by Mike Tyson
The guys who have the big bucks over there are first-, maybe second-generation wealth. Before that, their parents or grandparents were basically peasants, so these guys spent their money like crazy. I had guys shelling out $300,000 just to entertain me for one night. And that’s not even going out and boogying, that was just to pay for chilling. They’d order a huge tin of caviar, sixty grand. Big bottles of Rémy Martin Louis XIII, thousands of dollars. Whatever I wanted, I had. Money was no object to them.
I got in late the first night and I called Marilyn and told her that I’d like to do some sightseeing before the whole country knew I was in Moscow. Only about three paparazzi had shown up at the airport when I arrived. My hotel was just a couple of blocks from Red Square. Back in 2005, Russia was pretty much like the old Wild West with kidnappings and terrorist bombings every other day. Marilyn and I were on the way to Red Square and we had just passed the big statue of Karl Marx near Revolution Square when suddenly two big black SUVs and two long Mercedes sedans pulled up. Out jumped four guys with Uzi machine guns. In the Mercedeses were big guys in leather jackets holding handguns. Marilyn looked panicked but they came up and told me they were our bodyguards sent by the Ukrainian businessmen.
“I don’t think I’ve ever had security with Uzis before,” I told Marilyn.
So now we were walking along in a procession – me, Marilyn, the bodyguards who were all in camo outfits, and the three paparazzi who were trailing me from the hotel. When people saw this entourage, they started spilling out of the stores or abandoning their cars. By the time we got to Red Square, there was a mob following us.
Despite the crowd tagging along, we managed to get in a little sightseeing. I really wanted to visit Tolstoy’s house, and the translator who took us around was stunned that I knew the names of all of Tolstoy’s kids and I was aware of the dynamics between Tolstoy and his wife. We went to the Pushkin museum too. But it was impossible to get near the Kremlin with all the people following us.
Marilyn and I had fun during the day and then she went home and the fun really began. You could get anything you wanted in Moscow. The city is like New York on steroids. One night I visited some Russian big shot who had a huge mansion. In one area of his house he had a massive steam room with wooden couches and towels. Next to the steam room was a room filled with nothing but women, at least fourteen of them. So you’d pick out a girl and take her into the steam room. And there was a phone in the room so if you wanted a different girl, you just called out and they’d send that girl in.
I met the real Russian mob through my interest in pigeons. After a few days, I wanted to see some Russian pigeons, so I asked my guide who the biggest pigeon fanciers in Moscow were. She took me to a Russian Mafia guy who lived on the outskirts of Moscow and who had the most deluxe home I’d ever seen. His pigeon coop alone was the size of my whole house in Vegas. He owned property as far as your eye could see.
I had the best time, though, with this Kazakhstani Muslim businessman I met one night. I was with a Serbian friend when we met this guy. I thought he was just in town from Kazakhstan for business. He was acting like a normal guy with some money, being generous and picking up our tabs. We went to a mosque and said our prayers together and then we smoked some weed and he said, “I have a dance club for girls in town. Do you want to go there?”
He led us into the club and we went to a private area and he pulled a screen down and, boom, there were twenty beautiful young Russian girls. The oldest was probably twenty. They started dancing for us and he said, “Which one do you want?”
I didn’t want to pick anyone because I might pick someone who didn’t like me and they’d still have to come. I was still insecure about all the women who’d protest me when I fought in their country.
“Listen, brother, just ask who wants to come home with me and that will be fine. Any one of them will do.” My criteria at that moment was only that they were breathing.
He laughed.
“All right, who wants to go home with Mike?”
I heard screams echoing all over the place.
“Yeah, me, me, me!”
They all wanted to go back to my hotel with me.
“Now you have to pick because they’ll all go with you,” he said.
“Okay, how about her, she’s pretty hot. And the brunette one with the short hair is nice too. And I liked that blonde when I first came in. And what about that girl on the end in the second row?”
“Mike, you can’t take four girls. What are you going to do with four girls?” he said.
“I have to have them all, brother, or else I’ll be thinking about the ones that I didn’t have.”
So I went back to the hotel with four girls. We were getting high on coke and liquor. We were having fun and one of the girls called her mother.
“Ma, I’m here with Mike Tyson!”
She was so excited. She told me her mother was really hot too. But four was enough.
Call girls in the States were a completely different breed than these Russian girls. The girls in the States didn’t care to do anything but satisfy you sexually. That was their sole purpose. But these Russian girls all spoke four different languages. I called a friend in Belgium and one of them got on the phone and interpreted for the operator. Then I called Portugal and she was speaking fluently to them. We called Slovakia and she had the language down to a tee.
I was thinking, How do I get these girls back to the States? They could run a Fortune 500 company. They all had university degrees. I’m a smooth guy with the words I learned from the dictionary but I was being intellectually dwarfed like a motherfucker by these call girls. Oooh, how I wished I could have taken them home with me. Fuck that bankruptcy shit, I would have been out of Chapter 11 in a minute with these hos.
I only had them that one night. I was a pig back then so the next night it was onto other conquests. Those were great girls but it was time to go on to the next chapter of this story in Moscow.
We partied all night and then I was up bright and early to go to a museum with Marilyn. She knew what time it was. I didn’t have to tell Marilyn anything. She took one look at me and said, “So when are we going to work on recovery?”
One day we were in Red Square having brunch and the guy who owned the whole mall came up to us. He was a Jewish guy and he told me that he also made all the clothing for the Russian Olympic teams.
“Tonight we are having a special invitation-only event to debut the new 2006 Winter Olympics Russian uniforms. Every sports official in Russia will be there. Would you like to be our honored guest?”
Usually I charged big bucks for an appearance but meeting all these wonderful athletes was very exciting for me. I told him I’d be happy to attend, and then, in gratitude, he took me all around the mall to the finest Italian clothing stores, and he gave me all this incredible clothing.
That night we had dinner with him and he invited Viacheslav “Slava” Fetisov, the ex-hockey player who was the head of all sports in Russia then. They hadn’t announced that I would be there, so when the event started and I was introduced and walked in, those athletes almost tore that building down. They had created a big podium to look like the Olympic torch, and they sat Marilyn and me up there, and she was blinded by all the flashbulbs from the press. When the event was over, all these athletes rushed us to get my autograph and I had some big security guys watch over Marilyn. She would have been trampled in that crush.
One day Jeff, Marilyn, and I were eating lunch at the New York Café, a downtown Moscow restaurant where all the players hung out. We were sitting there and we saw a Chechen politician who had been partying with us in Saint-Tropez. He was one of the senators from Chechnya in the Russian Parliament. In Saint-Tropez and Sardinia he was so humble and nice and respectful. He looked and acted like a true diplomat. So I started to say, “Hey, brother,” but here in Moscow he wasn’t the nice guy that he appeared to be back in Saint-Tropez.
“Mike, he’s not as friendly as he was on the boa
t. What the fuck?” Jeff said.
This was not looking good for me. When we were hanging out on the boat, these Chechen guys pretty much kept me flush. I’d say, “I’m your Muslim brother. Please give me some money, I’m doing bad here.” They had so much money they’d tip people enormous amounts. Well, I needed some money now. The deal with the Ukrainian vodka people had run its course and they were going to stop paying for my big hotel suite.
But things started looking up a bit when the senator came over to our table and sat down.
“I have someone with me that really, really wants to meet Mike,” he told us. “This is a very special person.”
I said “Sure” and we got up and left our food on the table and followed the senator to a private dining room to one side of the restaurant. There was a table set up in there and we all sat down. A few seconds later, the door opened and Ramzan Kadyrov, the Chechen leader, walked in. Now, I knew all about the Chechen wars from a few years before. Ramzan’s father, Akhmad, was one of the most powerful warlords in Chechnya and one of the leaders of the independence movement to secede from Russia. It was a bloody, bloody struggle and the Russians made Akhmad president of Chechnya, hoping that would quell the rebellion. He was assassinated a year later and they made his son, Ramzan, the new leader. Ramzan was a big boxing fan and he wanted to meet me more than anything.
Ramzan sat down directly across the table from me. He was about twenty-eight years old but he looked much younger. After talking a bit, he pleaded with me to visit Chechnya. Now, the first thing that Americans were told when they entered Russia was “DO NOT GO TO CHECHNYA.” Back in 2005 it was still a very violent and dangerous place to be.
While I was thinking about this, a young, tall, husky guy walked into the room. He looked like he pumped some serious iron. He was wearing a black leather jacket and he pulled the jacket open and revealed two large automatic handguns stuck in a huge ammunition belt around his waist. He was just one of Ramzan’s bodyguards.
“Do you think anybody back in Arizona would believe any of this?” I whispered to Marilyn.
Ramzan kept pitching for me to come to his country, and we set up a lunch the following day at the Hyatt, my last day at the hotel. When I told them about my hotel situation, they offered to move me to the Rossiya, a huge non-touristy Russian hotel that was right near Red Square. The owner was a friend of Ramzan’s. There must have been ten thousand rooms in this hotel. When Marilyn picked me up in the morning, it took her half an hour to get from the lobby to my room.
The third morning I was staying at the hotel, Marilyn came to get me but I wasn’t there. She waited in the lobby for an hour and then she went home and frantically called Darryl, my assistant, back in Vegas and told him that she had lost me. He had no idea where I was. Later that night one of her friends called her.
“I just saw Mike on TV. He’s in Chechnya.”
I had left with Ramzan and his entourage that morning. I couldn’t turn down all that money. Chechnya was an amazing place. As soon as I got there, they gave me a machine gun. I was nervous as hell. I didn’t particularly want to shoot no goddamn gun but, hey, when in Rome do as the Romans do. Chechnya was predominately Muslim so they gave me a kufi to wear and they called me by my Muslim name, Malik Abdul Aziz, which meant “King and Servant of the Almighty” in Arabic. I only like to be called Abdul. If you don’t call me Abdul then just call me Mike. I was being hailed to the whole country as a Muslim hero. Muslim hero, my ass – I was a raging cokehead.
It really was a primitive culture in Chechnya. Half of the country had been burnt down during the wars with Russia. There were hardly any stores where I was. Nothing but land, no buildings. Marilyn later told me that she was worried for my safety because some of the rebels were opposed to Ramzan’s regime, but if anybody would have looked at me the wrong way while I was there those bodyguards would have taken their eyes out.
I made an appearance at their big soccer stadium. Their idea of excitement was to watch somebody do wheelies on a motorbike, Evel Knievel style. That was their culture. Look, if they’re going to take me to watch something, I’m going to say, “This is magnificent.” One thing I learned from that trip was to let people be in charge. I didn’t want to be confrontational.
My main job there was to open a four-day national boxing tournament that was being held in the memory of Ramzan’s dad.
“I am glad that I am in the Chechen Republic that I have read and heard so much about,” I told the crowd. “And I’m glad that I am among Muslims. We have seen on television an unfair war being waged in the Chechen Republic for a long time. We in America prayed for it to end.”
I went back to Moscow late that night. I didn’t get a chance to meet any Chechen girls. This visit was all about spirituality, all about Allah and Islam.
Back in Moscow, I spent some more quality time with Marilyn. My purpose of going to Russia was to see her and get some therapy. And if I ever needed some help from the courts, I could tell them that I had put in time with Marilyn in Russia, so it was a good political move for me too.
One night Marilyn set up a dinner at a Georgian restaurant and I met some very prominent business leaders. The next day, I told Marilyn that I didn’t want to meet any more big people. I wanted to hang out with some of her personal friends. So Marilyn invited me to lunch at her apartment. I was shocked when I saw the building she lived in. It reminded me of the tenement buildings I’d lived in as a kid. It even had the same stench of piss lingering in the halls. “Marilyn, what are you doing here?” I asked her. But that’s where she wanted to be – with the people. After lunch, Marilyn invited over about seven of her close Russian friends. They were all psychologists and pastors, all professional people.
We sat around in a circle in Marilyn’s living room and these people began to share their stories with me. Most of them had come from alcoholic homes. I knew just from living with Cus and Camille that Communism had some kind of ill backlash. So when they all started sharing I didn’t want them to feel uncomfortable because I was there. They might think that I had it going on because I was famous and known around the world. They must have assumed that I had nothing in common with them until I started telling my story. That’s what we all had in common, our stories. I was used to sharing like this just from being in all the institutions and group homes over the years. So I laid it all out for them. I told them about the violence in my childhood and the issues with my mother and being scared and bullied all the time. And they all felt more at ease.
There was a woman sitting next to me whose father had been a Russian military officer. Their home had been blown up by terrorists when she was a baby and her father died trying to save her life. She had been severely burnt in the attack and now her hands were just stubs and she had scars all over her body. She was now the head of the counseling psychology department for Moscow State University of Psychology and Education.
“Here I am, a psychologist, but nobody has ever been able to help me deal with my pain, all the psychological pain, the loss of my dad. I feel like I’ve waited my whole lifetime for Marilyn to come and to help me and know how to deal with this pain,” she said.
She started crying as she talked and I slipped out of my seat and sat down on the floor at her feet and held what was left of her hand as she talked. When she finished, I stayed sitting on the floor.
All of us in the room really bonded. What was supposed to have been a two-hour session ended up running for six hours. When we were leaving, one of the people came up to me.
“We think you should either be a politician or a preacher,” she said. “You could run for president of Russia and win.”
But I knew that Russia was no place for me. In Russian they don’t even have a word for “balance.” There’s no balance in Russia, only extremes. That’s why I fit in so good there. That place was just too perfect for me and my demons. I loved being in Russia. I could do anything I wanted with impunity.
Jeff went back to the States and I went
on to Portugal. I called my friend Mario to come meet me there the next day because he’s Portuguese, but he couldn’t just drop everything and come. I checked into a resort and I scored some coke and began doing it. I had been up for days without sleeping before that and the combination of that and the amount of coke I had done was enough to make me pass out. The lady I was with didn’t think I was still breathing so she called for the hotel physician. By the time he arrived I was fine. He wanted me to go to the hospital to be checked out but I passed.
I didn’t like where I was staying in Portugal very much. It was too stuffy for me. Everyone was too serious. The men all dressed up in suits. Everyone in the whole country was a workaholic. There was nobody to play with there. I got bored the second day and went to Amsterdam. Now, the Dutch knew how to party. I flew in a girl that I had met in Romania. She was a wonderful girl but she got nervous when I started doing a ton of cocaine and invited prostitutes up to our room. She told me she wasn’t into drugs and went home. But I continued my orgies and partying. Two weeks later I couldn’t take it anymore and I had Darryl come and get me. Even after he got there I partied for two more weeks before he could convince me to go home.
I flew back to Vegas and then I immediately left for L.A. I stayed there for a day and then I flew by myself to New York. I checked into the St. Regis hotel. It was my favorite hotel because they kept your butler on call by your door. I put down my suitcases and immediately got high on coke. Now I wanted to go out and party, so I opened one of my suitcases and I saw that my clothes were wrinkled. I panicked. My head started hurting, my heart started racing, and I freaked out. I was high as a kite when I called my butler.
“I NEED SOMEBODY UP HERE TO IRON MY PANTS, NOW!!! NOW, NOW!!”
The people on the phone were laughing because I was in a state of panic over my pants. I left the hotel and started walking while my pants were getting pressed. I wanted to eat something but the coke had killed my appetite so I figured that walking would wear down my high. I walked around Fifth Avenue, I walked over to Times Square, and then I walked back to the hotel.
