by Mike Tyson
We stopped in Sardinia and that was off the hook. I’m a history buff so when I think of Sardinia I think of the Punic Wars and Hannibal. I was vibing on the fact that great wars were fought here. Jeff and I stopped into a place called the Billionaire Club. That place lived up to its name. A bottle of champagne cost something like $100,000.
“You don’t have to worry about me drinking tonight,” I joked to Jeff. But they kept sending bottles over to us anyway. In Sardinia, we were hanging out with Cavalli and Victoria Beckham. He invited me on his boat that was so lavish that it changed colors. I would hop on one of Jeff’s Jet Skis and go from boat to boat, eating some food, drinking some liquor.
We had one unpleasant incident in Sardinia. There was another guy on Jeff’s boat who was an English friend of Jeff’s. He brought these two French girls on the boat and we all got high. I took one of the girls to my room and had sex with her. Afterwards I went upstairs on the deck, and when I came down, I saw the girl I was with going through the staterooms. I was high as a kite but I got really pissed at her. I thought, Holy shit. If anything comes up missing, they’re gonna blame me. I’m the only nigga here. So I grabbed the girl by her hair and said, “What the fuck are you doing?” I dragged her up onto the deck. I was so upset and paranoid from the coke that I was about to throw her overboard when a guy on the next boat saw me.
“No, Mike, stop, stop!” he yelled.
Now people were looking at us. So I grabbed the two girls and told the staff to kick them off the boat. This wasn’t my boat. I felt responsible for whatever those girls did. We left Sardinia and we were about a hundred miles away near Capri when a police boat drove up. They looked a little scary because they had a machine gun mounted on the boat.
The coast guard police came onto our boat to investigate me for allegedly assaulting that girl. So they had to interview a bunch of people. When it was my turn to be interviewed I told the guy the truth.
“This girl was stealing stuff from the room, so I grabbed her . . .”
“Hold on,” the cop said in halting English. “No, that is not what happened. Say it again, say what happened again.”
I got it.
“She was in the room stealing and I didn’t know what to do and she just ran off the boat and I couldn’t catch her,” I said.
“Yes, that is really what happened,” he said and wrote it into the report.
I was really paranoid when those cops came aboard. I had a huge bag of weed and I didn’t want them to search and find it so I had my friend Jenny, who was sunbathing butt naked, sit on the weed. The policemen kept staring at her but they never asked her to get up or anything.
We made a few more stops, including a stop in Turkey where I met and hung out with the prime minister, but I was looking forward to going to Moscow to see my therapist. Her name was Marilyn Murray and she was a kick-ass seventy-year-old psychologist who I had been seeing since 1999. I met her that summer when I had to do court-mandated anger management sessions because of the road rage incident. Monica went with me and we decided to try some marriage counseling at the same time. We went to this facility in Phoenix. I made an entrance like I was the President of the United States. A couple of big stretch limos, all the Secret Service–looking bodyguards in black suits. I came in sly with my expensive jewelry and diamonds and my Versace clothes and my $6,000 crocodile shoes. So we sat down with the therapist and started the session and I was convinced that Monica and this guy had colluded beforehand. They were both ripping me to shreds. He didn’t say anything about Monica; he just kept beating up on me.
“Fuck both of you! Y’all set me up ahead of time,” I said and stormed out.
Six months later I went back alone, in a cab, fucked up, broke, and broken.
“Can we try this again, please, sir?” I said humbly.
This time he assigned me to Marilyn. She had a really interesting background. She used to own an art gallery in Phoenix but she started getting sick and went into therapy to deal with some abuse from her childhood. When she was forty-five she went back to school and got her degree in psychology and became a psychotherapist. She volunteered for free for years in the Arizona prison system working with sex offenders, violent rapists, and child molesters. So she had a reputation for working with really hard cases, people who had suffered a lot of trauma in their lives.
They thought she’d be a good match for me. I’d been in therapy a lot over the years but the guys I had been seeing were all too white-bread for me. At first I thought she was just some foolish-ass white woman that thought she was going to change me. I was going to play the nice black man role and she’d never see Ike/Mike. But I didn’t know that Marilyn was a beast. She didn’t take any shit. She’d heard all the games before. I just never thought she had heard my international con game, the game I got over working with all those counselors since I was a kid.
In order to deal with me you had to have some kind of roaring ferocious animal in you to get my attention. Even if you go about it in a diplomatic way, even without expressing it to the naked eye, I have to know that that animal is in there. It might just be a subtle look in her eye. Well, Marilyn had it.
It was obvious to me after a while that Marilyn’s job in life was to help people. Some people can’t even conceive of that, a person whose whole goal is just to give her life energy to care about someone else. We’re taught that people like that have ulterior motives. But she had a mission. Just like Cus said that “my boy’s job is to put big strong scary men in their place,” Marilyn’s job was to take big strong scary men that society has rejected and make society accept them again and make them excel while they’re being accepted.
Marilyn introduced me to a concept called “baseline normal.” A healthy person might have a high baseline for normal but mine was way down in the gutter. My baseline normal was sex, alcohol, drugs, violence, more sex, more alcohol, more violence, and chaos. I told Marilyn that the scariest day of my life was when I won the championship belt and Cus wasn’t there. I had all this money and I didn’t have a clue how to comport myself. And then the vultures and the leeches came out.
I was a smuck with no self-esteem but everyone in the world was telling me how great I was so now I was a narcissistic smuck with no self-esteem and a big ego. Marilyn thought that I was still addicted to the chaos of my childhood so that anytime something good happened to me, I would do something to sabotage it. So I married a doctor and had two lovely children and I was running around screwing strippers and doing drugs and drinking my ass off. Marilyn wanted to break my addiction to chaos and to raise my baseline normal to a place that was healthy.
She was talking the right talk a hundred percent to me. I knew that my demons from my childhood were on my trail everywhere I went. So she wanted to deal with that little boy who was acting up my whole fight career, that little boy that had been bullied and brutalized and abused. I didn’t know how to take care of him when I was the champion of the world and now I had to learn how to nurture him and give him the love he never received before.
Marilyn became more than a therapist, she became a mentor. She would take me to dinner, take me to movies. We’d go sightseeing and she taught me all about Phoenix. We really bonded. She has so much love and care and passion in her heart. She wasn’t even tripping about making any money off me; she just wanted to see me improve. I don’t know what she saw in my unrehabilitated ass.
Right after 9/11 Marilyn was invited to Russia to do some work, and from 2002 on she would go to Moscow and spend four months out of the year there. There was so much trauma and substance abuse in Russia that Marilyn was a godsend. So in 2002, she told me that she couldn’t be my therapist anymore and that I needed someone who would be around full-time for me. I loved Marilyn. I didn’t want to see her leave.
“Why you got to go? Stay here and be my mom,” I pleaded with her. “Stay here and look after me, you don’t work with nobody but me
anyway.” It was like she was my mother anyway. She was fighting like mad for me. She’d use any influence she had politically. She was on a crusade to save my ass. Funny thing was, back then I didn’t want all that. I didn’t know that I was that damaged. Marilyn had to show me how fucked up I was.
So I told Jeff Greene that I was going to go to Russia and he said we could take the boat around the Balkans and stop in the Ukraine. So every few days I’d call Marilyn and tell her that I was coming to see her. “Hey, Marilyn, I’m in Saint-Tropez.” “Hey, Marilyn, I’m in Sardinia.” “I’m in Istanbul, see you soon.”
When we got to the Balkan states everything turned lawless. These gangsters really operated with impunity over there. All the stuff we do that people label “gangster” is nothing compared to these guys. They can walk the streets and you don’t know who they are but the law is on their side. The next thing I knew, these guys were hanging with me. They pretty much kidnapped me and wined me and dined me and gave me whatever I wanted.
I was in Romania at one point and I was hanging with all these drug and gang figures, and they were trying to make me happy.
“What do you do?” they asked me.
“Do you have any cocaine?” I said.
These guys didn’t do cocaine. But they made a call and a guy came in with a big brick and put it on the table.
“This is what you like?” they said.
I dug into it and then I told them that they all had to take a hit. So a couple of them joined me and then they started talking so much they couldn’t believe it. I’m such a monster. I turned the Romanian Mafia onto coke.
We took the boat as far as the Ukraine. Jeff and I and our friend Muhammad were sitting at a restaurant eating and, out of nowhere, thousands of people rushed over to see me. It was so bad that the police had to escort us to our hotel. Later that night, Muhammad and I went to meet some local “businessmen.” They were talking to me about doing an endorsement deal for their vodka. The guy running the show owned a mansion that was just massive. Everything was made out of marble. This was real tsar shit, in the immaculate robber baron arena. We were supposed to have a business dinner with some guys. So the owner came up to me before dinner.
“Come with me. I want to show you something.”
We walked to the south side of the house, past a big balcony and down the hall to another room. He opened up the door and there were two beautiful women lounging on a bed.
“This is your dessert after dinner,” he said.
So I went and got Muhammad to show him.
“We’re going to skip dinner and go right to dessert,” I said. And we just stayed in that room. The Ukrainian guys didn’t think that was so cool. Who would skip an important dinner for some broads? They felt that was odd.
In all these countries, Ukraine, Russia, Bulgaria, everything was about sex and power. As soon as we got off the plane from the Ukraine to Moscow, people were coming up to me. “Are you okay? Do you need a woman? You’re tired, you must want a woman.”
Can you imagine a hound like me in Russia? If you’re with the right people they will literally pull a girl off the street, pull her into the car next to you and say, “You go with him.” That shit was crazy over there.
The vodka guys put me up at the Hyatt in a $5,000-a-night suite that was at least ten thousand square feet. If my doorbell rang, by the time I’d get to the door it was too late, the person had already left.
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, yo
u 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.
