Undisputed Truth: My Autobiography

by Mike Tyson

  By then, airport security had broken up the fight. When Anthony returned to the waiting area, he told me what had gone down. When we got on the plane, I saw that they were supposed to be sitting behind us, so I moved my guys to the back of the plane. The whole flight I was flinging grapes at Ruddock. Just to be safe, we called ahead and had our whole crew, the training camp, the sparring partners, everyone, meet us at the airport in case something went down. But nothing happened.

  When we got to the Mirage the night of the fight, they had us in facing dressing rooms and Kevin Ali started trash-talking Anthony.

  “Yo, man, let me tell you something,” Anthony said. “I don’t smoke, but I will smoke your whole fucking family, you, your brother, your mother, I’ll kill all you motherfuckers, I don’t give a fuck.”

  John Horne heard Anthony hollering and he pulled him aside.

  “Yo, man, you don’t go inside the ring tonight,” he said. “You stay outside the ring. Because if Mike wins this fight, I know these motherfuckers are going to start something, so you be aware.”

  It was a chilly night in Vegas and we were fighting outdoors in front of a huge crowd of sixteen thousand people. I wore a green-and-white-striped sweat suit and a ski cap into the ring. I was the first boxer to wear urban clothes into the ring.

  Ruddock looked nervous and was hyperventilating. He was in with the big boys now. I knew he was going to come right at me, he was so nervous. A few seconds into the fight, I rocked him with a right hand. He came back with some hard punches but I was just too elusive for him. In the second, he went down from a left but it was a glancing blow, it looked like his leg got tangled up with mine, but my vicious body attack had slowed him to a standstill. He couldn’t hit me with hard punches, and by the third round he was pretty much holding on for dear life. I managed to get in a vicious left-hook counterpunch with ten seconds to go in the round and he went down.

  I was winning every round. In the sixth, he suddenly seemed to wake up and hit me with a flurry of hard punches. I shook my head at him. He hit me with a right to the jaw and I tapped my jaw and dared him to throw again. Me taking those punches with impunity must have demoralized him because I came out in the seventh and stunned him with a left hook to the jaw. Four more punches and he was stumbling back into the ropes. But Richard Steele jumped in and stopped the fight without Ruddock even going down. I thought the stoppage was premature, although one more punch and he would have been down.

  Before I knew it, I was in the middle of a riot. Murad Muhammad, Razor’s manager, got my trainer Richie on the floor and was kicking him in the head. Jay Bright pulled me over to a corner and we watched the rumble. By then, Anthony Pitts had come into the ring and he saw Kevin Ali charging across the ring and Ant cracked him with a right. Then Razor’s brother Delroy tried to hit Anthony, but Anthony grabbed him and was about to throw him over the ropes out of the ring but security grabbed his arm. So Delroy was up in the air, pushed up against the rope, and he had his arm hanging down, trying to catch himself. While this was happening, my friend G snatched Kevin Ali’s Rolex and then went into his pocket to see what else he could get. It was a crazy scene.

  There was a lot of controversy about the quick ending, so we decided to give Ruddock a rematch. We were at Don’s office on East Sixty-ninth Street in Manhattan, working out the details of the second fight. Don and Rory and John were upstairs, but I was chilling downstairs with Anthony because I was chatting with Don’s cute little receptionist who I was sleeping with. All of a sudden, Kevin Ali walked in. Kevin was a good Muslim brother but some Muslim brothers take their Muslim thing and bring it with them everywhere they go, fighting, eating, everywhere. So Kevin looked at me and said, “Oh, most beautiful champion. Great fight. I have to give you much respect. You’re a true warrior.” Then he pointed towards Anthony and said, “But I’m gonna kill him.”

  “Yo, man, I’m standing right here, motherfucker,” Anthony said. “Don’t send no messages to nobody for me. If you’ve got something to say, say it.”

  “We’re going to have to do this and what we do is, do or die. We could do this shit right now,” Kevin said.

  “That was just work, that’s over, let that shit go.” I tried to defuse the situation.

  “No, champ, I can’t let that go, I gotta do this,” Ali said.

  So he put his briefcase and his coat down and, boom, Anthony cracked him with one punch. They were fighting by the stairs and Don had a wall divider that blocked off the stairs, so I didn’t actually see Kevin go down, but it was like in a cartoon, you heard him go boom, boom, boom, down each step. Then he flew back up like he was a superhero and they went at it again. My friend Greg walked in drinking a bottle of soda and he saw Anthony and Kevin going at it so he clocked Kevin in the head with his bottle. Kevin went down and Greg started going through his pockets.

  “No, Greg, we can’t do that shit here,” I said. “You need some money, nigga? We can’t rob motherfuckers.”

  All this commotion made Don and John and Rory come down the stairs to see what was happening. Ali had gotten up and he claimed that Anthony had sucker-punched him.

  “That’s bullshit,” I said. “Ant was just in there chilling, this motherfucker came in threatening Anthony. Ant just defended himself.”

  Don kicked Kevin Ali out of the office and Kevin went outside and started pacing up and down in front of the townhouse. When we left, we saw Ali there. Our driver at the time was Captain Joe, a forefather in the Nation of Islam. He knew the Ali twins. Ali wanted to resume the fight but I told him that it was Ramadan and it was a time of peace.

  “Mike, this is a man thing,” Captain Joe said. “He can’t be in peace with Ramadan until he has peace with himself. He has to settle this.”

  “Do you want to do this?” Ali asked Anthony.

  “Hell, yeah. You said do or die.”

  The two went at it outside on the sidewalk like Rock ’Em Sock ’Em Robots. Anthony finally connected and dropped Ali. He hit the ground and Anthony drop-kicked him twice to the head. He was about to do it a third time when Rory grabbed him.

  “You’re going to kill him, man,” Rory said.

  “That’s the whole motherfucking idea,” Ant said. “He said ‘do or die.’ ”

  It was time to go to the movie. Anthony stepped over Kevin and we got in the car and split. Just then, Al Braverman, a legendary trainer who worked for Don, walked up to the office entrance. He saw Ali lying there unconscious and ran into the office and got some paper towels and water and cleaned him up and revived him. They called for an ambulance and that was the end of that.

  The rematch was set for June twenty-eighth. I had some time off before we went to camp, so I drove my black Lamborghini Diablo from New York to Ohio and did some sightseeing. Then it was back to Vegas to train. Richie had put me on a strict regimen that included a seven p.m. curfew so I was rested for my six-mile run at five a.m. I was so bored. Most of the time when I wasn’t training, I would watch cartoons. Then Don would come storming into the room.

  “God dammit, Mike, you are going to watch something else besides these fucking cartoons,” he said, and he put on documentaries about Nazi Germany. Don was obsessed with the Nazis. It was Hitler this and Hitler that. He thought that the Jews were the niggas of Germany and that fascism could happen here so we should learn from history.

  Richie’s regimen was driving me crazy. One night I woke Rudy up at eight p.m. and we snuck out in my Ferrari and drove to L.A. so I could have a booty call. Rudy gunned that mother up to 190 mph and we made it to L.A. in two and a half hours. So I began doing that regularly and it started to show in the gym. I was operating on only two hours of sleep. Giachetti had no idea why I looked so lackluster, but he finally busted me when he looked at the mufflers on the Ferrari and saw that they looked like burnt marshmallows.

  So they made Rudy put alarms on all the doors to prevent me from sneaking out at night.

  One night Rudy woke up when he heard a loud thump. He got up,
turned on the light, and walked outside and found me tangled up in a thorny bush. I had fallen from a second-story window trying to sneak out of the house. My plan was to silently roll the Ferrari down the driveway and then take off for L.A.

  I was so desperate all my life to get out and have some fun. I should have said, “Fuck you all, I’m going out,” but instead I snuck out. I’d be in Nicky Blair’s, my favorite restaurant in Las Vegas, holding court, surrounded by girls, and Don would storm in.

  “What the fuck are you doing, Mike?” he’d bellow. “We’ve got a fight coming up.”

  “Excuse me, Don,” I’d say. “I would appreciate it if you would just leave. Oh, by the way, girls, this is Don King.”

  When my nocturnal speed races to L.A. ended, I had Rudy ship the car to my Ohio house, where they knocked a hole in the exterior wall of my game room and had the car mounted on a platform in the middle of the room so me and my friends could hang out in it.

  I went after Ruddock before the fight began. We were doing a taping for Showtime and I wore dark glasses and looked pretty surly.

  “I will make you my girlfriend,” I told Ruddock.

  “I’m not going to come down to your level,” he said.

  “Make sure you kiss me good with your big lips,” I countered.

  I was pretty offensive but I knew he was a macho, testosteroned guy. I knew that would get to his psyche. That was one of Cus’s tactics of mind control. Confuse the enemy.

  Another reason I kept going to L.A. was because my friend Kevin Sawyer who had the beeper shop would beep me and tell me he had some girls lined up for us. He’d get a half a dozen girls and we’d get a room and have an orgy.

  I loved hanging out with Kevin. I was mean and nasty to girls then. So before I got there, he would tell the girls, “Mike is really a nice guy. He just never had a good upbringing. He was abandoned as a kid and he has trust issues.” That shit would work like a charm. I’d call them bitches and sluts and they’d say, “I understand your situation. My parents also abandoned me.” Kevin would tell me, “Just go along with this shit, okay?” Don and John and Rory would get so furious when I’d get beeped. They wound up taking my beeper and putting it in the freezer and then they threatened to kill Kevin.

  My second fight with Ruddock was epic. He went into that fight ten pounds heavier. I actually weighed one pound less, but I was weak because I had lost thirty-five pounds in less then a month. I was out of control before the fight, drinking, gorging on food, fucking women. I would get up and sneak out to Roscoe’s in L.A. for fried chicken. So I took fat-burning water pills, and I didn’t eat anything after dark. I’d work out morning, afternoon, and night.

  In the second and the fourth round of the fight, I knocked Ruddock down and had him in trouble a number of times, but I just couldn’t finish him off, I was too weak. He was hitting me hard, like a mule, but I was focused. We both got points taken off for hitting after the bell; I had two more points deducted for low blows. It was a war. But I still won an easy unanimous decision.

  In July I was hanging out in D.C. when I got a call from my friend Ouie back in New York. An old friend of ours had been shot in D.C. and Ouie was worried that if the wrong people saw me, they might go after me too. I wanted to get off the streets and wait until all the heat had cooled down, so I went to see Whitney Houston perform that night and stayed backstage and hung out with her after the concert.

  On my way back to New York, I was passing through Philadelphia and they had the Budweiser Superfest going on at the Spectrum. Craig Boogie was working the show and I was hanging out backstage with him when B Angie B, one of Hammer’s backup singers who was performing there, came up to me and grabbed me. We were hanging out and we slept together that night. Angie then told me that she was going to Indianapolis to perform at the Black Expo. Earlier that day I had received a call from Reverend Charles Williams, who ran the Black Expo, inviting me to make an appearance, so I decided to go and meet her in Indiana.

  I was trying to ditch my bodyguards. Anthony was out in L.A. getting ready to get married that week. I told Rudy not to come with me. Rudy called Ant and then Anthony called John Horne and they decided that Dale Edwards should meet me in Indianapolis. Dale was a nephew, either by blood or by marriage, of Don’s. He was a Cleveland police officer.

  Dale and I checked into our hotel. Then I had my limo driver drive me over to B Angie B’s aunt’s house. That night we hung out at a nightclub and had three bottles of Dom Pérignon. We walked out on the bill when the house photographer asked me to take a picture. We got back to my hotel at about 2:30 in the morning. Angie and I had sex that night and then again a few times the next morning. Then Angie left to get ready for her performance.

  A little bit later, Reverend Williams came to bring us to the Expo. He asked me if I wanted to say hello to some of the girls in the Miss Black America pageant. When we entered the ballroom at the Omni Hotel, the girls went crazy.

  “Look – it’s Mike Tyson!” they all screamed.

  I walked towards them and they surrounded me, hugging me, kissing me. They were filming a little promotional video, so while the contestants twirled and danced I walked down the line, checking them out, doing some awkward dancing and impromptu singing. “I’m in a dream, day after day, beautiful women in such an array.” I must have looked like a real schmuck.

  As the girls surrounded me, I’d say shit to them like, “Hey, I want to see you tonight. Is that possible? Oh, boy, this is going to be fun if you decide to come to my room.” I was being a pig, but they were going for it. I hugged Desiree Washington, one of the contestants, in the middle of the first take of that video and told her that I wanted to get with her later. She was very flirty with me and friendly and she wanted to hang out. I explained to her that I would do some other things and go to the concert with my friends, but I would see her later that night. I even told her to bring her roommate so we could have a ménage à trois in my room. I saw her again later that afternoon at the opening of the Black Expo. She was with her roommate, Pasha, the one I was trying to get to come along with Desiree.

  “There’s the two look-alike twins,” I said when I saw them.

  Desiree took out some photos of them taken during the swimsuit competition. She seemed anxious for me to see them. And she confirmed that we were on for later that night.

  I was being chauffeured around town by this middle-aged black lady who owned the limo company. Dale and I were total assholes to her. We kept calling her a dumb, ugly bitch. I made her stop the limo and I got out and pissed right in the street. I was being a total arrogant dick, and it would come back to bite me when she testified against me.

  After the concert, Dale and I got back in the car and called Desiree, who was in her hotel room. I told her to wear some loose clothing and I was surprised that when she got into the car, she was wearing a loose bustier and her short pajama bottoms. We started making out in the backseat. It was only a block from her hotel to mine. We got out of the limo and she and I went to my suite and Dale went to his room.

  Later after all the shit had gone down, Anthony was furious with Dale. He blamed him for everything that happened to me in Indianapolis. It was pretty common practice for my bodyguards to stay in the living room of my suites when I had a girl in bed, especially a girl we didn’t know. Many times I’d open up my door after having sex and Anthony would be sitting there. He wanted to be right there, listening to what was going on, in case there was a problem. Sometimes I’d even invite the bodyguards into the room and we’d fuck the same girl.

  Desiree came into my room and we went straight to my bedroom. She was sitting in somewhat of a Buddha position and we talked a little bit. She seemed to know all about my pigeon hobby. She talked a little bit about Rhode Island. We even discussed seeing each other again when I was back east.

  I’d like to tell you exactly what transpired in that room but U.K. law is so restrictive that I can’t comment on many aspects of my own trial. But you can find o
ut what I testified to if you read the transcripts of my trial.

  About a week later, I was in the car with my friend Ouie who was driving. He got a call and his face dropped.

  “Fuck, Mike! Our summer is fucked up. Someone said you raped her,” Ouie said with disgust and he threw his phone down.

  “What?” I said. I was thinking to myself that maybe I had disrespected one of my street girlfriends and they were playing me.

  “Where did this happen?” I asked Ouie.

  “Indiana,” he said.

  The next day it was on the front cover of every newspaper. Now all these non-talented comedians were doing “Mike Tyson the rapist” jokes. When I saw Don, he was worried.

  “Now you need my help, nigga. Your dick got you in trouble now. God dammit, Mike, now you need me.”

  We knew that we were facing something serious, so Don went about getting me a lawyer. I really didn’t have any input into the selection of the lawyer or my defense in general. I was used to other people deciding my destiny, whether it was the juvenile court system, Cus, Jimmy, or Don. Don wound up hiring Vince Fuller. Fuller had been Don’s tax attorney and he had gotten him off on a tax evasion charge. Fuller also represented John Hinckley and used the insanity plea to get him an acquittal after he tried to assassinate President Reagan. I don’t know why Don picked Fuller. All I know is that Fuller made over a million dollars to defend me.

  I didn’t get along with Fuller from the get-go. Don told Fuller that I was an ignorant nigga. He was a real Waspy arrogant guy, not my type at all. Anybody could see he was a cold fish. He had never tried a criminal case in a county court, and there was no way in the world that he was going to relate to an Indianapolis jury. In fact, no one on his team had ever tried a criminal case that was not in a federal court. I still don’t know why they didn’t let the local homeboy Jim Voyles do more of the work in that trial.

  As I’ve explained, I’m not allowed to go into all the details of the case, for legal reasons, but I suggest that you read two books that came out after I was in jail and see what you think. One is by Mark Shaw who is a writer and a former criminal defense attorney and was the legal analyst for my trial for CNN, USA Today, and ESPN. The other book is the self-congratulatory-attempt-to-grab-some-headlines book written by the prosecutor in my case, Gregory Garrison. I didn’t pay much attention to my trial as it happened; I was an arrogant young man who couldn’t be bothered with these kinds of proceedings. I didn’t understand them. That’s what I paid those suits for.