by Mike Tyson
The guy looked terrified. Just then EB and some of the club security guys barged into the bathroom and pulled me away from the guy. I was pretty drunk, so I bolted out of the club and jumped into my car. I had my long stretch limo with the hot tub in the back that night. I told the driver to drive me over to the south side. EB was frantic when he realized I was gone, so he called the limo driver’s car phone.
“Where are you?”
“We’re on Sixty-seventh and . . .” the driver said.
“What! I don’t even go over there,” EB worried.
“What do you want me to do?” the driver asked.
“Meet me back at the Ritz-Carlton,” EB said.
We headed back to the hotel. Little did I know, but about thirty cars were following my limo, all filled with women. They had been on our tail since I left the club. When I got out of the limo in front of the Ritz, EB was waiting for me. But first, I walked over to each of the cars that followed us, pulled out my roll of cash, and threw hundred-dollar bills on each car.
“What the hell are you doin’, Mike?” EB said.
“That’s all they want. Money,” I said.
I walked into the hotel, EB beside me.
“What are you doing here?” I said to him.
“I’m waiting on you,” EB answered.
“I don’t need nobody waiting on me. I came into this world by myself and I’m going to leave by myself,” I said.
“Well, I got to stay with you for the night, so you’ve just got to get mad at me,” EB said.
We got into the elevator to go up to the room.
By then, I was hungry, so we got off the elevator and went to the restaurant. This little white dude came up to us and said, “Sorry, Mr. Tyson, the restaurant is closed.”
I grabbed the guy around the neck, picked him up and said, “Feed me, don’t treat me like no nigga.”
Fifteen minutes later, we had an amazing spread before us. I ate all my food, then started in on EB’s too. Suddenly I broke down.
“Man, why’d she do me like that?”
I still hadn’t gotten over Robin.
“Man, take it easy,” EB said.
“That bitch. I loved her. She didn’t have to do me like that,” I moaned.
My mood was spiraling downward, so EB pulled out his phone and called Isaiah Thomas’s mother, Mary. She was a beautiful lady. Mary started consoling me and after a few minutes, I felt better.
It seemed that every time I went out, trouble was following in my wake. Sometimes it wasn’t even my fault. I once was in New York and picked up this Spanish girl. She was a transit cop in one of the city projects, but I knew that with a little sprucing up, she’d be stunning. So I got her a whole makeover and some nice new clothes and she was gorgeous. That night I invited her and a few of my female friends to the China Club, a hot club at that time, and we got a table. Just me and eight girls. I looked like a Mack. So naturally some guy was going to come over to the table to talk to the girls. I didn’t act like it was a big thing, I was cool. The guy wasn’t even talking to my girl, the cop, but the next thing I knew, she jumped up with both of her hands up. “Halt! Do not advance any further. These ladies do not want your attention,” she said to the guy.
I was looking at this, thinking, What the fuck is going on?
The guy was with a bunch of his friends and they were at the next table laughing at this lady. The next thing I knew, she went over to the guy laughing the loudest, grabbed him upright, and, ba-boom, kicked the guy in the head. She was in full-on combat mode.
You would have thought that the girls at the table would be happy she was defending them, but they were all afraid of her.
“You have to tell this bitch to get out of here, Mike,” one of my female friends said. “What if the press hears about this, Mike?”
“Baby, everybody is scared,” I told the cop. “You got to go.”
I couldn’t believe it. She smacked and kicked a big man and he and his friends had done nothing wrong. Oh, my God.
One of the reasons that I didn’t think I was going to live long was because I thought I was the baddest man in the world, both in the arena and out on the streets. When you add the alcohol to that giant ego, anything could happen. It felt like I was always on a mission, but what was I looking for, what was the problem? I was always mad at the world. I always felt empty. Even after Mexico, I had a chip on my shoulder about being poor, my mother dying, that I had no family life. Being champ of the world just accelerated and intensified those feelings.
Then I created that Iron Mike persona, that monster, and the media picked up on it and the whole world was afraid of that guy, the guy who could make women leave their husbands for a night and cheat. That image of being the big bad motherfucker was really intoxicating but inside I was still just a little pussy—this scared kid who didn’t want to get picked on.
But I had to play that role, I didn’t know what else to do. One night I was at Bentley’s, the New York club. I was drunk and thinking I was a tough guy. I was hitting on some girl and the girl’s husband didn’t like it and he pulled out a gun and aimed it at me.
“Go ahead and shoot, motherfucker. You bitch nigga. I’m going to fuck your wife,” I said.
I was talking stupid, un-fucking-legible English. Allah is my witness, I’m just grateful the guy didn’t have the guts to kill me. He was just talking shit but he wasn’t working no fingers, just working that tongue.
When I started working with Don, I had two of my friends from Albany, Rory Holloway and John Horne, come to work with me. They were always trying to get me to stay away from the gangster rap crowd, but I loved those rappers. Back then those guys helped me, they understood my pain. One time, I was at a club in L.A. with John Horne and James Anderson, my bodyguard at the time. We were with Felipe, who ran the club. I had a room with Felipe’s cousin Michael. As we walked in someone yelled out, “Yo, Mike, when you want a real bodyguard, come get some Long Beach Crips.”
Horne thought he was some kind of stand-up comedian and he made some crack about being in a Crip neighborhood once with his wife wearing a red jumpsuit. He thought the guys would laugh. But the guy didn’t even let him finish his sentence.
“You’re lying. You were never in my motherfucking hood with red on.” Once he said this, it was on.
He went all left field and he and all his friends pulled out their guns.
“Get your man, Mike, get your man,” the guy said.
I didn’t know what to do. I just started talking some slick bullshit and I put out my hand.
“Nigga, slap my hand,” I said. “My friend thinks he’s a comedian.” And I defused it. That guy, Tracy Brown, became one of my best friends. He was a cold cat. He did fifteen years and then came home and got killed. He was a beautiful brother.
I always had to save Horne’s ass. He was an arrogant guy. We went to a Bulls game in Chicago one night. Walter Payton came with us and I had EB and John along. We had the long limo with the hot tub in the back and we were wearing our white mink coats. John and I had gone to the bathroom and this little guy came up and wanted to shake my hand. John just said, “Get out of the way,” and pushed on by. He really dissed him. The guy turned real cold.
“Just say sorry right now and it’s over. If you don’t, it’s gonna be a problem.”
I immediately read the situation. A bitty guy fronting like that, he’s got to be in a gang.
John finally picked up on it and he apologized and shook the guy’s hand.
“Thank you, sir,” the little guy said. Then he shook my hand and kissed me. When we left the bathroom, the little guy had about fifty guys around him.
“We love you, champ,” the guys yelled at me.
I told Horne I was tired of stepping in and protecting him, tired of squashing things. I was the guy going out there with guns in my face, the
one who cools the shit down, when these guys were supposed to be protecting me.
At the beginning, I was my own bodyguard. But that didn’t turn out so good. I couldn’t be beating up people because they wanted an autograph and I happened to be in a shitty mood. So I went out and got some real bodyguards. Not to protect me from the public, but to protect the public from me. I had a friend named Anthony Pitts. We would hang out together in L.A. I knew that Anthony could be good bodyguard material because one night we were courtside at a Lakers game and this disrespectful, out-of-control fan stumbled and knocked into Anthony and didn’t apologize. Anthony got up and knocked this motherfucker out right onto the court. I said, “Oh shit!” The game was playing and this guy was laid out cold right out on the court. The police came to get the guy and we had to walk over his body because the game was still on!
Anthony decided I needed a real bodyguard one night when we were at a club in downtown L.A. I was there with Anthony and my friend Johnny, a white dude. We were outside talking to some girls. I had drawn quite a crowd of attractive young women when I heard someone say, “Fuck Mike Tyson!” All of a sudden the whole club was running into the street. So I grabbed this girl I had been talking to and we started running to my limo and I heard, boom. The guy had a gun and had shot at me, but he missed me and hit the girl in the leg. I was such a selfish pig that I still tried to get the wounded girl into my car to take her home. Her girlfriend was screaming, “They shot her because of you, Mike. They wanted to get you.” I wanted to get out of there, but my chauffeur wasn’t behind the wheel. I looked in the back window and he was curled up hiding in the back. That’s when Anthony decided to be my bodyguard. We took off and I left the girl behind. I felt bad that she got shot. Needless to say, she never talked to me again.
With all this drinking and partying, my weight shot up to 255 that December. My next fight was with Frank Bruno, but that wasn’t until the end of February 1989. Then I found myself without a trainer. Kevin was always in the papers talking negative bullshit, saying I didn’t know what I was doing. He was very anti-Don, always pro-Cayton. I think that his hatred for Don was blinding him. Kevin really fired himself. He didn’t want to be with us. He wanted the whole Cayton team back. We were going to hire him back at the same price, but he didn’t want it. And then he sued me.
I hired my Catskill roommate Jay Bright to be my new trainer. I wanted Jay to get some money because he was part of Cus’s family upstate. We also hired Aaron Snowell, who claimed he had trained Tim Witherspoon. Tim later told me that Snowell was just his running partner who had carried the bucket into the ring, but I didn’t care. I was a pugilistic god. My opponents should die with fright at the thought of fighting me. Oh, God!
Before we started training, I had some legal matters to resolve. In January a girl filed a million-dollar suit against me for grabbing her buttocks at Bentley’s, a nightclub just blocks from my apartment in Manhattan. Anthony was with me then and he told me to say that I didn’t grab her buttocks but that I was behind her and fell into her as I tried to break my fall. Anthony always came up with plausible deniability. And he would often take the fall for me. Another time we were at Bentley’s and I grabbed some girl’s ass and when she turned around Anthony piped in.
“No, no, that was me, baby. I’m sorry. I thought you were my ex-girl,” he told the girl. He defused that one.
But the first girl was taking me to court and she planned on having her friend who was there with her testify against me. I had seen the friend in court the day before she was supposed to testify against me, so I went looking for her and, amazingly enough, I found her out that night with a friend of mine.
“Hey, you’re the girl from the case,” I approached her.
“Don’t you get in my face,” she said.
“Hey, I don’t want to get in your face,” I said calmly. “I’m not mad at you. I’m mad at your friend. I didn’t do anything to her.”
I figured that if I fucked this girl, she couldn’t testify against me the next day.
“Hey, it’s no problem, sister. Why don’t you and me go for a ride in the Rolls?” My strategy worked. The girl didn’t testify.
In January I also had to appear in court for a deposition in connection with Cayton’s suit versus Don King. Thomas Puccio, a famous attorney, was Cayton’s man. He asked me about the Spinks fight payment and I told him that I couldn’t recall if I had been paid. When Puccio showed him that I had been paid my full twelve million dollars, I couldn’t recall what I did with the money. I didn’t even have my own accountant at the time; I was just using Don’s. I didn’t have anyone to tell me how to protect myself. All my friends were dependent on me. I had the biggest loser friends in the history of loser friends.
But the deposition got interesting when Puccio asked me about Jimmy and the revised managerial contract I had signed right before he died.
“I had total trust, implicitly, totally, with every soul of my body, in Jim,” I testified. “I signed that agreement because Jimmy asked me to sign it. I always trusted Jimmy, I never believed my listening to Jimmy would all come down to this, and being here facing you. I didn’t understand Cayton was my manager, because Jimmy, by some means, I can’t understand why, Jimmy had me sign this. Like I said, I trusted him and I signed it. I wanted to fight in the glory of Jim, I loved Jim,” I said. “He could have informed me about Mr. Cayton being my manager, which he didn’t.”
But Puccio kept pressing me. He grilled me about the specific terms of my contract with King. I had no idea what was in the contract. Do you think I read that shit?
“You’re stressing me out,” I told Puccio.
The truth was, I was more interested in putting the moves on Puccio’s hot young assistant lawyer, Joanna Crispi. I told her she had a nice ass and I kept trying to get her attention. I’m sorry you have to read about this. What was I thinking? You can’t do shit like that. But I did.
My own litigation with Robin was still in the courts, but that didn’t keep us from seeing each other. Whenever I was in L.A., I’d stop by for a booty call. I once drove up to her house in my Lamborghini Countach. I knocked on the door and there was no one there. That was odd. So I went back to my car, when I spotted Robin pulling up in her nice white BMW convertible. I should have recognized it, I bought the motherfucker. Great, I can still get my quickie in, I thought, but then I spotted a white silhouette with flowing blond hair in the passenger’s seat. Shit, it was probably one of her girlfriends from Head of the Class. But I looked closer and saw that it was a dude. Someone she was probably giving head to. They pulled up and got out of the car and I saw that the guy was Brad Pitt. When Brad saw me standing there in front of the house, you had to see the look on his face. He looked like he was ready to receive his last rites. Plus, he looked stoned out of his gourd. Then he went all pre-Matrix on me. “Dude, don’t strike me, don’t strike me. We were just going over some lines. She was talking about you the whole time.”
“Please, Michael, please, Michael don’t do anything,” Robin was crying. She was scared to death. But I wasn’t going to beat no one up. I wasn’t trying to go to jail for her, I was just trying to get in some humps before the divorce.
“Come back later, Mike,” she said. “I’ll be home, come back later.”
It was what it was. Brad beat me to the punch that day so I went back the next day.
That wasn’t the last time I saw Robin. While I was training for the Bruno fight, Robin was shooting some B movie up in Vancouver. She kept calling me for help, saying she was being stalked. I wanted to be by her side to protect her. I ditched my security team and immediately flew up there. I was grateful to get out of town because I was tired of training anyway. I was in full romantic mode, so I walked up to the hotel carrying a big bottle of Dom Pérignon. Suddenly I was surrounded by a swarm of reporters and camera crews. Robin had set me up. She had told the media that I was the one stalking her. They w
ere swarming me, asking why I was stalking her, so I acted on instinct. I transformed my champagne bottle into a bludgeon to escape with. Of course, I scared a few reporters and broke a really expensive camera in doing so, which set me back a few pennies. I spent the night with Robin, but I was so disgusted by her behavior that I left the next morning. That was the official end of my relationship with her.
Our divorce was finalized on February fourteenth. Ironic, huh? Robin got some cash money and got to keep all the jewelry I had bought her, which was worth a fortune. Ruthless took some of Robin’s booty and opened up an indie film production company in New York called Never Blue Productions. My friend Jeff Wald, the Hollywood producer, had recommended that Howard Weitzman represent me. He was a beast. At one point in the case, Robin had argued that a big check to herself was valid because it said on the bottom line “Mike Tyson gift.” What she didn’t know was that the bank microfilmed every check. So Howard had blown up the original microfilmed check and put it on a large piece of cardboard to show the court that Robin had written that shit on it after the check had cleared.
Robin also tried to keep my Lamborghini. She took that car and put it in her garage and then had someone put cement blocks into the ground in front of the garage door so we couldn’t get it out. But that was no problem for Howard. He hired some private investigators who were ex-Mossad agents and they had the car out in twenty minutes without waking up anyone.
I was free of Robin officially, but instead of being elated, I was really down. I didn’t want to be married to her anymore but I felt humiliated by the whole process. I felt like half a person. I had endured the dark side of love—betrayal—and I was ashamed because it had played out in front of millions of people. This was the first time I had made myself vulnerable to someone else. Here was someone I would have died for and now I didn’t even care if she died. How does love change like that? Now that I’m a more conscious person, when I think about those times, I realize that Robin and Ruthless were really deplorable people. There was nothing they wouldn’t do for money, nothing. They would fuck a rat. They had no boundaries—money was like paper blood to them. They were evil people.
