by Mike Tyson
Afterwards, Golota tried to blame his quitting on getting dizzy from head butts but he just quit on his stool. He was one of those guys who went nuts from the pressure of fighting. But the next day, Golota’s wife took him to a hospital in Chicago and the doctor diagnosed him with a concussion and a fractured left cheekbone, the one that was the target of the right hand that floored him.
As soon as I got back to my dressing room, the Michigan officials rushed in to give me my urine test. Because of Golota, they probably were testing for steroids, so I didn’t have time to get the whizzer from Steve Thomas. I had to give them my own urine. Of course, they found the weed in my system. They should have given me a bonus for fighting under pot because it dulls your aggression. They suspended me for ninety days, which didn’t matter because I wasn’t going to fight anyway, but they also fined me $5,000 and made me donate $200,000 to a Michigan-based charity. And they took away my TKO and changed it to a no-decision.
Even with that $20 million from that fight, I was fucked financially. It got so bad that I started hustling some Malaysian promoters who wanted me to fight over there. They sent this lady named Rose Chu to convince me and she spent weeks at my house. They offered me a site fee of $16 million and they gave me a million-dollar advance and I even got them to spend $200,000 on renovations to my house and a down payment for a new Rolls-Royce.
At the beginning of 2001 my accountants sent me a cash flow breakdown for the year 2000. I had started the year $3.3 million in the hole. I earned $65.7 million in 2000, including a $20 million settlement from Sidley, my former business manager. They knew what they had done with Don was highway robbery, so they were happy to settle. The problem was that I spent $62 million that year—$8 million for taxes, $5.1 million for legal fees, $5 million to Monica, $4.1 million to repay a loan from one of my promoters, $3.9 million to Rooney for his suit, $3.4 million in payroll, $2.1 million for cars, $1.8 million infusion into Iron Mike Records, the shit added up.
Of course, my new management team had no answers. They were at one another’s throats. Jackie was telling me that Shawnee was ripping me off royally.
“Mike, she’s stealing money. Whenever you fight and you get a new car, she buys the same car you’ve got. She’s a player. She don’t play checkers, she plays chess,” Jackie said. I got them on a three-way call but Shawnee started crying and said, “I told you she don’t like me.”
Shawnee had visited the seventy-five-thousand-square-foot office that Jackie had opened in Brooklyn for Iron Mike Records and Shawnee decided she needed the same luxurious offices in Atlanta where she lived. Like an idiot I agreed. I never once stepped foot in those offices.
The truth was I couldn’t give a shit about my business. I wanted to deal with my vices and nothing else. My attitude was, I don’t give a fuck. Why would I think like that when I was at the top of my game? The sad truth is that no one ever had my best interests at heart except for Cus. I still can’t believe that he put that money aside for me in an IRA. When I think about that, I cry to this very day.
Things didn’t get better in June of 2001 when Camille died. I plunged deeper into depression and took more drugs. But I had to start training for my next fight, which was going to be in Denmark, so we set up camp at Big Bear City in San Bernardino County, California.
Monica and the kids came to stay with me for a few days. The day after they left, Rick Bowers, one of my security guys, and I went to the local Kmart because that was the only place in town to get certain provisions. There was an older woman, maybe fifty or so, at one of the cash registers. She was far from a looker but she had a dynamite body. She asked me for an autograph when we were checking out and then slipped me her phone number. Dog that I am, I called her and she came over to the house that Rick and I were staying in.
We had sex on the couch in the living room. The next morning Rick took Crocodile to the emergency room because Croc wanted to have something looked at. The Kmart woman was there and she told Rick that she “did something I shouldn’t have done.” I had told her the night before that we shouldn’t be having sex because I was in training. She also told Rick that I had hurt her during the sex and that she needed treatment. Then she asked him how I felt about her since we had sex. Later she called Rick and arranged to meet him at the local Denny’s. She told Rick that she liked me and that she was disappointed that I hadn’t come with him. She kept bugging Rick to call me and tell me to come down because she wanted to go out with me again.
Then she started calling Rick on his cell and warned us to leave town because the D.A. wanted her to press charges. She also said she was going to the tabloids. Rick said, “How do we fix this?” and she said, “I just need a new car,” because she had some run-down piece of shit.
Rick came back to the house.
“What’s up with that Kmart lady? She says you hurt her,” Rick said.
“Huh?” I had no idea what he was talking about.
We decided to go and confront her at her job. We met her in the parking lot and she was just nuts. She started talking about going to the tabloids with the story and that she needed a new car. I listened for a few seconds and then I turned to Rick.
“Let’s get out of here, I told you she was crazy,” I said.
Now she really got pissed. There were people around us in that parking lot and she felt disrespected.
The next day, July eighteenth, we opened the papers to see that this lunatic was saying that I had raped her. I went to the gym and there were hordes of media trying to get me to make a statement.
Within hours, Darrow was on the case. He went to the gym, told Rick to go back to the house and pack all our shit, and in a half hour we were all on a small prop jet heading to L.A. Then Darrow went back to Big Bear City and went to work.
It’s amazing how similar this claim was to Desiree Washington’s. Both of them were trying to get in touch with me after sex and I wasn’t returning calls. Both of them flipped out when I treated them like a cad after. The difference was that this time I had a genius of a lawyer who actually did something proactive to defend me. He began by interviewing some of the Kmart lady’s coworkers. He found a close friend who worked with her who told him that the alleged victim had approached her at work the day after and told her that she had “made love” with me. She described me as being “sweet” and “nice” and how she “liked” my kisses and sweet talk. She also drew a picture of a large penis on a piece of paper and told her friend that I was that big and that she actually was hurt after having sex with me. She asked her friend to drive her to my house so she could get an apology from me for disrespecting her. She was disappointed because she expected “red carpet” treatment from me and I didn’t even serve her any refreshments. She also told her friend that she wanted things to “go a little farther” to get revenge against me because I didn’t apologize to her.
Darrow didn’t stop there. He got a call from the Kmart lady’s nephew, Kermit, and set up a meeting at Kermit’s apartment. Kermit told Darrow that he rented his apartment and that “I sure wish I had the two million dollars to afford the entire building.” Darrow then asked Kermit if he could record their conversation and Kermit said, “That’s not the way I do business. I guess you don’t want to do business.”
Darrow found the manager of Kmart, who told him, “You can’t believe anything she says.” Her manager also told Darrow that the woman was openly discussing her rape allegations with anyone who would listen, including her customers at Kmart. She was enjoying all the attention from the tabloids. Darrow also talked to the lady’s landlord who told him that she wasn’t “a very credible individual.” He even found a customer of the lady who ran a computer business who gave Darrow a tape of a conversation between the lady and himself because the woman wanted to meet him after work. She told the computer guy that she was frustrated with her situation at home with her husband and that she sought out physical companionship elsewhere. Wh
en the computer guy told her he didn’t want to have an affair, she started harassing him with phone calls.
Last but not least, Darrow even got affidavits from two prominent doctors who said that pain and/or bleeding is often a consequence of consensual sex.
Darrow put all of these interviews into a hundred fifty pages that he presented to the D.A. of San Bernardino County. He told the D.A. that under the California penal code the D.A. was “obligated to inform the grand jury of evidence that reasonably tends to negate guilt” and that his investigation had uncovered a wealth of evidence that strongly supports “Mr. Tyson’s unwavering contention that he has engaged in absolutely no criminal wrongdoing whatsoever.”
Meanwhile, the Kmart lady got that ambulance chaser Gloria Allred to represent her in a civil claims case. And Showtime was concerned that the allegations had received press around the world that could “seriously impede Showtime’s ability to conduct its preparations for Tyson’s next bout in Copenhagen.” They wanted a resolution to see if the D.A. would press charges. They got it. After receiving the amazing document Darrow had prepared, the San Bernardino D.A. refused to return an indictment against me. I guess sometimes justice does prevail.
Then they tried to screw me again. A few weeks later, I was lying down in the television room at my Vegas house, watching ESPN SportsCenter. I could smell the fried chicken that Chef Drew was whipping up in the kitchen for lunch. Just a typical Vegas morning. Until my assistant Darryl rushed into the room. “Yo, Mike. I think the Taliban is here.” He seemed hysterical.
“Darryl, shut the fuck up,” I said. It was about ten days after the terrible attacks on 9/11.
“No, really, I think the Taliban are on the property.” Darryl didn’t crack a smile.
“What are you talking about?” I said.
“Mike, come here, please,” he said. So we walked outside.
There were about a hundred guys with green camouflage outfits on, assault weapons in their hands, and hand grenades dangling off their belts. They each held a big clear protective shield in their other hand. They were slowly advancing on the house, periodically hiding behind my massive palm trees. On top of that, there were two huge battering ram tanks coming through each of the big wrought-iron gates of my property that had the word SWAT stenciled on their side. We heard a buzzing sound and looked up. There were helicopters in the sky. My house was being invaded.
By now the whole battalion were getting ready to go through the front door. They had their clear shields in front of them and their guns in their hands and their blouse pants over their boots. Then they drew down in front of us.
“Freeze! Stop moving!” one of them barked.
I stood still.
Click, click, click, the sound of cocked rifles wafted through the air.
“Bin Laden is not here. We don’t have anything to do with that nine-eleven stuff,” Darryl said. He had probably been watching too much CNN. They did look like military guys on an exercise in the desert. The only problem was this desert was my property.
They finally identified themselves. They weren’t the Taliban, they were the Vegas police. I’d never seen so many police in one spot in Vegas in my life. They said they were there to investigate a charge that I had held a young woman hostage in the house for three days and had raped her. I had some armed guards on the property who Darryl had set up in a guard shack. I guess this young lady had told the authorities that we had guns on the property so they came overly prepared. We had just changed the work policy and the guards were working from dusk to dawn. It was about eleven a.m. when the police stormed in, so the guards were already gone for the day and the gates were open.
As soon as Rick saw the troops invading us, he was on the phone with my lawyer Darrow Soll. Darrow told him to get me out of the house and to say nothing, not a word, to the police. Sounded right to me. They searched us and then they ordered us all off the premises. They made Darryl stay because he was the property manager and could give them access to everywhere they wanted to go. For some reason they let Chef Drew stay too. But while they had him on the ground, the smell of burning chicken came from the kitchen. They let him up so he could go back to the kitchen and stop the house from burning down.
With only Darryl and Drew there, they began to tear my house apart—room by room, box by box, paper by paper. They lifted box springs and mattresses off the beds. They went through every video. They were there from eleven in the morning until one in the morning the next day. Hell, at one point they even ordered pizza in and had a dinner break. They were nice enough to offer Darryl a slice but he refused.
They wound up confiscating a bunch of stuff including my personal sex tapes. I kept calling in through the day. “Darryl, are they still there?”
“Yeah, Mike, they’re tearing the house apart.”
I had gone to the gym and then had my bodyguard Rick drop me off at another girlfriend’s house. I was confused as to why these guys were raiding my house. It turns out, I had met the girl who called the police at Mack’s barbershop. I brought her back to the house and she basically moved in for about a week. I’d leave her when I went to train and she’d be going into the kitchen wearing only one of my T-shirts and have Chef Drew whip up some food for her. She knew all the security codes to the house and the gate, so she could come and go as she pleased. So how was she kidnapped? When she finally left the house, Rick drove her home. She left happy. So what could have compelled her to say all that shit about me so my ass got raided?
I found out when a record producer friend of mine called me from Houston. He told me that the girl was seeing another very prominent boxer. When she got back to him after being with me, he was furious. And he beat the shit out of her. Then he told her to go to the police and report that I had kidnapped her and held her against her will.
I was really pissed off. I couldn’t be certain that this other boxer was behind all this shit, but if he was, he was as good as dead. But I’m a strong believer in karma—that bad things happen to bad people. I contemplated laying him down and he must have figured I would because he increased his security. But his bodyguards would have meant nothing. I knew a little gangbanging guy from the hood who used to take me to my community service. He told me to just say the word and he would make a call and I’d have two hundred people, all strapped, standing with me. I appreciated the offer but I turned him down. I never did pursue revenge. I even got high with that boxer a few years later. I really wanted to fuck him up then. But I let it slide.
After the raid on my house, the girl’s identity got out, and reporters would come down to the barbershop to try and interview me. Mack would hide me in the back room and deny seeing me that day. Mack even called Stewart Bell, the district attorney, and told him that he had introduced the girl to me. He said that she was no prisoner; she was even driving my car all around town. Mack told him that he was concerned because I was supposed to leave soon for Copenhagen for my next fight.
“Don’t worry about that,” Bell told Mack. “Mike can go fight there. We have more investigating to do and if anything happens it will be after the fight.”
We had a little drama on the flight to Copenhagen for the Brian Nielsen fight. Crocodile started throwing up and then he passed out. He had OD’d. They rushed him to the hospital. Three days went by and we actually thought that Crocodile had died, but when we went to the weigh-in, he showed up like nothing had happened. Crocodile was one of those guys who could do drugs night and day and then stop cold turkey and go train a fighter for six weeks. Then he’d come back and get high like nothing happened.
“Yo, man, what you been doing?” I’d ask him.
“I haven’t got high since the last time I saw you,” he said.
“Listen, I haven’t stopped since the last time I saw you,” I said. “Fuck, how do you do that?”
When I get high, I have to be arrested to stop. We had Darrow along with us on
that trip. Shortly after we got there one of those big Danish biker types said something to Anthony Pitts’s wife and Darrow just turned around and, wop, knocked the guy out cold with one punch. He actually beat Anthony to that punch.
“This is the best,” I said. “I’ve got my lawyer and my fucking bodyguard with me at the same time.”
Denmark went crazy over us. They sold out the huge arena in no time. I hadn’t fought in over a year and I figured that I could get some rounds in with Nielsen. He was the IBC champ at the time but it was pretty meaningless. They called him Super Brian and his record was 62-1, but he really hadn’t fought any high-caliber fighters in their prime. He had beaten Bonecrusher Smith, Tim Witherspoon, and Larry Holmes, but they were on the way down when he met them. But he was a big boy, 6'4" and 260 pounds, so I had a big target to aim at. I punished him with body blows in the first round and with seconds to go in the third, I knocked him down with a series of devastating combinations. He went down like a redwood tree. If the ropes hadn’t cushioned his fall I think he would have split the ring in two. It was only the second time in his long career that he had been down. I was having a good time in the ring. I had put on some weight, ostensibly because he was so heavy, but in reality, I hadn’t trained much for the fight. I came in at 239 pounds, my heaviest fighting weight ever, so I wanted to get some rounds in.
I battered him around the ring for six rounds. At the beginning of the seventh, he just stayed on his stool. He had a cut over his left eye and I had been working it all night. He told the ref he couldn’t see out of the eye, but he really was just worn out. But he was a nice guy. Nobody liked him because he was really arrogant, but I related to him.
