by Mike Tyson
The first thing that I asked him was if he was the best pimp out there.
“No, I was nowhere near the best pimp. It’s just that I was educated and I knew how to read and write and put these stories together. And that’s all probably that I had. Those other guys were monsters,” he said.
He told me a lot of stories of his escapades, but he was at a point in his life where he wasn’t proud of them. When he got older, he had daughters, so he didn’t play the game anymore. But when he had been in the life, he was brutal to his girls. I found out later that he had used the pimp stick that his mentor had invented. He’d bend a clothes hanger and put it on a hot stove and beat his hos with it. He was the guy who, if it was raining out, told his girls, “Bitch, you had better walk between the raindrops and get my money. And don’t get wet.”
Berg wasn’t a happy, smiley kind of guy, and he wasn’t even excited that I had come to see him. I think that he thought that was the way it was supposed to be. He was the Mack. When you look at these pimps with their high heels and their funny-colored suits and stuff, we think they’re clowns, but their confidence is sky-high. We don’t understand how they get these girls to do what they do, but it’s all in the confidence. We laugh at these guys, but we envy them. How do these guys get this kind of control, to make these women do this stuff and then get money for doing it?
I kept making pilgrimages out to see Iceberg. I even invited him to see me fight but that would have been too much for him. Back in the day he was an immaculate dresser. He was one of the first guys to wear the ascots. He was the first nigga with French cuffs. But if he was to show up at one of my fights, he told me that he would have had to get his old leather suit out and he didn’t want to bother with that. He was very much into his brand. People expected him to look a certain way. “I got to be in my leather pants and I don’t feel like doing that,” he said. I respectfully told him that I would buy him whatever he wanted, but he was a classy guy and he refused my offer.
I once brought Don King, Rory, and John Horne to see Iceberg. Slim was in his pajamas in bed and we sat like little schoolkids at his feet on a raggedy old couch. We were paying homage to Berg, so if we wanted to talk we had to raise our hands. “Excuse me, Mr. Berg,” and then we’d ask him a question. That must have been killing Don’s arrogant ass to have to raise his hand and get called on.
One time, I raised my hand.
“Mr. Berg, what’s this macking shit? Does that mean if I can control a girl and make her do what I want her to do, that’s macking?”
“No, that’s not macking,” Berg replied slowly. “Macking is when you’re in control of all your elements, like right here. I know everything that is happening. Macking has nothing to do with the woman. The macking pulls in the woman, attracts the woman, then she knows what to do. In order for the macking to attract her, she has to be in the life. They’re magnetized; it’s magnetizing macking. It ain’t about no making girls do what you want them to do, she knows what to do. They’re automatically in the life, they’re attracted to the magnetizing of the macking and then that’s just it, everything is just opening up for you. They’re bringing you money, everything is happening. All this you hear about these young guys saying what they’re doing and who they’re beating. That’s not right. The woman chooses; this is by choice, not by force.”
We’re listening to this and thinking, What the fuck? I had to ask Don if this was the real guy. I was just taking Leon’s word. But Don was in the same demographic so he confirmed that that was the real Iceberg.
Even in his pajamas, you could sense his charisma. He knew that we were there to pay homage to him and get an education. We had thousands and thousands of dollars’ worth of custom-made clothing on, carrying our finest leather bags, and he wasn’t impressed by us in the smallest bit. He expected us to be there.
It used to be that before we would go out to a club to hang out and get some girls, we’d go visit Berg and get his blessings.
“What’s up, Berg? We’re going out tonight,” I’d say.
“Well, just be careful, young man. Don’t be out there letting these girls touch you. I know you’re famous and it’s hard for you, you’ll probably let these girls touch you. You can’t do that, son. You tell them, ‘Hey, hey, get your hands off me. What’s your pedigree, baby? Where’s your man at? Don’t handle me like that, baby, please.’ You got them all touching you and you’re laughing and smiling, Mike, that’s not the way to go. I understand you’re in that beautiful-people life, Mike, but you can’t have these women handling you like that. What’s wrong with you man, are you a freak? You should be telling them, ‘I could choose you, but I want to see your man first.’ Is he of the top caliber? You have to see her pedigree. If she’s with a knuckleheaded two-dollar sneaker pimp, you can’t mess with her.”
Berg seemed content in his situation. There was nothing about him that made me feel that he was insecure. He lived in a dilapidated apartment building that was worth maybe fifty thousand dollars and I was a millionaire. I was carrying more cash in my bag than Berg’s whole building was worth. But we were paying homage to him. Before we left that day, I told Don to give Berg some money. He broke off about 10K.
Another day Iceberg began lecturing me.
“Mike, you’re a very dangerous kind of guy. You’re going to leave here and have women problems all your life, because you’ll just fuck anything. And then you want to give them all full speed ahead, you want to give them all everything you got. You just will always have women problems, boy. I see you’re into satisfying every woman and you’re going to lose at that every time. You let them invade your mind. You’re not a lovey-dovey guy, you’ve got to stick and move since you’re too emotional with women. You’re going to always have some kind of connection with them or they’re going to have some connection with you, because you have to satisfy that feeling. And that’s very dangerous. Dangerous to yourself. You put that pressure on yourself, you don’t feel good, you don’t satisfy the woman. That’s a problem with your mother. There’s some connection that you had with your mother.”
Berg was getting sick and he was getting ready to die. He told me that he wanted one of those coffins that goes in the wall, above the ground, so that the bugs and the roaches wouldn’t get him.
“Now listen, Mike, I don’t want to be in the ground, I want to be in the wall. I don’t want the roaches and bugs eating me up. I’m beautiful, Mike. I don’t want them eating my eyes. I gave too much to the world, Mike.”
That’s just how arrogant pimps are. A pimp wants to be able to go to his own funeral to see who came. He don’t care that he’s dead, he just wants to know that the whole world came.
So I gave him twenty-five thousand dollars in cash from my bag and politely said, “Bergie, man, don’t worry about it. This is for the walls.” Iceberg took the money and said, “Wow, man.” But he never once said “Thank you.” That’s why I loved him. He kept it real until the end. I think he expected me to say “Thank you” for giving him my money. Most pimps don’t care about anyone but I knew he did. If I didn’t think he was a good person I would never have given him the cash.
About a week after Robin and I got married, I was asleep in Catskill. When I woke up, I saw there was some snow on the ground, so I called Bill Cayton to tell him that I couldn’t make it into the city. He had wanted me to sign a new managerial contract that had been changed to state that if either Jim or Bill died, their wives would get their share of the proceeds. That seemed innocuous enough but alarms should have gone off in my head when Bill got the police commissioner of Albany to send a marked police car to drive me to the city. They wanted that thing signed awfully bad.
Jimmy and Bill were there along with José Torres. José was getting canned as the commissioner of boxing in New York, but I guess he was there to help out his friends Jimmy and Bill.
My next fight was with Tony Tubbs in Japan. If I thought I was getting the celebrity treatment in the States, Japan was totally over the
top. There was mass hysteria when my plane landed and I was engulfed by thousands of screaming fans. We were the first attraction at the Tokyo Dome, a new stadium that held sixty-five thousand fans and within an hour of the tickets going on sale, we had sold 80 percent of them. The Japanese promoter, Mr. Honda, had handpicked Tony Tubbs as my opponent because he thought that he had the best shot at prolonging the fight into the later rounds and satisfying the audience. Don King had even promised Tony a $50,000 bonus if he came in at under 235 pounds. But Tony was battling some demons then and he couldn’t make weight.
Robin joined me in Tokyo and Larry Merchant interviewed her right before the fight.
“Inquiring minds want to know: How does a woman who went to Sarah Lawrence College and Harvard Medical School wind up falling in love with a guy who’s a graduate of the school of hard knocks?” he asked.
“God, I want to know too. We have a lot in common. Traditional families. It was sort of love at first sight. It was hard at the beginning but we got through it and we got married.”
Traditional families? Yeah, traditional for Iceberg Slim, maybe. But Robin loved the attention.
The fight didn’t last long. I felt Tubbs out in the first round and I was pleased to see that he wasn’t trying to clinch. It would have been hard for him to run at that weight. In the second round we actually traded punches and I stunned him with a left to the temple. Then I unloaded some vicious blows to the body and when he came off the ropes, I knocked him out with a left hook.
When Larry Merchant interviewed me after the fight, I was my usual megalomaniac self.
“I refuse to be hurt, to be knocked down. I refuse to lose!”
On the plane ride back to New York, Robin began throwing her weight around. She cornered Bill Cayton and according to him said, “I’m Mrs. Mike Tyson and I’m taking over.” She demanded to see all the paperwork concerning my agreements with Bill and Jim. If she wanted to see the books, it was fine with me. If Jimmy had been there, I’m sure the situation would have been handled more smoothly. He was much more of a people person than Bill. But Jimmy had to miss the fight because he was in a hospital in New York. He had lied to me and told me that he couldn’t attend the fight because he was trying to locate some rare film footage of black boxers from the turn of the century.
Nobody had told me that Jim was seriously ill, so when I got a phone call in my limo from Robin a few days after getting back to New York, it threw me for a loop.
“Michael, Jimmy is dead,” she said.
I was messed up. I had known Jimmy for a long time. I had felt that Cus had entrusted me to Jimmy, who was very close to Cus. If Cus was like a father to me, Jimmy was like a brother. So you can imagine how my grief was compounded when I found out that Jimmy had been suffering from chronic lymphocytic leukemia for over nine years and had hidden his condition from me. What’s worse, everyone had lied to me and told me that Jimmy wasn’t that sick. Maybe that was why Bill was so insistent on giving me a police escort to sign the contract before I left to fight Tubbs.
I flew to L.A. the next day for Jim’s funeral. With Jim gone the vultures were circling around for the fresh meat: me. Don King was there and he and I wound up being two of the pallbearers for Jim’s coffin. I was surprised that Bill chose Don because Bill was trying to cut Don out of promoting my fights. I bet that Don hustled Bill and told him that he’d help him handle me. I wasn’t exactly close to Cayton. During the funeral ceremony, Don and José Torres were in the back of the chapel, probably doing business. I’m sure that José was angling to get in on managing me. He was going to be out of work soon after that.
Meanwhile, Ruth had found us a nice house. It was in Bernardsville, New Jersey, thirty miles west of New York, but in traffic it felt more like three hundred miles from the city. It was a sprawling stone house that had once belonged to the undersecretary of state for FDR. I worked with a Spanish lady to decorate it and we picked out really high-end opulent furniture. Each room had a different theme to it – one was Mediterranean, one was Victorian. I didn’t know it at the time, but Ruth was going around suggesting to my friends that if they wanted to get us a wedding present, we needed furniture.
I didn’t spend much time in that house. When Robin was working, we’d go to L.A. to her place there. But every once in a while, we’d plan a party. Ruth and Robin hated my friends from Brownsville. They were such wannabes they didn’t want to stoop to hanging out with people from the hood. Robin even once hired Porta Potties for a party we had because she didn’t want my friends to go inside the house to piss.
It was around that time that Robin served notice on Cayton’s office, demanding to see all their financial records concerning me. Once we got married it was like a switch went off. Robin became more demanding. Nothing could please her. She wanted more and more control over me. I just got tired of that and started fucking more and more other girls.
One day Robin and Ruth and I were in downtown Manhattan at a soul food restaurant and Robin put her hands in my pocket to get money for the bill and she came up with some condoms. Robin got really mad but Ruth didn’t seem that disturbed. “No, Robin, it’s okay, these things happen early in the marriage,” she said. I guess she didn’t want to upset the Golden Goose. So we left and Robin was still mad and she got behind the wheel and started driving down Varick Street to go back to New Jersey through the Holland Tunnel. She never drove well to begin with, but she was so angry that she rammed the Bentley into the car in front of us.
The driver of that car came out and yelled at us that his hand was messed up so I gave him twenty thousand dollars in cash. He ran, and I mean ran, straight to the off-track betting office a block away. Then two Port Authority cops came onto the scene. I didn’t want to see Robin get in trouble so I took the rap and told them that I was driving the car. I was so in love with her at the time. One of the cops seemed really happy to see me. I could see the larceny in his eyes. He was giving me too many compliments on how beautiful my car was, so my brain started moving and I knew then that he would probably take a bribe. So I offered him the car if he wouldn’t report the accident.
“I can’t do that,” he said.
“Yes, you can,” I said. “You work too hard. You put your life on the line every day. You deserve it.”
“What am I going to do with a Bentley?” he said.
“Sell the parts,” I suggested.
“Man, don’t tell me that,” he said, as if he was already contemplating that.
By this time Robin and her mother had already fled from the scene in a cab. As the cop was considering my offer, a second man came on the scene, claiming that his hand was broken in the accident. The cop immediately jumped on him.
“I’m not gonna tell you no more. Get the fuck out of here!” he told the guy.
So I left the car there and took a cab over to Cayton’s office. I called the cops. “They fucking took my Bentley. Get my fucking car back!” We got it back that day.
After a few months with Robin and her mother, I was going crazy. I called Gene Kilroy, Ali’s right-hand man.
“The women are driving me crazy. They’re treating me like I’m a slave. The mother talks to me like I’m her husband,” I moaned.
It wasn’t just Robin and her mother. Everybody was vying to get control over me with Jimmy out of the picture. The women had a meeting with me and Bill and their attorney, Michael Winston. They got all the financial records but they couldn’t understand any of it so we showed the records to Don King. That was just the wedge he needed, and he began poisoning Robin and Ruth’s mind about Cayton because Cayton was trying to cut Don out of my future promotions.
The truth is I was pretty oblivious to all this intrigue swirling around me. I had one of the biggest fights of my career in June, a showdown with Michael Spinks, who in some people’s minds was the people’s heavyweight champ. He had to forfeit his IBC belt when he had pulled out of the unification tournament. I was training for that. I wasn’t interested in going over an
y goddamn contracts line by line. El Smucko.
Eventually, we all went down to the bankers, Merrill Lynch, and moved ten million dollars to another bank so they could have full check-writing privileges with that money. This was after I spent over a half million dollars on jewelry, clothes, and furs for both of them and $85,000 on a BMW for Robin.
Right before I was about to shoot a Diet Pepsi commercial, Ruth stopped the cameras and did some extortion stuff on Cayton. He agreed to drop his cut of the earnings from one-third to 25 percent. Which was actually a good thing. Most managers got just 10 or 15 percent and he was gouging me for one-third of my commercial work.
By the end of May, Ruth had her attack dog Winston file a civil suit to get rid of Cayton as my manager. I wasn’t really against that. After they had all lied to me about Jimmy’s condition, I couldn’t trust those guys. I really felt I needed a fresh start. The idea that they could just hand me off like chattel from Jimmy to Bill made me sick. I didn’t know which way was up. I still was conflicted about fighting. When I had a fight, I thought about retiring. But when I didn’t fight, I wanted to fight. My head was so far up my ass.
Robin then told me that she had had a miscarriage. Now I’m glad that we didn’t have a kid together but back then part of me wanted a child. She didn’t want my baby anyway. She would have died if she had a nappy-head black baby like me.
All this pressure was getting to me. I had a press session with some boxing reporters and I started losing it.
“You ruin people’s lives; I’m a sucker to even be talking to you guys. I should be ready to rip your heads off. My wife, my mother-in-law, they’re being cut to pieces. When I’m in that ring, I don’t have no more problems. It’s easy to forget problems when people are throwing punches at your head. The people in the fight business are so bad. I thought people where I came from were criminals, but these guys are bigger crooks than the guys in my neighborhood could ever be. They’re not out for my best interests, they tell me they are, but they’re not. They say ‘I did this for you and that for you’ but it’s not true. Whatever they did, they did for themselves. Whatever I get, they get a bigger percentage of it.”