by Mike Tyson
One time, I brought two childhood friends of mine to a hotel room where Don was staying. They were supposed to scare Don, but Don started talking and had them all shook up. I was looking at my guys like, What the fuck, you’re supposed to be tough guys. So all of a sudden I got up and smacked the shit out of Don.
“Just shut the fuck up, motherfucker,” I said.
And my guys, the guys I brought up to deal with Don, started jumping on me to restrain me.
Meanwhile, I kept meeting with Don whenever he reached out to me. I’m so happy that at that stage in my life, I didn’t have the guts that I had back when I was younger or I really would have done a number on Don. Don once called me and said that he was going to come over to my office in Vegas and drop off $100,000 for me. My friend Zip was in town, so the two of us were there waiting for Don to show up.
Don arrived with a bag full of cash and began counting out $100,000. Zip walked over to him, calmly took the whole bag, and brought it over to me.
“Thank you very much. Please escort Don to the door,” I said.
Zip grabbed Don’s arm and walked him out.
“Me and the champ are going to work out now,” Zip said.
“Hey, man, I need that money,” Don said.
“See you later, Don, it was a pleasure meeting you. I’ve always been a big fan,” Zip said and closed the door in his face. We started counting the money. There was sure a lot of gwap in the bag.
My lawyer Dale Kinsella heard about these meetings with Don and drafted a letter to Don’s attorney at the end of May.
I am appalled about what is going on with the participation of your office in the last thirty days.
Jerry Bernstein and I are Mike’s counsel of record. To work so perilously to exclude us from what is going on should cause anybody, let alone Judge Daniels, to have serious reservations about any proposed settlement.
Don appears to have learned absolutely nothing from this litigation. It is Don’s persistence in getting Mike sequestered, whether in an office or in a hotel room, and having him execute documents without the benefit of any independent legal or financial advice, which is a core fact of this litigation. I truly do not understand what anybody on your side of the table is thinking.
Mike’s propensity to sign agreements, let alone settlement agreements, under the influence of people that he trusts, respects, and/or whom he believes he can trust (even if momentarily) is well documented. His recent decision to settle his divorce with Monica without counsel or financial advice (which had to be undone on the grounds of undue influence) is a prime example of what I am talking about.
If and when Mike is served with process, and if and when Jerry and you and I are called upon to address the court, these matters as well as others will undoubtedly be raised. I agree with the court that Mike’s case is his case and not his lawyer’s, but for everybody’s sake any settlement consummated between Mike and Don should (and probably must) be reviewed by someone who is independently representing Mike.
In this context, I would appreciate it if Don and/or your office would see fit to advise Jerry and me to what in the world is going on.
What Dale didn’t know was that a few weeks before he sent that letter, I had Jackie negotiating with Don behind their backs. My assistant Darryl had called Jackie to tell her that we were down to our last $5,000. We had no money to pay the house bills or the maintenance workers or anything. Jackie came out to Vegas and saw how dire my financial situation was.
“I want my fucking money from Don,” I told her.
Don was thrilled to hear from Jackie. He was desperate to settle the case because we finally had gotten a trial date the coming September. As soon as we heard that, Jeff Wald told me that Don was going to do his magic and we’d see why he was Don King. Jeff didn’t know that I had Jackie talking directly with Don, trying to get some money from him. Don was offering me a $20 million settlement in exchange for him getting to promote my fights again. I told Jackie that before we could talk about working together and settling, I wanted three things of mine that Don still had – a green Rolls-Royce, a painting that the Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi had given me that was supposed to be worth a lot, and the thing I was worried the most about: a drawing of me in the middle of a bunch of X-Men that Stan Lee had done.
Don called Jackie and told her that he would fly us down to Florida and put us up in the Delano Hotel so we could work out a settlement. Jackie, her son, my girlfriend Luz, and I got on Don’s private jet and flew down. I packed a big block of coke and a duffel bag with a half-pound of reefer. I was doing my coke and smoking my blunts and listening to my Discman and I was higher than the plane was when an epiphany hit me.
“This is my motherfucking plane. I paid for this plane. And this motherfucker is acting like he’s doing me a favor sending me down on my own fucking plane. This nigga is playing me.”
The drugs were playing with my head and I was freaking out and getting jealous.
Don picked us up at the private airport in his Rolls and he had Isadore Bolton, his chauffeur, who used to be my chauffeur before he stole him from me, driving some of Don’s associates in the lead car. We were driving down to Miami from Fort Lauderdale on I-95, the main highway, and Jackie was in the front seat and I was in the back with Luz and Jackie’s son. Don said some innocuous thing, and all that jealousy and rage spilled out of me and I kicked him in his fucking head. Boom! You don’t turn your back on a jealous cokehead.
Don swerved off onto the side median and I started choking him from the backseat.
“No, no, let him go, Mike,” Jackie screamed.
“Jackie, you hold this nigga up, I’m coming to the front,” I said.
She said, “Okay, I got him.”
I got out of the car to get into the front seat and kick his ass some more, but Jackie couldn’t hold him, she was in shock, and Don took off down the median.
Now I was on the side of the fucking highway by myself. Don drove a little bit down the road and then let Jackie and her son and Luz out of the car. They came up to me carrying my bag with the half-pound of reefer. I had the coke stash on me when I got out of the car.
“Why did you let him go, Jackie?” I screamed. “Now we’re out here on the fucking highway.”
The cars and the trucks were whizzing by us. All of a sudden, Isadore pulled up. He was there to pick us up because he lost our car and when he called Don, Don told him to turn around and get us.
He pulled up alongside me and rolled his window down and told me to get in the car.
“Fuck you, motherfucker,” I screamed.
Isadore got out of his driver’s door and I was right on him. I punched him in the face twice, shattering his left orbital bone. The force of the blows knocked him across the driver’s seat and I reached in and grabbed his leg and bit it. Isadore managed to kick me off him and close his door, so I punched the outer panel of his door and bent the steel. I was about to break his window when he managed to drive away.
His shoes were still on the side of the road and he was driving barefoot.
Then the cops came. They were talking to us and I had the half brick of coke and Luz was holding the duffel bag with the half-pound of weed. These cops were so excited to see me that the motherfuckers didn’t even ask me what the four of us were doing on the side of the highway. They’d have put anybody else’s ass on that grass, and they’d be locked up for life for having all that coke. I’m an extremist. Why couldn’t I just buy an eight ball? No, I had to have a half a brick. The guys who sold it to me said, “Mike, this is sales weight. Police are not going to hear that you’re getting high with a half a brick of blow.” And I had this as my personal stash.
The cops offered to drive us to our destination and we piled into one of the cars and they took us to South Beach. Don had reserved half of a floor for us, so we started living it up. Jackie talked Don into giving us some money, and he sent a guy over with a couple hundred grand.
We partied every
night for a month and then a friend of mine came by with his tour bus and we picked up a couple of girls and drove all around the East Coast.
In June, I got hit with another bullshit paternity case. This lying wench Wonda Graves claimed that I had raped her in 1990 and that I had fathered a boy. That piece-of-shit lawyer Raoul Felder, who represented Robin Givens, took on the case and bragged that he would “defeat Mike Tyson in the ring again.” They both crawled back into the gutter when the DNA test came back and showed a zero percent chance that I was the father.
But I was no angel then either. Later that month I was visiting my childhood friend Dave Malone and we were flying our pigeons in Brownsville. That night Dave drove me back to the Marriott Hotel where I was staying. Outside the hotel, two guys who were returning to their rooms and they were pretty drunk and came up to me and asked me for an autograph. I was high on cocaine. Let me tell you something about me. When I was getting high and it was nighttime or early in the morning, I was not a good person to meet. I was just nasty, looking for trouble. I could have these Herculean fucking mood swings, almost Jekyll and Hyde shit.
So these two Puerto Rican guys approached me and asked me for my autograph. I told them to fuck off.
“You ain’t all that, anyway,” one of them said. “We got guns and you only got your fists.”
If I wasn’t on coke probably nothing would have happened. But I was, so I chased them into the lobby and up the escalator. We got to the top of the escalator and I knocked one of them out with one punch. The other guy was hiding behind the front desk and I pulled him out and hit him. He was spared when hotel security came.
The fight was my fault. They were going to charge me with misdemeanor assault and them with menacing and harassment. I had to go to court the next day and when I got back I showed my friends Dave and Zip the thick rap sheet that was part of the court record.
“They’re born troublemakers,” Dave said. “Look at their records.”
“Hey, that’s my rap sheet,” I corrected him.
“Man, we hang around you because we think you’re a celebrity and you’re gonna give us a good look,” Zip said. “You got a worse police record than we do, nigga.”
I was living day to day then. By now I was tired of all the bullshit surrounding me. I didn’t feel like there was anyone in my camp I could trust and I got tired of all the Machiavellian power grabs, so I got rid of my whole management team.
So now I had Shelly handling what was left of my career. I had a rematch clause in my contract with Lennox Lewis and he wanted to fight me again to get another big payday. But I didn’t want to get my ass kicked twice. If I was motivated and got in top shape I had no doubt that I could have kicked his ass. But I wasn’t interested in boxing; I was interested in drugs.
So Shelly and Lewis’s people came up with the idea of me fighting on the undercard of Lennox’s next fight. I would be billed as a co-headliner. I declined to fight on the undercard because it was a dis to me. So we turned down Lewis’s offer and they turned around and sued me and Don King for $385 million, claiming that King was enticing me to neglect the contract so he could promote my next fights.
My only real asset left was my suit against Don. By then, Jeff Wald knew that I was meeting with Don and he was furious at me. He told me that Don would keep delaying lawsuits that were filed against him until the last minute before the trial was about to start and then he would settle. Jeff and Dale Kinsella were telling me that we could settle for as much as $60 million out of the $100 million we had sued for and that I might even be able to get my fight film library back, which would be money in the bank for me for years to come. All I had to do was hold on until our court date in September.
But my financial predicament was so bad that the people who were around me on a day-to-day basis were telling me to file for bankruptcy. Jackie and I had been hanging around Jimmy Henchman at that time, the rap entrepreneur who managed the Game and was CEO of Czar Entertainment. Jimmy brought in Barry Hankerson, a record producer who had managed Toni Braxton and R. Kelly. They were all pushing for me to file for bankruptcy. Hankerson had told Jackie that I should file a Chapter 11 bankruptcy, so Jackie actually went online and Googled “Chapter 11 Bankruptcy.” That was what I was dealing with at the time. Jackie was a good person but she was in way over her head. None of us knew anything about high finance or bankruptcy; we were just having fun and spending money.
So I called Jeff Wald and told him that all these people were suggesting that I go bankrupt.
“Do not file for bankruptcy because the minute you do, we don’t control the lawsuit anymore, the bankruptcy judge does. Then the suit is out of our hands,” he told me.
“Well, what if I lose?” I asked.
“You’re not going to lose. It’s black and white,” he said.
I wasn’t so sure. In my first deposition against Don I had picked up a pitcher of water and poured it on his lap. And now Don had that Florida stomping to hold over my head.
Wald was convinced that Don was working all my friends, including Jackie, to influence me to file for bankruptcy. He started calling me a few times a day, begging me not to file. But I didn’t believe that my friends were taking kickbacks.
But when I looked at the mountains and mountains of bills that I couldn’t pay, I decided to file. Hankerson got me a bankruptcy lawyer and we filed on August first. That same day, I went shopping on Rodeo Drive with Hankerson, Henchman, and my bodyguard Rick. Hey, just because I filed for bankruptcy didn’t mean I had zero money. I just didn’t have $100 million to pay off my debts. I was still hustling deals. The media made a big deal of me shopping on Rodeo Drive, but they didn’t go into the stores with me. I was talking to Muslim guys who ran some of these high-end clothes stores and I pulled out my Muslim card in hopes they would cut me a deal.
“How about if I give you fifteen hundred dollars for this three-thousand-dollar suit, my brother. You know the golden rule of Islam. Want for your brother what you want for yourself.”
The next day all the newspapers had every little detail of my finances splashed across their pages. I owed about $27 million, $17 million of which was for back taxes I owed the IRS and the English tax people. The other $10 million was for personal expenses, which included the money I owed Monica from the divorce, what I owed the banks for my mortgages, and my huge legal fees.
I was so overwhelmed and pissed off by the whole bankruptcy thing that I just gave up my house.
“Fuck it, take the fucking house,” I told my lawyers and they auctioned it off. I was so high I couldn’t get anything done. I was just working out. I had no fight scheduled, but I worked out anyway and got high.
I was a real adaptable kind of guy. I could live in the gutter or in an elevated state. I knew all the hustles and I was gambling with life. Even when I was in the gutter, I had my $2,000 pants and shoes on. I didn’t have a nickel in my pocket, but I was still talking shit, hitting on chicks.
I spent some time in Phoenix with Shelley, the mother of my child. Dave Malone came down and hung out with me for a while. I was so poor that we were eating Frosted Flakes and Twizzlers for dinner. We had no money to do anything, so we used to sit in the backyard and watch my pigeons fly. Every once in a while, I’d set up an autograph signing somewhere and I’d charge twenty-five bucks for an autograph, just to get over the hump. I was so poor that a guy who had stolen my credit card account number went online to complain that I was so broke he couldn’t even pay for a dinner with my credit card.
But there were some benefits. I went back east and I was hanging out with my friend Mario Costa who had some of my pigeons behind the Ringside Lounge, his restaurant and bar in Jersey City. It was a beautiful Indian summer day and we were sitting in the back where the pigeons were. I fell asleep and Mario left me alone. Two hours later I woke up and started shouting, “I’m rich! I’m rich!” Mario came running out back.
“You okay, champ?” he said.
“I’m rich, Mario,” I sa
id. “I don’t have no watch, no money, no phone, but I feel so peaceful. No one’s telling me to ‘go here,’ ‘go there,’ ‘do this.’ I used to have cars that I never drove and I wouldn’t even know where the keys for them were. I had houses I didn’t live in. I had everybody robbing me. Now I have nothing. Nobody calls me, nobody bothers me, nobody is after me. It’s so peaceful. This is rich, man.”
Some of my friends stepped up to the plate for me. My friend Eric Brown and his brother gave me a $50,000 advance from their company CMX Productions. I would have done anything for them, but I never had to.
Meanwhile, in August, my friend Craig Boogie started negotiating a deal for me with the mixed martial arts K-1 people. I had nowhere to live so the K-1 people put me up in a suite in the Beverly Wilshire Hotel in L.A. and paid all my expenses. I needed that. I had already been kicked out of every big hotel on the Strip in Vegas. In return, I did promotional appearances for them.
“Mike, we need you to be in the audience at this event in Hawaii.”
Boom, I flew down to Hawaii. The next month I went somewhere else. I was getting fifty grand for this, a hundred grand for that. I was making all this money by doing nothing. Instead of saving that money and paying off my bills, I bought an Aston Martin Vanquish and a Rolls convertible. I had all these cars and nowhere to go. I shopped on Rodeo Drive every fucking day. I was in these shops, looking in the mirror, deciding how I was going to project myself when I went out that night. I’d be wearing $3,000 pants, a $4,000 shirt, and a $10,000 blazer. Meanwhile, I didn’t have a pot to piss in or a window to throw it out of.
Everybody in the Beverly Wilshire knew me. They’d have these exclusive dinner parties in one of the meeting rooms and I’d crash them. If there was a Palestinian-Israeli debate, I was going. I was a master schnorrer.
