Undisputed Truth: My Autobiography (53 page)

“I broke my back.”

“What do you mean by that, you broke your back?”

“My back is broken.”

“A vertebrae or a portion …?”

“Spinal.”

“You did that in sparring?”

“No, I did it by a motorcycle accident. The doctor discovered, I was doing my sit-ups, 2,500 a day with my twenty-pound weight, and one day I couldn’t move anymore. And I just asked the doctor, ‘What is wrong?’ And he said, ‘Believe it or not your back is broken slightly.’ ”

“Are you in pain right now? Did you take some type of injection? How did you make it to this fight?”

“I can’t take injections; you know they’re going to test me. But all praise be to Allah, I don’t know. I’m just happy that I’m fighting and I’m punching well and accurate.”

“Were you ready for this fight, Mike, I mean your trainer Freddie Roach advised you four days before the fight, not to fight. Were you ready?”

“No, but I’m obligated, I’ve got to be a man and fight. I canceled too many fights in my career, and I don’t want anybody to think I was afraid. And I needed the money, I am always in need of money, and I am glad the both of us did it. I have so much respect for him as a man, he is a friend of mine.”

Gray started asking me whether I was going to fight Lewis again. That was the speculation: another big Lewis fight to make a lot of money.

“I’m not ready to fight him now. I’m not interested in getting beat up again. I don’t know if I want to fight anymore if I have to fight Lewis next fight. I want to get my shit together. I’m so messed up; I just want to get my life together.”

I carried that morose attitude with me back to my hotel suite, trailed by my documentary film crew. I did a video conference call with my kids to see if they had seen their daddy win. Then I kicked the camera crew out of my room and started partying with my pimp/gangster friend. He had brought some of his girls with him along with another girl who was a friend of a friend. I had a few snorts of coke and smoked some weed and my mood lifted. We had a few bottles of Dom Pérignon open. My friend was telling one of his war stories and we were all laughing and the girl who was a friend of my friend joked and said, “Oh, you’re full of shit, nigga.”

BOOM! My friend grabbed that Dom bottle and clocked her on the head with it. I tried to stop him, but he was too fast. The blood was bursting out of her head like an oil geyser.

I was thinking that my life was ruined. We were in the South. The girl was screaming like crazy, and she was married to a very well-known celebrity. My friend was going to have to kill these people and I would be associated with all this. Then all of a sudden, my friend and the girl were talking all pleasant with each other. That was just how that pimp-ho shit goes.

I had picked up another $5 million from the Etienne fight, but I was still in massive debt. My lawsuit against Don King was still making its way through the court system and Don was getting nervous about me having my day in court. So he started reaching out to me. I didn’t have any long-standing contract with Shelly, so I was a free agent of sorts at the time. Don figured he could woo me and show me a little cash and I’d come back to him and drop the lawsuit.

I was consumed with getting money. I couldn’t wait years for the lawsuit to play out; I needed money right then. Instant gratification wasn’t quick enough for me. So I reached out to Jackie Rowe to help me deal with Don. Jackie was like a pit bull. I’d say, “Baby, get me this,” and she’d go out and get it done. And then I’d go get high.

In April of that year, I had Jackie talk Don into buying me three Mercedes-Benzes. I had him put one of them in Jackie’s name, one in Luz’s name, and the other in my friend Zip’s name. We were playing Don, telling him that if he’d come through with cash and cars, maybe I’d drop the lawsuit. So Don would set up a meeting thinking he could fool me into signing some new agreement to settle the case for peanuts and I’d wind up robbing or beating him each time.

One time, I brought two childhood friends of mine to a hotel room where Don was staying. They were supposed to scare Don, but Don started talking and had them all shook up. I was looking at my guys like,
What the fuck, you’re supposed to be tough guys.
So all of a sudden I got up and smacked the shit out of Don.

“Just shut the fuck up, motherfucker,” I said.

And my guys, the guys I brought up to deal with Don, started jumping on me to restrain me.

Meanwhile, I kept meeting with Don whenever he reached out to me. I’m so happy that at that stage in my life, I didn’t have the guts that I had back when I was younger or I really would have done a number on Don. Don once called me and said that he was going to come over to my office in Vegas and drop off $100,000 for me. My friend Zip was in town, so the two of us were there waiting for Don to show up.

Don arrived with a bag full of cash and began counting out $100,000. Zip walked over to him, calmly took the whole bag, and brought it over to me.

“Thank you very much. Please escort Don to the door,” I said.

Zip grabbed Don’s arm and walked him out.

“Me and the champ are going to work out now,” Zip said.

“Hey, man, I need that money,” Don said.

“See you later, Don, it was a pleasure meeting you. I’ve always been a big fan,” Zip said and closed the door in his face. We started counting the money. There was sure a lot of gwap in the bag.

My lawyer Dale Kinsella heard about these meetings with Don and drafted a letter to Don’s attorney at the end of May.

I am appalled about what is going on with the participation of your office in the last thirty days.

1. Jerry Bernstein and I are Mike’s counsel of record. To work so perilously to exclude us from what is going on should cause anybody, let alone Judge Daniels, to have serious reservations about any proposed settlement.
   
2. Don appears to have learned absolutely nothing from this litigation. It is Don’s persistence in getting Mike sequestered, whether in an office or in a hotel room, and having him execute documents
   without the benefit of any independent legal or financial advice, which is a core fact of this litigation
   . I truly do not understand what anybody on your side of the table is thinking.
   
3. Mike’s propensity to sign agreements, let alone settlement agreements, under the influence of people that he trusts, respects, and/or whom he believes he can trust (even if momentarily) is well documented. His recent decision to settle his divorce with Monica without counsel or financial advice (which had to be undone on the grounds of undue influence) is a prime example of what I am talking about.
   
4. If and when Mike is served with process, and if and when Jerry and you and I are called upon to address the court, these matters as well as others will undoubtedly be raised. I agree with the court that Mike’s case is his case and not his lawyer’s, but for everybody’s sake any settlement consummated between Mike and Don should (and probably must) be reviewed by someone who is independently representing Mike.
   

In this context, I would appreciate it if Don and/or your office would see fit to advise Jerry and me to what in the world is going on.

What Dale didn’t know was that a few weeks before he sent that letter, I had Jackie negotiating with Don behind their backs. My assistant Darryl had called Jackie to tell her that we were down to our last $5,000. We had no money to pay the house bills or the maintenance workers or anything. Jackie came out to Vegas and saw how dire my financial situation was.

“I want my fucking money from Don,” I told her.

Don was thrilled to hear from Jackie. He was desperate to settle the case because we finally had gotten a trial date the coming September. As soon as we heard that, Jeff Wald told me that Don was going to do his magic and we’d see why he was Don King. Jeff didn’t know that I had Jackie talking directly with Don, trying to get some money from him. Don was offering me a $20 million settlement in exchange for him getting to promote my fights again. I told Jackie that before we could talk about working together and settling, I wanted three things of mine that Don still had – a green Rolls-Royce, a painting that the Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi had given me that was supposed to be worth a lot, and the thing I was worried the most about: a drawing of me in the middle of a bunch of X-Men that Stan Lee had done.

Don called Jackie and told her that he would fly us down to Florida and put us up in the Delano Hotel so we could work out a settlement. Jackie, her son, my girlfriend Luz, and I got on Don’s private jet and flew down. I packed a big block of coke and a duffel bag with a half-pound of reefer. I was doing my coke and smoking my blunts and listening to my Discman and I was higher than the plane was when an epiphany hit me.

“This is my motherfucking plane. I paid for this plane. And this motherfucker is acting like he’s doing me a favor sending me down on my own fucking plane. This nigga is playing me.”

The drugs were playing with my head and I was freaking out and getting jealous.

Don picked us up at the private airport in his Rolls and he had Isadore Bolton, his chauffeur, who used to be my chauffeur before he stole him from me, driving some of Don’s associates in the lead car. We were driving down to Miami from Fort Lauderdale on I-95, the main highway, and Jackie was in the front seat and I was in the back with Luz and Jackie’s son. Don said some innocuous thing, and all that jealousy and rage spilled out of me and I kicked him in his fucking head. Boom! You don’t turn your back on a jealous cokehead.

Don swerved off onto the side median and I started choking him from the backseat.

“No, no, let him go, Mike,” Jackie screamed.

“Jackie, you hold this nigga up, I’m coming to the front,” I said.

She said, “Okay, I got him.”

I got out of the car to get into the front seat and kick his ass some more, but Jackie couldn’t hold him, she was in shock, and Don took off down the median.

Now I was on the side of the fucking highway by myself. Don drove a little bit down the road and then let Jackie and her son and Luz out of the car. They came up to me carrying my bag with the half-pound of reefer. I had the coke stash on me when I got out of the car.

“Why did you let him go, Jackie?” I screamed. “Now we’re out here on the fucking highway.”

The cars and the trucks were whizzing by us. All of a sudden, Isadore pulled up. He was there to pick us up because he lost our car and when he called Don, Don told him to turn around and get us.

He pulled up alongside me and rolled his window down and told me to get in the car.

“Fuck you, motherfucker,” I screamed.

Isadore got out of his driver’s door and I was right on him. I punched him in the face twice, shattering his left orbital bone. The force of the blows knocked him across the driver’s seat and I reached in and grabbed his leg and bit it. Isadore managed to kick me off him and close his door, so I punched the outer panel of his door and bent the steel. I was about to break his window when he managed to drive away.

His shoes were still on the side of the road and he was driving barefoot.

Then the cops came. They were talking to us and I had the half brick of coke and Luz was holding the duffel bag with the half-pound of weed. These cops were so excited to see me that the motherfuckers didn’t even ask me what the four of us were doing on the side of the highway. They’d have put anybody else’s ass on that grass, and they’d be locked up for life for having all that coke. I’m an extremist. Why couldn’t I just buy an eight ball? No, I had to have a half a brick. The guys who sold it to me said, “Mike, this is sales weight. Police are not going to hear that you’re getting high with a half a brick of blow.” And I had this as my personal stash.

The cops offered to drive us to our destination and we piled into one of the cars and they took us to South Beach. Don had reserved half of a floor for us, so we started living it up. Jackie talked Don into giving us some money, and he sent a guy over with a couple hundred grand.

We partied every night for a month and then a friend of mine came by with his tour bus and we picked up a couple of girls and drove all around the East Coast.

In June, I got hit with another bullshit paternity case. This lying wench Wonda Graves claimed that I had raped her in 1990 and that I had fathered a boy. That piece-of-shit lawyer Raoul Felder, who represented Robin Givens, took on the case and bragged that he would “defeat Mike Tyson in the ring again.” They both crawled back into the gutter when the DNA test came back and showed a zero percent chance that I was the father.

But I was no angel then either. Later that month I was visiting my childhood friend Dave Malone and we were flying our pigeons in Brownsville. That night Dave drove me back to the Marriott Hotel where I was staying. Outside the hotel, two guys who were returning to their rooms and they were pretty drunk and came up to me and asked me for an autograph. I was high on cocaine. Let me tell you something about me. When I was getting high and it was nighttime or early in the morning, I was not a good person to meet. I was just nasty, looking for trouble. I could have these Herculean fucking mood swings, almost Jekyll and Hyde shit.

So these two Puerto Rican guys approached me and asked me for my autograph. I told them to fuck off.

“You ain’t all that, anyway,” one of them said. “We got guns and you only got your fists.”

If I wasn’t on coke probably nothing would have happened. But I was, so I chased them into the lobby and up the escalator. We got to the top of the escalator and I knocked one of them out with one punch. The other guy was hiding behind the front desk and I pulled him out and hit him. He was spared when hotel security came.

The fight was my fault. They were going to charge me with misdemeanor assault and them with menacing and harassment. I had to go to court the next day and when I got back I showed my friends Dave and Zip the thick rap sheet that was part of the court record.

“They’re born troublemakers,” Dave said. “Look at their records.”

“Hey, that’s my rap sheet,” I corrected him.