Undisputed Truth: My Autobiography

by Mike Tyson

  “No, really, I think the Taliban are on the property.” Darryl didn’t crack a smile.

  “What are you talking about?” I said.

  “Mike, come here, please,” he said. So we walked outside.

  There were about a hundred guys with green camouflage outfits on, assault weapons in their hands, and hand grenades dangling off their belts. They each held a big clear protective shield in their other hand. They were slowly advancing on the house, periodically hiding behind my massive palm trees. On top of that, there were two huge battering ram tanks coming through each of the big wrought-iron gates of my property that had the word SWAT stenciled on their side. We heard a buzzing sound and looked up. There were helicopters in the sky. My house was being invaded.

  By now the whole battalion were getting ready to go through the front door. They had their clear shields in front of them and their guns in their hands and their blouse pants over their boots. Then they drew down in front of us.

  “Freeze! Stop moving!” one of them barked.

  I stood still.

  Click, click, click, the sound of cocked rifles wafted through the air.

  “Bin Laden is not here. We don’t have anything to do with that nine-eleven stuff,” Darryl said. He had probably been watching too much CNN. They did look like military guys on an exercise in the desert. The only problem was this desert was my property.

  They finally identified themselves. They weren’t the Taliban, they were the Vegas police. I’d never seen so many police in one spot in Vegas in my life. They said they were there to investigate a charge that I had held a young woman hostage in the house for three days and had raped her. I had some armed guards on the property who Darryl had set up in a guard shack. I guess this young lady had told the authorities that we had guns on the property so they came overly prepared. We had just changed the work policy and the guards were working from dusk to dawn. It was about eleven a.m. when the police stormed in, so the guards were already gone for the day and the gates were open.

  As soon as Rick saw the troops invading us, he was on the phone with my lawyer Darrow Soll. Darrow told him to get me out of the house and to say nothing, not a word, to the police. Sounded right to me. They searched us and then they ordered us all off the premises. They made Darryl stay because he was the property manager and could give them access to everywhere they wanted to go. For some reason they let Chef Drew stay too. But while they had him on the ground, the smell of burning chicken came from the kitchen. They let him up so he could go back to the kitchen and stop the house from burning down.

  With only Darryl and Drew there, they began to tear my house apart – room by room, box by box, paper by paper. They lifted box springs and mattresses off the beds. They went through every video. They were there from eleven in the morning until one in the morning the next day. Hell, at one point they even ordered pizza in and had a dinner break. They were nice enough to offer Darryl a slice but he refused.

  They wound up confiscating a bunch of stuff including my personal sex tapes. I kept calling in through the day. “Darryl, are they still there?”

  “Yeah, Mike, they’re tearing the house apart.”

  I had gone to the gym and then had my bodyguard Rick drop me off at another girlfriend’s house. I was confused as to why these guys were raiding my house. It turns out, I had met the girl who called the police at Mack’s barbershop. I brought her back to the house and she basically moved in for about a week. I’d leave her when I went to train and she’d be going into the kitchen wearing only one of my T-shirts and have Chef Drew whip up some food for her. She knew all the security codes to the house and the gate, so she could come and go as she pleased. So how was she kidnapped? When she finally left the house, Rick drove her home. She left happy. So what could have compelled her to say all that shit about me so my ass got raided?

  I found out when a record producer friend of mine called me from Houston. He told me that the girl was seeing another very prominent boxer. When she got back to him after being with me, he was furious. And he beat the shit out of her. Then he told her to go to the police and report that I had kidnapped her and held her against her will.

  I was really pissed off. I couldn’t be certain that this other boxer was behind all this shit, but if he was, he was as good as dead. But I’m a strong believer in karma – that bad things happen to bad people. I contemplated laying him down and he must have figured I would because he increased his security. But his bodyguards would have meant nothing. I knew a little gangbanging guy from the hood who used to take me to my community service. He told me to just say the word and he would make a call and I’d have two hundred people, all strapped, standing with me. I appreciated the offer but I turned him down. I never did pursue revenge. I even got high with that boxer a few years later. I really wanted to fuck him up then. But I let it slide.

  After the raid on my house, the girl’s identity got out, and reporters would come down to the barbershop to try and interview me. Mack would hide me in the back room and deny seeing me that day. Mack even called Stewart Bell, the district attorney, and told him that he had introduced the girl to me. He said that she was no prisoner; she was even driving my car all around town. Mack told him that he was concerned because I was supposed to leave soon for Copenhagen for my next fight.

  “Don’t worry about that,” Bell told Mack. “Mike can go fight there. We have more investigating to do and if anything happens it will be after the fight.”

  We had a little drama on the flight to Copenhagen for the Brian Nielsen fight. Crocodile started throwing up and then he passed out. He had OD’d. They rushed him to the hospital. Three days went by and we actually thought that Crocodile had died, but when we went to the weigh-in, he showed up like nothing had happened. Crocodile was one of those guys who could do drugs night and day and then stop cold turkey and go train a fighter for six weeks. Then he’d come back and get high like nothing happened.

  “Yo, man, what you been doing?” I’d ask him.

  “I haven’t got high since the last time I saw you,” he said.

  “Listen, I haven’t stopped since the last time I saw you,” I said. “Fuck, how do you do that?”

  When I get high, I have to be arrested to stop. We had Darrow along with us on that trip. Shortly after we got there one of those big Danish biker types said something to Anthony Pitts’s wife and Darrow just turned around and, wop, knocked the guy out cold with one punch. He actually beat Anthony to that punch.

  “This is the best,” I said. “I’ve got my lawyer and my fucking bodyguard with me at the same time.”

  Denmark went crazy over us. They sold out the huge arena in no time. I hadn’t fought in over a year and I figured that I could get some rounds in with Nielsen. He was the IBC champ at the time but it was pretty meaningless. They called him Super Brian and his record was 62-1, but he really hadn’t fought any high-caliber fighters in their prime. He had beaten Bonecrusher Smith, Tim Witherspoon, and Larry Holmes, but they were on the way down when he met them. But he was a big boy, 6'4" and 260 pounds, so I had a big target to aim at. I punished him with body blows in the first round and with seconds to go in the third, I knocked him down with a series of devastating combinations. He went down like a redwood tree. If the ropes hadn’t cushioned his fall I think he would have split the ring in two. It was only the second time in his long career that he had been down. I was having a good time in the ring. I had put on some weight, ostensibly because he was so heavy, but in reality, I hadn’t trained much for the fight. I came in at 239 pounds, my heaviest fighting weight ever, so I wanted to get some rounds in.

  I battered him around the ring for six rounds. At the beginning of the seventh, he just stayed on his stool. He had a cut over his left eye and I had been working it all night. He told the ref he couldn’t see out of the eye, but he really was just worn out. But he was a nice guy. Nobody liked him because he was really arrogant, but I related to him.

  Once the fight was over, we wen
t 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 one of the female bodyguards from 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.”

  So I picked three hot ones and we all went back to my room and partied.

  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?