare on the celebrity circuit, although Bolivar says he has had to “suppress life” while protecting a client (he declines to elaborate). Engbrecht says he has displayed his weapon twice, “and it became apparent I was prepared to use it”. Whitfield has never had to take action. “Anyone who would have got close enough to steal anything from Mr Jackson would have broken the barrier and that’s never gonna happen with me,” he says.
Sometimes sacrifices have to be made. Iain Robertson was a former para who became a bodyguard and road manager for bands including Oasis and Spandau Ballet. In the early 2000s, before he quit for a safer life as a firefighter, he was in a Moscow nightclub after a Marc Almond concert. “He had a particularly stylish and flamboyant fur coat that night,” Robertson remembers at his one-engine fire station in Gloucestershire. “We’d been in this club a couple of hours, with the beautiful people of Moscow and shitloads of gangsters, when I was approached by a couple of guys who had been sitting a few tables away.
“I introduced myself and they asked if they could buy me a beer. Then one said: ‘My boss’s wife would really like that coat.’ I said I’d speak to Marc but that I knew he was very attached to it. ‘I don’t think you understand,’ they said. So I talked to Marc. He didn’t want to give up the coat. ‘OK, I’ll take care of this,’ I told him. ‘You need to gather up the band and slip out of here back to the hotel.’”
Robertson, now 56, says he returned to the table to stall the men. But two of them spotted the band leaving and got up. “I gave the first guy a sort of straight arm to the throat and the second got a sort of knuckle punch into the temple,” he says. “I knew what was going to happen next. I got the living shit kicked out of me, but the band were able to get out. Then the guys who had done the beating picked me up, dusted me down and bought me a beer.”
I ask Whitfield how he felt after Jackson’s death in the summer of 2009. The bodyguard had stayed in Las Vegas to prepare the security for the world tour that was due to start in London two weeks later. Jackson was in a rented mansion in Los Angeles with his physician, who would later be convicted of involuntary manslaughter for administering the fatal dose of surgical anaesthetic that Jackson demanded for his insomnia. Whitfield had become unfailingly loyal, even forgoing wages while Jackson’s debts multiplied. He remembers carrying in a briefcase two Gone With the Wind Oscars statuettes that Jackson had bought in 1999 for $1.5m. They would be used as currency if the cash ran out.
Whitfield had watched lawyers, promoters and family members circle while the tour took shape. “Mr Jackson said to me at the beginning: ‘Bill, watch; now the vultures are going to start to show up.’ And soon I knew exactly what he meant. I witnessed the heartache and stress. He expressed it to me. So when the word came out that Mr Jackson passed away? After what I had witnessed him go through, the first thing that came to my mind was: ‘Now he’ll rest.’ He didn’t die, he left this place and all of what he was going through.”
That loyalty endures and Whitfield dismisses the more lurid claims about Jackson’s private life. He says the man under the mask was “as normal as the rest of us”. In 2014, he wrote Remembering the Time: Protecting Michael Jackson in His Final Days with Javon Beard, his fellow bodyguard. “Mr Jackson became my friend, someone I cared for and loved,” Whitfield says, before putting down the phone and going to school. “Writing the book was a way of continuing my protection of him.”
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