by Mike Tyson
“Fuck off! Asshole!”
“You’re a class act, buddy.”
“So’s your mother.”
Part of the reason I was so belligerent was that I had been taken off my daily dose of Zoloft a week before the fight.
I was so rusty for that fight. It was a horrible night for me. Botha was holding me continually. He clinched me in the corner at the end of the first round and I leveraged his left arm with my right arm and I tried to snap it off. I’m a real dirty fighter. I shouldn’t say this, but it’s true. I think I really wanted people to talk about how dirty and vicious I was. When they asked me after the fight whether I was trying to intentionally break his arm, I just said, “Correct.”
I won only one round of the first four and in that round Richard Steele deduced a point from me. The Showtime guys—Kenny Albert, Ferdie Pacheco, and Bobby Czyz—all thought that Botha was getting to me with his holding and was turning it into a street fight. But after the fourth round, I told Crocodile and my new trainer Tommy Brooks that he was getting tired and I could get to him. Apparently, Ferdie Pacheco didn’t believe that.
“Tyson looks like he’s in slow motion. He can’t get off two punches. That’s the mark of a shot fighter, he can’t get off punches. Oh!”
I didn’t need two punches. Just as Ferdie was saying that, I hit Botha with a right hand square on his jaw. He crumpled to the canvas. He tried to get up but he couldn’t beat the count. Then he careened into the ropes and collapsed back on the canvas. It was an ugly fight, but I redeemed it with a resounding one-punch knockout. Botha went down like he had been shot with an elephant gun. The White Buffalo just got poached.
There was intrigue with my team now too. Shelly and Shawnee had gotten together and ganged up on Jeff and Irving. Jeff was still recuperating from his surgery and had to go back to L.A. to coproduce Roseanne Barr’s new show, so he pretty much left the picture. My career was in the hands of Shelly, Shawnee, and Jackie Rowe.
And the Maryland judicial system. I showed up in a small court in Rockville on February 5, 1999. I was wearing a charcoal gray suit and a black vest. Monica was there with me, along with at least a dozen of my lawyers and advisors. I had pleaded no contest to the charges and my attorneys had worked out a deal that would avoid jail time. I’d just pay a fine, be put on probation, and be ordered to do community service. But then I got fucked again.
The new district attorney, Doug Gansler, and his assistant prosecutor, Carol Crawford, showed up in court with an eleven-page document that made me sound like I was a Nazi war criminal. Crawford especially seemed to loathe me. She was a very masculine-looking woman with a severe short haircut. She seemed hell-bent on taking out her anger towards all men on me. I was her showpiece.
Instead of keeping up their end of the deal, these two liars trotted out every derogatory thing they could pin on me, including quotes from Teddy Atlas saying that Cus had spoiled me as a kid. They quoted from my own interviews, including the Playboy interview from 1998 where I told Mark Kram, the writer, that I was “a very hateful motherfucker” who would “blow one day.” Then they cited Kram himself when he wrote that I was “the darkest figure in sports” that he had ever encountered.
“This comment is noteworthy from a man who met with the reviled boxing legend Sonny Liston, an ex-con who died of a drug overdose in suspicious circumstances, and, coincidentally, one boxer the defendant has expressed an affinity for,” Gansler and Crawford wrote in their memo in aid of sentencing.
They even turned around my psychiatric report from Mass General that, except for the depression, gave me a clean bill of health.
“Perhaps we can’t find something ‘wrong’ with the defendant beyond that which one might find ‘wrong’ with any neighborhood bully. For this bully, however, the world is his playground. One commentator, clinical psychologist Robert Butterworth, Ph.D., may have provided the greatest direction for the court. After reviewing the Kram interview comments by the defendant, Mr. Butterworth commented, ‘If he’s telling us all he’s going to do this, we’d be idiots not to see it coming.’ Although we do not punish prospectively in this jurisdiction, the Court must always consider the safety of the defendant, as well as the public, in sentencing appropriately. The defendant is nothing less than the time bomb buried in our own backyard.”
Can you believe this shit? What was this, Stalinist Russia? These two liars wanted to use an interview where I blew off steam and a diagnosis from this Dr. Butterworth who never laid eyes on me to put me behind bars before this “time bomb” blew up. Anybody could see that these people were just out to abuse me, but no one cared because they probably thought I deserved this.
“Although we do not punish prospectively in this state”—but that’s exactly what they were arguing for—“executed incarceration, as a starting point, will address the twin goals of punishment and deterrence. Rehabilitation, through the fine programs of this jurisdiction, may be commenced while incarcerated and followed during any probationary period. Given the defendant’s denial of responsibility, his defiance, his comments on his character, and his predictions of future conduct, the goals of deterrence and rehabilitation may never be achieved. However, for at least the period of incarceration, the public at large will be protected from his potential for violence.”
Judge Johnson agreed. He sentenced me to two years in jail, with one year suspended, and fined me $5,000, and ordered me to serve two years probation and perform two thousand hours of community service. He also denied me bail if I appealed the decision.
The standing-room-only courtroom filled with shocked gasps. I was stunned. Monica started crying hysterically. They slapped handcuffs on me and took me right to jail.
Gansler was getting his fifteen minutes of fame. People actually were outraged that I could be sent to jail for a year after we had reached a plea deal for no time with the old state attorney.
“Any prosecutor would do what I did,” Gansler told an AP writer. “People are going to say what they’re going to say.”
They threw me in a five-and-a-half-foot-by-eight-foot cell in Cellblock Two, which was their version of protective custody. That meant that I was separated from the inmate population who were mostly white privileged kids from Montgomery County. My unit was isolated with just a few people who were either too weak to be in population or too aggressive. I begged them to put me in population. I needed to be out there to work the system to get my privileges. I was raised that way. Instead I was in protective custody and the guards were coming around and taking pictures of me and selling them to the papers.
I was in for two weeks when I got sent to their version of the hole. It started when they sent some prison shrink to see me. I was seeing Dr. Goldberg, one of the best psychiatrists in the country, so I refused to even talk to this fool. He cut my normal dose of Zoloft in half. When they came with a different-looking pill, I refused to take it. Two days later, I was in the dayroom, on the phone, when a particularly sadistic guard came in and hung up the phone in the middle of my conversation. I was a different person in jail; I was more fastidious than I was at home. One little thing went wrong and I was ready to go off the hinges and tear it up.
I got enraged and pulled the TV set off its metal bracket, threw it on the floor, then picked it up and chucked it at the bars of the cell where the warden and two guards were observing me from behind. A small piece of plastic broke off and went through the bar and hit one of the guards. The guards immediately sent me to “administrative segregation.” I was locked up for twenty-three hours of the day and wasn’t allowed to buy snacks from the canteen or have visits or telephone calls, except from my lawyers or doctors. Doctor Goldberg visited me the next night and got me back on my regular dose of Zoloft.
After the TV incident, the jail administration charged me with disorderly conduct, destruction of property, and assault on a corrections officer because the little plastic shard hit him. They thr
ew me in the hole, and I wasn’t a happy camper. I thought I was one of those Baader-Meinhof German political prisoners who would go crazy when they were put in jail. They’d kill guards, they’d kill themselves. I even started wearing a little Spanish bandanna on my head and was butt naked, throwing things at the guards.
They sentenced me to twenty-five days in isolation, but my lawyer appealed and I got out after five days. I really didn’t like this prison. I wanted to be sent back to Indiana. I had nobody to work with in this jail, nobody to bring me stuff and get me girls. I was still on probation there so they could have easily yanked me back. The problem was that they could make me serve the last four years of my previous sentence. Jim Voyles, my Indiana lawyer, made about twenty trips back and forth from Maryland and finally reached a deal where I would serve an extra sixty days in jail at Maryland, and Indiana would wash their hands of me forever. Judge Gifford was more than happy to sign off on that. Nobody wanted me back in Indiana.
I was pissed. I wanted to sue the judge’s ass to get back there. But when I settled into jail in Maryland, it turned out not to be too bad. Monica started cooking for me and I was allowed to have the food sent in. After a few months, I started gaining so much weight that I asked them if I could bring in my treadmill and a stationary bike and they let me. I was always the privileged prick in prison.
We even shot a cover for Esquire while I was in there. Monica brought my new baby boy, Amir, to the prison and we posed for pictures to accompany an article about me.
I started mingling with the other guys in protective custody. There were a number of young kids who were in there for murder. Two of them even hung themselves while I was in there—one guy was a wealthy Israeli kid and the other a black kid. I paid for the black kid’s funeral because his parents didn’t have much money. It broke my heart to see these young beautiful kids from privileged families getting caught up in drugs and then doing something like murdering someone over a hundred bucks. When I left that jail, there must have been $12,000 on my books, so I had the prison split that money up among the five guys who were in isolation with me. They weren’t no tough guys. They were little kids who had no money who were never going to go home.
I sort of became the protective custody Don at that place. The other guys would send messages to me through the guards and ask me to talk to them about their problems. Some of the guards would come to me and tell me about a kid who might be having a problem and I’d send him a message and tell him to chill out.
I didn’t get many visitors in jail in Maryland. Monica came, Craig Boogie came, some other friends dropped in. My Jamaican girlfriend, Lisa, came. She had written her name in the visitors’ log and Monica came a few hours later and saw her name and threw a shit fit. Thank God they had that little glass window separating us.
But the visitor who got the most attention when he came was John F. Kennedy Jr. He came to visit me one night. When the word got out, ten news teams showed up and waited outside for hours. Inside, it was pandemonium. I had John say hello to all the other inmates in isolation with me. “Yeah, hug their mom. Give the kid a kiss.” I was the big Don.
John and I were friends from New York. I met him on the street one day and he invited me up to see him at his George magazine office. He was such a beautiful, down-to-earth cat, riding his bike around Manhattan, taking public transportation sometimes. The first thing he told me when he came to see me was, “My whole family told me not to come to see you. So when you see them and they’re all saying ‘Hi’ to you, you get the picture.”
Right before he came, one of his cousins got in trouble for screwing his babysitter or something like that.
“Yeah, my cousin is the poster boy for bad behavior,” John said.
“Whatever you do, don’t disrespect your family in public. Don’t do that because that’s what society wants. People want to break you and make you like you’re nothing,” I told him. “Just call them an asshole in private. Don’t ever do it in front of the public.”
We talked about the Kennedy family a lot, especially his grandfather, but he didn’t seem to know that much about him, other than he didn’t teach any of his sons anything about business. “Nobody in my family knows how to run a business, that’s why they all went into politics. He wanted us to be pampered guys.”
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.
12
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.”