by Mike Tyson
Nobody had told me that Jim was seriously ill, so when I got a phone call in my limo from Robin a few days after getting back to New York, it threw me for a loop.
“Michael, Jimmy is dead,” she said.
I was messed up. I had known Jimmy for a long time. I had felt that Cus had entrusted me to Jimmy, who was very close to Cus. If Cus was like a father to me, Jimmy was like a brother. So you can imagine how my grief was compounded when I found out that Jimmy had been suffering from chronic lymphocytic leukemia for over nine years and had hidden his condition from me. What’s worse, everyone had lied to me and told me that Jimmy wasn’t that sick. Maybe that was why Bill was so insistent on giving me a police escort to sign the contract before I left to fight Tubbs.
I flew to L.A. the next day for Jim’s funeral. With Jim gone the vultures were circling around for the fresh meat: me. Don King was there and he and I wound up being two of the pallbearers for Jim’s coffin. I was surprised that Bill chose Don because Bill was trying to cut Don out of promoting my fights. I bet that Don hustled Bill and told him that he’d help him handle me. I wasn’t exactly close to Cayton. During the funeral ceremony, Don and José Torres were in the back of the chapel, probably doing business. I’m sure that José was angling to get in on managing me. He was going to be out of work soon after that.
While I was attending the funeral, Robin and her mother were making a scene at the Merrill Lynch office in New York that handled my finances. Bert Sugar, the great boxing writer, happened to be in the office at the time and saw Robin and her mother screaming at the Lynch people.
“Give me my money,” they demanded. When my account executive refused, Robin called him a “motherfucker.” They wanted to withdraw five million cash to buy us a mansion in New Jersey that Robin’s mother had picked out. Before I flew to L.A., Ruth had me sign a paper giving Robin power of attorney over me so she could withdraw the money. The morning of the funeral, Robin called me from the Lynch offices and put the executive on the phone. He explained that my money was in short-term investments, triple tax free, that were coming due on April fourteenth. The interest from those would have paid most of my 1988 tax bill, so that’s why he didn’t want to pull the money out. I listened and then told him to give them the money. I was in love. I was El Smucko.
Ruth had found us a nice house. It was in Bernardsville, New Jersey, thirty miles west of New York, but in traffic it felt more like three hundred miles from the city. It was a sprawling stone house that had once belonged to the undersecretary of state for FDR. I worked with a Spanish lady to decorate it and we picked out really high-end opulent furniture. Each room had a different theme to it—one was Mediterranean, one was Victorian. I didn’t know it at the time, but Ruth was going around suggesting to my friends that if they wanted to get us a wedding present, we needed furniture. Now do you see what kind of hustlers we were dealing with here?
I didn’t spend much time in that house. When Robin was working, we’d go to L.A. to her place there. But every once in a while, we’d plan a party. Ruth and Robin hated my friends from Brownsville. They were such wannabes they didn’t want to stoop to hanging out with people from the hood. Robin even once hired Porta Potties for a party we had because she didn’t want my friends to go inside the house to piss.
The same day that they stormed the Merrill Lynch offices, they served notice on Cayton’s office, demanding to see all their financial records concerning me. Once we got married it was like a switch went off. Robin became more demanding. Nothing could please her. She and her mother wanted more and more control over me. I just got tired of that and started fucking more and more other girls.
One day Robin and Ruth and I were in downtown Manhattan at a soul food restaurant and Robin put her hands in my pocket to get money for the bill and she came up with some condoms. Robin got really mad but Ruth didn’t seem that disturbed. “No, Robin, it’s okay, these things happen early in the marriage,” she said. I guess she didn’t want to upset the Golden Goose. So we left and Robin was still mad and she got behind the wheel and started driving down Varick Street to go back to New Jersey through the Holland Tunnel. She never drove well to begin with, but she was so angry that she rammed the Bentley into the car in front of us.
The driver of that car came out and yelled at us that his hand was messed up so I gave him twenty thousand dollars in cash. He ran, and I mean ran, straight to the off-track betting office a block away. Then two Port Authority cops came onto the scene. I didn’t want to get Robin in trouble so I took the rap and told them that I was driving the car. I was so in love with her at the time. One of the cops seemed really happy to see me. I could see the larceny in his eyes. He was giving me too many compliments on how beautiful my car was, so my brain started moving and I knew then that he would probably take a bribe. So I offered him the car if he wouldn’t report the accident.
“I can’t do that,” he said.
“Yes, you can,” I said. “You work too hard. You put your life on the line every day. You deserve it.”
“What am I going to do with a Bentley?” he said.
“Sell the parts,” I suggested.
“Man, don’t tell me that,” he said, as if he was already contemplating that.
By this time Robin and her mother had already fled from the scene in a cab. As the cop was considering my offer, a second man came on the scene, claiming that his hand was broken in the accident. The cop immediately jumped on him.
“I’m not gonna tell you no more. Get the fuck out of here!” he told the guy.
So I left the car there and took a cab over to Cayton’s office. I called the cops. “They fucking took my Bentley. Get my fucking car back!” We got it back that day.
After a few months with Robin and her mother, I was going crazy. I called Gene Kilroy, Ali’s right-hand man.
“The women are driving me crazy. They’re treating me like I’m a slave. The mother talks to me like I’m her husband,” I moaned.
It wasn’t just Robin and her mother. Everybody was vying to get control over me with Jimmy out of the picture. The women had a meeting with me and Bill and their attorney, Michael Winston. They got all the financial records but they couldn’t understand any of it so we showed the records to Don King. That was just the wedge he needed, and he began poisoning Robin and Ruth’s mind about Cayton because Cayton was trying to cut Don out of my future promotions.
The truth is I was pretty oblivious to all this intrigue swirling around me. I had one of the biggest fights of my career in June, a showdown with Michael Spinks, who in some people’s minds was the people’s heavyweight champ. He had to forfeit his IBC belt when he had pulled out of the unification tournament. I was training for that. I wasn’t interested in going over any goddamn contracts line by line. El Smucko.
We all went down to the Merrill Lynch offices and moved ten million dollars to another bank so they could have full check-writing privileges with that money. This was after I spent over a half million dollars on jewelry, clothes, and furs for both of them and $85,000 on a BMW for Robin.
Right before I was about to shoot a Diet Pepsi commercial, Ruth stopped the cameras and did some extortion stuff on Cayton. He agreed to drop his cut of the earnings from one-third to 25 percent. Which was actually a good thing. Most managers got just 10 or 15 percent and he was gouging me for one-third of my commercial work.
By the end of May, Ruth had her attack dog Winston file a civil suit to get rid of Cayton as my manager. I wasn’t really against that. After they had all lied to me about Jimmy’s condition, I couldn’t trust those guys. I really felt I needed a fresh start. The idea that they could just hand me off like chattel from Jimmy to Bill made me sick. I didn’t know which way was up. I still was conflicted about fighting. When I had a fight, I thought about retiring. But when I didn’t fight, I wanted to fight. My head was so far up my ass.
Robin claimed that she had had a misc
arriage. She was supposedly three months pregnant when we got married. Now it was June and she hadn’t gained a pound, so the next thing I knew she was in bed and she claimed she had miscarried our baby. Now I’m glad that we didn’t have a kid together but back then part of me wanted a child. She didn’t want my baby anyway. She would have died if she had a nappy-head black baby like me.
All this pressure was getting to me. I had a press session with some boxing reporters and I started losing it.
“You ruin people’s lives; I’m a sucker to even be talking to you guys. I should be ready to rip your heads off. My wife, my mother-in-law, they’re being cut to pieces. When I’m in that ring, I don’t have no more problems. It’s easy to forget problems when people are throwing punches at your head. The people in the fight business are so bad. I thought people where I came from were criminals, but these guys are bigger crooks than the guys in my neighborhood could ever be. They’re not out for my best interests, they tell me they are, but they’re not. They say ‘I did this for you and that for you’ but it’s not true. Whatever they did, they did for themselves. Whatever I get, they get a bigger percentage of it.”
Around that time I called up Shelly Finkel, one of the few human beings in the boxing business.
“Shelly, I feel like I’m going to kill either Robin or Cayton.”
Shelly immediately called Cayton and told him to talk to me and Robin, but Cayton told Shelly that I should come to him. He couldn’t even be a friend to me when I needed him.
Robin and her mother had me set up from the beginning. They had me down, but they just couldn’t hang in and stay married long enough. I was probably just too overbearing for them. They were probably thinking, If we just stay a little bit longer, we’ll get the money, but God, this guy’s too fucking crazy.
So that’s when they started to implement Plan B.
On June thirteenth, two weeks before my big fight with Spinks, Wally Matthews from Newsday got a call from an Olga. Olga was Ruth’s assistant, her slave girl, but she claimed to be a vice president at Ruth’s alleged company. Well, she had an office, let’s put it that way. An office paid for by the major investor in her company. Dave Winfield. She got that money before she sued him for allegedly giving her herpes. Olga told Matthews that Ruth and Robin were getting crucified in the press and she wanted to set the record straight. I physically abused both Ruth and Robin, Olga claimed. But she said it wasn’t my fault. I just wasn’t socialized.
Now, being a good reporter, Wally told her that he needed someone to go on the record. Olga said she’d get back to him. The next day she said Ruth and Robin wouldn’t go on the record but that it was all right with them to print it. Wally said that wasn’t good enough, he needed someone to quote. That night Olga called back and gave him Robin’s sister’s number in Portugal where she was attending a tennis tournament. He called Stephanie and she confirmed everything. She said I showed up to Robin’s sitcom set in L.A. drunk, that I broke lights and cursed and hit Robin in the head with a closed fist. “He knows how to hit her, and where to hit her, without causing any real damage.” Yeah, like I’m some kung fu master. But Stephanie added that it wasn’t my fault because I JUST WASN’T SOCIALIZED.
Now Wally felt like he was being played. It was like Olga and Stephanie had been reading from the same script. So Ruthless invited him to her “office.” Wally went there and it was all dark and spooky like a witches’ coven. Even the walls were dark. Winston, their attorney/lapdog, was there and he told Wally that he couldn’t use his tape recorder. But my man was a sly, slick dog. Wally reached into his pocket and turned on his hidden tape recorder. Ruth said that she was going public with all this because of Cayton. She wanted to make me understand the business end of things so that Robin and our children and I would be well provided for.
“Truly I’ve grown to love Mike,” she told Wally. “Clearly he loves Robin and he loves me.”
But Cayton had poisoned the press against her, and she had received death threats and obscene phone calls, she claimed. She went on for an hour. And then, surprise, surprise, Robin showed up at the office/coven.
“Oh, Mom, I didn’t know you had company,” she gushed. “I didn’t know the press was here!”
Within seconds Robin was crying. Yes, she sobbed, Mike had hit her.
“So that is true?” Wally asked.
“You can’t quote me, it must be off the record,” Robin said.
But then she said, “Mike has changed tremendously in the year and five months I’ve known him. I really feel Michael has NOT BEEN SOCIALIZED. He’s only twenty-one and he’s a young twenty-one.”
The next day, Wally called me in A.C., where I was training, to get my reaction to my wife and mother-in-law’s story. He left a message and I called him back.
“What’s the problem? What’s so urgent? Am I in trouble?”
I listened as Wally told me of the charges that I physically abused Ruth and Robin. Of course I denied all that bullshit. But then he asked me how I felt about my family’s revelations.
“I feel great. You opened my eyes to a lot of things here. You can’t say bad things about a person, call them an asshole, and then say you love them. What they’re saying basically is that I’m useless. I can’t understand it. Maybe I’m not the man for them. You know what I mean? Maybe I’m not man enough for them. I’ll get by somehow. I always find a way to get by.”
Robin also went on a local New York station’s five o’clock news show and claimed that she found that twenty million dollars was missing from my accounts. She also claimed that private detectives were following her mother and that Cayton had offered Father Clements fifty grand to help us get a divorce. And then, incredibly, she said, “Michael has orchestrated everything.”
What the fuck did I do? These were dirty, filthy scoundrels. Besides being after my money, I think these people were so into themselves and wanted to be bigger than they were. They wanted to be the face of the product, the face of me.
Wally’s article was due to hit stands in the Sunday paper, so on Saturday the two women came down to my training camp. They didn’t want me to read the story before they could prep me. They just claimed that they were misquoted. And El Smucko believed them.
“Bill will be dead and gone in ten years, but I’ll still be with my wife,” I told the press. “He’s trying to embarrass us, he’s trying to make it look like I can’t control my wife and that they’re gold diggers.” Robin was there and she got her two cents in. “They’re trying to destroy us; they want to say who I slept with, instead of asking about Mike’s business. This is the day we decided about Cayton.”
“He’s a snake, a ruthless guy,” I said.
“Bill is finished,” Robin vowed.
Meanwhile, Ruthless was quoted in another article. “I’m his surrogate mother, not his manager. I’m the glue that holds my family together. If I fall apart, we all do.”
These were some delusional hos. Meanwhile, Don was lurking behind the scenes, waiting for the women to do the heavy lifting of getting rid of Cayton so he could swoop in. He actually told me that the women would overplay their hand. While all this was going on, José Torres was still trying to worm his way into the picture and manage me. I truly was the Golden Goose. Michael Fuchs from HBO called me “a cash register in short pants.” I squelched the idea of José managing me in the New York Post, so he went out and got a book deal with Time Warner with a $350,000 advance, which was big bucks then. Four years earlier José had promised Cus that he would write a book on how I had been molded into a champ. José was supposed to share the money from the book with Camille, but now he was selling the book to the publisher as an authorized biography of me.
So this was the shit I was dealing with going into the Spinks fight. A day before the fight I was asked about the circus going on around me.
“I hate them all; writers, promoters, managers, closed-circuit, e
verybody. They don’t give a fuck about me, they don’t give a fuck about my wife, they don’t give a fuck about my trainer, my mother-in-law, my stepmother, my stepbrother, my pigeons. Nothing concerns them but the dollar, so I don’t want to hear anything. We’re friends, that’s bullshit, I don’t want no friends, there’s no such thing as personal friendships. I can go in the street and fight, I don’t need anybody to manage me. It’s too late for that stage, I’m too mature. All I need is a trainer. I’ll go in the street and make a million dollars in a street fight.”
God, I was lost. I talked about moving to Monaco, anyplace that was far away where I could go and be welcome. I did an interview with Jerry Izenberg, a veteran reporter from the Newark Star-Ledger. He saw how much distress I was in. He asked me what I thought about when I did my morning runs.
“I think about Cus and some of the things he told me and how right he was about some things. And how he’s not here anymore to help me. And then I think about certain things and it occurs to me how much more fun it used to be. It wasn’t about money then so much. We were all like a family. We were together but then suddenly he died and everything became money, money and I don’t have anyone to talk to.”
And then I grabbed Izenberg and buried my head in his chest and started crying hysterically. I cried so much that Jerry had to go to his room and change his shirt.
But all these distractions made me more focused in the ring, where I could escape this bullshit. I was knocking out guys right and left during sparring. Right before the fight I was back to my usual self. I told the reporter for the Boston Globe that “I’ll break Spinks. I’ll break them all. When I fight someone, I want to break his will. I want to take his manhood. I want to rip out his heart and show it to him. People say that’s primitive, that I’m an animal. But then they pay five hundred dollars to see it. I’m a warrior. If I wasn’t into boxing, I’d be breaking the law. That’s my nature.”
