Undisputed Truth

by Mike Tyson

  Around that time I started hanging out with this guy named Michael Politz. We had actually been in jail together in Maryland. He was in and out every once in a while because he said his crazy girlfriend at the time was slapping him with restraining orders that he kept violating so he could see his kid. Michael was totally plugged into the Vegas nightlife scene. He was straight, he didn’t drink or do drugs, so he was a perfect sober companion for me. I was doing enough drugs for the two of us. One night he heard about this party that the strip club Scores was throwing in the bowling alley suite at the Palms Hotel. The adult video convention was in town and the party was packed full of beautiful porn stars. I was eyeing two of them, but they had their boyfriends with them. Meanwhile, Michael was hitting on a pretty waitress. I had a brief conversation with one of the girls out of earshot of the boyfriends and then I went back to Michael.

  “Come here,” I told him and I pulled him away from his waitress. We were whispering like little girls.

  “Look behind me,” I said. “That’s the bathroom. I’m going to take these two girls into the bathroom and fuck them. Here’s what I want you to do. See those two guys? Those are the girls’ boyfriends. You’re going to keep them busy.”

  “What!” Michael said.

  “It’s going to be fine, brother, don’t worry,” I said.

  “And what if these guys fuck with me?”

  “Don’t worry, I’ll be able to hear it. If I hear a commotion and they start to kick your ass, I’ll be right out of the bathroom in seconds and help you out. It’s going to be fine,” I assured him.

  My face was pressing against his ear, whispering all this shit. So to bust my balls, Michael blurted out all loud, “Mike, I’m not that comfortable right now with your mouth so close to my ear.”

  The whole room heard him. I started laughing hysterically. This was one crazy white boy.

  “Now you really owe me, motherfucker,” I said.

  “All right, go,” he told me.

  I went into the bathroom with the one girl while Michael diverted the guys’ attention. Then the other girl snuck in while he was telling them all these Mike Tyson stories. By the time the guys realized the girls were gone and asked where they went, Michael told them we all probably stepped outside for a second to smoke a joint.

  That’s just how I was back then. I was fucked up and attracting that kind of energy. I was gaining weight and I was starting to look like a fat rock star. But because of the blow, my confidence was sky-high.

  I was getting more and more blatant with the coke while I was out in clubs. I was with my friend Mack the barber one night and we were hanging out at the bar at the Wynn Hotel. Between signing autographs and posing for pictures with people, I kept going to the bathroom. Finally, Security came up to Mack.

  “You need to come get your friend,” they told him. I had gotten caught doing blow in the bathroom and they were kicking me out of the hotel. That was the way it was then. I’d either get the royal treatment at the nightclubs or I’d be thrown out because people would report that I was doing coke in the bathroom or I was banging some broad in there. I was friendly with a lot of the doormen so they’d let me back in but some clubs totally barred me.

  That’s why I always liked going to strip clubs more.

  “Why do we hang out at these dance clubs when we can go to the strip clubs?” I’d tell my friends. “These girls have their clothes on and they’ve got an attitude. At the strip clubs the girls are naked and they’ve got good attitudes. Let’s get right to the nitty-gritty.”

  The strip club owners all worked with me. I had my own private bathroom in some of those clubs. I’d be in there for hours and then I’d come out and talk with the owner. I was such a prima donna that when the security guy would come up to me, I’d scream at him.

  “Get away from me! Get away from me, I’m not bothering nobody.”

  It got so blatant that I’d be carrying my bag of coke openly with a straw coming out of it like it was a milkshake. I’d give a friend a hit and they’d think they’d be getting a little bump but then they’d squeal because so much coke was in the bag. They’d start coughing and spitting.

  I started dating some of the strippers, and that was a volatile situation. I’d be high and I’d see one of my girls with a client, and I’d barge right over to her.

  “Why are you not returning my calls?” I’d yell at her. She was doing a lap dance for some guy and I was in her face, harassing her.

  “Hey, if there’s a problem . . .” the scared customer would say to me.

  “Just mind your business, I’m talking to her,” I’d snarl.

  Then the girls I was dating would get jealous and they’d start fighting with one another in the middle of the club. So I started getting banned from certain shifts.

  The next thing you know, I started sleeping in the strip clubs. I’d get a box of fried chicken and I’d be eating it and then I’d just pass out from staying up for days on end. I’d be sleeping and the strippers were eating my chicken and going through my pockets. Then I’d wake up and start fighting with the G-string divas, not because they were going through my pockets but because they were eating my chicken and I was ravenously hungry. When you come down from coke, you’re famished.

  By November of 2005, I was really gone. I went to L.A. for the premiere of 50 Cent’s Get Rich or Die Tryin’. I was really high on cocaine and Robin was there. She must have seen me running around before the movie started, hitting on girls and just being silly. When the movie was over, I got up from my seat and she was right there. She gave me a hug and I kissed her. I was hoping that I might get to fuck her again. But she just went “Whoa” and walked away. As soon as she walked away, I turned around and Naomi Campbell grabbed me and hugged me. She must have seen me hugging Robin and she was probably thinking, He shouldn’t be hugging that bitch. With all that shit he went through with her, he’s hugging her?

  Naomi pulled out of the hug and looked me in the eyes.

  “Mike, the word is out you’re doing a lot of blow. You need to stop. You’re fucking your life up.”

  She was mad and she was reading me a couple of paragraphs of the riot act. Nay Nay always cared deeply about me, and vice versa. She was a true friend.

  But I didn’t heed her advice. I kept right on doing blow. Now, if you get high on coke and you don’t have girls around, that’s not a good high. And if you have girls without the coke, that’s not good either. You need both of them for the optimal experience. I used to say I needed “a ho and some blow.” Now, you might think that doing a lot of cocaine was not conducive to having sex, but that’s what Cialis and Viagra were for.

  Around this time I started hanging out with Crocodile again. He would come back from training someone for a fight and he’d be in full party mode. One time, we were in my hotel room in Vegas with a famous porn star and her boyfriend. We had arranged for her to come to the room to have sex with us. As soon as they came into the room, Crocodile and I started taking off our clothes. Her boyfriend supposedly was okay with us both having sex with the porn star until he saw us naked.

  “No, please don’t do it,” he cried to his girlfriend.

  “What’s the deal with homeboy here?” I asked her. “I thought he was cool with this.”

  “No, no! Just have oral sex with them,” he pleaded.

  “No, man, we want to step on this pussy,” I told him.

  He started crying so much that the porn star got up.

  “I can’t do this. I got to go with him,” she said, and they both left.

  Crocodile was too much. Every time he saw me with a girl, he automatically started taking his clothes off.

  “Crocodile, this is my woman,” I’d tell him. “Not this time.”

  “Oh, my bad, my bad,” he’d apologize.

  Croc and I were at a New Year’s Eve 2006 party in Phoenix. Denn
is Rodman and Charles Barkley were there too. At the end of the night I saw this beautiful, beautiful girl, one of the most exquisite women I had ever seen. She was an actress and she kept dropping names, like Charlie Sheen. The girl was in close proximity to Crocodile but I couldn’t tell if she was really with him. I was looking at her and I said, “Who are you with?” And the next thing I knew, she said she was with Crocodile. This is going to be interesting, I thought.

  We brought her back to a house that I had purchased in Phoenix and we started messing with the girl but we were both so high that we couldn’t get an erection, even though we were kissing on her and licking her. So we went out to some twenty-four-hour porn shop and brought some dirty movies back. And that didn’t even work. Man, it was so frustrating. This was the best-looking person I’d ever seen in my life and I couldn’t do anything. Croc and I were like two little kids at Christmas who weren’t strong enough to open the toy box. I was so pissed that I wasn’t packing my Cialis that night. I was just out getting high, I didn’t think I was going to run into any pussy.

  I was able to buy that house in Phoenix because from time to time I’d make some money that didn’t have to go right to the creditors. A company in Japan gave me $800,000 to do a Pachinko gambling machine and an extra $100,000 to allow them to put me in trunks that were not black.

  So my partying shifted to Phoenix then. I had spent a lot of time with Shelly Finkel in Phoenix so I was pretty connected to some wealthy people there. If I needed a place to stay before I bought the house, they’d find me someplace. Phoenix is a smaller party scene than Vegas but in some ways it’s much more intense. It looks like a quiet town, but at night it turned into a little animal. The partying there was really high end, everyone getting down in mansions or in great hotel suites.

  I got into a party circle there that included a lot of doctors. One of the doctors was a plastic surgeon and he used to have me come to his office and he’d set me up in one of the examining rooms. I had my cocaine to one side, my weed to the other, Viagra out on the table.

  “Hey, Doc, I’m coming down. I don’t like the way I’m feeling,” I told him one day.

  “Don’t worry, I’ll set you up,” he said and he went into the other room.

  A few minutes later he wheeled in one of those intravenous drip things. He hooked me up to it.

  “This’ll take the edge right off,” he said.

  “What is it?” I asked him.

  “A morphine drip,” he said.

  This plastic surgeon could party like crazy. One time, he was driving alone in his car, doing all this coke, and he rolled the car. He went through the window and his face got all scraped up by the trees and the brush he plowed through.

  Shortly after this I went to his house. I was shocked when he opened the door.

  “You better look at your face, man,” I said. “You’re fucked up.”

  All of the skin of his face had been peeled off by the brush and his whole face was one mask of blood. He was lucky he was a plastic surgeon.

  I would get so fucked in Phoenix that I would start hallucinating. One time, I was in a car, and my assistant Darryl was driving. We were coming up to one of my friend’s houses and I said to Darryl, “Look! There are all these people outside the house waving at us.” There weren’t no people, it was the trees’ branches moving from the wind.

  In July of 2006 I got another visit from the FBI. I had been partying the night before and when I saw an FBI SWAT team coming up the front steps of my house, I ran to the back door but they were right there too.

  “Mr. Tyson? We need to talk to you, champ.”

  Oh shit, I thought. Whose ass did I grab last night?

  “We’d like to know your association with this gentleman in the picture. His name is Dale Hausner,” one of the agents said.

  I looked at the picture. It showed this guy Dale and me shaking hands like we were buddies.

  “Do you know this man? He’s a boxing writer and a photographer,” the agent said.

  “I do remember this man. He came to visit me when I was working out in my gym. There were a few of the Mexican fighters there and they started hassling him.

  “‘Get out of here, you fucking fag,’ one of the Mexican fighters said to him. ‘The champ don’t want to talk to you.’

  “But it was Ramadan so I interceded and explained to the other fighters that this was a time of peace and that everybody had a place. So I let him interview me. I’m sorry if he was offended in any way. I didn’t mean to cause him any discomfort.”

  “No, no, he liked you, Mr. Tyson,” the FBI agent said. “He just didn’t like the eight people that he murdered and the other nineteen people that he shot.”

  It turned out that the police were investigating Hausner and his friend for a string of drive-by shootings in Arizona from May 2005 through July 2006. It was a good thing that I stopped those guys and showed this guy some respect or he might have been waiting outside the gym to shoot me.

  At the end of August, I got a gig doing boxing exhibitions at the Aladdin Hotel in Vegas. It was a sweet deal. They gave me a nice suite and paid me to work out in a room where they set up a boxing ring. Thousands of people coming through the hotel could see me sparring and hitting the heavy bag. I got free food, whatever I wanted, carte blanche. So I called all my friends.

  “Come on over. I’m here for a month. You can order anything, it’s on the bitch, nigga.”

  I called the hotel “the bitch” then. I was in that pimp mentality.

  Bobby Brown was in town and I invited him and Karrine Steffans, aka Superhead, the girl he was currently seeing, to come up to see me. I had fooled around with her before too, so it was all good, so I thought. She was one of those girls who you couldn’t get ahold of that often but when you did it was a great time.

  Bobby didn’t want to do that. I didn’t realize that he was actually serious about her. So he brought his father and some other friends down. They came there first and I gave them the royal treatment. Then Bobby came. I was down in the lobby when he arrived and we went up the elevator together. People were going crazy when they saw the two of us. The wife in one couple said, “Oh shit! Mike Tyson and Bobby Brown. These two niggas together, it’s on, baby, it is on.” They knew that we were trouble.

  I wanted Bobby to chill for a while with me. It was great to hang out with Bobby because when he was married to Whitney she would never let him hang out with me—although I couldn’t blame her.

  Around this time, I started to have difficulty acquiring my coke. It wasn’t like there was any shortage of blow in Vegas; it was that the dealers didn’t want to provide coke to my ass. Dealers were always notoriously late when they said they’d be by with the stuff, and I had no patience so sometimes I’d wind up copping in a burger joint. My drought began in the ghetto. First, they wouldn’t let me in the bathroom of the bars on the Westside. Then the drug dealers started refusing to service me.

  “Go train, Mike, we need you to train,” they’d tell me. These guys had grown up with me in Vegas, seen me hanging around the barbershop for years, and they didn’t want to contribute to my downfall. I used to hand out free turkeys to these guys when they were kids so they felt a real bond with me. So out of necessity I started fucking with the white people on the Strip. The casino greeters, the doormen at the clubs, they all had connections.

  I was at the Aladdin during the time I was doing the exhibitions and I called up a guy to have an eight ball sent up to my suite. They sent this fucking country nigga with the blow. He was all excited, he thought that he was going to be partying with me and a bunch of girls. He was going to be the life of the party and hold everyone captive with that coke. I opened the door for him and let him in.

  “You got the stuff?” I said.

  “Yeah, but where the people at?”

  “There ain’t nobody. Just me here, nigga,” I said.
“You sell drugs, right? So just sell me the motherfucking drugs, okay?”

  I grabbed the package from his hands.

  “Fuck that shit, you don’t need to do this stuff, Mike,” he said. “You’re the champ. We love you, Mike.”

  “As a matter of fact, I’ll work out by escorting your ass to the door.”

  I opened the door and the fucker grabbed the bag of coke and ran out. “Go fucking train, Mike,” he yelled back at me. I ran after him but I was fat and mad and I didn’t have no clothes on. I was clutching a towel that was around my waist.

  “You come back, motherfucker. I’m going to kill you!”

  He was in shape and he got away. I really wanted to beat his ass. Who did he think he was, Florence Fucking Nightingale?

  I started strong-arming the few dealers that would still sell to me when I was low on cash. One day a dealer came to me for help.

  “Listen, Mike, can you help me out? Please tell Crocodile to pay me my money. I gave him all this coke.”

  Once he told me that, he was finished. I knew this guy was a pussy and I knew that I’d never have to pay him for drugs anymore if he couldn’t get Crocodile to pay him.

  “Sure, I’ll talk to Crocodile, but give me that stuff you’ve got right now,” and I snatched his coke right out of his hand.

  “Oh, man, my boss is going to kill me. I need to bring back some money,” he said.

  “Your boss needs that money from that other nigga,” I said.

  “Nah, man, I got to get it from you.”

  “Well, you tell your boss to come and talk to me about the money then. Listen, you got me addicted, now you want to charge me money, motherfucker? I’m strung out on the coke, nigga.”