“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. “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. “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. So when the word came out that Mr Jackson passed away? “Mr Jackson became my friend, someone I cared for and loved,” Whitfield says, before putting down the phone and going to school.

Source: The Guardian October 11, 2016 16:52 UTC