The Life and Crimes of Don King: The Shame of Boxing in America

by Jack Newfield

  Breland dropped what he was doing and went to pick Tyson up on Columbus Avenue and hugged his old friend. As they talked, Breland suggested they go immediately to Bill Cayton’s office on East Fortieth Street and attempt a reconciliation.

  “Go back to the people who got you here, your old boxing family,” Breland advised. “I don’t know Cayton that well, but I do know that King has cheated all the heavyweights he has had.”

  “I’m embarrassed. I’ve said too many bad things about Cayton,” Tyson replied.

  “Just forget the past and look to the future,” Breland rebutted.

  Tyson agreed and Breland called Cayton to say he was bringing the estranged champion to his office in the next half hour. Breland chauffeured Tyson to Cayton’s office in his Mercedes 380. They walked through the door at 11:00 A.M.

  The first person Tyson saw was assistant trainer Steve Lott, in whose apartment he had often slept when he was fourteen and fifteen, and who was in his corner in every fight. They hugged and Lott started to cry for joy.

  Tyson then walked up a flight of stairs to Cayton’s office and the two men embraced a little stiffly.

  “I’m glad to be back,” Tyson said. “Sorry ’bout the things I said. I wanna work with you.”

  Cayton told Tyson the first thing he wanted to do was remove the “manic-depressive stigma that has been attached to you” by the Barbara Walters TV show.

  Cayton asked Tyson to come back the next day, Tuesday, October 4, and be examined by a psychiatrist, Dr. Abraham Halpern of the United Hospital Medical Center of Port Chester, New York. Tyson agreed and left, although there was some apprehension in the room that he would not return the next day. In advance of the session with Tyson, Dr. Halpern called some of Tyson’s closest friends to solicit their perceptions, including Jose Torres, Tyson’s sister Denise, and Camille Ewald, his adoptive mother, who had lived with D’Amato in the Catskills for years.

  Tyson did show up on time the next day and was interviewed by Dr. Halpern for an hour in a room in Cayton’s duplex office, filled with twenty thousand boxing tapes, and old boxing photographs. After the examination, Dr. Halpern declared, “Mike is definitely not manic-depressive.”

  “I’ll call the press and make an official announcement” was Cayton’s first reaction. But Dr. Halpern first wanted to call Dr. McCurtis, who had made the formal diagnosis that had been publicized around the world.

  McCurtis occupied a little-known position in the psychiatric profession, while Halpern was widely respected. In their conversation, McCurtis quickly surrendered, claiming he never had really diagnosed Tyson, or even examined him. He said his information about Tyson had all been anecdotal from Givens and Roper. McCurtis told Halpern that he had actually thought Tyson was suffering from “atypical pugilistic disorder,” a condition Halpern had never heard of. McCurtis did admit that he had prescribed lithium for Tyson to take as the medication for this nonexistent condition.

  Halpern then told Tyson he was not a manic-depressive, that he should not be taking lithium, and that in his opinion, the best therapeutic treatment for his mood swings was to get back into “the discipline of regular training and frequent fights.”

  Tyson then went into Cayton’s office and Cayton sketched a schedule of six fights for Tyson that would earn him more than $50 million. The schedule was international, and included fights in England, Brazil, and Italy. None of them would be promoted by Don King.

  Tyson seemed receptive, and then he and Breland left Cayton’s office and encountered dozens of reporters and camera crews outside on the sidewalk.

  “I’m coming back,” Tyson said. “I’m happy when I’m in the gym. I’m going back to the way I was before, but better.”

  He then drove off with Breland. He told Breland he would fly to Detroit and be in his corner on Friday to see his old buddy from Door-Die Bed-Stuy fight. It was the least Tyson could do for his friend, who had interrupted his own training to spent these two eventful days with Tyson.

  But Tyson never went to Detroit. Two days later, on Thursday, October 6, he was with Don King.

  King later testified at a court hearing that Tyson called him on his own initiative and asked if he could come directly to his house for help. But both friends of Tyson, and former employees of King, say that King paid several people to find Tyson and bring him to his home. These sources say that Tyson was located at a rap concert and was driven to see King for a late-night meeting. King certainly had read the newspaper accounts of the King–Cayton reunion, which all the tabloids ran in the front of the paper, not back in the sports pages.

  Once Tyson was in his clutches, King was smart and decisive as usual. He took command and made all the right moves to protect Tyson’s interests. King didn’t bring in a psychiatrist, or lay out a plan for future fights. He got into a limo with Tyson and drove around Manhattan to secure Tyson’s assets, before Givens could grab any of Tyson’s money. King’s activist reactions were street. He sensed Givens and Roper were small-time hustlers, and he was the best hustler in the world. He knew how they would think.

  On Thursday, October 6, King, with Tyson in tow, visited all of the fighter’s bank and brokerage accounts. All the accounts were switched into Tyson’s name. Givens could not make any more withdrawals. King also showed Tyson how to cancel all their joint credit cards and get new ones in his own name.

  King and Tyson also went to the offices of Mike Tyson Enterprises, which was really only a phone and a desk in Roper’s office in the Lincoln Building. The door was locked and Roper had the key, and she was already in Los Angeles with Robin.

  By dusk on Thursday, King had used his marvelous business skills to protect all of Tyson’s assets, which were about $35 million, including the $12.3 million that had been his net for the June fight with Spinks.

  It proved to be a brilliant move. As soon as she arrived in Los Angeles on October 3, Givens had written a check to Robin Givens Productions for $581,812.60. It was check number 1312 from the checkbook of Mike Tyson Enterprises, which was Mike Tyson’s money. In her own hand, Givens had written on the check, “Reimbursement for expenses.”

  But the check bounced, thanks to King’s changing all of Tyson’s joint accounts to his own name. King had frozen the Mike Tyson Enterprises account. When rumors about the $581,000 check began to circulate among reporters, who were now in a feeding frenzy over the impending divorce, Givens claimed, “The check was never written.”

  That’s when King leaked a copy of the check to New York Post boxing writer Mike Marley. The Post published a blown-up copy of the check across five columns, at the top of page 3.

  After Givens filed for divorce in Los Angeles on October, King hired one of the best lawyers in the country to represent Tyson, Howard Weitzman of Los Angeles. It was another adroit move that only King had the national contacts and experience to make.

  For the next six weeks King hardly let Tyson out of his sight. Tyson moved into King’s mansion in Orwell, Ohio. King took Tyson with him to the WBC convention in Venezuela and the WBC convention in Mexico City. The fifty-seven-year-old King accompanied the twenty-four-year-old Tyson to discos and rap concerts. On those rare occasions when King couldn’t be with Tyson, Tyson’s two friends John Home and Rory Holloway went with him. Since both of them were on King’s payroll, they served as baby-sitters and spies for King.

  King cut Tyson off from his old friends. Torres, Rooney, Lott, Breland, Brian Hamill, and others couldn’t get through to Tyson. It was as if Tyson had been kidnapped into a cult and was being brainwashed. When he emerged into public view, he was spouting ideas and phrases King had used in the past. He even accused Cayton of stealing from him.

  While staying in King’s home, the promoter gave Tyson a book to read called Countering the Conspiracy to Destroy Black Boys. King had two dozen copies of the book in his library and had given out copies to other fighters and associates. The book is filled with anti-white conspiracy theories.

  When Tyson seemed bored, King suppl
ied him with prostitutes from Cleveland. They were high-class, and sometimes John Home picked them up in Cleveland and drove them back when Tyson was finished with them.

  When they were alone, King talked his philosophy to Tyson, the way Cus had. King’s philosophy was the brotherhood of black outlaws, two survivors of the ghetto and jail, at the top of the world. They had to trust each other because the white world was out to destroy them, especially the media.

  Tyson loved rap and hip-hop music, especially Public Enemy, and King kept telling Tyson the two of them were the two biggest public enemies in America. King, the great salesman, gave Tyson a heroic outlaw self-image that made Tyson feel part of history and destiny.

  In November, Tyson took time out from his debauchery to be baptized in the Holy Trinity Baptist Church in Cleveland, with King on the pulpit and TV news crews present to record the religious ritual. For a few weeks afterward Tyson was saying he was “born again.”

  The ironic truth is that Tyson may have been inadvertently programmed for brainwashing by his savior, Cus D’Amato. Although a great trainer and original thinker, D’Amato expected all his fighters to think like him, and he subjected them to long orations about fear, will, loyalty, and character.

  Tyson sounded like Cus before Cus died. Tyson, needing love and seeking a strong father figure, was susceptible to this kind of influence.

  I first met Tyson when he was fourteen years old, when Jose Torres took me to see him work out in Catskill. You didn’t have to be an expert to see he was a natural prodigy with extraordinary punching power and hand speed. For me it was like the first time I ever saw Willie Mays play the outfield, or Bob Dylan sing in a folk club. It was like watching the new standard at creation.

  In December 1985, after D’Amato’s funeral, I wrote a long profile of Tyson for the Village Voice that was called “Cus’ Unfinished Masterpiece.” Tyson was then nineteen and I spent a fair amount of time with him.

  Between 1986 and 1988 I saw him sporadically and watched him try on different personalities. I heard him say things he thought others wanted to hear. I saw both his guile and his lack of a strong core identity. I saw that he could be manipulated by someone who knew how to penetrate his wall of defenses and booby traps.

  Tyson was smarter than most people gave him credit for, but he was not as smart as he thought he was. He could be conned by a powerful personality. He was ripe for Don King.

  In October, Don King had rescued Tyson from a bad situation by saving and freezing his assets, just as Cus had rescued him from a bad situation when he took Tyson into his home when he was paroled from juvenile jail. King would give him a whole new worldview, just as Cus did.

  What’s amazing is that Tyson was willing to buy into an anti-white worldview, since all his own life experiences with whites in boxing had been positive—Bobby Stewart, Cus D’Amato, Camille Ewald, Teddy Atlas, Jim Jacobs, Steve Lott, and Kevin Rooney had all befriended him. None of them had betrayed him except Cus and Jimmy by the act of dying.

  But as soon as Tyson moved into King’s home, he started sounding like a King echo, not like himself. In mid-October Tyson let a reporter from the Chicago Sun-Times interview him at King’s Ohio house. Tyson told him that Givens and Roper “don’t like black people.” Tyson went on to say, “They want to be white so bad. The way they talk about black people, you’d think you were living with the Ku Klux Klan. She and her mother want so much to be white, it’s a shame. And they were trying to take me away from the people I grew up with and throw me into their kind of high-class world.”

  Tyson couldn’t see that his words—spoken in a high-class mansion with a swimming pool, a sunken bar that could seat twenty people, a pool table, a beautiful skylight—could also apply to him, to King, and to his original friends, who fed him, sheltered him, taught him his craft, and made him a millionaire.

  On October 7, HBO’s Seth Abraham tried to make a truce between King and Cayton, so his cable subscription network could put on a Tyson–Frank Bruno fight. Cayton was still Tyson’s manager, with a contract valid till February 12, 1992. Tyson was living with King, and again angry with Cayton, but Cayton still had a legal right to approve Tyson’s opponents. King didn’t want the Bruno fight because he was not Bruno’s promoter. But he went to the meeting at the HBO office on Sixth Avenue to buy time and gain information.

  King apologized for calling Cayton “Satan,” and Cayton complimented King for protecting Tyson’s bank accounts.

  Afterward, he and King met privately in Cayton’s office. Cayton says King told him: “Of course I have poisoned Mike’s mind against you. But if you give me a four-year, exclusive promotional contract with Mike, I will unpoison his mind.”

  Cayton said he would think about it.

  The next day King called him and said Tyson had injured his right hand again, and that he would mail him X-ray photos to prove the injury was legitimate.

  But King had already invited his old love-hate partner, Richard Giachctti, to his home, to meet Tyson and become his new trainer, replacing Kevin Rooney.

  The short period of pretend truce ended on October 21, when Tyson signed a four-year exclusive contract with King. The terms of the contract were all favorable to King, and obliterated all distinctions between the roles of promoter and manager.

  King would pay Tyson $1 million per fight, plus $200,000 in training expenses, plus 66 1/2 percent of all “net receipts” after “out-ofpocket expenses” and all applicable taxes.

  With King’s gift of flexible accounting and manipulating the “net,” and inflating his own expenses, the contract was not in Tyson’s interests. As undisputed, undefeated heavyweight champion, he should not have a monopolistic contract with any single promoter but should make all promoters bid competitively for his services.

  Seth Abraham asked for one last meeting to negotiate a truce and avoid protracted litigation, and it was held in Las Vegas on October

  29. King and Cayton actually agreed to a compromise under which the Hilton Hotel would promote the Tyson–Bruno fight in Las Vegas, Cayton would select Tyson’s future opponents and remain Tyson’s manager till 1992, and King would be Tyson’s exclusive promoter for the four title defenses after Bruno. The deal included Cayton getting 20 percent as manager.

  But eight hours later, King told everyone that Tyson had vetoed the deal. Cayton was certain that was a ploy, and that it was King himself who killed the compromise. Seth Abraham believed King, since King would have made $10 million for minimal work under the proposed detente.

  A source at HBO says the truth is somewhere in the middle. He says that when Howard Weitzman explained the deal to Tyson, the fighter objected to one detail, and then King, still anxious to impress and please Tyson, overreacted, and started screaming how he had been pressured in the room to accept the deal when he didn’t really want to. Another source told author Montieth Illingworth, “Don was covering his ass. If Mike had just sat there and nodded, there would have been a truce.”

  Nevertheless, King had essentially won his hostile takeover of Mike Tyson. Cayton would get paid his 20 percent, but King was the promoter, and he had Tyson’s loyalty. Soon Rooney was fired and Giachetti was Tyson’s new trainer. King was in control of the heavyweight championship again, making more than $10 million a year off Tyson.

  In a coda to this part of the drama, Robin Givens called Bill Cayton on November 9.

  “I want to apologize for all the vicious things I said about you,” Robin said. “I’m really sorry. Now I know they aren’t true.”

  “So why did you say them?” Cayton asked.

  “Because King told me they were true,” Robin answered.

  Mega-fame is hard to handle. It has killed or damaged the biggest stars—Elvis, Marilyn Monroe, Scott Fitzgerald, Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin, Marl on Brando, Michael Jackson, Pete Rose, Jerry Lee Lewis, Doc Gooden, Charlie Parker, Kurt Cobain. Fame can be a mind-altering narcotic.

  So it is not fair to blame all of what happened to Mike Tyson on Do
n King. Tyson always had his internal demons, was always a time bomb. There were incidents with women, incidents of violence, when Cus and Jimmy were alive, incidents papered over with cash settlements. And once Tyson became champion at twenty, temptation and trouble came looking for him.

  But, on balance, the better angels of Tyson’s nature were nourished and reinforced by Tyson’s first boxing family. Bobby Stewart, the aide in Tryon Reformatory, told him he would teach him how to box only if he learned how to read. Teddy Atlas gave him discipline and a code of honor. Cus gave him love and technique. So did Kevin Rooney. Jacobs, Lott, and Cayton tried to give him humane values and a sense of personal responsibility.

  But once Tyson went with King in October 1988, almost all positive reinforcement vanished from his life. The more lawless and antisocial side of his nature went back into the ascendancy. He began to hang out with criminals and grifters. He began to work in the gym with the outlaw trainer Panama Lewis, who had gone to prison for removing the padding from the gloves of a fighter before a match.

  Tyson began to travel with bodyguards Anthony Pitts and Dale Edwards, who were paid $1,000 a week by King and kept Tyson’s old friends away from him. He also began to travel with Rudy Gonzales, who was paid to be a driver and gofer but also helped screen women for Tyson.

  And in this fast lane of mega-fame, Tyson became more and more aggressive with women—an interpersonal imperialist.

  Cus D’Amato’s philosophy was based on the mastering of emotionalism inside the ring. But Tyson never learned to discipline his emotions outside the ring.

  After aligning himself with King, Tyson slapped a parking-lot attendant in Los Angeles. He fathered at least two children with different women. He was arrested for drag racing in Albany with a friend who was later arrested for dealing cocaine. Police began to notice him hanging out with major drug traffickers. Erin Cosby, the daughter of comedian Bill Cosby, accused him of attempted rape. Two women (Sandra Miller and Lori Davis) sued Tyson for grabbing their buttocks in a Manhattan disco. The two incidents happened on the same night.