Undisputed Truth: My Autobiography (47 page)

I guess that’s why he was doing his magazine, to learn the business end. He felt that he had no accomplishments in life and that was one thing that he could point to.

We talked about my case a little bit.

“Look, I know that the only reason you’re in here is because you’re black,” he told me. He was letting me know that he knew what time it was.

At one point, I just flat out said to him, “You know you’ve got to run for political office.”

“What?” He seemed a little taken aback. “Do you think so?”

“You’d be letting my mother down, my mother’s people down. They saw you under that desk. You can’t let a lost generation that believed so much in your family down. Not me, fuck me, I’m going to do what I do, but you can’t let those people down. Your father and your uncle were their hope and you’re the bloodline to that hope,” I said.

He didn’t say anything. Maybe he thought I was crazy.

“No, nigga, you’ve got to do this shit. Are you crazy? What’s the purpose of you even living? That’s what you were born to do. People’s dreams are riding on you, man. That’s a heavy burden but you shouldn’t have had that mother and father you did.”

He would have made a great politician. He really cared about people; you could tell it wasn’t some phony-baloney shit. Just the way he really engaged with people, really catching the eyes of people he didn’t even know. He wasn’t scared to be seen out in public; he was out there looking to engage.
Whoa,
I’d think,
this is one interesting guy.

He looked tired that night. He told me he had to get some coffee because he was going to fly back to New York that night. He had flown down with his flight instructor.

“No, man. Go over to the house. Stay with Monica and the kids,” I told him. “You’re fucking crazy to fly that plane anyway.”

“You don’t know how I feel up there, man. I feel so free,” he told me.

“You must feel stupid, you up there and you don’t really know what you’re doing. If you have to fly, fly by yourself. Please don’t take somebody you love up there.”

He didn’t say anything, but he went to see Monica that night and she told me that he said, “Well, Mike said I was stupid for flying my plane. He’s the one who got in the motorcycle accident.”

We also talked about hanging out when I got out of jail. He was talking about other women and I got a sense that he was going through a lot of shit with his wife.

“When you get out, give me a little time to handle some stuff with my wife. Then you and I have got to hang. You need to come with me to Aspen.”

“Aspen?” I said. “They got no niggas in Aspen. I’m not gonna get no love up there.”

“Uh-huh. There’s Lynn Swann,” John said.

“Lynn Swann ain’t no nigga,” I said.

“Yeah, you’re right,” he conceded.

Of course, I made the pitch to get out right then. I had been in jail for almost four months already. That was enough time I thought. One of John’s cousins, Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, RFK’s oldest daughter, was the lieutenant governor of Maryland at the time.

“Get me out of here,” I begged. “Ask your fucking cousin.”

“Mike, I don’t really know her,” he said.

Maybe he was sophisticated enough not to say anything in that visiting room.

“You don’t know her? What the fuck do you mean? You all play football together up there in Hyannis Port.”

He smiled and then he left. The media surrounded him when he got out.

“I’m here in support of my friend,” John said. “Mike’s a much different man than his public image would suggest. He’s a man who was really putting his life back together and has an opportunity to do so in the future. I hope perhaps coming here and telling folks that, people might start to believe it, because he’s had a difficult life.”

Then he got into his limo and drove to my house to get some coffee. Shortly after John-John was there, boom, I got out of jail.

As soon as I got out of jail, the very first day, I went home, packed a bag, and went to New York. I didn’t hang out and spend time with my family like I should have. Boom, I got in the car and drove to New York to see one of my girlfriends. I just didn’t have the skills or tools to be a responsible person. Or the desire. You can’t have one foot in a marriage and the other foot in the gutter. Having all those girlfriends while I was married was like a drug in itself. And if I needed some more, I’d just walk down the street and women would throw themselves at me. I was a slave addicted to the chaos of celebrity. I wished I could stop it but I couldn’t.

Nothing in my life was pretty then. My new business guys had negotiated new deals with Showtime and the MGM Grand because Don wasn’t in the picture, but I was still on the hook for all those millions that Showtime had advanced me and that wound up in Don’s pocket. And the IRS was still on my back.

I had moved to Phoenix to start training for my next fight, and at the beginning of June I started doing community service at the infamous Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s jail in Phoenix. He was thrilled to have me there. I would walk around his tent city and talk to the prisoners and tell them to stay out of trouble. Meanwhile, my probation officers were treating me like I was John Gotti. They’d try to write me up every chance they got. If they heard a rumor that I was out at a club, they’d call my lawyer and we’d have to get witnesses to dispute it. Then the lawyer would write them: “As I indicated to you, Mike did not visit the Amazon nightclub on Tuesday, June 29th, as Monica confirmed. Mike was in his room asleep.”

My lawyer even started telling my bodyguards to be on the alert.

“As you know the Maricopa County Adult Probation Department is intensifying its surveillance of Mike. Accordingly, as Anthony has already begun to do, I’d like to establish the following procedures. If Mike leaves the hotel after ten p.m. you should page both Paul and his surveillance officer, Chad. Anthony has these numbers. Additionally, please telephone my voice mail and leave me an identical message as to where Mike is going. If Mike leaves to go to another club, or even to a restaurant, it’s important that you make telephone calls to both probation officers and myself informing all parties of the itinerary. As I discussed with Anthony, it’s important that Mike remain calm, no matter what probation does. In the event that a confrontation occurs with a probation department, or is about to occur, please call me immediately.”

I’m Al Capone! I’m a bad nigga, the scariest man alive. You know my megalomaniacal ego was eating this shit up. They were treating me like I was the Godfather.

And I was still a huge target for cheap shots. One day in August I was doing my service at Sheriff Arpaio’s tent and he called me into his office.

“Mike, one of my sheriffs is pressing charges against you. She said you struck her and knocked her down. I don’t know why it took her a week to file these charges,” he said.

“You were with me all the time. You know this is bullshit,” I said.

“I don’t see how you could have done this,” he agreed.

Of course, it was all bullshit. But this was the shit I had to go through. Getting charged for things while I was doing community service? They found video and pictures taken of the scene when the incident was supposed to have taken place and the sheriff was there with me and she was all smiles, so they dropped the case but I could have been sent back to jail in Maryland. I think they were really out to embarrass Arpaio. His sheriffs didn’t like him too much.

I got back in the ring in Vegas on October 23, 1999. My opponent was Orlin Norris. Back when I was champ, I didn’t know who this guy was, but he used to show up at my press conferences and just stare all crazy at me. He fought on some of my undercards, but I didn’t recognize him. I was thinking,
This nigga might have a gun. Who is this guy?
Did I talk shit to him or win all his money at a dice game?
I was scared. Nobody had ever had the balls to do that to me. He’d just stare at me, not say nothing. I thought he was probably someone I had wronged in the streets.

He had been the WBA cruiserweight champion, so he did know how to fight. We felt each other out the first round and, right at the bell, I hit him with a left uppercut that sent him down. Richard Steele deducted two points from me for hitting after the bell, but it didn’t matter. Norris went back to his corner and sat on his stool and didn’t get up. He claimed that he had injured his right knee when he went down and he couldn’t continue. The crowd started booing and throwing things and next thing you knew, there were fifty uniformed cops in the ring. Here we go again. I was really in good shape and I would have applied the heat and knocked him out in the next round, but he wouldn’t get off his stool. It’s funny when you watch the video; he got up and strolled back to his corner, fine, and listened to his trainer tell him what he was doing wrong. But he quit and that was another black mark on my name in Vegas. They ruled it a no contest. I didn’t realize it at the time, but that was the last time I’d ever be in a ring in Las Vegas.

Shelly Finkel thought that it might be better for me to fight outside the United States for a while and let Vegas calm down after the Norris fiasco. So he set up a fight for me in Manchester, England, on January 29, 2000. I was going to meet Julius Francis, the British heavyweight champion. England was a trip. I was mobbed everywhere I went. When I visited the ghetto in Brixton, there were so many adoring fans swarming me that I had to take refuge in a police station. I think it might have been the first time in my life that I entered a police station voluntarily.

A week before the fight, I did an interview with Sky TV.

“Do you think you are getting fair treatment here?” the interviewer asked.

“Your guys treat me with kid gloves compared to what they do in the United States. They make you not even want to come outside sometimes, but I am strong and there is nothing that can stop me. I refuse to be beaten down anymore or be stomped on emotionally anymore. Whatever comes at me I am just going to put my head up and face it.”

“Twenty-one thousand people snapped up all of the tickets to see you in two days. What do you think is your magnetism for fight fans?” he wondered.

“I don’t know, but I do know there’s another sixty thousand that couldn’t get tickets and I think they should just crash the gate and come in, that’s what I believe.”

“Don’t give them ideas, Mike.” He sounded terrified.

“That’s what they need, they need ideas. They’re supposed to see me fight. I was a fan of Duran and I rounded up a bunch of guys from the street. ‘Come on, man, come on! They can’t stop us!’ And we just crashed right through the gate.”

“A couple more questions about Julius Francis. Tell us your prediction of what is going to happen?”

“I don’t know. I think I am going to kill Julius Francis,” I said, deadpan.

“You don’t mean to kill him really, do you? I just said that because the people will pounce on the quote and say, ‘Oh, Mike Tyson wants to kill Julius Francis.’ ”

“That’s okay. Listen, can I tell you something? It doesn’t faze me what anyone says about me. Michael and Tyson are two different people. To my children and my wife I am Mike and Daddy. But I am Tyson here. Tyson is just a freak, somebody who generates a ton of money. No one knows me, no one has any kind of consideration for my feelings, my pain, anything I’ve ever been through in my life. You have no iota who I am or what I am. They don’t even know why they cheer for me. Why, because I’m a good fighter? Because I stand up for myself? Tyson is not who I am. I become that person, but I am Mike and Daddy, and that is more important to me.”

“And the only time you are that other person is when you are in the ring, yeah?”

“Right now! I am Tyson right now.”

“The guy?”

“Yeah, I’m the guy that’s gonna make the whole freak show happen on the twenty-ninth. Everyone is going to come and watch me kill somebody, or beat somebody up, or knock somebody out. Tyson is the ticket, Tyson is the moneymaker. Not too many people care about Michael personally, because Michael is just some nigga out of Brownsville, Brooklyn, that just happened to make it one day, or was lucky. Where I come from, I am the piece of gum on the bottom of your shoe. God has blessed me, I don’t know, he put me in this situation to be around, I don’t know, I guess you guys are supposed to be decent people, right?”

I couldn’t walk the streets of London because we’d start a riot, so we went shopping by car. One time, we stopped for a light and when people saw I was in the car, they started rocking it. Other people were diving headfirst into the car. It was like a scene out of a third-world country where the dictator was trying to leave and the crowd was doing everything to block the car, even tear the roof off. But these people were showing love.

“We love you, Mike! We love you!” they were screaming.

It was like Beatlemania. A lady friend was with me and it looked like she was going to take a heart attack.

“Damn,” she said, turning around to look at me. “Who the fuck are you?”

We got back to our hotel, but the crowd just swarmed under the window and started chanting. They wouldn’t leave until I went out on the balcony and gave them the thumbs-up and saluted them. I thought I was fucking Charlemagne.

I had some vocal detractors too. I got no support from the ladies’ groups. They would boycott my appearances. I was invited to visit Britain’s parliament, but all the lady M.P.s protested. Maybe it was because when I visited Madame Tussauds wax museum, I called the statue of Winston Churchill “another damn limey.”

But I enjoyed fighting the protest groups. I relished being an international fucking pig. I felt like Dillinger. Because I had such a disgusting reputation, the gangsters in any country I went to would open up their clubs for me to hang out in.

“Fuck them motherfuckers, Mike,” they’d say. “We’re with you.”

I had met an awesome Russian girl at my hotel who saw my jewelry and told me to visit her at Graff Diamonds, the highest-end jewelry store in the world. She worked there translating for the Russian oligarchs and their wives when they visited the store. I went there with my fight promoter, Frank Warren, who was the Don King of Europe. She waited on me and she started flirting. She asked me what I was like as a boy and I told her, “I used to rob people and steal.”

“Stop playing!” she said.

“No, really. I broke into houses and robbed people at gunpoint.”

I also picked up the girl and slept with her a few times before I had to go to Manchester to fight. I wasn’t really worried about the fight. You could see that Francis wasn’t training seriously; he came in at 243 pounds. He had gone to some army camp to get in shape and he got fatter. I don’t think that the English press thought much of his chances. The London
Daily Mirror
gave him $50,000 to put an ad for their paper on the bottom of his boxing shoes. They got their money’s worth. I knocked Francis down five times in the first four minutes of the fight before the ref stopped it.

When I got back to London, I called up my Russian girlfriend. While I was talking to her, I could hear some guy in the background saying, “Who is that, Tyson?” She hung up and came right to see me at my hotel. I started getting nervous. She had told me when I first met her that she was seeing this Chinese arms dealer named Michael.

Oh shit,
I thought.
I am fucking dead.

I was convinced he was going to follow her to my hotel. When she got there, I immediately barraged her with questions.

“Will Michael get mad? Is Michael the jealous type?”

“To hell with him,” she said. “I don’t care anymore. He’s just a pain in the ass. But he does have a lot of money and he takes good care of me.”

Jackie Rowe was in the room and she put some street shit on this naïve girl. The Russian girl was so overwhelmingly beautiful that she had never learned how to play games. But this time she had to because she was going to lose her sugar daddy if she did anything rash. I was going back to America the next day. I wish she could have come with me but that was impossible.

“No, no, no, no,” Jackie told her. “You have to go back to him and tell him that everything is all right. Don’t pull your head out of the lion’s mouth abruptly. You’ve got to pull it easily out. Look, you need that money. Mike is going home. Don’t lose that guy.”

She took care of it. I knew that the guy was going to take her back. She was really an awesome lady.

I went back to the States, but it wasn’t long before I got in trouble again. On May eighteenth, I was with my barber friend Mack chilling at Cheetahs strip club in Vegas. Back then when I wanted to get my head clear, I went to a strip club. That’s just what people did back in the early 2000s.

So I was sitting on a couch at the back of the club next to the DJ booth, talking to my friend Lonnie who was one of the managers. This stripper came up to me and asked me if I wanted a lap dance. I didn’t want anything from her, but she was persistent. She kept insisting she give me a lap dance. She approached me a number of times, then she tried to sit down on my lap. I put up a hand to stop her and she teetered on her high heels and fell on her backside. I think I also called her a “skank” and a “dirty whore.” She went back to her dressing room, embarrassed.