Undisputed Truth: My Autobiography (54 page)

“Man, we hang around you because we think you’re a celebrity and you’re gonna give us a good look,” Zip said. “You got a worse police record than we do, nigga.”

I was living day to day then. By now I was tired of all the bullshit surrounding me. I didn’t feel like there was anyone in my camp I could trust and I got tired of all the Machiavellian power grabs, so I got rid of my whole management team.

So now I had Shelly handling what was left of my career. I had a rematch clause in my contract with Lennox Lewis and he wanted to fight me again to get another big payday. But I didn’t want to get my ass kicked twice. If I was motivated and got in top shape I had no doubt that I could have kicked his ass. But I wasn’t interested in boxing; I was interested in drugs.

So Shelly and Lewis’s people came up with the idea of me fighting on the undercard of Lennox’s next fight. I would be billed as a co-headliner. I declined to fight on the undercard because it was a dis to me. So we turned down Lewis’s offer and they turned around and sued me and Don King for $385 million, claiming that King was enticing me to neglect the contract so he could promote my next fights.

My only real asset left was my suit against Don. By then, Jeff Wald knew that I was meeting with Don and he was furious at me. He told me that Don would keep delaying lawsuits that were filed against him until the last minute before the trial was about to start and then he would settle. Jeff and Dale Kinsella were telling me that we could settle for as much as $60 million out of the $100 million we had sued for and that I might even be able to get my fight film library back, which would be money in the bank for me for years to come. All I had to do was hold on until our court date in September.

But my financial predicament was so bad that the people who were around me on a day-to-day basis were telling me to file for bankruptcy. Jackie and I had been hanging around Jimmy Henchman at that time, the rap entrepreneur who managed the Game and was CEO of Czar Entertainment. Jimmy brought in Barry Hankerson, a record producer who had managed Toni Braxton and R. Kelly. They were all pushing for me to file for bankruptcy. Hankerson had told Jackie that I should file a Chapter 11 bankruptcy, so Jackie actually went online and Googled “Chapter 11 Bankruptcy.” That was what I was dealing with at the time. Jackie was a good person but she was in way over her head. None of us knew anything about high finance or bankruptcy; we were just having fun and spending money.

So I called Jeff Wald and told him that all these people were suggesting that I go bankrupt.

“Do not file for bankruptcy because the minute you do, we don’t control the lawsuit anymore, the bankruptcy judge does. Then the suit is out of our hands,” he told me.

“Well, what if I lose?” I asked.

“You’re not going to lose. It’s black and white,” he said.

I wasn’t so sure. In my first deposition against Don I had picked up a pitcher of water and poured it on his lap. And now Don had that Florida stomping to hold over my head.

Wald was convinced that Don was working all my friends, including Jackie, to influence me to file for bankruptcy. He started calling me a few times a day, begging me not to file. But I didn’t believe that my friends were taking kickbacks.

But when I looked at the mountains and mountains of bills that I couldn’t pay, I decided to file. Hankerson got me a bankruptcy lawyer and we filed on August first. That same day, I went shopping on Rodeo Drive with Hankerson, Henchman, and my bodyguard Rick. Hey, just because I filed for bankruptcy didn’t mean I had zero money. I just didn’t have $100 million to pay off my debts. I was still hustling deals. The media made a big deal of me shopping on Rodeo Drive, but they didn’t go into the stores with me. I was talking to Muslim guys who ran some of these high-end clothes stores and I pulled out my Muslim card in hopes they would cut me a deal.

“How about if I give you fifteen hundred dollars for this three-thousand-dollar suit, my brother. You know the golden rule of Islam. Want for your brother what you want for yourself.”

The next day all the newspapers had every little detail of my finances splashed across their pages. I owed about $27 million, $17 million of which was for back taxes I owed the IRS and the English tax people. The other $10 million was for personal expenses, which included the money I owed Monica from the divorce, what I owed the banks for my mortgages, and my huge legal fees.

I was so overwhelmed and pissed off by the whole bankruptcy thing that I just gave up my house.

“Fuck it, take the fucking house,” I told my lawyers and they auctioned it off. I was so high I couldn’t get anything done. I was just working out. I had no fight scheduled, but I worked out anyway and got high.

I was a real adaptable kind of guy. I could live in the gutter or in an elevated state. I knew all the hustles and I was gambling with life. Even when I was in the gutter, I had my $2,000 pants and shoes on. I didn’t have a nickel in my pocket, but I was still talking shit, hitting on chicks.

I spent some time in Phoenix with Shelley, the mother of my child. Dave Malone came down and hung out with me for a while. I was so poor that we were eating Frosted Flakes and Twizzlers for dinner. We had no money to do anything, so we used to sit in the backyard and watch my pigeons fly. Every once in a while, I’d set up an autograph signing somewhere and I’d charge twenty-five bucks for an autograph, just to get over the hump. I was so poor that a guy who had stolen my credit card account number went online to complain that I was so broke he couldn’t even pay for a dinner with my credit card.

But there were some benefits. I went back east and I was hanging out with my friend Mario Costa who had some of my pigeons behind the Ringside Lounge, his restaurant and bar in Jersey City. It was a beautiful Indian summer day and we were sitting in the back where the pigeons were. I fell asleep and Mario left me alone. Two hours later I woke up and started shouting, “I’m rich! I’m rich!” Mario came running out back.

“You okay, champ?” he said.

“I’m rich, Mario,” I said. “I don’t have no watch, no money, no phone, but I feel so peaceful. No one’s telling me to ‘go here,’ ‘go there,’ ‘do this.’ I used to have cars that I never drove and I wouldn’t even know where the keys for them were. I had houses I didn’t live in. I had everybody robbing me. Now I have nothing. Nobody calls me, nobody bothers me, nobody is after me. It’s so peaceful. This is rich, man.”

Some of my friends stepped up to the plate for me. My friend Eric Brown and his brother gave me a $50,000 advance from their company CMX Productions. I would have done anything for them, but I never had to.

Meanwhile, in August, my friend Craig Boogie started negotiating a deal for me with the mixed martial arts K-1 people. I had nowhere to live so the K-1 people put me up in a suite in the Beverly Wilshire Hotel in L.A. and paid all my expenses. I needed that. I had already been kicked out of every big hotel on the Strip in Vegas. In return, I did promotional appearances for them.

“Mike, we need you to be in the audience at this event in Hawaii.”

Boom, I flew down to Hawaii. The next month I went somewhere else. I was getting fifty grand for this, a hundred grand for that. I was making all this money by doing nothing. Instead of saving that money and paying off my bills, I bought an Aston Martin Vanquish and a Rolls convertible. I had all these cars and nowhere to go. I shopped on Rodeo Drive every fucking day. I was in these shops, looking in the mirror, deciding how I was going to project myself when I went out that night. I’d be wearing $3,000 pants, a $4,000 shirt, and a $10,000 blazer. Meanwhile, I didn’t have a pot to piss in or a window to throw it out of.

Everybody in the Beverly Wilshire knew me. They’d have these exclusive dinner parties in one of the meeting rooms and I’d crash them. If there was a Palestinian-Israeli debate, I was going. I was a master schnorrer.

I’d have parties in my room and order steaks and lobsters and caviar and Cristal. I’d invite up the biggest dope dealers and hustlers and we’d shoot dice. I’d whoop their asses in the dice game and then talk shit to them.

“Is that all the money you got, nigga? I thought you were a big-time motherfucking player out here in L.A. This is what happens when you fuck with the Iron One. You think I’m just a fighter? I’m a hard stonecutter nigga, man. You may as well go play Lotto; you ain’t gonna win nothing from me.”

I lived it up in that suite for two years. Partying my ass off, getting high on weed and coke, having my girls come up. I ballooned up in weight from all the late-night eating.

Right after I signed up with K-1 that August, they put out a press release that I was going to fight Bob Sapp, a 6'5", 390-pound ex-NFL player who was one of the K-1 stars. But I was never going to fight no kickboxer.

“It might be nice,” I told the
New York Times
when they called me. “But under the Marquis of Queensberry rules. I don’t really feel like getting kicked in the head, you know?”

Then I showed up at the big K-1 fights at the Bellagio in Vegas on August fifteenth. Right after Bob Sapp won his match, he called me into the ring and challenged me.

“I’ll do it right here,” I told the crowd. “Get me a pair of shorts and I’ll fight him tonight with the Marquis of Queensberry. Sign the contract, big boy.”

This was wrestling shit talk. I loved doing these appearances.

A few weeks after I moved into the Beverly Wilshire, I went to Neverland to see Michael Jackson. It was nice hanging out with Michael. He was very low-key then. He asked me what I had been doing and I told him that I had been taking it easy.

“Rest is good. Rest is just real good, Mike,” he told me. “Get as much as you can.”

I didn’t know then that he couldn’t sleep at all.

It was weird, everyone was saying that he was molesting kids then, but when I went there he had some little kids there who were like thug kids. These were no little punk kids, these guys would have whooped his ass if he tried any shit.

In April 2004, I made a joint appearance with Ali at a big K-1 event. Again they announced that I had signed with them to fight and that I’d make my debut that summer. One of their stars had a press conference and said he looked forward to fighting me.

“I would accept a fight under boxing rules,” Jerome Le Banner said. “But as soon as I am in the ring I’d do whatever the fuck I want … Western boxing or not, I will kick him … Tyson has already bit an ear, now he’s gonna eat a size twelve foot.”

I would have been crazy to fight those monsters. I’d rather go back to my hotel suite and just chill.

My bankruptcy was winding along. In June, Don finally settled the suit. The bankruptcy judge let him pay only $14 million. He had played everybody once again. I didn’t get no film rights or anything. Monica was the first to get paid out of the settlement. The bankruptcy lawyers wound up costing $14 million. They got paid ahead of the IRS. I was still up shit’s creek, so I had Shelly get me a fight. He chose an English boxer named Danny Williams and we signed to fight in Louisville on July thirtieth. Williams was the former British heavyweight champ who was on the comeback trail. He had knocked out his last two opponents, but he had lost to Julius Francis so I wasn’t too worried about fighting him.

I had to do press again. A couple of weeks before the fight, I was my usual optimistic self when I met them.

“I guess the thing I am most curious about, Mike, is where you find serenity in your life?” I was asked.

“I don’t know. I’m realizing that I am not the only person that has been in a situation. You have to understand I have lost everything and I mean everything. Anyone I ever cared about, anybody I ever loved, romantic, I’ve just lost everything. My money, home, I’ve lost everything. The people who love you, you just chase them away by being so belligerent and crazy. You have to lose it all. And I think at some point of your life you wish you could receive them back but I guess that is part of our growing pain. We lose people that we love and care about the most in order to start our life off fresh, with a brand-new start.”

I was doing drugs right up to the fight. I went into the fight weighing 232, but I was in pretty good shape. My entourage was gone when I walked into the ring. I had made my security guy Rick one of my cornermen. I rocked Williams in the first round and almost had him out, but he was a smart fighter and he held on to me and got through the round. With thirty seconds to go, I felt something snap in my left knee after I threw a punch. I found out later that I had torn my meniscus, so I was fighting on one leg from the second round on. I still managed to rock him in the second round, but I couldn’t move and be elusive and he started pounding me pretty good to the body. In the third round the ref deducted two points from him for low blows and a late punch.

By the fourth I was just out of gas and was a stationary target. He unleashed a barrage of punches and between my knee and my lack of conditioning I couldn’t move. A final right hand sent me down. Then I was sitting up against the ropes, watching as the ref counted me out. That fight really killed my spirit.

I went back to Phoenix to Shelley’s house and I had an operation on my knee. I was in a wheelchair for a while and then on crutches. Of course, that was another excuse to do drugs. I spent the next few months in a deep depression, just hanging out in the backyard and flying my birds.

I came out of seclusion in October when I went to New York to see the Trinidad-Mayorga fight at Madison Square Garden. I was there with my friend Zip and a new bodyguard from the Bronx. When we walked to our seats in the Garden, the people at the fight went nuts. They hadn’t seen me for a long time and they were losing it. I got a standing ovation. I love Zip like a brother but Zip didn’t understand that the people were just showing appreciation for me. He got so excited.

“We’re back, Mike, we’re back!” he said. “They’ll be calling you for commercials soon. They’ll get you in movies. We’re going to have that big book deal. You’re a hell of a man to overcome this, brother. We’re back!!”

Forget the fact that I was a full-blown cokehead, we were back.