Givens threw a fit.
“I want my money,” she shouted. “Where is my motherfucking money, you motherfucker?”
Givens finally reached Tyson by phone in Los Angeles and he instructed Brady to do whatever his wife wanted. Even after Brady agreed to complete the transfer, Givens was still angry, telling him, “You’re one of Cayton’s boys. We’re going to take our money out of here.”
Two months later she did, transferring the $10 million account to the United States Trust Co.
Brady was only trying to be prudent and follow the instructions that Jacobs had given him. Jacobs had set up a $2 million annuity for Tyson in 1987 and tried to guard his money. He had told Brady never to let Tyson withdraw any cash without waiting for twenty-four hours and notifying him or Cayton. He thought this would protect Tyson from being fleeced by hustlers, and from his own shopping binges for cars and jewelry.
Brady later told me, “Robin didn’t seem to care at all about Jim’s death. She wanted the money and wouldn’t wait one day. I was surprised she wasn’t attending the funeral and even asked her about it. She ran through about one million of Mike’s money in the first sixty days of their marriage.”
Meanwhile, back in Los Angeles, Don King was openly making a play for Mike Tyson during the funeral, in front of Cayton and Jacobs’s closest compadres.
Before the services, King told Jose Torres that he should become Tyson’s manager and work with him as Tyson’s promoter. Torres was then the chairman of the New York State Athletic Commission and could not become anyone’s manager without creating the appearance of a conflict of interest.
King spoke directly to Tyson and proposed that he take four or five “easy fights” before he met Michael Spinks to unify the title, a bout already scheduled for June 27. King was not the promoter of Tyson– Spinks and was getting only a set fee of $3 million for his subordinate role to Butch Lewis, Spinks’s promoter. King’s role was to make the undercard matches.
When manager Jimmy Jacobs (left) died in March 1988, Mike Tyson was inconsolable. King crashed the funeral, and a few months later he took over Tyson’s career. BIG FIGHTS
John Martin, the president of Ohlmeyer Communications, was one of Jim Jacobs’s pallbearers and eulogists at the funeral. He recalls: “I saw it all happen right in front of me at Jim’s funeral. At one point I spoke to Mike, who was inconsolable and crying. I told him to be careful, that all these forces will try to take over now that Jim is gone.
“I said that to Mike because I could see King maneuvering right in front of the open casket in the private family room. Don was working on Mike right next to the casket. Don has the guts of a burglar. The room was watching. Don was leaning all over Mike. He wouldn’t let him get away from him. Mike was weeping and Don was hitting on him.”
Gene Kilroy, Muhammad Ali’s camp facilitator, was one of the mourners who watched King start his play for Tyson. He went to Tyson and told him, “You can trust Bill Cayton. He’s honest and a good businessman.”
A few days later Kilroy urged Cayton to “bring a black guy into Tyson’s camp, as a trainer, or lawyer, or accountant,” to help fend off the race card when King played it. But Cayton ignored Kilroy’s perceptive counsel.
By the end of the funeral Tyson was like a lost child, not knowing which way to turn, or whom to trust. Robin had told him she was pregnant, but he didn’t know if he completely believed her. He didn’t really know the seventy-year-old Cayton, who was honest, but condescending and egocentric. He had always been warned about King by D’Amato and Jacobs, but he was charmed by King’s funky charisma, and he felt he could control King, telling a friend, “I can handle a snake if I keep the light on.”
King, the uninvited guest, had ended up one of the pallbearers.
Tyson was so upset by the funeral that he asked Torres to accompany him back to New York on a red-eye flight and not wait for the next morning, when most of the funeral party was flying back.
On the plane Tyson noticed Dr. Gene Brody in a nearby seat. Tyson sat down next to him and asked about Jacobs having leukemia—if it was true, why nobody had ever told him, and did Jimmy know he was dying?
Brody told Tyson he didn’t want to discuss it on the plane, and that he should call him at his office in New York. Tyson was reaching out for information, for an anchor, at a moment he felt he was drowning. It wasn’t his custom to defer gratification and make an appointment a week later. He never called Dr. Brody.
At the start of 1988 it seemed that Mike Tyson’s rise to the unified heavyweight championship would cause the eclipse of Don King as boxing’s dominant promoter.
King did not have a piece of Tyson. Tyson was loyal to Jacobs and Cayton. They had managed Tyson into being an authentic free agent—like Ali and Ray Leonard—avoiding exclusive entanglements with any promoter, putting each fight up for the highest, free-market bid. At twenty-one, Tyson looked like an invincible superman who would remain champion for years.
King had watched with envy and frustration as Tyson defeated all his heavyweights during his march to the unified title: Trevor Berbick, Bonecrusher Smith, Tony Tucker, and Tony Tubbs. Ali these King’s men were intimidated and vanquished by Tyson.
Although still able to tell a bank his net worth was between $20 and $25 million, King had lost $3 million in the October 1987 stock market crash, as a result of margin calls he couldn’t meet. The loss irritated King, but still not as much as his loss of control over the heavyweight title.
But then King saw his opening with the sudden death of Jimmy Jacobs, and Tyson’s equally sudden marriage to actress Robin Givens. King saw a vacuum and he saw chaos and he took advantage. He didn’t make one false step in a six-month campaign to capture control over Tyson’s future and fortune.
At first King had to compete with both Bill Cayton and “the women” for Tyson’s loyalty. His strategy was to lie back, poison Robin’s mind against Cayton, and let Robin turn Tyson against his surviving manager, while he just befriended and flattered Tyson with no strings seemingly attached.
King also had to maneuver with Jose Torres, an important influence on Tyson in this period, as the living link back to Cus. Torres says King during this time made “anti-Semitic remarks” to him about both Jacobs and Cayton, and assumes that he was making the same points to Tyson in private.*
Givens and Roper were also trying to win Torres over to their side in the triangular tug-of-war. They suggested they could get him a job with Donald Trump if he advised Tyson to let them control his career.
Torres had also been close to Jacobs and knew that Jacobs and Cayton had not cheated Tyson out of any money, although King was saying this almost daily.
Torres knew that Jacobs and Cayton had gotten Tyson a seven-fight contract with HBO worth $26 million. He knew they had gotten Tyson commercial endorsement contracts worth over $2 million from Diet Pepsi, Nintendo, and Toyota. And he knew they had set up a $2 million annuity for Tyson on his twenty-first birthday that would mature when he was thirty.
(In October 1989, Price Waterhouse would complete a confidential audit of all of Tyson’s fights and contracts under Cayton and Jacobs. The bottom line was: “Mr. Tyson actually received approximately $168,000 more than that required under the existing contracts.”)
While Torres felt loyal to Cayton, he also could see that Cayton had trouble communicating with Tyson and was acting defensive and embattled when Roper and her lawyer asked him financial questions, even though he had nothing to hide. Age, ego, and rigidity made Cayton a poor infighter in the arena of charlatans.
Torres urged Cayton to make peace with Robin and Ruth and form a united front with them against King, but Cayton couldn’t even try. Torres also advised Cayton—as had Gene Kilroy—to bring some people of color into Tyson’s circle, to make Tyson feel more comfortable and to counter King’s black solidarity song.
But King vs. Cayton was a mismatch from the start. Cayton had no interpersonal skills. He even alienated Joe Spinelli, who had become perhaps
King’s most profound critic after investigating him for the FBI.
* Torres quoted King’s comment to him that “the Jews want to control Tyson” in his book, Fire and Fear, page 192. Torres also heard King refer to Cayton, Jacobs, and Shelly Finkel as “Jews in suits.” King also made an anti-Semitic remark to Bob Arum when they were grappling with each other after the Hagler–Leonard fight. In July 1988, when King appeared on Bill Mazer’s New York television show, he admitted he couldn’t say he “never” made an anti-Semitic remark. When Katz quoted the “Jews in suits” line in a column, and wrote that Tyson was “beginning to sound like Don King,” King went on Mazer’s show and called Katz a racist.
Shortly after Jacobs’s funeral, Cayton came to see Spinelli at his New York State Inspector General’s office.
Cayton came with a pad and told Spinelli that Jacobs had made eight phone calls the last week before he went into the hospital, and two of them were to Spinelli.
“What were they about?” Cayton asked.
Spinelli was offended by the question.
“It’s none of your business,” he told Cayton. “It was between me and Jimmy. If he wanted you to know, he would have told you.”
Spinelli had actually done a favor for Jacobs, getting Los Angeles lawyer David West to successfully represent Tyson in a civil case growing out of Tyson’s slapping a parking-lot attendant. Tyson had slapped the attendant after he had objected to Tyson’s harassment of a woman.
But if Cayton’s imperious manner turned off a law enforcement official who should have been his biggest ally, he had no chance to communicate with the twenty-one-year-old ghetto-centric Tyson.
King, meanwhile, continued to play the wolf in sheep’s clothing. He hung out with Tyson in Los Angeles, making him feel like he was making decisions, giving him advice, being his friend, talking boxing, making up lies about Cayton.
In early May King bought Tyson two luxury cars. One was a Rolls-Royce convertible with a sticker price of $183,000. The other was a black Rolls-Royce limousine with a sticker price of $198,000. He paid for them with checks drawn on Don King Productions and had them registered to Tyson personally.
King purchased the minimum amount of liability insurance for the cars—$15,000 on each. When Cayton found out, he told reporters King didn’t know what he was doing, that the liability was too low for a poor driver like Tyson. Cayton increased the insurance on each car to $6 million.
And the cars weren’t really gifts. On June 8, King admitted during a TV interview with Greg Gumbel that the cars were “a bridge loan… he’ll pay me back.”
On the same show, Gumbel asked, “Do you deny that you’re trying to take control of Tyson?”
King’s reply was: “Categorically. Why would I need it? I’m the promoter. That’s all I really want. I don’t want nothing but to solidify my position. I don’t want his [Cayton’s] position. But he seemingly don’t want me around at all, I don’t know why. I’m really shocked and extremely disappointed.”
The struggle to control Tyson’s future had its daily ebbs and flows, and King was not always confident of the outcome.
On June 15, two weeks before the fight with Spinks, King picked up Jose Torres in his customized Cadillac and took him to a soul-food restaurant. King was furious that Torres had advised Tyson not to sign an exclusive promotional contract with King before the Spinks fight.
“We lost the chance of our lives,” King said. “We had Tyson and because of you we lost him.”
“You mean you lost him,” Torres replied.
The environment around Tyson leading up to the Spinks fight was total anarchy, but somehow Tyson was able to convert chaos into controlled rage.
His wife’s always mysterious pregnancy ended in an alleged miscarriage at an Atlantic City hospital on June 3, although a private detective hired by Cayton, who gained access to hospital records, says there never was a pregnancy.
Ruth Roper decided to sue Cayton over a February 12 contract extension Tyson signed, making Cayton Tyson’s manager should Jacobs become deceased. Cayton was then the assignee on the contract on file with the athletic commission. The new contract also made Jacobs’s wife, Lorraine, the new assignee, should Jacobs die.
The timing of the contract extension till February of 1992 became suspicious in retrospect—six weeks before Jacobs’s death. But the contract amendment does seem legal and valid.
It was signed by Tyson and by Jacobs and Cayton and their wives, and witnessed by Torres and commission staff member Peter Della. Some of the signatures were actually signed during Tyson’s wedding party at the Helmsley Palace hotel. The papers were prepared by Carl DeSantis, the commission lawyer, and notarized.
About ten days before the fight, Tyson was being interviewed by Jerry Izenberg of the Newark Star Ledger, one of the best writers in the business. Tyson was saying, “They died [meaning Cus and Jimmy] and then everything became money, money, money. Now, I don’t have anyone to talk to.”
Suddenly Tyson stopped speaking, buried his head against Izenberg’s chest, and cried for several minutes.
“He was in hysteria,” Izenberg later told filmmaker Barbara Kopple. “He cried so much that I had to change my shirt.”
Eight days before the fight, Wally Matthews published a long article in Newsday, reporting that Tyson had punched his wife in the head with a closed fist and had engaged in violent rages while drinking heavily.
Givens went on live television and told local NBC-TV anchor Sue Simmons that $20 million of her husband’s money was “missing” (not true), and that she was frightened because her mother was being followed by a private detective (true). Givens also aired the false story—fed to her by King—that Cayton had bribed the Chicago priest who married her.
The next day King dropped his nice guy pose and called Cayton “Satan in disguise.”
Three days before the fight, Michael Winston, the lawyer for Givens and Roper, sent Cayton a letter by certified mail in behalf of Tyson. It began: “Starting now, you are to take no action in my behalf as a boxing manager.” It directed Cayton to send all money held, or due from the Spinks fight, to Winston’s office. This triggered three years of litigation.
In the midst of this madness, Mike Tyson went out and destroyed unbeaten Michael Spinks in ninety-one seconds, ending his career with two punches, one of them to the body. When Spinks was counted out, Tyson was still in a rage, his pent-up anger unspent. He looked like he wanted to keep punching somebody. He seemed robbed of his release. He seemed somehow frustrated and disappointed in his moment of vindication.
During the summer of 1988, Don King bided his time and waited, as Mike Tyson’s life spun out of control into a tabloid soap opera. The champion’s marriage was falling apart in a public way. King was positioning himself to be Tyson’s father figure at the end, after having used Robin Givens to weaken Tyson emotionally and drive the emotional wedge between him and Bill Cayton. It was strategic thinking worthy of the three-dimensional chess master. King’s patient plan was to be there when the plane crashed and to inherit the wreckage.
On August 23 Tyson got into a street fight with boxer Mitch Green at 5:00 A.M. outside a Harlem all-night clothing store. Tyson broke Green’s nose, but fractured a bone in his right hand with the punch.
On September 7, Daily News columnist Mike McAlary wrote a page 1 story saying that Tyson had tried to commit suicide three days earlier by crashing his silver BMW into a tree. He also reported Tyson was being treated by a psychiatrist for manic depression.
On September 20, while on a trip to Russia, Tyson assaulted his wife and threatened suicide by drinking lithium that had been prescribed for his alleged bipolar illness. Tyson, drunk on vodka, chased Givens through the hotel and then hung from a hotel balcony for ten minutes, threatening to kill himself.
On September 30, the ABC-TV network show 20/20 aired an unforgettable hour-long interview with Tyson and Givens, conducted by Barbara Walters. The champion said, “I’m not a psychopath or a mania
c…. I’ve seen some doctors and I have a very slight illness that I had all my life, just being extremely hyper…. I’m a moody person by nature.” Tyson also said, “I never struck my wife.”
Later in the show, in a segment taped separately, Tyson and Givens sat next to each other on a couch. Tyson was heavily medicated and seemed dopey. He did not voice any dissent as Givens contradicted him, and demeaned him.
“He gets out of control,” Givens said, “throwing, screaming, he shakes, he pushes, he swings… and just recently I’ve become afraid, very much afraid…. Michael is manic-depressive. He is. That’s just a fact.” Givens also said, “He’s got a side to him that’s scary. It’s been torture, pure hell. It’s worse than anything I could possibly imagine… every day has been some kind of battle.”
As soon as the interview went off the air, Tyson started getting a deluge of phone calls from his friends telling him he looked like a chump, a fool, a dummy, sitting there in docile silence while his wife trashed the Baddest Man on the Planet, as millions watched.
On Sunday, October 2, still seething from his humiliation on national television, Tyson went berserk in his New Jersey mansion. He threw a sugar bowl at his wife’s head. He threw a chair through a window, sending glass all over his lawn. Givens and her mother ran out of the house to a pay phone and called their friend Henry McCurtis, a sports psychiatrist, who had diagnosed Tyson as manic-depressive.
McCurtis told Givens her husband should be hospitalized for psychiatric examination. The women then called the police, who in turn called Dr. McCurtis. McCurtis told the police the women were in serious physical danger if they remained in the house any longer with Tyson.
This episode was the end of Tyson’s marriage. Before the police arrived he drove to New York City. He was at his emotional rock bottom. Strangely, Don King was not the first person he turned to for help.
Tyson called his old friend from Bed-Stuy, boxer Mark Breland. Breland was four years older than Tyson and had been a five-time New York City Golden Gloves champion when Tyson was boxing in smokers at sixteen. Breland had won an Olympic gold medal in 1984, then won and lost the welterweight championship, and was training for a comeback fight that week, when a distraught and needy Tyson called him.
The Life and Crimes of Don King: The Shame of Boxing in America Page 27