Undisputed Truth: My Autobiography (48 page)

From the dressing room she called her husband and told him what had happened. He called the police and claimed that me and my entourage were at Cheetahs right that moment manhandling the strippers and throwing them around the club. The Vegas police dispatched eight cars to the scene. I talked to one of the cops who told me that when he was working the Vice division, strippers wouldn’t take no for an answer. They were just hustlers trying to milk men dry. The cops took her aside and grilled her and she admitted that I never struck her and that she was fine, she was just embarrassed. She told the cops that her pride was hurt and she told me that if I had thrown her $500 this never would have happened. “After all this embarrassment I should be able to get something out of this,” she told them. The cops then left and because there was no incident, they didn’t charge me with anything. She finished her shift, doing lap dances and pole dances.

I guess she went home to her scam artist husband and he got to her because the next day she changed her story and filed a police report that claimed that “Tyson reached out with his open hand and punched/shoved her in the chest area causing her to literally fly across the room and land on the floor. She stated she was stunned and Tyson proceeded to call her a ‘skanky whore’ and ‘a bitch.’ She said she received bruises from the incident.” The police then reopened the investigation and again found no merit to her claim, calling her allegations “completely unfounded.”

But that didn’t stop her. She sued me a few months later. In the suit she said, “Tyson’s violent and painful blow sent [her] several feet across the floor and caused her to fall on her tailbone, with the heel of her shoe sharply striking her leg as she landed on the floor.” She claimed emotional distress, bodily injury, and stress in the marital relationship that curtailed their marital activities.

The case dragged on. The following April I had to give a deposition. I was not amused having to sit there and listen to her lawyer’s bullshit questions. He was asking me to recount the situation when she approached me.

“You’re sitting, if I understand it, and I’ll try to make this short, you were sitting on, I guess, the couch area next to the deejay booth?”

“Yes.”

“And how did she come at you?”

“She’s a tramp. She insisted on giving me a lap dance. I said, ‘No.’ I didn’t want a lap dance. She went away and came back and she was insisting. She tried to thrust herself upon me. I put my hand out.”

“Did your hand come in contact with Miss Bianca?”

“Yeah, it could have, but from her being aggressive. My hand was out there for her to keep her distance away from me, not from me being aggressive, no.”

He kept badgering me. I called him a piece of shit and a fucking dick. He called for a recess and huddled with my lawyer. We had offered him ten grand to settle the case, they were asking for forty. When they came back from recess, he told me he wasn’t going to keep me anymore.

“I don’t need to be here anymore, because your client is a liar. You don’t want to keep me here, I’ve done nothing wrong,” I said.

The case went to arbitration when their attorney claimed that we had accepted the forty-grand settlement. The arbitration judge ruled against her. They appealed. We arbitrated again and she got $8,800, plus I had to pay the arbitrator $1,615. And my attorney charged me $25,000. That was the most expensive lap dance I never had.

By June, I was back in Phoenix training for my next fight. I was in a really bad mood and I was taking it out on my probation officer who was a really nice woman. But I didn’t get my ass thrown back in jail thanks to one of the greatest lawyers I ever came across. His name was Darrow Soll and he was a Jewish cat, a former Green Beret. He didn’t look like a badass; he was big but not muscular big. He was solid. We really bonded. Darrow was a really smart lefty, ACLU-type guy. He told me his father had been killed by one of those white Aryan supremacists, but he would still defend Aryan Nation guys. Darrow would take up the cases of the black guys who were on death row unjustly and not even charge them, even though he was broke to the teeth half the time. He was a wonderful man.

He was connected in the Phoenix law scene and helped smooth out a lot of shit for me over the years. My probation officer Erika was trying to get me to do more community service, but two different places refused to take me, so I yelled at her a couple of times on the phone. But Darrow chilled her out and told her that “medication” problems were causing my bad behavior.

“Good news. After much discussion Erika agreed to omit Mike’s verbal outbursts from her reports to her supervisor. She did this in large part because Mike was apologetic in his last meeting with her,” he wrote in a memo to my team.

Now my English promoters were worried about that bullshit lawsuit from the Cheetah girl. If I had had a bad probation report I might not have been allowed back into the U.K. to fight Lou Savarese. I was due to leave on June sixteenth, but I was back in New York because one of my best friends Darryl Baum got murdered on June tenth. People called him “Homicide” but I still called him by his original street name, “Shorty Love.” He hated that name because he hated anything that would make him seem soft and vulnerable. Shorty Love was from my neighborhood and he had a really notorious street rep for hurting people. I would always see him hanging around with the tough guys in the neighborhood. These guys were damn-near grown and he was just a little kid, but it was like he was the leader.

They called him Homicide because he was a knockout artist when he was twelve years old. He’d go up to someone on the street and knock them out with one punch and rob their jewelry or their sheepskin coat. In 1986, he went to jail on a two-to-six-year sentence for robbery. He was so violent in jail that he wound up serving twice his time. He finally got out on December 31, 1999. When he got out, I broke him off some money and bought him a nice Rolex and a chain and a Mercedes-Benz. I also offered to give him a job as one of my security men. I just wanted him to get off the streets and straighten out his life.

“Hang out with me,” I told him. “Don’t do that shit no more, we could get some money.”

“I ain’t going to take no fucking money from you, Mike,” he said. “Too many people took money from you.”

Shorty Love was gangster to the core. He wanted to be in that life. He got involved in a drug dispute between two rival gangs and they shot him dead six months after he got out of jail. Isn’t it crazy? All of my old friends, they all got murdered or they killed somebody. They were good people just caught up in drugs, sex, and death. That’s what my life was all about, being reckless.

I paid for Shorty’s funeral. I rented out this big luxurious Italian funeral home in Brooklyn and we had to add three other rooms because so many people showed up to pay their respects to him.

So I reluctantly got on that plane to England to make my fight.

Once I got to Scotland my mood lifted. The fight was in Glasgow and the reception for me there was overwhelming. I was doing some blow before the fight and I smoked some pot. There was no problem with the blow because that leaves your system right away, but for the pot, which stays in your system, I had to use my whizzer, which was a fake penis where you put in someone’s clean urine to pass your drug test. Jeff Wald’s assistant Steve Thomas used to travel with me and contribute.

I was high as a kite the day before the fight. They dressed me up in a kilt and I saluted the crowd from the top of a Mercedes-Benz. I was jumping up and down on the roof of the car screaming, “Champion! Champion!” and the people went crazy. A German man came up to me and told me it was a German car, trying to impress me that it was expensive.

“Big fucking deal,” I said. “Oh, so this is what you did with the money that you stole from the Jews? You bought cars?” I shouldn’t have said it; that was just me being political and disgusting.

Savarese was an interesting opponent for me. He was no tomato can. He had gone the distance and lost a split decision to George Foreman in 1997. In 1998 he knocked out Buster Douglas in one round. He had thirty-two KOs in forty-two bouts, but I didn’t think he would pose any problem for me.

The bell rang and he went down from my first punch, a looping left hook that hit him up on the temple. He got up and I was all over him. He was on his way down again when the ref got in between us. I didn’t realize that the ref was actually stopping the fight, so I kept punching and I accidentally hit him with a left hook and knocked him down. The British broadcasters later joked that that particular ref could never take a punch.

I was one of those spoiled-brat fighters. I thought I could get away with things like hitting the ref and not getting in trouble. But this particular time I really wasn’t trying to hit the ref. I was just being mean until I hurt Savarese. I was really psyched up when Jim Gray from Showtime interviewed me after the fight.

“Mike, was that your shortest fight ever?”

“I bear witness there is only one God and Mohammed blesses and peace be upon him as his prophet. I dedicate this fight to my brother Darryl Baum, who died. I’ll be there to see you, I love you with all of my heart. All praise be to my children, I love you, oh God, oh man, what?!”

“Is this your shortest fight ever, in any time? Amateur, professional, ever?”

“Assalamu alaikum Maida. I don’t know man, yeah, Lennox Lewis, Lennox I am coming for you.”

“Is it frustrating to train like you did and then have this over in seven or eight seconds?”

“I only trained probably two weeks or three weeks for this fight. I had to bury my best friend and I wasn’t going to fight, but I dedicated this fight to him. I was going to rip his heart out, I am the best ever, I am the most brutal and the most vicious and most ruthless champion there has ever been, there is no one could stop me. Lennox is a conqueror? No! I am Alexander, he is no Alexander. I am the best ever, there has never been anybody as ruthless. I am Sonny Liston, I am Jack Dempsey, there is no one like me, I am from their cloth. There is no one that can match me, my style is impetuous, my defense is impregnable and I am just ferocious, I want your heart, I want to eat his children, praise be to Allah!”

With that, I stormed away. I was doing all this ranting because I was losing my mind. I was getting so high, my brain was getting fried. I was taking phrases from the Shaw Brothers karate movies like
Five Deadly Venoms
. I was quoting from Apocalypse, my favorite cartoon character. He was just a black badass and he always spoke so nobly. “Watch me and tremble as I bring the purity of oblivion to your world.” I was a little guy but I talked big like that. I was talking that WWE wrestling patter, eating his babies. I thought I was a tough badass but I was really just a showman in my blood.

Back in the States my parole officer worried about my comments after the Savarese fight and about an alleged confrontation with the promoter of the fight, Frank Warren. Darrow smoothed it all out. I was even allowed to associate with Ouie.

One of the conditions of my parole was to see a psychiatrist, so I met with Dr. Barksdale and his associate in Tempe, Arizona. The meeting didn’t go so well. But once again, Darrow came to the rescue.

“It is my understanding that the initial meeting with you and your partner may have been rough,” he wrote Barksdale. “Notably, however, Mike telephoned me last night on an unrelated issue and explicitly asked whether he could see you and your partner again. I must tell you that, based upon my experience with Mike, this was quite encouraging.”

I was back in Vegas. One of the reasons why I was in such great shape for the two fights in the U.K. was that I had taken to walking thirty miles a day, sometimes in 105-degree weather. I usually walked alone, but I had some foolish friends who thought that it might be a joyride to walk with me and pick up girls along the way, but it wasn’t like that. There was no talking, no stopping, I was just zoning out. One friend of mine had a heart attack walking with me.

I started these long walks when I was reading a book about Alexander the Great and his army. They were walking sixty miles a day back then so I just said, “Fuck this, I can do this.” I got to ten miles a day and my feet felt like someone had taken a blowtorch to them. I had great sneakers on too, New Balance, and they still felt like someone set them on fire. I did a little more reading and I found out that all these great warriors would do these marches high. The history of war is the history of drugs. Every great general and warrior from the beginning of time was high.

So I started incorporating weed and alcohol into my walking regimen. I was pissed off in general but walking high in over 100-degree heat took my bipolar shit to a new level. Liquor, the weed, and the heat didn’t go together. I’d be walking bare-chested with my shirt tied around my head. My pants were falling off because I had lost so much weight. The sun had fried me, so I was as black as tar. I looked like a crackhead. People would see me and they didn’t know if it was me or not. One guy came up to me for an autograph and, pow, I smacked him. I saw a girl I had slept with one time who worked at Versace. She was concerned about me.

“Mike, are you all right?” she asked me.

“Fuck you, bitch,” I yelled at her. “I hate your guts. I never liked you.”

The sun had really fried my brains, I was losing my mind.

I didn’t carry any money on me and I’d get so dehydrated that I’d stumble into stores and the guys in there gave me water. Sometimes the local news choppers would be overhead following me around like I was O.J. in the Bronco.

All this walking was driving my security crazy. They nicknamed me Gump after Forrest Gump. Anthony Pitts would try to follow me at a discrete distance, but sometimes I’d lose him. Sometimes I didn’t even know he was around. I’d walk over to Cheetahs from my gym and Anthony had the managers primed to call him when I got there. Then Anthony and my other guys would take turns sitting in the parking lot watching for me.

One time, I walked all the way over to my friend Mack’s barbershop from my house. It was a particularly hot day and I had a big bag of weed with me. I was hanging out with Mack at his house, but then he had to go pick up some clothes from the dry cleaner so I started walking home. I was so out of it that I was talking to myself. I got a few blocks when I saw Anthony following me in his Suburban. I was high and I just snapped. I didn’t care if I lived or died. I’d go through spurts like that. In my stoned paranoid mind, Anthony was spying on me. Why did he want to go everywhere I fucking went? It slipped my mind that I was paying him to do this.