by Mike Tyson
Once the fight was over, we went into full party mode. I had a big suite and Croc and I got some weed and some booze and we had girls come up. They were normal, straight girls, not hookers or dancers, just nine-to-five corporate types. There was a big sex scene in Denmark with all these sex clubs, but that was a little too crazy for me even. Their concept of sex over there and Germany and the Balkan states was too aggressive.
Crocodile was going crazy over there. He was fucking the promoter’s daughter. Then he got a Palestinian girl in the bathroom of my suite and I walked in on them.
“Hey . . . Hey, brother.” I tapped him on the shoulder and we started tag-teaming her. We went back in the room and there were all these other girls there and we started having sex with them. I was on one side of the room and Croc was on the other and I heard one of the girls say, “I love you, Crocodile.”
“How do you love him?” I shouted from across the room. “You’ve only been knowing him for a week.”
I even nailed the tough female bodyguard that was the head of the security team that the Danish promoter had hired. She looked real tough and had her hair up in a bun, but Crocodile was amazed when he walked into my room and she was in the bed with her hair down, wearing one of my T-shirts, looking all feminine. She really fell for me. She even followed me back to the States, but I didn’t pursue the relationship.
After a few days of partying in Copenhagen, everyone went back home, but Crocodile and I stayed and partied all over Europe for the next two months. We went to Amsterdam, of course, and smoked the whole time. That was where I finally learned how to roll a blunt. I was so high and still tired from the fight, so we just got some girls up to our massive suites in the hotel and stayed in for most of the time.
From Amsterdam we went to Barcelona. We were all over the place. But then one of my trainers started calling Crocodile, telling him to get me back home, so we eventually went back.
I hung around New York for a while, and I took Crocodile to Brownsville to see my old neighborhood. Crocodile was driving one of my Rollses and it was midnight and we pulled over to a corner. About a hundred guys came up to the car and they were losing it. They were so happy to see me. I broke them off some money. Later that night, I went to Jackie’s house to sleep and told Crocodile to get himself a hotel room. When I woke up in the morning, I looked out the window and there were thirty guys standing around my car watching Crocodile sleep.
“Why didn’t you sleep in a hotel?” I asked him.
“Man, I just wanted to sleep in the car,” he told me. But later I found out that he thought the hotels around there were like flophouses.
While I was waiting for Shelly Finkel to negotiate a fight for the heavyweight crown, I had a warm-up fight. I was at the Sugar Hill Disco in Brooklyn in the early hours of December sixteenth. I was chilling with my childhood friend Dave Malone and a bunch of girls when this broad, tall guy came in. He was wearing a big mink coat and a nice hat. I thought that for sure this guy was a gangster.
“Mike, have a drink with me. C’mon, you can’t fuck with the little people anymore?” he asked.
I gave him some respect and we had a few glasses of champagne and we smoked a little weed. He told me his name was Mitchell Rose and that he was the first person to beat Butterbean.
“Mike, if me and you would have fought, you would attack and I would counter,” he bragged.
“Brother, can you be kind enough to say that again?” I said. “I thought you said something, but I wasn’t sure.”
“If me and you would have had a fight, you would attack and I would lean back and counter,” he said, as he hit on a joint.
“Pass me the joint,” I said.
He passed it to me and I tore off the end where his lips had touched the joint before taking a hit.
“Pass me my champagne,” I said.
He gave me the flute. I threw the glass on the floor.
“Get the fuck out of here, nigga,” I snarled.
I got up and I was going to go for him right there in the club but David defused it. Eventually Mitchell left.
A short time later, me and David and about four girls left the club. And right there on the sidewalk was Mitchell Rose.
“Hey, Mike, go on home with those chicken heads,” he said, referring to the girls. That was it. I jolted after him, and his mink coat came off. I started throwing vicious lefts and rights, but he slid away from my drunken swings and took off. So I picked up the mink coat, pulled down my pants, and wiped my ass with his mink. By now the sun had come up and there were a lot of people going to work and the buses were driving past and the whole club had spilled out onto the sidewalk and everyone was watching me wipe my ass with his coat. Oh, God! Can you imagine if it was today with all the video cameras in the phones?
Nobody can make a better fool out of me than myself. I’m so much like my mother in that respect. Once my mother started up, she’d rant and tell people to “suck her pussy” and to “fuck off.” Then later, we’d both feel bad about what we had done.
Four months later, Rose filed a $66 million lawsuit against me. He wanted money for attempted assault on him and actual assault on his mink coat. He also wanted $50 million for punitive damages. This guy still haunts me to this day, trying to piggyback me for notoriety. He even wrote a self-published pamphlet called Mike Tyson Tried to Kill My Daddy.
The negotiations to fight Lennox Lewis were in their final stages and we were set to meet in April, so I decided to party a little bit more before I started to train. Less than a week after the Mitchell Rose street fight, I took two young female street girls on vacation to Jamaica. They were my hangout partners. I would go to Versace and dress them. We had sex and got high together and if I wanted other girls they would get me some awesome chicks. I always had girls who would get me other girls. So if you saw me with a beautiful girl, you might have thought I was having sex with her but most likely she was gay or bisexual and it wasn’t me she was interested in. And I’d get girls too, so we’d both help each other out.
When Shelly heard that I was going to Jamaica, he flipped out. He knew I’d be wearing the most expensive jewelry and back then people were getting robbed and killed in Jamaica right and left. So he sent the great Jamaican fighter Michael McCallum, who was a world champion in three weight divisions, to get my jewelry.
“McCallum, nice to see you,” I said. “What are you doing here?”
“They sent me to come and get your stuff,” he said.
“Come hang with us, bro. It’s going to be a blast,” I said.
“All right. But first you’ve got to take your jewelry off. These people are poor, Mike, if they see it they’ll take it,” he said.
“Fuck that shit,” I said. “They don’t want to take it; they want to see me with it. They ain’t gonna respect me if I go down there without my jewelry,” I said.
He was reluctant but I wouldn’t budge. And we went all over the worst parts of Jamaica and nobody tried anything. All we got was love. I got the highest I had ever been in my life at Damian Marley’s house, which had belonged to his dad. We were getting so high, we were sweating. And that wasn’t no down weed, that was weed that kept you numb. It was exotic, intense yet still relaxed.
One night McCallum took me to, of all places, a strip club. I was looking at all of these awesome Jamaican girls.
“Hey, Mike, I would like to get some of them to accompany me back to the hotel. How much do you think it would cost?” I asked him.
“You could probably get that one there for forty thousand,” he said.
“Forty thousand dollars for her?” I couldn’t believe it.
“No, no, that’s Jamaican money. Twenty dollars U.S.,” he explained.
“Fuck, let’s get them all. Tell the place to close down,” I said.
“They can’t do that, Mike,” he said. “Pick three of them.”
When it was almost New Year’s Eve, I decided to leave the girls behind in Jamaica and bring in the New Year in Cuba for a few days. Rick, my security guy, insisted that he go with me. He was holding my passport. I didn’t know it but Shelly was nervous that if the Cuban government stamped my passport, the Americans wouldn’t let me back in the country.
As soon as I got off the plane, I felt like I was in heaven. Being in Cuba is like being in a time capsule set for 1950. They’ve restored all these old-school American cars from the ’50s and the houses all look like they’re from that era. As soon as we checked into our hotel, I ditched Rick. I wanted to check out the people. That was actually the second thing I did. The first thing I did was snort some coke. I had brought my drugs along from Jamaica.
The Cuban people were wonderful. I walked around and nobody bothered me. No one said anything to me except for maybe coming up to me and asking me for a hug or seeing if I needed anything. Everyone was so hospitable and protective. It wasn’t a crazy mob scene like in Scotland or England or Japan. The Cubans were pretty hands-off. Maybe they thought I was crazy. But a good crazy, because they were all smiling and laughing.
I had been walking around Havana through the ghettos and the alleyways for a couple of hours when this guy came up to me. He spoke perfect English.
“Mr. Tyson! Mr. Tyson! I saw you walking, I couldn’t believe it was you. You can’t be walking by yourself in these streets. You need family. Yo, Poppy, you stay with me, in my house.”
“All right, cool,” I said. I’m that kind of guy.
He took me to his house and now I had to line up a woman.
“So what is happening here?” I asked. “Show me the ladies. I’d like to go to a nightclub.”
“Oh, no, you don’t go to nightclub for that. You need a wife? Stay right here.”
And this guy ran out, jumped a fence, ducked into an alleyway and minutes later, out of nowhere, he came back with this beautiful young lady wearing a summer dress.
“I have your wife,” he said. “Is this one okay?”
I couldn’t believe I could possibly do any better. I didn’t want to mess this up and make this girl feel I didn’t like her. How could he possibly top this girl?
“This one is just fine,” I said.
I thought this was some pimp/ho shit, so I reached into my pocket.
“How much do I owe you? How many dineros?”
“No, no, no,” he said. “You are family now. This is your wife.”
This woman was wonderful. If I needed anything, she’d get it for me. She was so attentive. We walked around a bit and then we went back to this guy’s house because he wanted to make us a nice dinner.
His wife cooked some nice lobsters and then the guy brought a couple of bottles of wine to the table. I couldn’t believe my eyes. One of them was a bottle of Lafite Rothschild. That was a $2,000 bottle, but these people didn’t have money like that. They were living in what was basically a run-down tenement building. I thought that maybe somebody in this guy’s family had worked at one of the hotels that Meyer Lansky owned and when the revolution came, they took off with this bottle. He was trying to be hospitable, bringing out his nicest bottle of wine, but I didn’t have the heart to drink it. So I suggested that we open the cheaper bottle.
My host planned a big night out for us. We were all going to go to the spectacular stage show they put on in the Copa Room at the old Hotel Habana Riviera, which used to be owned by Lansky. The only problem was that on the way to the Riviera, I had to lean my head out of the cab and projectile vomit. I didn’t realize it at the time, but the lobsters had been boiled in unpurified water and I must have gotten a bad case of Montezuma’s revenge.
I tried to make it through the show but I couldn’t. I was as sick as a motherfucker, but that didn’t stop me from being my pervy self. I wanted to get my girl back to my hotel room. I was thinking that this vomiting shit was going to go away and my dick was going to get hard.
So I got my wife and I thanked my host by giving him a beautiful expensive ruby bracelet I had on, and then we got a cab back to my hotel. My girl had never been in a nice hotel because the Cuban government doesn’t allow locals to go into tourist hotels. They claim that they do that to protect the tourists from prostitutes who might slip them a Mickey and rob them but I think they just don’t want the Cuban people to get a taste of the luxury life.
Before I could get to my room, there were Cuban TV film crews set up in the lobby. I guess the news that I was there had spread. I was bare-chested and I didn’t have any underwear on and my pants were loose from all the vomiting and you could see my plumber’s crack, so the last thing I wanted was the paparazzi to film me. I went berserk. I picked up some of their equipment and threw it at them, then I grabbed three glass Christmas ornaments off the tree and chucked them at the press. I punched one of the photographers in the head. I went crazy, but the paparazzi picked up their cameras and split.
When we got to the check-in desk, I thought that I’d have to finesse my girl inside, but the receptionist told me that government officials had called the hotel and that it would be okay for me to bring any guests to my room. We went to bed and the girl was on me, but I was so sick I couldn’t do anything. I felt better in the morning, and Rick and I were flying back to Jamaica on an early flight. I had sex with the girl before we left and she was sad that I was leaving. I had given away all my money and most of my jewelry except for this diamond chain I was wearing that was worth fifty or sixty thousand. To me that was like buying a candy bar. She was hesitant to take it, but I forced her to. I was hoping that she’d sell it and make enough money to support her whole family for a few years at least.
I left my girl in the hotel room and I met Rick in the lobby. We went to the airport to wait for our plane and we were both ravenously hungry, but Rick didn’t have any money on him either. I was surrounded by tourists asking me for my autograph, so I started bartering the autographs for food.
“Please, if you would be kind enough to buy us some food for the autograph?” I asked. In case they didn’t speak English, I demonstrated by pointing to the food stand and making believe I was eating.
When I got to Cuba, I must have weighed 270, but when I got back to Jamaica, I had lost about thirty pounds. I hadn’t considered that I had food poisoning or some parasite. In fact, it wasn’t until one of the girls I had brought from New York saw me that she triggered a huge alarm in my head.
“Mike, you lost so much weight, even though you haven’t been training. You look good,” she said.
Oh shit, I thought.
I was convinced I had AIDS. When I had taken those strippers home that night before I had gone to Cuba, I was fucking one of them and my rubber just popped. And as soon as the woman realized what had happened she had a really strange look on her face. I was convinced that she had given me AIDS. But maybe she thought that I had given it to her.
13
I was worrying the whole flight back to New York. I was also still a little high from the last of the coke I had in Jamaica. Usually I just breezed through customs with the royal treatment, but this time I was met by people from Homeland Security. And these guys were all hard-asses.
“What were you doing in Cuba?” one of them asked.
How did they know I was in Cuba? It wasn’t on my passport. Then I remembered the fight I had with the paparazzi in the lobby of the hotel. It was all over the news.
“I was just hanging out for New Year’s,” I said.
“So you figured you’d just take off and go to Cuba for a New Year’s vacation for a day, disregarding the laws we have in place that prohibit travel to Cuba,” the official said.
“I did it from Jamaica,” I said, as if that was any better.
“Did you spend any American funds?” he asked.
“I had Cuban currency but nobody took it. They only take U.S. dollars over there,” I told him. I bought Cuban money because I thought they would take it, but I got scammed.
This was not the best time to be caught sneaking into Cuba. Bush had just been elected and he said that he was going to crack down on any relations with the Castro government, so I played the religion card.
“Am I being held here because I’m Muslim?” I asked the lead interrogator. “This ain’t no Muslim shit. I’m just trying to have a good time, brother.”
They all laughed. Once I get a laugh out of people, I’m a ham. So I gave them a little shtick and they said, “Go ahead, you can go.”
I was still sick and losing weight when I got back to the States, so the first thing I did was to make an appointment to see a doctor. I just knew I had AIDS. I started calling all my friends to say good-bye to them. I even called Monica and told her that I had AIDS and that I was going to die. That might not have been the smartest move.
I went to see a Spanish doctor and he did the AIDS test. It came back negative.
“Nah, doctor. I have it. You’re not doing this shit right. Get me another doctor,” I said. He started laughing.
“Mike, you’re HIV negative,” he said.
“Did someone pay you to say I don’t have it?” I said. He finally convinced me that I was AIDS-free.
I was also worry-free. I had a huge fight in a few months with Lennox Lewis for the heavyweight title, and I was fucking around in Jamaica and Cuba not even training, just living a crazy drug-fueled life. I had to be nuts.
Then I started getting fallout from the Cuba trip. Darrow was seriously concerned that the Bush administration was going to make an example out of me.
He sent out a memo to my whole boxing and legal team.
“As you are no doubt aware, Mike is alleged to have traveled to Cuba and to have committed an assault on a Cuban journalist while there. I am less troubled by the assault (it is unlikely the Cuban government would be able to extradite Mike given the current status of Cuban-American diplomatic relations), than by the fact that the Cuban American National Foundation (CANF) has petitioned the Department of Justice and the Department of the Treasury to investigate Mike for criminal violations of the Cuban Assets Control Regulations and the Trading With the Enemy Act. It is difficult to determine how seriously the Bush administration will take this matter. Unfortunately the Bush administration, in order to repair the damage caused by the Clinton administration’s handling of the Elian Gonzalez matter, has pledged to organizations such as the CANF to enforce strenuously travel and trade restrictions.