by Mike Tyson
When I first started using coke heavily, I would carry half a brick with me. I was carrying sales weight but I didn’t care, I just wanted to be able to share it and turn all my friends on. I would go around and ask people, “You want some?” People I never dreamed of were doing that shit. The interesting thing is that these motherfuckers would sniff my dope and then reprimand me while they were doing it.
Or all of a sudden some guy that you never snorted with before is now an expert. He does some lines, delicately wipes his nose clean, then he looks like he’s deep in thought and says, “I can get you better stuff.” All of a sudden, he’s an aficionado.
Sometimes you get guys who can’t wait to turn you onto their coke.
“Mike, are you ready for this shit? You sure you’re ready for it,” he’d say. “Welcome to fucking Dreamsville, buddy.”
He laid out some lines and I snorted them.
“Pure Peruvian flake,” he said proudly, like he had just opened a bottle of Lafite Rothschild.
But he was right. The shit was so good, it made my eyeballs freeze.
I was hanging out with friends in L.A. after the McBride fight, feeling pretty depressed, when my phone rang. It was Jeff Greene, a new friend of mine. On the face of it, you’d think it was pretty improbable that Jeff and I would be friends. Jeff was a Jewish businessman who made a billion dollars playing the real estate market. I was a Muslim boxer who spent almost a billion dollars on bitches and cars and legal fees. I met him through a mutual friend and we just clicked. He started coming to my fights in Europe and I started traveling around the world with him on his yacht. He’d invite me over for dinner during Rosh Hashanah, shit I even got to read from the book during the Passover seder.
“Hey, Mike, why don’t you come join me on my boat in Saint-Tropez? I’ll charter a jet to take you to France and then I’ll have my guy come pick you up and take you to the boat.”
Jeff was worried that I’d get depressed just thinking about the way I went out of boxing, so he figured that hanging out with some of the most beautiful women in the world and partying might be just the remedy I needed.
Before I left, I called Zip to see if he wanted to come along.
“No, man, I can’t go,” he said. “Some nigga shot me and I want to find out why.”
“Zip, come on. We’re flying on a private jet, we’ll be hanging out on a yacht all around the Mediterranean …”
“Shit, man. I got shot. Somebody else needs to get shot. A shot for a shot.”
“We’re going where the best pussy in the history of the world is and you’re talking about someone getting shot? They don’t care if you’re toked or broke, if you’re there, you’re fucking,” I said. But he was bent on getting revenge.
So I went there and it was cool. I didn’t really feel out of place. I saw some people who I knew and they started taking me around. I would eat breakfast on Jeff’s boat and then get on one of his Jet Skis and I’d be riding around and some Wall Street guy would see me and invite me over to his boat.
“Hey, my boat’s bigger than Jeff’s,” they’d say. “Come over and party with us on our boat.”
I don’t know what these guys thought. I wasn’t no nigga for rent. Jeff was a friend of mine. Besides, we had the most exciting boat. Jeff’s boat was over 150 feet long but it wasn’t big enough because there was too much fun happening.
I was a little nervous at first that I wouldn’t fit in with Jeff’s other friends.
“Jeff, this is white honky heaven. I don’t know if Mr. As-salamu alaykum is gonna fit in here,” I said. This was my introduction to real Jewish jubilance. All of a sudden Denise Rich saw me and she came over and introduced me to her friend, trying to get me comfortable. She’s such a beautiful, elegant, sophisticated lady. And nobody’s tripping out on me. Then I realized that I was the only one tripping in my head. So I’m sitting there getting comfortable with all my new Jewish friends and suddenly this rude, obnoxious rich Saudi Muslim comes up to us.
“My son was going to pay fifteen million dollars to get you out of jail when that girl said you raped her,” he said. He didn’t even say, “Mr. Tyson, so nice to meet you …”
“Oh, thank you, sir,” I said.
Denise Rich looked sadly at me. “I am so sorry,” she said.
What kind of guy does something like that? What arrogance. Suppose that my new friends here didn’t know I was in prison for rape? Suppose they asked, “What were you in prison for, Mike? Did you embezzle money? Insider trading?” Thank you, Mr. Desert Jockey, for explaining this in minute detail to the whole Jewish jubilance. I didn’t talk to that guy the whole rest of the night.
I had another more pleasant chance meeting while we were in Saint-Tropez. I was on another rich Jewish guy’s yacht and I watched him checking out this other Jewish guy whose boat was moored nearby. They were looking at each other, just like black people do, you know how we look at each other? And then one guy said, “Harvard seventy-nine?”
“Yes, didn’t you study macroeconomics?”
“Yeah. Didn’t you date Cindy from Hyannis Port? I dated her too for a second.”
So I’m on this boat and I see a big black guy. He’s the bodyguard for a very well-known international arms dealer. And I’m looking at him and looking at him and I just can’t place him. He came over to me.
“Spofford seventy-eight?” he asked.
“Shit, nigga, we met in lockdown,” I remembered.
“Yeah, I got into that fight with the guy in the chow hall.”
“All right, that’s you!”
After Saint-Tropez we took that boat all over. We went up and down the coasts, and every time we stopped at another country, it was chaos when they found out I was on Jeff’s boat. There’s nothing like it. You could get off the plane anywhere and it’s like you never left home. You get to meet kings, queens, and princes. Everything’s carte blanche, people open doors for you. You never have to wait in line to go to a club, you always have a table at the finest restaurants in the world. It was just a wonderful world to live in. It seemed like one big blur. But one thing I did realize is that none of all that filled that big hole that I had in my soul. I never truly respected the championship; it all came very easy. I truly put in a lot of hard work to achieve what I did, but I took it for granted.
When we docked in Sicily, we went out to a party and about a hundred people followed us back onto the boat. They all wanted to see me and take pictures with me. All of a sudden, the whole boat started tilting and sinking. Everybody wanted to party with us. Which was ideal for my demons, no doubt about it.
We stopped in Sardinia and that was off the hook. I’m a history buff so when I think of Sardinia I think of the Punic Wars and Hannibal. I was vibing on the fact that great wars were fought here. Jeff and I stopped into a place called the Billionaire Club. That place lived up to its name. A bottle of champagne cost something like $100,000.
“You don’t have to worry about me drinking tonight,” I joked to Jeff. But they kept sending bottles over to us anyway. In Sardinia, we were hanging out with Cavalli and Victoria Beckham. He invited me on his boat that was so lavish that it changed colors. I would hop on one of Jeff’s Jet Skis and go from boat to boat, eating some food, drinking some liquor.
We had one unpleasant incident in Sardinia. There was another guy on Jeff’s boat who was an English friend of Jeff’s. He brought these two French girls on the boat and we all got high. I took one of the girls to my room and had sex with her. Afterwards I went upstairs on the deck, and when I came down, I saw the girl I was with going through the staterooms. I was high as a kite but I got really pissed at her. I thought, Holy shit. If anything comes up missing, they’re gonna blame me. I’m the only nigga here. So I grabbed the girl by her hair and said, “What the fuck are you doing?” I dragged her up onto the deck. I was so upset and paranoid from the coke that I was about to throw her overboard when a guy on the next boat saw me.
“No, Mike, stop, stop!” he yell
ed.
Now people were looking at us. So I grabbed the two girls and told the staff to kick them off the boat. This wasn’t my boat. I felt responsible for whatever those girls did. We left Sardinia and we were about a hundred miles away near Capri when a police boat drove up. They looked a little scary because they had a machine gun mounted on the boat.
The coast guard police came onto our boat to investigate me for allegedly assaulting that girl. So they had to interview a bunch of people. When it was my turn to be interviewed I told the guy the truth.
“This girl was stealing stuff from the room, so I grabbed her …”
“Hold on,” the cop said in halting English. “No, that is not what happened. Say it again, say what happened again.”
I got it.
“She was in the room stealing and I didn’t know what to do and she just ran off the boat and I couldn’t catch her,” I said.
“Yes, that is really what happened,” he said and wrote it into the report.
I was really paranoid when those cops came aboard. I had a huge bag of weed and I didn’t want them to search and find it so I had my friend Jenny, who was sunbathing butt naked, sit on the weed. The policemen kept staring at her but they never asked her to get up or anything.
We made a few more stops, including a stop in Turkey where I met and hung out with the prime minister, but I was looking forward to going to Moscow to see my therapist. Her name was Marilyn Murray and she was a kick-ass seventy-year-old psychologist who I had been seeing since 1999. I met her that summer when I had to do court-mandated anger management sessions because of the road rage incident. Monica went with me and we decided to try some marriage counseling at the same time. We went to this facility in Phoenix. I made an entrance like I was the President of the United States. A couple of big stretch limos, all the Secret Service-looking bodyguards in black suits. I came in sly with my expensive jewelry and diamonds and my Versace clothes and my $6,000 crocodile shoes. So we sat down with the therapist and started the session and I was convinced that Monica and this guy had colluded beforehand. They were both ripping me to shreds. He didn’t say anything about Monica; he just kept beating up on me.
“Fuck both of you! Y’all set me up ahead of time,” I said and stormed out.
Six months later I went back alone, in a cab, fucked up, broke, and broken.
“Can we try this again, please, sir?” I said humbly.
This time he assigned me to Marilyn. She had a really interesting background. She used to own an art gallery in Phoenix but she started getting sick and went into therapy to deal with some abuse from her childhood. When she was forty-five she went back to school and got her degree in psychology and became a psychotherapist. She volunteered for free for years in the Arizona prison system working with sex offenders, violent rapists, and child molesters. So she had a reputation for working with really hard cases, people who had suffered a lot of trauma in their lives.
They thought she’d be a good match for me. I’d been in therapy a lot over the years but the guys I had been seeing were all too white-bread for me. At first I thought she was just some foolish-ass white woman that thought she was going to change me. I was going to play the nice black man role and she’d never see Ike/Mike. But I didn’t know that Marilyn was a beast. She didn’t take any shit. She’d heard all the games before. I just never thought she had heard my international con game, the game I got over working with all those counselors since I was a kid.
In order to deal with me you had to have some kind of roaring ferocious animal in you to get my attention. Even if you go about it in a diplomatic way, even without expressing it to the naked eye, I have to know that that animal is in there. It might just be a subtle look in her eye. Well, Marilyn had it.
It was obvious to me after a while that Marilyn’s job in life was to help people. Some people can’t even conceive of that, a person whose whole goal is just to give her life energy to care about someone else. We’re taught that people like that have ulterior motives. But she had a mission. Just like Cus said that “my boy’s job is to put big strong scary men in their place,” Marilyn’s job was to take big strong scary men that society has rejected and make society accept them again and make them excel while they’re being accepted.
Marilyn introduced me to a concept called “baseline normal.” A healthy person might have a high baseline for normal but mine was way down in the gutter. My baseline normal was sex, alcohol, drugs, violence, more sex, more alcohol, more violence, and chaos. I told Marilyn that the scariest day of my life was when I won the championship belt and Cus wasn’t there. I had all this money and I didn’t have a clue how to comport myself. And then the vultures and the leeches came out.
I was a smuck with no self-esteem but everyone in the world was telling me how great I was so now I was a narcissistic smuck with no self-esteem and a big ego. Marilyn thought that I was still addicted to the chaos of my childhood so that anytime something good happened to me, I would do something to sabotage it. So I married a doctor and had two lovely children and I was running around screwing strippers and doing drugs and drinking my ass off. Marilyn wanted to break my addiction to chaos and to raise my baseline normal to a place that was healthy.
She was talking the right talk a hundred percent to me. I knew that my demons from my childhood were on my trail everywhere I went. So she wanted to deal with that little boy who was acting up my whole fight career, that little boy that had been bullied and brutalized and abused. I didn’t know how to take care of him when I was the champion of the world and now I had to learn how to nurture him and give him the love he never received before.
Marilyn became more than a therapist, she became a mentor. She would take me to dinner, take me to movies. We’d go sightseeing and she taught me all about Phoenix. We really bonded. She has so much love and care and passion in her heart. She wasn’t even tripping about making any money off me; she just wanted to see me improve. I don’t know what she saw in my unrehabilitated ass.
Right after 9/11 Marilyn was invited to Russia to do some work, and from 2002 on she would go to Moscow and spend four months out of the year there. There was so much trauma and substance abuse in Russia that Marilyn was a godsend. So in 2002, she told me that she couldn’t be my therapist anymore and that I needed someone who would be around full-time for me. I loved Marilyn. I didn’t want to see her leave.
“Why you got to go? Stay here and be my mom,” I pleaded with her. “Stay here and look after me, you don’t work with nobody but me anyway.” It was like she was my mother anyway. She was fighting like mad for me. She’d use any influence she had politically. She was on a crusade to save my ass. Funny thing was, back then I didn’t want all that. I didn’t know that I was that damaged. Marilyn had to show me how fucked up I was.
So I told Jeff Greene that I was going to go to Russia and he said we could take the boat around the Balkans and stop in the Ukraine. So every few days I’d call Marilyn and tell her that I was coming to see her. “Hey, Marilyn, I’m in Saint-Tropez.” “Hey, Marilyn, I’m in Sardinia.” “I’m in Istanbul, see you soon.”
When we got to the Balkan states everything turned lawless. These gangsters really operated with impunity over there. All the stuff we do that people label “gangster” is nothing compared to these guys. They can walk the streets and you don’t know who they are but the law is on their side. The next thing I knew, these guys were hanging with me. They pretty much kidnapped me and wined me and dined me and gave me whatever I wanted.
I was in Romania at one point and I was hanging with all these drug and gang figures, and they were trying to make me happy.
“What do you do?” they asked me.
“Do you have any cocaine?” I said.
These guys didn’t do cocaine. But they made a call and a guy came in with a big brick and put it on the table.
“This is what you like?” they said.
I dug into it and then I told them that they all had to take a hit. So a
couple of them joined me and then they started talking so much they couldn’t believe it. I’m such a monster. I turned the Romanian Mafia onto coke.
We took the boat as far as the Ukraine. Jeff and I and our friend Muhammad were sitting at a restaurant eating and, out of nowhere, thousands of people rushed over to see me. It was so bad that the police had to escort us to our hotel. Later that night, Muhammad and I went to meet some local “businessmen.” They were talking to me about doing an endorsement deal for their vodka. The guy running the show owned a mansion that was just massive. Everything was made out of marble. This was real tsar shit, in the immaculate robber baron arena. We were supposed to have a business dinner with some guys. So the owner came up to me before dinner.
“Come with me. I want to show you something.”
We walked to the south side of the house, past a big balcony and down the hall to another room. He opened up the door and there were two beautiful women lounging on a bed.
“This is your dessert after dinner,” he said.
So I went and got Muhammad to show him.
“We’re going to skip dinner and go right to dessert,” I said. And we just stayed in that room. The Ukrainian guys didn’t think that was so cool. Who would skip an important dinner for some broads? They felt that was odd.
In all these countries, Ukraine, Russia, Bulgaria, everything was about sex and power. As soon as we got off the plane from the Ukraine to Moscow, people were coming up to me. “Are you okay? Do you need a woman? You’re tired, you must want a woman.”
Can you imagine a hound like me in Russia? If you’re with the right people they will literally pull a girl off the street, pull her into the car next to you and say, “You go with him.” That shit was crazy over there.
The vodka guys put me up at the Hyatt in a $5,000-a-night suite that was at least ten thousand square feet. If my doorbell rang, by the time I’d get to the door it was too late, the person had already left.
