by Mike Tyson
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 call
ed 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.”
She showed me two amazing jewel-encrusted watches that cost about $800,000 U.S. each. Warren tried to be a big shot.
“I’m going to buy these for him,” he told the girl. He had a relationship with the owners of the store. So I took the two watches along with a pair of diamond musical pocket watches and a diamond bracelet. The total bill was around $865,000.
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, whose real name was Victoria but went by the stripper name of Flower, 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.
From the dressing room she called her husband and told him what had happened. He called the police and claimed that me and my entourage were at Cheetahs right that moment manhandling the strippers and throwing them around the club. The Vegas police dispatched eight cars to the scene. I talked to one of the cops who told me that when he was working the Vice division, strippers wouldn’t take no for an answer. They were just hustlers trying to milk men dry. The cops took Flower aside and grilled her and she admitted that I never struck her and that she was fine, she was just embarrassed. She told the cops that her pride was hurt and she told me that if I had thrown her $500 this never would have happened. “After all this embarrassment I should be able to get something out of this,” she told them. The cops then left and because there was no incident, they didn’t charge me with anything. She finished her shift, doing lap dances and pole dances.
I guess she went home to her scam artist husband and he got to her because the next day she changed her story and filed a police report that claimed that “Tyson reached out with his open hand and punched/shoved her in the chest area causing her to literally fly across the room and land on the floor. She stated she was stunned and Tyson proceeded to call her a ‘skanky whore’ and ‘a bitch.’ She said she received bruises from the incident.” The police then reopened the investigation and again found no merit to her claim, calling her allegations “completely unfounded.”
But that didn’t stop her. She sued me a few months later. In the suit she said, “Tyson’s violent and painful blow sent Victoria several feet across the floor and caused her to fall on her tailbone, with the heel of her shoe sharply striking her leg as she landed on the floor.” She claimed emotional distress, bodily injury, and stress in the marital relationship that curtailed their marital activities.
The case dragged on. The following April I had to give a deposition. I was not amused having to sit there and listen to her lawyer’s bullshit questions. He was asking me to recount the situation when she approached me.
“You’re sitting, if I understand it, and I’ll try to make this short, you were sitting on, I guess, the couch area next to the deejay booth?”
“Yes.”
“And how did she come at you?”
“She’s a tramp. She insisted on giving me a lap dance. I said, ‘No.’ I didn’t want a lap dance. She went away and came back and she was insisting. She tried to thrust herself upon me. I put my hand out.”
“Did your hand come in contact with Miss Bianca?”
“Yeah, it could have, but from her being aggressive. My hand was out there for her to keep her distance away from me, not from me being aggressive, no.”
He kept badgering me. I called him a piece of shit and a fucking dick. He called for a recess and huddled with my lawyer. We had offered him ten grand to settle the case, they were asking for forty. When they came back from recess, he told me he wasn’t going to keep me anymore.
“I don’t need to be here anymore, because your client is a liar. You don’t want to keep me here, I’ve done nothing wrong,” I said.
The case went to arbitration when their attorney claimed that we had accepted the forty-grand settlement. The arbitration judge ruled against her. They appealed. We arbitrated again and she got $8,800, plus I had to pay the arbitrator $1,615. And my attorney charged me $25,000. That was the most expensive lap dance I never had.
By June, I was back in Phoenix training for my next fight. I was in a really bad mood and I was taking it out on my probation officer who was a really nice woman. But I didn’t get my ass thrown back in jail thanks to one of the greatest lawyers I ever came across. His name was Darrow Soll and he was a Jewish cat, a former Green Beret. He didn’t look like a badass; he was big but not muscular big. He was solid
. We really bonded. Darrow was a really smart lefty, ACLU-type guy. He told me his father had been killed by one of those white Aryan supremacists, but he would still defend Aryan Nation guys. Darrow would take up the cases of the black guys who were on death row unjustly and not even charge them, even though he was broke to the teeth half the time. He was a wonderful man.
He was connected in the Phoenix law scene and helped smooth out a lot of shit for me over the years. My probation officer Erika was trying to get me to do more community service, but two different places refused to take me, so I yelled at her a couple of times on the phone. But Darrow chilled her out and told her that “medication” problems were causing my bad behavior.
“Good news. After much discussion Erika agreed to omit Mike’s verbal outbursts from her reports to her supervisor. She did this in large part because Mike was apologetic in his last meeting with her,” he wrote in a memo to my team.
Now my English promoters were worried about that bullshit lawsuit from the Cheetah girl. If I had had a bad probation report I might not have been allowed back into the U.K. to fight Lou Savarese. I was due to leave on June sixteenth, but I was back in New York because one of my best friends Darryl Baum got murdered on June tenth. People called him “Homicide” but I still called him by his original street name, “Shorty Love.” He hated that name because he hated anything that would make him seem soft and vulnerable. Shorty Love was from my neighborhood and he had a really notorious street rep for hurting people. I would always see him hanging around with the tough guys in the neighborhood. These guys were damn-near grown and he was just a little kid, but it was like he was the leader.
They called him Homicide because he was a knockout artist when he was twelve years old. He’d go up to someone on the street and knock them out with one punch and rob their jewelry or their sheepskin coat. In 1986, he went to jail on a two-to-six-year sentence for robbery. He was so violent in jail that he wound up serving twice his time. He finally got out on December 31, 1999. When he got out, I broke him off some money and bought him a nice Rolex and a chain and a Mercedes-Benz. I also offered to give him a job as one of my security men. I just wanted him to get off the streets and straighten out his life.