Undisputed Truth: My Autobiography (38 page)

I had met Monica Turner years earlier. She was a friend of Beth’s, one of my lady friends. Beth wanted to set me up with Monica because she thought we’d be a good match. So Monica sent me a letter at Camille’s house and enclosed a photo. I didn’t follow up with her until two weeks before my trial. I was in D.C. and I showed up in front of her house with two stretch limos. I had her number in my head because I have a photographic memory, so I figured I’d go over there and see her because we had never met in person.

“Where you at?” she said.

“I’m at your front door.”

I met her at the door and tried to talk my way in, telling her that we should go upstairs, but she wasn’t going for it. Craig Boogie was there with me.

“Can I use your bathroom?” he asked.

And she let him right in.

“Why are you letting him in the house? You don’t even know him,” I said.

“Because you want to come in and do something else, but he just wants to go to the bathroom.”

So I just gave her a kiss and I left and I didn’t talk to her again. Then one day when I was in prison, I got a letter from Monica.

“Oh, God, please call me, please,” she wrote. She was very concerned and caring. So I called her collect.

“Hey, you want to be my girl?” I asked her right off the bat. That’s how I lived my life, right in the moment.

“Yeah! I do,” she said.

I was glad. She was a nice, smart girl. She’d been through a lot; she’d been abused, been through some hard times. She was going with one of the New York Knicks then but she dumped him.

I sent her some plane tickets and she came right out to Indiana. She wasn’t making much then; she was a student studying to be a doctor.

She saw me in the visiting room and started crying.

“I can’t believe you’re in here,” she said.

We hit it off and she kept coming to see me every opportunity she had, sometimes even twice a week. We never had sex while I was in prison. We might have fooled around a little, but I didn’t want to risk having her banned from visiting me. More than anyone else, I really looked forward to seeing Monica when I was in there.

When she first started visiting me, she was a little overweight. I was really shallow then so I told her she needed to lose a few pounds. I put her on a workout plan and started training her over the phone. She was really motivated and lost the weight.

I had been there for three years, and I was finally getting out. I got up really early that morning and packed all my stuff. Farid had been discharged earlier, so I didn’t have any really close friends there, but I said my good-byes to the inmates. I was being processed and was waiting to go out and greet the hundreds and hundreds of reporters and cameramen who had been waiting outside since the middle of the night. Right before I was set to go, this little white female guard came up to me.

“I’m proud of you, man,” she told me. “I didn’t think you could handle this, but you did. You didn’t let them break you. Congratulations.”

I thought about what she said for a second. My megalomania kicked in and I thought,
Didn’t think I could handle this? Does she know where the fuck I came from? I was born in the institutional system. Who the fuck does she think I am?

But that wasn’t what she was talking about. She was talking about taking that long fall from grace and adapting to a society where I didn’t look at myself as being bigger than everyone else. We were all equals. What that guard said went right over my head – the head that, despite my best efforts, was getting bigger and bigger with each step I took towards the outside world.

I couldn’t sleep the night before I was going to be released from prison. At four a.m. I started hearing the helicopters whirring outside in the sky. They were from the news stations who were getting their live feed ready. Outside the facility, the parking lot was jammed with satellite dishes and the cars of print reporters. Across from the lot, a huge crowd had gathered in a cornfield in the dark, waiting to get a glimpse of me leaving. At six a.m., Don and Rory and John Horne arrived in a black stretch limo and went into the facility.

I was waiting for them, but I really didn’t want to leave the prison. I had gotten used to being in jail. I enjoyed just being able to chill and get visits from celebrities and TV journalists. It was a rest well deserved, but then I had to go out into the world again.

I took a deep breath and then we left. It was only a short walk to the limo, but it seemed like an eternity. The cameras were flashing, the four helicopters were whirring, and the people in the cornfield cheered. It was sensory overload. I was wearing a simple black coat with a white linen shirt and a white knit kufi on my head. I was trying to be a humble brother, but it was hard.

Before we flew to Ohio, I wanted to stop at a local mosque and pray as a heartfelt gesture of appreciation and gratitude, but even that became magnified into a circus show. Siddeeq had enlisted Muhammad Ali to pray with me and he was waiting at the mosque when we got there. There was a mob of people and everyone was jockeying for a position so they could be seen with me in the camera shot. I was always the vehicle to get someone on television or have them mentioned in the papers. That was the devil at his best, right there.

After we prayed, we flew to my house in Ohio. It was ironic that the same team that had seen me into prison was now ushering me out. Don was already pissing me off and I was only hours out of prison. He had stocked the limo with Dom Pérignon. Along the way to my house there were yellow ribbons tied around the trees and big banners that read
MIKE WELCOME BACK TO YOUR FAMILY
and
CHAMP WE MISSED YOU
.

When we got to my house, I saw that Don had planned a big welcome-home party. He had invited all these people who I had no connection to and he catered the event with lobster, shrimp, and pork, and champagne – real appetizing stuff for a Muslim. I kicked everyone out of the house, including Don, and then Monica and I consummated our relationship.

When Don came over the next day, I fired him. We were supposed to have a big press conference announcing our deals with the MGM Grand and Showtime, but I didn’t give a shit. I scratched his name off the press release.

“Mike, please don’t do this, please,” Don started begging. “Don’t do what these white devils are doing to me.” I could give a shit about his pleas. But then he opened up an attaché case filled with a million dollars in cash and that caught my attention. No other promoter could come up with that much cash, so I changed my mind again. I put his name back in the release and a few days later we held a press conference to announce our new deals.

I had no time to adjust to the world. I had so many people in my face because I had $200 million in fights lined up. It was worse than when I went in. Everybody was around me saying, “Mike’s the man. He’s the man.” But now I had a different frame of mind. I was afraid of everybody. Prison doesn’t rehabilitate anyone; it dehabilitates you. I don’t care how much money you earn when you get out, you’re still a lesser person than when you went in. I was paranoid. I thought everybody was gonna hurt me. I’d panic every time I’d hear an ambulance siren. One time, Monica and I were in bed and I woke up and looked at her and grabbed her. For some reason I thought somebody had come into the bed and was trying to stab me. I was so scared.

I wasn’t the same guy; I had become hard. Prison basically took the whole life out of me. I never again trusted anyone – not even myself around certain people. I never wanted to be in any kind of situation around women. It had been brewing over my head for so many years that I wasn’t able to let it go; it even really bothers me to this day. All my friends say, “Let that die, let that die,” but they’re not the one who has to deal with it. That’s a hard pillow to sleep with.

I had signed those two contracts that advanced us a lot of money, so no one wanted to hear that I needed some time to get my mind and my life together. Everybody expected so much out of me. I was conflicted. As scared as I was, I was also starting to get arrogant again. I wanted everything. I thought I was owed a lot from my time in prison. I wanted to fuck the best girls, buy the best cars, own the best houses. I was the Count of Monte Cristo. I was a gladiator. God himself couldn’t produce a better fighter. And here I was, afraid of ambulance sirens.

I wanted to perform up to the most impeccable standards, but I didn’t know if I could. I was twenty-nine years old, but I felt a lot slower. I didn’t have the same hunger I had before I went to jail. And, more than anything else, I felt ashamed that I had been in prison. Every time I went to a new city, I had to go and register as a sex offender. If I forgot, I’d get pulled aside at the airport by the police.

“Excuse me, can I talk to you?” the cop would ask. “I see that you haven’t registered when you came here, so if you would be so kind as to register in your destination city that would be much appreciated. I could arrest you right now so I think it would be prudent to register as soon as you arrive.”

Oh, God. That shit still goes on to this day when I travel.

Even though everyone was expecting me to decimate the whole heavyweight division, it wasn’t going to be that easy. Nobody in boxing history had ever been robbed of three years of their life and then come back like nothing had happened. Ali had been stripped of his title, but he hadn’t been in jail for three years, unable to train, so that just added to the pressure I was under.

I really tried to be a good brother when I got out, but I got swept into the material world. There were too many people throwing themselves at me and my consciousness wasn’t fully developed then. I was still praying but all these distractions were permeating my head and pushing me back to that pre-prison Mike.

It’s easy to blame Don for pulling me right back into that sick world of garish consumption and booze and women. Maybe he was genuinely concerned that I might begin to follow some Muslim creep and get rid of his ass. But you can’t blame anyone but me. I wanted to prove to everybody that I was still the man, even though I had been locked up for three years. Underneath that chiseled body, I was still a glutton. If it was up to me, I’d eat cakes and ice cream all day. So I had to suppress that part of me.

But it wasn’t that easy to suppress my sex drive. Monica wanted to surround me with a family and a stable home life, but I didn’t want that back then. I was totally out of my league trying to be a family man; I was still much too immature. My idea of being a family dude was “Just shut up and take the money.” I was a selfish pig.

Shortly after I got out of jail, I was in New York with Craig Boogie. We were walking down the street and I saw this beautiful black girl and I started following her. I was trying to stop her to get her to talk to me, but she ducked into a Banana Republic store. I followed her in and saw her go into a dressing room to try something on. We were waiting outside the door when she came out of the store.

She just kept running away, she didn’t want to talk to me.

A week later, I was doing a photo session in my house in Ohio for some magazine and this girl showed up. She was the stylist on the shoot.

“Hey, I know you,” I said. “I guess our meeting was just fate. You were delivered to my house.”

She was so hot that the photographer was hitting on her the whole time too. But I kept up with that prisony pseudo intellectual modern mack rap and she went for it. She told me her name was Tuesday, and from that day on we would be together for many, many Tuesdays to come.

Now that the money was rolling in, it was time to buy some really luxe properties. I needed a place in Vegas since I would be fighting there, so I bought a beautiful six-acre spread next door to Wayne Newton’s mansion. I had a great time decorating that house. Everything was Versace, from the toilet paper holders to the blankets and the pillows. When you entered the house through these giant wooden doors with crystal handles, you immediately saw a giant waterfall with two lion figurines on either side of it. There were vaulted ceilings so the trickling of the water would cascade throughout the house and create a feeling of tranquility.

I liked to watch karate movies, so I set up several different home theaters there. My bedroom was tricked-out with the latest in high-tech sound equipment. I loved my sounds so much that sometimes I would put sound systems in my cars that cost more than the car itself. For the foyer upstairs, I commissioned a two-thousand-square-foot mural of all the greatest fighters in history. That set me back $100,000.

When you went out to the backyard, you’d think you were in Italy. Or at least the Bellagio Hotel. I had a moat put in, as well as a huge pool. The pool was ringed with seven-foot statues of fierce warriors like Alexander the Great, Hannibal, Genghis Khan, and Jean-Jacques Dessalines, the Haitian revolutionary. You can’t just go out and buy a giant statue of Hannibal, so I called the guy who did the lions at the MGM Grand, and he worked from pictures I supplied and then got a crane to place the statues. Ringing the entire yard were exotic trees that cost $30,000 each. The maintenance on the trees came to almost $200,000 a year.

Of course I had to have an East Coast mansion as well, so I went out and bought the largest house in the state of Connecticut. It was over fifty thousand square feet and had thirteen kitchens and nineteen bedrooms. My goal was to fill each bedroom with a different girl at the same time. It was quite a spread. Thirty wooded acres, an indoor and outdoor pool, a lighthouse, a racquetball court, and an actual nightclub that I called Club TKO.

I felt like Scarface in that house. My master bedroom was five thousand square feet. I had a walk-in closet that was so big and filled with elaborate clothing and shoes and cologne that you would have thought you were in an actual Versace store. When Monica was there, she had her own walk-in closet that was over a thousand square feet. There was a huge balcony off the bedroom that looked out over the main floor of the house. I could get to the bedroom by walking up these twin circular marble stairs or I could take a glass elevator. It was a great house, but in the six years I owned it, you could count the number of times I was actually there on two hands.

I still owned the Ohio mansion, and then I bought a fourth house for Monica, a nice place on the golf course of the Congressional Country Club in Maryland, the same course Tiger Woods often played on. But I wasn’t just spending my money on houses. I started indulging again in my car obsession. When I had been in jail, I was down to six cars, but I started building my collection again with Vipers, Spyders, Ferraris, and Lamborghinis. We’d drag race them up and down the street outside my Vegas house.

I’d supply all my guys with fine cars. Me and Rory and John Horne once were walking by a Rolls-Royce dealership in Vegas and we looked in the window. The salesmen inside didn’t think much of three black guys in sneakers and jeans peering through the glass at the expensive cars, and when we walked in the place, they didn’t recognize me so they had some junior flunkie take care of us.

“That Rolls there, how many do you have on the lot?” I asked the guy.

“Do you want to test-drive it?” the young salesman asked.

“No, I’ll just take all you have in stock,” I said.

That kid got promoted to general manager after I left the place.

After each of my fights, Boogie and I would go to L.A. and spend the entire day shopping on Rodeo Drive. Then we’d have a nice dinner, pick up some girls, and hit the clubs. I’d still hit the Versace store at Caesars from time to time, dropping $100,000 at a time. We’d leave the place and it looked like a scene out of
Coming to America
with all these people carrying bags and bags just loaded with stuff. The ironic part is that most of the clothing stayed in my closets. I would usually just wear my sneakers and my jeans or some sweats. Johnny Versace used to send me invitations to all his parties when I was in prison. He knew I couldn’t come but it was his way of letting me know he was thinking about me. He was an awesome guy.

I had so much money that I couldn’t even keep track of it. One time, Latondia, Rory’s assistant, was hanging out in New Jersey at Rory’s house. She didn’t have time to pack a bag, so when she got there, she went to a guest room where there was a Louis Vuitton duffel bag. She assumed it was either mine or Rory’s, and figuring she could find a clean T-shirt in there, she opened the bag and was shocked. There was a million dollars in cash in the bag. She immediately called Rory into the room and showed him her discovery.

“Man, Mike forgot where he left that bag,” Rory said. “I’m going to call him right now and ask him to loan me two hundred thousand dollars.”