by Mike Tyson
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 threw 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.
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.”
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 State
s 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.’ ”
