Undisputed Truth: My Autobiography (40 page)

But for every sympathetic interviewer with whom I could share my pain there were others who wanted to destroy me. I was doing a national media conference call for the fight and one guy asked, “Mike, is there any truth to the rumors that you’ve got some eye injury and, if so, is that from the effects of all those years of Mace during sex?”

Sometimes I just didn’t know how to shut my big mouth. At one of the press conferences to promote the fight, it was revealed that I had donated fifty thousand dollars for a Martin Luther King Youth Center in Vegas.

“It doesn’t make me a nice guy. Everything is more of a burden now. I don’t know if I should use the word ‘burden’ but I’m just not a happy type of guy. I try to do my best but I always fall short of the mark,” I said. Then when a reporter asked me about my new daughter, I gave Monica a little left-handed compliment.

“Her mother is beautiful but Rayna is so beautiful and gorgeous that she makes her mother look like a yard dog.” What was I thinking?

We had a crazy camp for the Bruno fight. Crocodile kept getting in fights with my sparring partners. Then he’d tell them that I’d bust their heads if they keep disrespecting him. He would put the first guy in the ring and then he would come over to me.

“You know, Mike, all them guys are saying that they’re going to kick your ass. That they should be fighting for the title, not you.”

He had me in the middle of it. These guys were now trying to kill me. I was in a fucking life-or-death situation with my sparring partners. What the fuck?

One day close to the fight, I was jumping rope and Crocodile came over.

“You’re back, champ. When Ali was in exile, he came back and fought for the world title,” he said.

“Yeah, Ali didn’t get his, but I’m not fighting Joe Frazier. I’m fighting Frank Bruno. Ali had to fight animals when he came back. But I’m going to get mine,” I said. “I’m going to get this guy.”

I took that confidence into the ring with me. I was led in by Crocodile who was wearing a black vest with white lettering on the back that read,
LOVED BY FEW, HATED BY MANY, RESPECTED BY ALL
. I was booed for the first time in my career going into the ring because thousands of Bruno’s rabid English fans had flown to Vegas for the fight, but I didn’t hear shit.

“
Tyson is a rapist
,
la la la, la la la,
” they chanted. I didn’t hear that either.

When Bruno entered the ring, I smelled the fear on him. His own promoter noted later that as soon as Bruno’s dressing room door opened for his ring walk, “it was as if someone had put a pin to Bruno and all the air rushed out.” He must have crossed himself a dozen times while they played the British national anthem. Him being scared gave me a real confidence boost. He gave me a good fight the first time we squared off. He had beaten my sparring partner Oliver McCall for the title and he also knocked out Lennox Lewis.

I knew that Bruno really didn’t want to be in there, so all I had to do was be tough and hit him with some good shots and it would be a wrap. At the end of the first round, I stunned him with a right that opened up a bad cut over his left eye. He was holding me so much in the second round that Mills Lane had to deduct a point from him. It didn’t matter. About a half a minute into the third round Bruno turned southpaw for a second and I rocked him with two left hooks. He tried to hold me but I got in two vicious right uppercuts, the second one almost knocked him up off his feet. He collapsed against the ropes and then I finished him off. I had gotten in twelve uncontested punches. Mills Lane stopped the fight and I was the new WBC heavyweight champion.

I turned around and raised my arms in triumph, soaking all that adulation up, but then I gained some kind of respect and self-dignity and fell to my knees and put my forehead on the canvas and paid homage to Allah and made a short prayer.

In the back of my mind I knew that if Bruno had fought me in this fight with the same spirit he did in the first fight, there was no way I would have beat him. So I got up and I went right to his corner where he was sitting on a stool being consoled by his wife. I stroked his head and kissed him on the cheek.

That night I had a party in my hotel suite. My friend Zip and a bunch of his L.A. boys came up. Zip loved champagne, so I ordered a hundred bottles of Dom Pérignon and we drank all night.

My humility wore off six days after the fight. I was supposed to fight Bruce Seldon next for his belt.

“I think I deserve a lot more than thirty mil and I don’t think I’ve been getting what I’m entitled,” I told the press. “I have children to take care of. Nobody cares if my children are starving or on welfare. Nobody’s gonna give me no handouts and say, ‘You are a great champion, we owe you this.’ ”

I was the champion again, which meant that I would be an even bigger target for scamsters, cheap hustlers, conniving women, and every con artist around. I couldn’t even count the massive amount of money that my management team paid out to keep the gold diggers and the ambulance chasers away. Rory and John Horne used to actually leave Johnny Tocco’s gym before I would and approach the girls who were waiting for me. They knew that if I caught a glimpse of one of them, I would say, “Let’s go,” and my training regimen would be shot.

“What do you want from Mike?” Rory would ask the girls. “If you cared about him, you wouldn’t be here.”

Then they’d give the girls some cash to leave so I could train.

My assistant Latondia handled the brunt of all the psychos and scam artists who were after my money. She paid out money right and left to people who would come up to the office in wheelchairs with casts and doctors’ bills and claim I was responsible for them somehow. Workers at my house would “fall” off ladders and sue. Women would drive up in limousines wearing mink coats and wait for hours in the hope that I’d show up at the office.

Some of the time I did have altercations when I’d go out and drink heavily when I wasn’t in camp. So some of the money might have gone to the Unanticipated Consequences of Getting Shitfaced Fund.

A prime example of all this happened a few weeks after the Bruno fight. I was in Chicago hanging out at my friend Leonard’s nightclub. I was chilling in Leonard’s office right off the VIP area with Anthony and a couple of other friends when a crazy lady in a micro skirt and big knockers wanted to meet me. They brought her up to the office. We necked a little bit.

“You know I want you,” I told her. That was my one line. I was a regular black Rudolph Valentino, aka El Schmucko.

She started heating it up, so Anthony and the other guys left the room and went outside to the VIP area. I gave her a little love nip on the neck, but when I found out she was from Indiana, I gave her the boot. Literally. I think I kicked her in her butt. Then I walked her out of the office and she left. Anthony noticed that she wasn’t flustered or anything because that was his job.

The next day, Leonard got a call from this woman’s boyfriend.

“My girlfriend said that Mike Tyson accosted her in your club last night,” he said. “And she just filed a police report.”

Not good. I was still on probation from Indiana. If I as much pinched a girl on her ass, Judge Gifford could haul my ass back into jail for nine more years.

So Leonard and a friend of his, who was a big entrepreneur dealing in illicit consciousness-altering substances, drove to Indiana to see the girl.

She told them that I had bitten her neck and tried to touch her privates.

Leonard sensed immediately that we didn’t want another “he said, she said” situation. And he knew she was only in this to separate me from a large chunk of my money.

“Tell me what you need, because we don’t need any adversity,” he said.

“Here, here’s ten grand,” his friend the entrepreneur offered.

“Ten grand! I want ten million,” the girl said.

“Ten million!” Leonard roared. “What did he do, rip your pussy out and take it so it’s no longer there? We’ll talk more about this.”

By the time Leonard got back on the expressway to Chicago, the story was all over the news. She called the press as soon as they left.

So they turned around and drove back to her house. Now she had some two-bit lawyer there, some guy in a cheap suit and sleeves up to his forearms. He was adamant about wanting ten million.

Leonard and his friend drove back to Chicago. He was trying to figure out a strategy when this woman’s friend, who Leonard knew, called him.

“Let me tell you, nothing happened to that woman,” her friend said. “We drove all the way back that night and she wasn’t mad about anything Mike did.”

So Leonard took one for the team. Her friend was a big fat chick, so he had a limousine pick her up and brought her to Chicago to tell her story at a press conference that Leonard called. Leonard met the car halfway to the press conference and he talked a little while to the girl and then he fucked her in the backseat of the limo.

The next day two police officers came to investigate the claims. Leonard told them that he and two other women, his niece and a girl he was banging, were in the room with us the entire time. Leonard had to drive over to my house in Ohio, where I was forced to remain until these charges against me were substantiated, to get my story straight. My house was already surrounded with press cars, so Leonard took the license plates off his car and drove through my gates. He told Rory and John what I should say to the police officers when they interviewed me the next day.

Before I was remanded to stay at home I had gone back to Leonard’s club one Sunday night when he had gangster night. Two thousand gangsters and their posses packed the club every Sunday. I was sitting at Leonard’s table in the VIP area when a bunch of these young gangster guys came up to me. I was really stressing about this case, thinking this liar could send me back to jail.

“Yo, Mike, what about that bitch,” one of the young guys said. “Where does she live at, man?”

I kept my mouth shut. I was thinking that this guy might have been an undercover cop trying to set me up.

This lady was not the most credible person for the cops to believe. She was a twenty-five-year-old beautician and liquor store owner from Gary, Indiana, whose husband had been murdered weeks earlier while he was facing charges of selling rock cocaine. Plus, days before the incident with me, she had reached a settlement in a personal injury suit she had filed after being in a 1994 traffic accident, where the investigating cop filed a report that no one had been injured.

When the cops refused to file charges, the woman sued Leonard’s club in federal court, saying that he had allowed her to be accosted. She got her money when his insurance company settled out of court.

Even my probation counselor tried to get in on the action. The Indiana court had appointed a Cleveland-based psychologist named Dr. Keith J. Smedi to supervise my probation. Everything I did had to go through this guy. I couldn’t even be intimate with Monica without getting permission from him. This guy was both stupid and corrupt. He had the IQ of a fucking lit candle. He must have gotten his Ph.D. from his uncle.

While he was working for the state supervising me, he was telling all my friends to persuade me to go into business with his father. I knew I could work with a guy like that because if I got in trouble, he’d never violate me, he’d just hold it over my head. I knew that, as time went on, he’d reveal himself to be dirty so I just played him.

At first he was all strict, saying I couldn’t hang out with any of my high-profile friends. But then he tried to extort me. He saw this Chicago case as his ticket to the big time. A few weeks after the dust had cleared and the cops had declined to press charges, Smedi sent my office a bill for his services.

1. Dr. Smedi chose NOT to have Mr. Tyson returned to Indianapolis, Indiana as initially requested to possibly face the judge and the charges of this young woman who accused Tyson of biting her face while in the nightclub.
   
2. Dr. Smedi chose NOT to have Mr. Tyson returned to Chicago and face extensive interrogation by the Chicago authority.
   
3. Dr. Smedi chose NOT to have Mr. Tyson immediately re-incarcerated pending the Chicago investigation this April 7th episode.
   
4. Dr. Smedi chose NOT to add time onto Mr. Tyson’s present term of parole and offender therapy program.
   
5. Dr. Smedi chose to consider a large “Monetary charge” in order to reach the thinking and feeling levels of this offender Mike Tyson.
   

Dr. Smedi therefore levied a seven million dollar (behavioral modification thinking impact charge based on Tyson’s earning potential of Tyson) for this act of extremely poor judgment which was observed as potential risk to relapse behavior and parole violation behavior in lieu of the above alternate options. This monetary charge is aimed at impacting (ie shocking) Mr. Tyson
were [sic] it will cause the most “memory” in order to make him to rethink his actions and apply in real life this “thinking insight” while in nightclubs and other areas were [sic] “Young women are in abundance in his long term future and especially after parole is terminated.
Of course this could be levied only once in the course of a sex offender’s parole. Any further acts of poor judgment parole violation behavior will result in possible extension of parole and possible recommendations for re-incarceration.
(This is not expected, due to Mike’s good efforts so far, lets keep it up!)
This seven million dollar amount is discounted
to two million dollars, due to Mr. Tyson’s overall positive effort to this point in time, aside from the April 7th mishap.
Remember this charge is in lieu of extending the parole time and to eliminate severe, negative media reports if Tyson had been forced to face Indiana and the Chicago authorities and to restrain from having to “add more time” to Tyson’s parole restrictions. Most of these immediate restrictions after Chicago have been removed at this date.

Total breakdown: April through August 1996 expenses: $182,862.00 April 7th: Offender’s poor judgment/potential offender parole violation behavior setback charge: $2,000,000.00