8

It was a long flight back from Tokyo. My eye was still fucked up so I was wearing these big dark sunglasses that Anthony Pitts gave me. During the flight I talked to Anthony.

“So I guess you’re going to leave me now,” I said. The addict in me was saying “I’m doomed. My world is over.”

“Mike, I’ll never leave you,” he said. “You can’t fire me and I can’t quit so we’re stuck together. You watch, you’ll be all right when the swelling goes down.”

We went straight to Camille’s house when we landed. I’m a weird dude, I go right back to the basics. Home to my moms. The next morning Anthony got up at seven a.m., and when he went downstairs I was already doing sit-ups and push-ups.

“Oh, now you want to train? After the motherfucking fight,” he said.

“Man, I’m just trying to stay focused,” I said.

I talked to Camille later. She had been at the fight watching from the front row and she thought that I looked like I was in a daze.

“You didn’t throw any vicious punches,” she said. “You looked like you wanted to lose. Maybe you just got tired of it.”

She was probably right. I believed in the Cus theory that the only thing wrong with defeat is if nothing is learned from it. Cus always used to tell me that fighting is a metaphor for life. It doesn’t matter if you’re losing; it’s what you do after you lose. Are you going to stay down or get back up and try it again? Later I would tell people that my best fight ever was the Douglas fight because it proved that I could take my beating like a man and rebound.

So I hung out in Catskill and played with my pigeons and read about my heroes. How Tony Zale had come back from Rocky Graziano. How Joe Louis came back to demolish Max Schmeling. How Ali came back from exile. How Sugar Ray Robinson just bridled at seeing the word “former” in conjunction with his name. My narcissism started working again and I started thinking that I was from these guys’ bloodline. I knew that it was inevitable that I would get back those belts. I was going to go away to some destitute place and learn this masterful trade and come back and be better, like in all those great Shaw Brothers karate movies. Ain’t that some bullshit? I was just a sewage rat with delusions of grandeur.

Meanwhile, the whole boxing world was in turmoil. The day after the fight, every major newspaper abhorred the idea that Douglas wouldn’t be recognized as the new champ. As soon as he got back to the States, Jose Sulaiman recanted. And Don was reduced to begging for an immediate rematch. He was banking that Evander Holyfield, who was the mandatory challenger, would take a nice sum to step aside to let me fight a rematch. But Holyfield’s people knew that if Evander beat Buster, Don would be on the outside of the heavyweight picture looking in.

Then there were the reporters who couldn’t contain their glee that I had lost. That little slimy coward Mike Lupica from the New York Daily News saw me as some Satan figure.

“Someone who bounces women around and gives it in the back to his friends and turns his back on people who helped make him champion, making it seem as if dogs have more loyalty than he does . . . Tyson was some kind of savage, on whom the culture bestows all that is normal, only for him to reject the gifts and the givers, and revert to life on the instinctual level. The only end for such a man is death.”

Woooo! I loved that shit.

I picked up on that sentiment in an interview I did with ESPN. They asked me why everyone was so fascinated with my life.

“I believe a lot of people want to see me self-destruct. They want to see me one day with handcuffs and walking in the police car or else going to jail. Like you’ve seen Marlon Brando’s son. People love saying, ‘This is what I told you, I told you he was heading for that.’ But I’m not in jail and I’m not in Brownsville anymore and I beat all the odds.”

Don had me do a few press conferences and I tried to put on the best face I could but my honesty kept getting in the way.

“Nobody’s invincible,” I told them. “Sometimes the guy just breaks your will in a way. Buster kicked my butt. I didn’t train for that fight. I didn’t take the fight serious. I was fucking those Japanese girls like I was eating grapes. You’d thought I was Caligula when I was out there in Japan.”

In L.A., I cracked up the press when I told them how I watched the fight on tape back home.

“I sit there and I tell myself, ‘Hey, man, duck!’ But on the screen, I don’t duck. I scream, ‘Duck, you dummy!’ But the dummy don’t listen to me.”

A reporter asked me if I felt suicidal after losing the belt.

“Hey! I got lots of money to spend before I kill myself. You have to deal with things like this every day. Did I cry? I wish I could cry! The last time I cried was when I got my divorce. That’s when you cry. Actually, can I tell you something? It was a relief, is what it was. It was a relief of a lot of pressure.”

The divorce really fucked me up. I wouldn’t want to ever tell anybody that now, so for me to say that then means I must have still been fucked up about it.

People were trying to make excuses for me, but I wasn’t buying it. Even Larry Merchant, who was not always respectful to me, tried to blame the loss on my eye closing up when he interviewed me for an HBO special a week after the fight.

“You have another eye. Use that one. You fight to the finish,” I said. “My heart was still beating.”

When I got back from L.A., I went straight to my refuge in Catskill. Except now half the world was going up there looking to interview me. You’d see reporters from Brazil, England, Scandinavia, Japan hanging out in Catskill and Albany, going to the places I frequented like September’s. They’d ring Camille’s door and she’d fight with them.

“You don’t come here anymore, you leave him alone, he’s just a little baby!” she yelled. “You should feel ashamed of yourself.”

Buster Douglas won the fight but no one was paying any attention to him, people were looking for me. They even made a dance video of my knockout and me fumbling for my mouthpiece. It was ironic. I subconsciously wanted to lose to get out of that pressure cooker but not even that worked.

“Now I can’t quit, I’m a whore to the game,” I told one reporter. “Now I have to prove something. In fact, now I wonder sometimes if I’m not bigger than I was before because I lost.”

In the midst of all this confusion, my sister died. She was the only person who wasn’t afraid to put me in deep check. She was always my protector, even right until she died. She was pretty obese and her husband told me that she had been doing cocaine the night before. I really hope that she wasn’t doing it because she was depressed about me. I had a long phone conversation with her the night before she died.

“Go talk to your father,” she said. “And please get your eye checked out.”

She was always close to Jimmy, our biological dad. She wanted us to start having a relationship. My sister was something. I’d try to give her money but she didn’t like to take my money. She was really comfortable with her ghetto life. She never sweated me for anything.

I was sad when she died, but by then I had become accustomed to death and understood it implicitly. We had her funeral in Brooklyn and the Reverend Al Sharpton presided over it. We would make fun of Reverend Al and tease him about being fat and his big hairdo but he was a giant hero in our community. We were proud of him. You saw where he came from and you knew where he was then and you’d have to say it was a miracle. I saw a documentary on PBS the other night about the history of Broadway and they had Milton Berle talking about growing up poor in Brooklyn. He said that having a humble shitty-paying job wasn’t failing. Going back to Williamsburg and Brownsville, that was failing. That cut me right to my soul.

I had to go visit my friends in Brownsville after I lost the title. I really didn’t want to go back with my tail between my legs but my friends were wonderful. It was all love. I hung out a lot with my friend Jackie Rowe. She and I used to hustle together when I was a kid. Me and my friends would rob a place and then go to Jackie’s house to split the money up. Jackie was a big, brash, in-your-face person, kind of like my sister. In fact, after Niecey died she began to call herself my sister.

Despite thinking that the gods wanted me to get my belt back, I was sad and embarrassed and doubting myself after my loss. Jackie was always upbeat.

“Are you crazy, motherfucker?” she’d yell at me. “Do you know who you are? It was one fight, Mike. You lost. Big deal. Let’s move on. You’re the best.”

“Do you think so?” I’d say.

“Yes, I know so. You just didn’t follow protocol; you just didn’t do what you were supposed to do.”

“You’re right, you’re right,” I said.

I’d visit Jackie and park outside her apartment, which was in one of the city housing projects. I’d just chill at her house and Jackie would go out and get me my favorite food. I’d hang out her window calling to girls. They’d look up and do a double take.

“That can’t be Mike Tyson. Is that Mike Tyson? Mike! Mike!”

When the word got out, so many people rushed out that they had to put police tape around my Ferrari and cordon off the whole block.

Sometimes Jackie took me up to Harlem and people would go crazy.

“You’re still the greatest, champ,” they’d yell out. “You can do it again!”

I definitely got some reassurance by being around all these people and seeing that I was still loved.

Don had signed me to make my comeback in Vegas on June 16, 1990, fighting Henry Tillman. I started training in New York before we went out to Vegas. My buttocks-grabbing case was winding down and I’d go to court and then go train. Emile Griffith, the former world champion, was working with some fighters at the gym I was training at. One day he said something that just rocked me to my bones and made me finally forget about my loss to Douglas.

I was talking to him about that Douglas fight.

“Yeah, I really didn’t do that well, huh?” I said.

“I know the great Mike Tyson is not going to let something like this discourage him,” Mr. Griffith said.

Oh, man. Those few words completely changed my opinion of myself and my comeback. Isn’t that crazy? Just hearing those words made me forget about the loss and think I was champion again. Once he said that, I was back.

We had two new additions to Team Tyson. Don had hired Richie Giachetti as my new head trainer. And I had my first child with this woman Natalie Fears, a son that I named D’Amato.

In mid-April we relocated to Vegas to train. I jumped into it like a maniac. Up at four a.m. to run, working out at the gym, sparring in the afternoon, then riding a bike for two hours at the Las Vegas Athletic Club. George Foreman was fighting on my undercard and he had an interesting thing to say about losing a title.

“You are ashamed to see everybody, especially the skycaps at the airport. You don’t want to see the taxi drivers because everybody is going to say something, in your mind. And you have to build yourself up, so you start spending billions of dollars on cars, suits, anything you can to make yourself look like the best in the world. Mike Tyson will never sleep again until he gets a chance to fight for the title again and win it. He’ll never sleep again until he redeems himself. I hate to see a young man go through that, but that is the way that it is.”

I didn’t necessarily agree with George then. I was such a megalomaniac that I knew that it was foreordained that I’d win the belt back. I just knew that I had to train.

The night of the Tillman fight I was primed. I’m fighting the guy who beat me in the amateurs. It was a great comeback story. The guy goes down and I’d get revamped.

Even though he was an Olympic gold medalist and had a respectable 20-4 record, the odds were 1–2 for a first-round knockout.

I obliged the oddsmakers. At the very beginning of the fight, I took a heavy right from him and it didn’t even faze me. I slowed him up with a huge right to the body and then finally caught him with an overhead right to his temple with twenty-four seconds left in the round. He was out on his back. I really didn’t want to hurt Henry. I wanted to get it over with real quick. I liked him a lot and I was just glad he got a nice payday. Tillman was one of those fighters who was really great but just didn’t have confidence in himself. If he had believed in himself, he would have been a legendary fighter; he would have been in the Hall of Fame.

At the postfight press conference Don was being Don.

“He’s back, he is Mighty Mike Tyson,” he yelled.

I yanked his arm and told him to shut up.

“You know you are back,” Don said.

I talked a little bit about the fight and gave Henry some props but I wanted to talk about my baby boy.

“He’s so gorgeous. He’s six weeks old and twelve pounds. He can already sit up! I live for my son.”

A few months after the fight, my buttocks case finally came to a conclusion. I was convicted of battery and, to assess damages, her attorneys made us file a statement of my assets. Don’s attorney filed it and we found out that Don still owed me $2 million from the Tokyo fight. According to what was filed I had assets of $2.3 million in cash, the Jersey house that was worth $6.2 million, my Ohio house, and about a million and a half in cars and jewelry. My assets totaled $15 million but with all my purses I should have had a lot more. I didn’t know if they were cooking the books for the trial or if I was getting ripped off. Either way the damages the jury awarded to that woman were a bit short of the million dollars they were asking for. They gave her $100. When I heard that verdict, I stood up in court, pulled a hundred-dollar bill out of my pocket, licked it, and pasted it to my forehead. I guess she didn’t want to take cash.

My next comeback fight was supposed to have taken place in Atlantic City on September twenty-second. I was going to fight Alex Stewart. Stewart was a former Jamaican Olympiad who started his career with twenty-four straight knockouts. His only loss was an eighth-round TKO by Evander Holyfield, a fight that he was dominating until he got cut and Holyfield went to work on that cut. During camp, I got a cut over my eye and I needed forty-eight stitches to close it so the fight was postponed until December eighth.

Meanwhile, HBO was pressing to re-sign me. Seth Abraham thought he had reached a deal with Don for a ten-fight extension for $85 million but then Don backed out of it. He claimed that the reason he backed out was because he didn’t want Larry Merchant doing my fights, because Merchant would always talk shit about me. After the Stewart fight Don used that excuse to move to Showtime. I thought that the Showtime deal was better, but later I would learn that it was better for Don not me.

While I waited to fight Stewart, Buster Douglas defended his title against Evander Holyfield. I knew Holyfield would win. Douglas went in way overweight and Holyfield was the better fighter. Douglas just quit. He got hit a little and laid down. He was a whore for his $17 million. He didn’t go into the fight with any dignity or pride to defend his belt. He made his payday but he lost his honor. You can’t win honor, you can only lose it. Guys like him who only fight for money can never become legends. I can tell that it still affects Buster to this day. Years later, I ran into him again at an autograph session we both attended. No one wanted his autograph. This was the guy who made history for beating me but now his legacy had been reduced to nothing.

The next night after his win, Holyfield announced that he would defend his title against George Foreman. That pissed me off. Everybody wanted to put me down, overshadow me, but they couldn’t. I was still the biggest star in the boxing world, bigger than any of them without a belt.

Stewart and I finally squared off on December eighth in Atlantic City. HBO was so intent on re-signing me that they even hired Spike Lee to do the prefight introduction film segment just to placate me. I decided to talk some shit on film with Spike and make people mad.

“Everything is totally against us,” I said. “Don and I are two black guys from the ghetto and we hustle and they don’t like what we’re saying. We’re not like prejudiced anti-white, we are just pro-black.”

I didn’t take that shit seriously. I was just having fun fucking around.

“They’re always changing rules when black folks come into success, black success is unacceptable,” Don said. When HBO screened the segment for reporters, they were disgusted. Mission accomplished.

But I was paying a price for my association with Don. Hugh McIlvanney, a famous Scottish sportswriter, had blamed my losing to Douglas on my relationship with King.

“Of all the contributing factors in Tyson’s downfall, most damaging of all, perhaps, has been his alliance with Don King, who has precipitated decay in practically every fighter with whom he has been associated.”

He was absolutely right. Don was very toxic. His presence was offensive. He did it on purpose. Everybody blackballed me once I got involved with him. He gave me free reign to indulge my childish behavior and people saw that I wasn’t trying to get away from him, so they blocked everything I tried to do.

At the prefight press conference, I sounded crazy.

“I am a champion. Being a champion is a frame of mind. I’m always going to be champion. Being happy is just a feeling like when you are hungry or thirsty. When people say that you are happy, that’s just a word somebody gave you to describe a feeling. When I decided to accomplish my goals, I gave up all means of even thinking of being happy.”

I am not a happy camper. I just wasn’t built that way.

I must have liked fighting at Trump’s casino in Atlantic City. That was my third fight there and my third first-round knockout. I hit Stewart four seconds into the fight with my right hand and he went down. Then I stalked him around the ring and floored him again with a right. I was pretty wild and at one point I even missed and fell to the canvas. But I finally cornered him and knocked him down with a left with thirty-three seconds left in the round. The three-knockdown rule was in effect, so they stopped the fight.

When they finished examining Stewart, I went out to him and hugged him.

“Don’t be discouraged. You’re a good fighter. Remember I got beat by a bum.”

On my way out of the ring, Jim Lampley, the play-by-play announcer for HBO, asked me a few questions. The last two fights, I had refused to talk to Larry Merchant when the fight was over.

“I’d like to thank all my fans watching on HBO for supporting me all these years,” I interjected. “This is my last fight for HBO because I think that they’d rather see Holyfield than me.”

The new sensation in the heavyweight ranks was a Canadian boxer named Razor Ruddock. He had fought Michael Dokes in April of 1990 and the tapes of that knockout were circulating throughout the boxing world. I finally saw the tape when Alex Wallau of ABC Sports showed me a copy.

Dokes was ahead during the fight and then, boom, Ruddock hit him with one punch and knocked him cold. It was a very frightening, gut-wrenching, breathtaking KO.

“What do you think?” Alex asked me.

Since I was a palooka in the art of manipulation, I laid back and stayed cool.

“What about it? I’m not Michael Dokes. He’s going to be a quick knockout, he’s nothing.”

But with Holyfield signed to fight Foreman, I had to keep busy. So Don signed me to fight Ruddock in Vegas on March 18, 1991.

Fuck, these people are trying to kill me out here. They’re sending the big guns out to get me, I thought.

I started training hard in early January. I had Tom Patti, my old housemate when Cus was around, in my camp. We were watching TV one night and one of Ruddock’s fights came on and I saw a flaw in Ruddock.

“I’m going to kill this guy,” I told Tom.

I knew that Ruddock was a dangerous puncher, but I also saw that I’d be too elusive for him. He wouldn’t be able to hit me solidly.

We almost started the fight a few days before it was scheduled at the prefight press conference at the Century Plaza Hotel in Los Angeles. We were doing the face-off for the photographers and I told Ruddock that I was going to make him my bitch. Razor tried to approach me like a tough guy and Anthony Pitts pushed him back. I said, “No, no. Let him come closer to express himself better.” I knew I could beat him in a street fight. Razor’s bodyguards wanted to step up but it was squashed.

So we went to the airport for the plane back to Vegas. Turned out that Razor and his crew were on the same flight. When we got there, Rory forgot his phone in the car so Anthony went to get it from Isadore, our driver. When Anthony was on his way back, he started walking down the steps and Ruddock’s people were walking up the steps and they blocked off Ant.

Ruddock had twin bodyguards and one of them, Kevin Ali, said, “Oh, you think you’re bad?” He showed Anthony his walkie-talkie. “You see what these are for?” So he stepped up on Anthony and Anthony popped him. But Isadore saw there was a fracas and he ran up the stairs and grabbed Anthony.

“Isadore, why are you grabbing me?” Anthony said. “Grab one of these motherfuckers.”

By then, airport security had broken up the fight. When Anthony returned to the waiting area, he told me what had gone down. When we got on the plane, I saw that they were supposed to be sitting behind us, so I moved my guys to the back of the plane. The whole flight I was flinging grapes at Ruddock. Just to be safe, we called ahead and had our whole crew, the training camp, the sparring partners, everyone, meet us at the airport in case something went down. But nothing happened.

When we got to the Mirage the night of the fight, they had us in facing dressing rooms and Kevin Ali started trash-talking Anthony.

“Yo, man, let me tell you something,” Anthony said. “I don’t smoke, but I will smoke your whole fucking family, you, your brother, your mother, I’ll kill all you motherfuckers, I don’t give a fuck.”

John Horne heard Anthony hollering and he pulled him aside.

“Yo, man, you don’t go inside the ring tonight,” he said. “You stay outside the ring. Because if Mike wins this fight, I know these motherfuckers are going to start something, so you be aware.”

It was a chilly night in Vegas and we were fighting outdoors in front of a huge crowd of sixteen thousand people. I wore a green-and-white-striped sweat suit and a ski cap into the ring. I was the first boxer to wear urban clothes into the ring.

Ruddock looked nervous and was hyperventilating. He was in with the big boys now. I knew he was going to come right at me, he was so nervous. A few seconds into the fight, I rocked him with a right hand. He came back with some hard punches but I was just too elusive for him. In the second, he went down from a left but it was a glancing blow, it looked like his leg got tangled up with mine, but my vicious body attack had slowed him to a standstill. He couldn’t hit me with hard punches, and by the third round he was pretty much holding on for dear life. I managed to get in a vicious left-hook counterpunch with ten seconds to go in the round and he went down.

I was winning every round. In the sixth, he suddenly seemed to wake up and hit me with a flurry of hard punches. I shook my head at him. He hit me with a right to the jaw and I tapped my jaw and dared him to throw again. Me taking those punches with impunity must have demoralized him because I came out in the seventh and stunned him with a left hook to the jaw. Four more punches and he was stumbling back into the ropes. But Richard Steele jumped in and stopped the fight without Ruddock even going down. I thought the stoppage was premature, although one more punch and he would have been down.

Before I knew it, I was in the middle of a riot. Murad Muhammad, Razor’s manager, got my trainer Richie on the floor and was kicking him in the head. Jay Bright pulled me over to a corner and we watched the rumble. By then, Anthony Pitts had come into the ring and he saw Kevin Ali charging across the ring and Ant cracked him with a right. Then Razor’s brother Delroy tried to hit Anthony, but Anthony grabbed him and was about to throw him over the ropes out of the ring but security grabbed his arm. So Delroy was up in the air, pushed up against the rope, and he had his arm hanging down, trying to catch himself. While this was happening, my friend Greg snatched Kevin Ali’s Rolex and then went into his pocket to see what else he could get. It was a crazy scene.

There was a lot of controversy about the quick ending, so we decided to give Ruddock a rematch. We were at Don’s office on East Sixty-ninth Street in Manhattan, working out the details of the second fight. Don and Rory and John were upstairs, but I was chilling downstairs with Anthony because I was chatting with Don’s cute little receptionist who I was sleeping with. All of a sudden, Kevin Ali walked in. Kevin was a good Muslim brother but some Muslim brothers take their Muslim thing and bring it with them everywhere they go, fighting, eating, everywhere. So Kevin looked at me and said, “Oh, most beautiful champion. Great fight. I have to give you much respect. You’re a true warrior.” Then he pointed towards Anthony and said, “But I’m gonna kill him.”

“Yo, man, I’m standing right here, motherfucker,” Anthony said. “Don’t send no messages to nobody for me. If you’ve got something to say, say it.”

“We’re going to have to do this and what we do is, do or die. We could do this shit right now,” Kevin said.

“That was just work, that’s over, let that shit go.” I tried to defuse the situation.

“No, champ, I can’t let that go, I gotta do this,” Ali said.

So he put his briefcase and his coat down and, boom, Anthony cracked him with one punch. They were fighting by the stairs and Don had a wall divider that blocked off the stairs, so I didn’t actually see Kevin go down, but it was like in a cartoon, you heard him go boom, boom, boom, down each step. Then he flew back up like he was a superhero and they went at it again. My friend Greg walked in drinking a bottle of soda and he saw Anthony and Kevin going at it so he clocked Kevin in the head with his bottle. Kevin went down and Greg started going through his pockets.

“No, Greg, we can’t do that shit here,” I said. “You need some money, nigga? We can’t rob motherfuckers.”

All this commotion made Don and John and Rory come down the stairs to see what was happening. Ali had gotten up and he claimed that Anthony had sucker-punched him.

“That’s bullshit,” I said. “Ant was just in there chilling, this motherfucker came in threatening Anthony. Ant just defended himself.”

Don kicked Kevin Ali out of the office and Kevin went outside and started pacing up and down in front of the townhouse. When we left, we saw Ali there. Our driver at the time was Captain Joe, a forefather in the Nation of Islam. He knew the Ali twins. Ali wanted to resume the fight but I told him that it was Ramadan and it was a time of peace.

“Mike, this is a man thing,” Captain Joe said. “He can’t be in peace with Ramadan until he has peace with himself. He has to settle this.”

“Do you want to do this?” Ali asked Anthony.

“Hell, yeah. You said do or die.”

The two went at it outside on the sidewalk like Rock ’Em Sock ’Em Robots. Anthony finally connected and dropped Ali. He hit the ground and Anthony drop-kicked him twice to the head. He was about to do it a third time when Rory grabbed him.

“You’re going to kill him, man,” Rory said.

“That’s the whole motherfucking idea,” Ant said. “He said ‘do or die.’”

It was time to go to the movie. Anthony stepped over Kevin and we got in the car and split. Just then, Al Braverman, a legendary trainer who worked for Don, walked up to the office entrance. He saw Ali lying there unconscious and ran into the office and got some paper towels and water and cleaned him up and revived him. They called for an ambulance and that was the end of that.

The rematch was set for June twenty-eighth. I had some time off before we went to camp, so I drove my black Lamborghini Diablo from New York to Ohio and did some sightseeing. Then it was back to Vegas to train. Richie had put me on a strict regimen that included a seven p.m. curfew so I was rested for my six-mile run at five a.m. I was so bored. Most of the time when I wasn’t training, I would watch cartoons. Then Don would come storming into the room.

“God dammit, Mike, you are going to watch something else besides these fucking cartoons,” he said, and he put on documentaries about Nazi Germany. Don was obsessed with the Nazis. It was Hitler this and Hitler that. He thought that the Jews were the niggas of Germany and that fascism could happen here so we should learn from history.

We had a new chef in camp. Chef Early, who had been with us for a long time, was fired by Don for supposedly sneaking out the back door with meat. That seemed like bullshit to me. One of my bodyguards, Rudy Gonzalez, ran into Chef Early’s nephew a few years later and he told him that Chef Early had been fired by Don because he wouldn’t put that “magic powder” in my food. He claimed that John Horne had given Chef Early a powder that was supposed to be some “endurance vitamins” that I had refused to take. Chef Early looked at the powder and found a tiny piece of orange capsule with a “5” or an “S” on it. Rudy looked it up in a PDR and it looked like a section of a Thorazine pill. I guess Don was so afraid of me, he was trying to medicate me without me knowing it.

Richie’s regimen was driving me crazy. One night I woke Rudy up at eight p.m. and we snuck out in my Ferrari and drove to L.A. so I could have a booty call. Rudy gunned that mother up to 190 mph and we made it to L.A. in two and a half hours. So I began doing that regularly and it started to show in the gym. I was operating on only two hours of sleep. Giachetti had no idea why I looked so lackluster, but he finally busted me when he looked at the mufflers on the Ferrari and saw that they looked like burnt marshmallows.

So they made Rudy put alarms on all the doors to prevent me from sneaking out at night.

One night Rudy woke up when he heard a loud thump. He got up, turned on the light, and walked outside and found me tangled up in a thorny bush. I had fallen from a second-story window trying to sneak out of the house. My plan was to silently roll the Ferrari down the driveway and then take off for L.A.

I was so desperate all my life to get out and have some fun. I should have said, “Fuck you all, I’m going out,” but instead I snuck out. I’d be in Nicky Blair’s, my favorite restaurant in Las Vegas, holding court, surrounded by girls, and Don would storm in.

“What the fuck are you doing, Mike?” he’d bellow. “We’ve got a fight coming up.”

“Excuse me, Don,” I’d say. “I would appreciate it if you would just leave. Oh, by the way, girls, this is Don King.”

When my nocturnal speed races to L.A. ended, I had Rudy ship the car to my Ohio house, where they knocked a hole in the exterior wall of my game room and had the car mounted on a platform in the middle of the room so me and my friends could hang out in it.

I went after Ruddock before the fight began. We were doing a taping for Showtime and I wore dark glasses and looked pretty surly.

“I will make you my girlfriend,” I told Ruddock.

“I’m not going to come down to your level,” he said.

“Make sure you kiss me good with your big lips,” I countered.

I was pretty offensive but I knew he was a macho, testosteroned guy. I knew that would get to his psyche. That was one of Cus’s tactics of mind control. Confuse the enemy.

Another reason I kept going to L.A. was because my friend Kevin Sawyer who had the beeper shop would beep me and tell me he had some girls lined up for us. He’d get a half a dozen girls and we’d get a room and have an orgy.

I loved hanging out with Kevin. I was mean and nasty to girls then. So before I got there, he would tell the girls, “Mike is really a nice guy. He just never had a good upbringing. He was abandoned as a kid and he has trust issues.” That shit would work like a charm. I’d call them bitches and sluts and they’d say, “I understand your situation. My parents also abandoned me.” Kevin would tell me, “Just go along with this shit, okay?” Don and John and Rory would get so furious when I’d get beeped. They wound up taking my beeper and putting it in the freezer and then they threatened to kill Kevin.

My second fight with Ruddock was epic. He went into that fight ten pounds heavier. I actually weighed one pound less, but I was weak because I had lost thirty-five pounds in less then a month. I was out of control before the fight, drinking, gorging on food, fucking women. I would get up and sneak out to Roscoe’s in L.A. for fried chicken. So I took fat-burning water pills, and I didn’t eat anything after dark. I’d work out morning, afternoon, and night.

In the second and the fourth round of the fight, I knocked Ruddock down and had him in trouble a number of times, but I just couldn’t finish him off, I was too weak. He was hitting me hard, like a mule, but I was focused. We both got points taken off for hitting after the bell; I had two more points deducted for low blows. It was a war. But I still won an easy unanimous decision.

•   •   •

In July I was hanging out in D.C. when I got a call from my friend Ouie back in New York. An old friend of ours had been shot in D.C. and Ouie was worried that if the wrong people saw me, they might go after me too. I wanted to get off the streets and wait until all the heat had cooled down, so I went to see Whitney Houston perform that night and stayed backstage and hung out with her after the concert.

On my way back to New York, I was passing through Philadelphia and they had the Budweiser Superfest going on at the Spectrum. Craig Boogie was working the show and I was hanging out backstage with him when B Angie B, one of Hammer’s backup singers who was performing there, came up to me and grabbed me. We were hanging out and we slept together that night. Angie then told me that she was going to Indianapolis to perform at the Black Expo. Earlier that day I had received a call from Reverend Charles Williams, who ran the Black Expo, inviting me to make an appearance, so I decided to go and meet her in Indiana.

I was trying to ditch my bodyguards. Anthony was out in L.A. getting ready to get married that week. I told Rudy not to come with me. Rudy called Ant and then Anthony called John Horne and they decided that Dale Edwards should meet me in Indianapolis. Dale was a nephew, either by blood or by marriage, of Don’s. He was a Cleveland police officer.

Dale and I checked into our hotel. Then I had my limo driver drive me over to B Angie B’s aunt’s house. That night we hung out at a nightclub and had three bottles of Dom Pérignon. We walked out on the bill when the house photographer asked me to take a picture. We got back to my hotel at about 2:30 in the morning. Angie and I had sex that night and then again a few times the next morning. Then Angie left to get ready for her performance.

A little bit later, Reverend Williams came to bring us to the Expo. He asked me if I wanted to say hello to some of the girls in the Miss Black America pageant. When we entered the ballroom at the Omni Hotel, the girls went crazy.

“Look—it’s Mike Tyson!” they all screamed.

I walked towards them and they surrounded me, hugging me, kissing me. They were filming a little promotional video, so while the contestants twirled and danced I walked down the line, checking them out, doing some awkward dancing and impromptu singing. “I’m in a dream, day after day, beautiful women in such an array.” I must have looked like a real schmuck.

As the girls surrounded me, I’d say shit to them like, “Hey, I want to see you tonight. Is that possible? Oh, boy, this is going to be fun if you decide to come to my room.” I was being a pig, but they were going for it. I hugged Desiree Washington, one of the contestants, in the middle of the first take of that video and told her that I wanted to get with her later. She was very flirty with me and friendly and she wanted to hang out. I explained to her that I would do some other things and go to the concert with my friends, but I would see her later that night. I even told her to bring her roommate so we could have a ménage à trois in my room. When I left, it was clear to me that she knew we were going to have sex later that night. I even saw her later that afternoon at the opening of the Black Expo. She was with her roommate, Pasha, the one I was trying to get to come along with Desiree.

“There’s the two look-alike twins,” I said when I saw them.

Desiree took out some photos of them taken during the swimsuit competition. She seemed anxious for me to see them. And she confirmed that we were on for later that night.

I was being chauffeured around town by this middle-aged black lady who owned the limo company. Dale and I were total assholes to her. We kept calling her a dumb, ugly bitch. I made her stop the limo and I got out and pissed right in the street. I was being a total arrogant dick, and it would come back to bite me when she testified against me.

After the concert, Dale and I got back in the car and called Desiree, who was in her hotel room. I told her to wear some loose clothing and I was surprised that when she got into the car, she was wearing a loose bustier and her short pajama bottoms. She looked ready for action. We started making out in the backseat. It was only a block from her hotel to mine. We got out of the limo and she and I went to my suite and Dale went to his room.

Later after all the shit had gone down, Anthony was furious with Dale. He blamed him for everything that happened to me in Indianapolis. It was pretty common practice for my bodyguards to stay in the living room of my suites when I had a girl in bed, especially a girl we didn’t know. Many times I’d open up my door after having sex and Anthony would be sitting there. He wanted to be right there, listening to what was going on, in case there was a problem. Sometimes I’d even invite the bodyguards into the room and we’d fuck the same girl.

Desiree came into my room and we went straight to my bedroom. She was sitting in somewhat of a Buddha position and we talked a little bit. She seemed to know all about my pigeon hobby. She talked a little bit about Rhode Island. We even discussed seeing each other again when I was back east.

Nowadays I don’t normally like to be graphic in my descriptions of sexual congress, but I think in this case I must be because of the ramifications of what went down. After we talked awhile, I started kissing her. She got up and went to the bathroom, and I later learned that her visit there was to remove her panty shield. Then she came back to bed and I started performing cunnilingus on her. I normally do that because I make it a practice to make sure that a woman is satisfied when we have sex. I had no idea I was gargling blood because she didn’t tell me she was on her period.

We must have had oral sex for about twenty minutes and then we started fornicating. She seemed to be really into everything. At one point she seemed to be getting uncomfortable and complained that I was too big, so I asked her if she wanted to be on top and she did. I wasn’t wearing a condom, so before I came, I withdrew from her and ejaculated outside of her.

Now it was really late and I was going to have to get up in an hour or so to catch the first flight to New York. I told her that she could stay in my room because she was telling me how small her room was at the Omni and she had to share it with some other girls, but she then asked me to take her back to her hotel.

Now, this is where it gets crazy. I told her I was too tired, but I’d drop her off at her hotel when I had to go to the airport.

“No, take me down.” She got all prissy on me.

“Fuck you, then,” I said. “Get the fuck out.” I was just a rude, spoiled twenty-five-year-old.

She got up, got dressed, and walked out of the room. Dale, my bodyguard, who was supposed to be in the other room of the suite, was outside his room next door getting a hamburger delivered from room service. She passed by him on her way out. Then she got into my limo and told the driver to take her back to her hotel.

On the way back to her hotel, the only thing she said to the limo driver was, “I don’t believe him. I don’t believe him. Who does he think he is?”

About a week later, I was in the car with my friend Ouie who was driving. He got a call and his face dropped.

“Fuck, Mike! Our summer is fucked up. Someone said you raped her,” Ouie said with disgust and he threw his phone down.

“What? Who the fuck did I rape?” I said. I was thinking to myself that maybe I had disrespected one of my street girlfriends and they were playing me.

“Where did this happen?” I asked Ouie.

“Indiana,” he said. “What the fuck happened in Indiana?”

I told him how this girl Desiree had come to my room at two in the morning and how I had dissed her. I was told that she had called my house in Ohio the day after we were together, but I never responded.

The next day it was on the front cover of every newspaper. Now all these non-talented comedians were doing “Mike Tyson the rapist” jokes. When I saw Don, he was worried.

“Now you need my help, nigga. Your dick got you in trouble now. God dammit, Mike, now you need me.”

When he calmed down, I explained to him what happened. He knew I didn’t do it. How do you rape someone when they come to your hotel room at two in the morning? There’s nothing open that late but legs.

Don’s first strategy was to bribe her.

“We could pay the bitch,” he said.

He actually tried that later by having a friend of his, Reverend T. J. Jemison, talk to her family and offer them money to drop the charges, but the holy man wound up getting indicted. I wasn’t aware that Don had done that but it wasn’t the first time that Don had paid a member of the clergy for a favor.

We knew that we were facing something serious, so Don went about getting me a lawyer. I really didn’t have any input into the selection of the lawyer or my defense in general. I was used to other people deciding my destiny, whether it was the juvenile court system, Cus, Jimmy, or Don. Don wound up hiring Vince Fuller. Fuller had been Don’s tax attorney and he had gotten him off on a tax evasion charge. Fuller also represented John Hinckley and used the insanity plea to get him an acquittal after he tried to assassinate President Reagan. I later found out that Fuller was handling Don’s suit against Cayton at the same time. I wouldn’t put it past Don that he owed Fuller money and he was letting Fuller bill me so that I’d pay for both my and Don’s cases. All I know is that Fuller made over a million dollars to defend me.

I didn’t get along with Fuller from the get-go. Don told Fuller that I was an ignorant nigga. He was a real Waspy arrogant guy, not my type at all. Anybody could see he was a cold fish. He had never tried a criminal case in a county court, and there was no way in the world that he was going to relate to an Indianapolis jury. In fact, no one on his team had ever tried a criminal case that was not in a federal court. I still don’t know why they didn’t let the local homeboy Jim Voyles do more of the work in that trial. I really think that I would have been acquitted if he had handled the case.

Some people think that just because someone is convicted of a crime, especially one as heinous as rape, that that automatically means that the convicted person did it. All I can say is, if you don’t take my word that I was not guilty of this crime, then I suggest that you read two books that came out after I was in jail. One is by Mark Shaw who is a writer and a former criminal defense attorney and was the legal analyst for my trial for CNN, USA Today, and ESPN. The other book is the self-congratulatory-attempt-to-grab-some-headlines book written by the prosecutor in my case, Gregory Garrison. I didn’t pay much attention to my trial as it happened; I was an arrogant young man who couldn’t be bothered with these kinds of proceedings. I didn’t understand them. That’s what I paid those suits for. But if you read these books then I think that you’ll agree that the last thing that was served in Indianapolis back in 1992 was justice.

There was a lot of interesting insight into the prosecution’s case, reading Garrison’s book. In fact, up until they reached the verdict, key members of the prosecution team didn’t even think they had a case against me. Jeff Modisett, the elected prosecutor of Marion County, won his office by just 285 votes out of 180,000. The only district he carried was the black district. He was no schmuck. He didn’t want to alienate his base, so he decided not to charge me with a crime; instead he would send my case to a grand jury to let the “people” decide if a crime had been committed. If I wasn’t indicted, he could care less. He even told some of his colleagues that he would “just as soon see the case go away.”

Tommy Kuzmik, the sex crimes investigator for the police, told Modisett that they would have a problem with physical evidence because there wasn’t any. But he said that Desiree would make a great witness because she was “intelligent, articulate, attractive—easy to look at, easy to understand, easy to believe.” But most importantly, she wasn’t a victim who “talked street.” You figure out the code there.

Garrison also said that because people who could help the case were scattered around the country, “the FBI located and interviewed potential witnesses.” Hmm. Is this standard operating procedure for every rape allegation in the country? Somehow I don’t think so.

So a special grand jury was appointed on August 13, 1991. Modisett assigned the presentation of evidence to the grand jury to his deputy prosecutor David Dreyer. Now, Dreyer was an interesting individual. According to Garrison, Dreyer was always a little put off by Desiree’s act. When she testified before the grand jury on August sixteenth, Dreyer thought that the major problem she had was her “lack of emotion. She seemed too much the beauty queen, detached, maybe even a bit cold.” Dreyer thought that the chances of getting an indictment from the grand jury were at best fifty-fifty. In fact, Dreyer had so many reservations about Desiree that Garrison quoted him as saying, “As matter of fact, when the jury began its deliberations, I wasn’t sure in my own mind if there had been a rape or not!” And that’s the deputy prosecutor talking. That sounds like the very definition of reasonable doubt to me.

I had to testify before the grand jury on the thirtieth. Well, I didn’t have to. In fact, Jim Voyles was begging Vince Fuller NOT to have me testify. There was no upside to my testifying. The only thing it could do was give the prosecution ammunition to come after me with during the trial. But somehow Fuller and Don convinced themselves that I should go before the grand jury.

“This man is innocent. Mike Tyson says he’s innocent. He’s testifying because I think that’s what we’re supposed to do,” Don bellowed on the courtroom steps in front of all the media that day. “I’m going to let due process take its course. I’m not an attorney, I’m just a promoter of the greatest fighter in the world, and he’s going to win the championship in the fall.”

I was facing a long stretch in jail and he was promoting my damn fight with Holyfield that was scheduled for November. Only in America.

They had me dress in a very conservative dark blue double-breasted suit. We were brought to a small room with a noisy window air conditioner. There were six jurors there. Five of them were white. They asked me questions and I answered very softly and the court reporter made over a hundred errors in her transcription.

At one point they asked me if Dale Edwards had been in the parlor of my suite. I said he was. Dale had testified he was. That’s where he was supposed to be. I couldn’t know for sure because the bedroom door was closed.

To indict me they needed five out of six votes. We took a recess at one point and I had been eyeing this large candy bowl that was in the middle of the table that the jurors had been eating from.

“Could I have a piece of candy, please?” I asked.

“Sure,” they said. And the one black lady handed me the candy.

On September ninth, the grand jury began deliberations. The vote was 5–1 to indict me for rape. You do the math. I was indicted on one count of rape, two counts of criminal deviate conduct (using my fingers and using my tongue), and one count of confinement. I faced sixty years in jail. My trial was scheduled to start on January ninth.

We held a press conference after the jury came back with their vote. Don rattled on and on about famous celebrities who had gotten into trouble—Elvis, James Dean, Marilyn, Judy Garland. Then I gave my statement.

“I know what happened. I know I’m innocent. I didn’t hurt anyone. I didn’t do anything. I love women—I mean, my mother’s a woman. I respect them as well.”

From September until the start of the trial, I ate a lot. I was nervous. I was training to fight Holyfield, but my heart wasn’t into fighting. A few weeks into training, I tore cartilage in my ribs. The doctors recommended that I postpone the fight. I actually could have fought, but I was happy to postpone it. I had too much on my mind.

While I was stressing and eating, the prosecution assembled their team. Modisett’s gamble failed. The grand jury didn’t make my case go away, so he did the next-best thing: He hired an independent Republican special prosecutor to try my case. Greg Garrison was a former deputy prosecutor who had been making money recently by prosecuting drug dealers on RICO charges and getting a cut of everything that was confiscated from the dealers. Garrison was making so much money from those cases that Modisett assigned those drug cases in-house once he was elected. What a sleazeball.

Modisett only paid Garrison $20,000 to take on the case, but this wasn’t about money—he was doing this for the glory and to get his name out in front of the world. If you read his book, you’d think that he took this case to help defend Indiana from the ravaging Hun. “I am a product of rural Indiana, a land of conservative Republicans and hardworking, decent people who tend their own fields, respect the law, and help their friends when needed. . . . Make no mistake, Tyson picked the wrong place to commit his crime. Indiana is different from Palm Beach or D.C. or L.A.”

Garrison started investigating the case. The first place he looked was at Desiree’s panties. He was concerned about the lack of any physical injury to Desiree, so he went to the grand jury room and examined the clothing she wore that night. “It seemed like a risqué costume when you just looked at it lying on the table,” he wrote. Damn straight. She was wearing long shorts, a bustier that “would have stopped traffic on the right woman,” and her panties. He didn’t think the panties were “consistent with the image of a young gold digger heading out to get into the pants and pocketbook of the former heavyweight champ of the world.” I guess he didn’t understand the concept of a booty call.

“I opened the panties and looked down at them as if I were going to put them on.” Now, this is some perverted shit. He lined up the bloodstains on the panties and then decided that Desiree had jerked her panties on after we had sex and blotted them with the bleeding from the injuries I had inflicted on her. And then it all fit in his mind. She was telling the truth and I had raped her. The smoking gun was her panties.

He thought, Hell, I’m forty-four years old and have had sex a few times in my life. And you don’t hurt a woman that way. Not and keep it up. If it hurts, you get told to stop.

Garrison also couldn’t believe that we had oral sex for twenty minutes or so.

“Again, his description of the event veered wildly counter to everything I knew about sex.” Maybe he should have read a little of Dr. Kinsey instead of all those law books. He was convinced that Desiree wouldn’t have had the two small abrasions in her vagina if we had consensual sex and she was lubricated. But it wasn’t an issue of lubrication. It was an issue of size and intensity. This could happen to anyone during sex.

Of course, this issue came up during the trial. My man Voyles wanted to address the issue of my size and get a doctor to testify that it could have caused her vaginal abrasions, but Fuller didn’t want to hear about it. He was squeamish about any of the sexual aspects of the case.

Even after his CSI investigation of the panties, Garrison still had no idea about my motivation to rape someone. “I admitted I had no idea why Tyson would have chosen to rape Desiree when he could have had any one of a score of women.” He was still asking himself that question after I had been convicted.

Then Garrison and his assistant, Barbara Trathen, took a little road trip. In November they went to Rhode Island to meet with Desiree and her family. They were struck by how “polite and genteel” her family was. Of course, appearances could be deceiving. By the time the prosecution had gotten to Rhode Island, Desiree and her mother had accused her father of abusing them and he had moved out.

Desiree and her family were met at the airport by Edward Gerstein. Now, Mr. Gerstein is a very interesting and important player in this case. Shortly after the rape investigation, a Rhode Island lawyer named Walter Stone approached the Washington family. He was a counsel to the International Boxing Federation, so he told them it would be a conflict of interest for him to represent Desiree but that his partner Edward Gerstein could do so. So Gerstein became Desiree’s civil attorney. He was the one they had hired to sue me for civil damages and negotiate big fees for movie and book rights. Gerstein’s involvement with the Washington family freaked Garrison out.

“This news was a live wire. If there were even a hint of pending litigation out of the Washington family, the case would be hurt. It would be impossible to refute the gold digger charge.”

So what did the prosecution do? Keep this information from my defense team. After the trial was over, Star Jones, who was then NBC’s legal correspondent, criticized the prosecution for not revealing the fact that Desiree had a retainer with a civil lawyer. “That’s sleazy. A prosecutor has the duty to turn over all the evidence,” she said.

Garrison and his deputy started questioning Desiree. Apparently, the whole issue of Desiree going to the bathroom in my room and taking off her panty shield was a little troubling to him. According to Desiree, I had suddenly turned mean and lustful and she was freaked out. So she went to the bathroom and took off her panty shield and went back to bed. When Garrison asked Desiree why she had gone to the bathroom, she answered, “It was the first thing I could think of doing after he turned mean.”

Well if that was true, the second thing she could have thought of doing was to keep on walking right out the door. If she sensed danger, like she claimed she did, it would have been easy for her to just leave. Voyles even re-created a model of the hotel room that cost $6,000 to demonstrate that fact. But of course Fuller shut him down and never used it during the trial.

Garrison didn’t think much of the whole panty shield dilemma the prosecution faced. He was eager to believe Desiree when she said that she discarded her soiled panty shield “out of habit” and that when she realized that she had left her purse in the bedroom, she thought that she could pick up another panty shield “at one of the parties she wanted to attend.” WTF? Nobody ever talked about going to parties that night. Where was she going to get another panty shield?

Garrison also heard about my deposition in the Cayton case where I propositioned Thomas Puccio’s female assistant, Joanna Crispi. He was shocked that I simulated intercourse using my fingers, and then told her, “I want to fuck you,” but somehow he couldn’t believe that I had said the exact same thing to Desiree Washington. Right there was proof of my crude m.o. at that time with women.

Garrison flew to D.C. and met with the U.S. Attorney to get dirt on Fuller. The fed told Garrison that everyone in Washington legal circles was baffled as to why Fuller had accepted the case. It didn’t fit his blue-blood firm’s profile. “They just don’t do street crimes. Never. Not even in the D.C. area.”

While he was in D.C., Garrison stopped at the BET studios to talk with Charlie Neal, who was the announcer for the Miss Black America Pageant. Charlie told Garrison that he saw no change at all in Desiree after the alleged rape. Plus, I could have had my pick of the women there. Why did I need to rape one? I guess Garrison didn’t like what he had heard from Charlie.

“What he [Charlie] had to say boiled down to I didn’t see nothin’, I didn’t hear nothin’, I don’t know nothin’. It was clear to me that he must be thinking that these honkies weren’t going to get a thing from him against a brother,” Garrison wrote. What a lowlife racist asshole.

But I was most upset when I read that my old friend José Torres had met with Garrison. He went into his usual bullshit that boxing is lying for a living and that the best boxers were the best liars. And he told Garrison that no other boxer lied like I did. Then Torres repeated his bullshit stories about me and women and sex that he had put into his book. Torres told Garrison that I had bragged to him about hitting Robin so hard that she “hit every fucking wall in the room.” According to him, I said it was the greatest punch I had ever thrown.

Torres had explained to Garrison that he was on the outs with me, so Garrison should have taken most of this with a grain of salt. The worst betrayal was when Garrison asked Torres if I was capable of rape.

“Oh, yes. Absolutely,” he said, and then he went into his pseudo Freudian bullshit about how I couldn’t control my libido because my id was too strong. “He takes what he wants. He always has,” Torres said. I couldn’t believe what I was reading. What a disgrace of a human being. Garrison finished his interview by asking Torres what he could expect if I took the witness stand.

“He’ll try to outthink you and give the jurors what they want. Remember, boxers are liars. And Tyson’s the best.”

Before the trial started, Desiree went to Indianapolis for her deposition. Fuller decided not to do it, so he had his co-counsel Kathleen Beggs do it. Garrison was shocked at Beggs’s strategy. She tore Desiree a new asshole. Beggs was “accusatory, arrogant, unkind, and mean-spirited,” according to Garrison. Instead of being sweet and finessing out some information that my defense could use, she reduced Desiree to tears. It was a major blunder. But not the last that my million-dollar defense team would commit.

My trial began on January 27, 1992. My judge was a lady named Patricia Gifford. She had overseen the grand jury, so she was automatically assigned to the case. She was a former deputy prosecutor in that county’s office who had specialized in rape cases. She helped initiate the rape shield legislation that shielded rape victims from any evidence of their sexual history being introduced. Later this would play a big role in my case. She was a card-carrying Republican who could trace her ancestry back so far she was a member of the Daughters of the American Revolution. Her father was an army colonel. Just my kind of girl. Judge Gifford could have easily recused herself from my case. In fact, after my conviction, the Supreme Court of Indiana wrote a new Tyson Rule. They ordered rotation so that the same judge who presided over the grand jury wouldn’t get the actual case.

It was time to select a jury of my peers. The only problem was that back then, Indiana used voter registration rolls to get their jury poll, which meant that since a lot of black folk didn’t vote, they couldn’t be included as potential jurors. That’s another Tyson Rule that was changed after my case. So out of 179 people called as potential jurors, 160 were white. Fuller and his team even had problems picking the jury. They had no experience doing that. In federal court, the judge picks the jury, and Garrison was a master at that. He could interview the potential jurors and bullshit with them, ask them if they lived near that big Walmart out by the interstate. Fuller couldn’t even begin to connect with the Midwestern jurors.

Fuller was too stubborn to even hire a jury selection expert. As a result, he let this former Marine named Tim onto the jury. Later one of the other jurors would say that Tim was “much more conservative than the rest of us, more straight, a real redneck.” This guy would become the foreman of my jury and have more of a role in getting me convicted than anybody else.

If, as some people think, 90 percent of cases were decided in the opening statements, then we weren’t going to do so good in this court. Garrison’s opening lasted for forty-five minutes. You would have thought he was reading from that book Fifty Shades of Grey.

“He’s grinning at her. His voice is low, different than before. And he pulls her legs apart and sticks his fingers into her. She cries out in pain. The medical, anatomical, physiological miracle of human sexuality that causes the female of the species to become lubricated when she’s sexually excited ain’t working, and she’s terrified. So when these big fingers go into her, it hurts a lot, and she cries out, ‘Don’t!’”

“She hops up from the bed and puts her clothes on fast, wiping her tears, getting her clothes on, trying to find her dignity along with her clothes, and says, ‘Is the limo still down there?’ He says, ‘Oh, you can stay if you want.’ She says, ‘Why? So you can do that again?’”

Fuller was a dry twit compared to this Garrison guy. He tried to paint a portrait of Desiree as sophisticated beyond her years, not the sweet, innocent girly girl the prosecution presented, but Garrison kept objecting during Fuller’s presentation. Fuller did point out some key inconsistencies between what Desiree told the various other girls. She told some people she screamed, told others she didn’t. She said that I attacked her in the bed to one person and that we’d had sex on the floor to someone else. It sounded like she was making up her story as she went along. But Fuller made a major error during his opening statement. He promised that the jury would hear from me. You don’t do that in a major case like this. There were some people who thought that the state’s case was so weak that we could have called no witnesses, just rested, and still have won an acquittal. But he promised them me, so I would have to testify. What’s worse, during his whole opening argument, Fuller not once came near me. Not one pat on the shoulder, not one glance in my direction, not one display of bonding between the defense lawyer and his client. That was first-year law school shit.

“Jurors weren’t seeing a defense team at work, only a foghorn barrister from another state who had made a cold-fish first impression.” I didn’t say that, Mark Shaw did.

After calling her roommate to the stand, Garrison brought on Desiree. Using the rape shield law, they made her out to be some shy, naïve college student who was a Sunday school teacher and an usher in her church. She claimed that when I asked her to go down to the limo, she was reluctant until I told her we’d go out “sightseeing.” Yeah, there’s a lot to see in Indianapolis at two in the morning. I was there recently doing my one-man show and the only thing you could see around the Canterbury Hotel area was ambulatory schizophrenics, homeless people, and a washed-out hooker if you were lucky.

Desiree repeated her story that we didn’t kiss or hold hands and that I didn’t display any signs of affection until I got her on the bed and I turned weird and mean. She repeated that she then went to the bathroom and took off her panty shield and threw it away. “I had a pad in my purse but I figured I could put it on later.”

When she got back, she claimed, I pinned her down, took off her top, and slid her shorts off and her panties down and then inserted two fingers into her vagina. Then I penetrated her. She said that she told her mother what had happened the next night and then they called 911.

Garrison thought that she had testified spectacularly. Others weren’t so sure. Some reporters thought that she was too “stoical” and one even wrote that she seemed “a little prissy” and “almost too perfect.” Before the trial, Garrison had brought in another attorney, Robert Hammerle, to do a mock cross-examination of her so they could see how she would respond to pressure.

Hammerle began to ask her about the improbabilities that he saw about the case.

“Look, you met Mike Tyson, and you saw him making all of these passes at girls . . . and then you gave him a picture of you in a bathing suit, and you still didn’t think he had sex on his mind?” he asked Desiree.

“No,” she said.

“He called you in the middle of the night, and you went down to his limousine and when you got in, he kissed you, and it still never crossed your mind that he had sex on his mind?”

“No.”

“Then you went to the hotel, and you went to his room, and you sat on his bed, and it never crossed your mind that he wanted to have sex with you?”

“No.”

“And then he said, ‘You’re turning me on,’ and you didn’t think he had sex on his mind?”

“No.”

He kept going on and on, asking her about the panty shield.

“It didn’t make sense,” Hammerle told Garrison, “but that was her story and she stuck to it. My overall impression was that she did battle with me. I had heard that there was this eighteen-year-old naïve lady but I came away with the feeling that while it could have happened, I was dealing with someone much stronger who wouldn’t let me run over her. I couldn’t figure out how this all fit with all the naïve mistakes she was supposed to have made.”

Hammerle told his wife about the panty shield incident. His wife said that any woman who goes to the bathroom to remove her panty shield is expecting to have sex. And he agreed with his wife. When Hammerle ran into Garrison the next day in the City-County Building, he told him, “You, my friend, are in a world of shit!”

I wish that Hammerle had been my attorney. When it came time for Fuller to cross-examine Desiree, he didn’t even seem to want to be doing it. Mark Shaw agreed with me.

“Fuller’s polite and less than forceful cross-examination was difficult to understand, especially when Garrison’s direct examination gave him so many opportunities to probe Washington about what specifically happened in the hotel room between her and Tyson,” he wrote.

He couldn’t understand why Fuller didn’t take advantage of her defensiveness. She would have given him a lot more information than was requested. He never followed up on the specifics of the agreement her family had with her civil attorney. In fact, she lied about the purpose of having one. She knew full well she was going to sue my ass and collect lots of money when this criminal case was over. And she did.

Fuller never fired rapid questions at her like Hammerle had in his mock cross-exam. He never put her on the defensive. If he had, the jury might have seen that she wasn’t as naïve as she projected herself to be. When Fuller had noted that Desiree had been reprimanded for acting like a groupie when she was backstage that night at Johnny Gill’s concert, she actually told the jury that she didn’t know what the word “groupie” meant!

He didn’t even ask her any questions about her removing her panty shield! He didn’t wonder how I could have been giving her oral sex and still be pinning her to the bed. Where were the bruises if I had physically overpowered her? If she had screamed, why didn’t anyone in the hotel hear her? C’mon, we were in a hotel room in the middle of the night where the walls echo because it’s so quiet and she screamed? If anybody ever attacked me, I would have been gone. I’d have lost it as soon as I got in the hallway. I’d be in the Twilight Zone, knocking on people’s doors, “Help me, come, this guy’s right in here.” You don’t have to be F. Lee Bailey to decipher her bullshit.

The other state witness who hurt me was the emergency room doctor, Stephen Richardson. He testified that he had examined Desiree the night after the alleged attack. He found no bruises or abrasions on her arms or legs, no signs that she had been hit or squeezed. There was no trauma to her labia majora or labia minora. But he did find two very small abrasions, an eighth of an inch wide and three-eighths long on her introitus, the opening to her vagina. He said that 10 to 20 percent of rape victims have injuries there. And he said that in twenty years of practice, he had seen those injuries only twice from consensual sex.

To hear him talk, these were very small abrasions, but Garrison had blown up a huge picture of Desiree’s privates, mounted it, and displayed it in the courtroom. You’d look at that picture and you’d think that somebody had taken a mallet and beat her vagina.

Fuller had nothing to counteract Dr. Richardson’s testimony. He could have. Voyles had a urologist lined up to examine my member and testify how those little abrasions could have been caused by penetration, but Fuller didn’t want to go there. He should have. Instead of the urologist, Fuller got some lame doctor who was so confused that she started scoring points for the prosecution! My million-dollar defense team.

Before the prosecution finished putting forward their case, my lawyers attempted to get three witnesses added for the defense. My defense team was getting a lot of crazy calls during the trial, so they were a little skeptical when they got a call from a girl who said that she and two of her friends had seen me and Desiree hugging and kissing in the back of the limo and holding hands on the way into the hotel! Now this would have been huge and it would have shown Desiree to be the sophisticated liar that she was. So Voyles got permission to take the limo out of evidence. He put it in front of the hotel at nighttime and you could see through those tinted windows like it was day.

They checked the girls out and they were all credible, so they tried to get them admitted as witnesses but Judge Gifford nearly had a fit. She wanted to know why the prosecution hadn’t been told about these witnesses immediately. Because they had to be checked out, shown not to be nuts. She didn’t care. It was like she took it personally.

“I am of the opinion that not excluding the witnesses would result in substantial prejudice to the State of Indiana, and I believe that the State of Indiana is entitled to a fair trial the same as the Defendant in any case,” she said, and excluded probably my most important witnesses from testifying.

Then the state wrapped up their case. They called Mrs. Washington to the stand and she poured it on thick.

“Desiree is gone, and she’s not going to come back. I just want my daughter back.”

Even some of the jurors started crying.

Then they played an edited version of her 911 tape. This was like calling Desiree to the stand again and without letting us cross-examine her.

“I went out with this person in a limousine that night and the person told me that he had to go in to get his bodyguards and he asked me if I wanted to come in for a second and I said, ‘Oh, okay, fine.’ You know, thinking this was a nice person. And we went in and the person started attacking me. I just came out of the bathroom and this person was in his underwear and he just basically kind of did what he wanted to do and kept saying, ‘Don’t fight me, don’t fight me.’ And I was like saying, ‘No, no, get off me, get off me, please, get off of me.’ And he was going, ‘Don’t fight me, don’t fight me.’ And the person is a lot stronger than I was and he just did what he wanted to and I was saying, ‘Stop, please, stop, please.’ And he just didn’t stop.”

Later in that tape, the dispatcher kept telling Desiree that she was the victim, she was the victim, and then Desiree slipped something very interesting in.

“I’m not trying to tell you what to do but don’t be scared,” the dispatcher told her. She was pushing Desiree to report the rape.

“But someone nationally known against someone just like me, a regular person, I mean, people like just kind of naturally think that I’m going for the money or something,” Desiree said out of nowhere.

Allowing that tape to be entered in evidence was very prejudicial to my case.

Many legal scholars thought that it should have been inadmissible, but that didn’t stop that little lady judge.

It was time for us to put forward our case. By then, Voyles and I were totally disheartened. I never really had any faith in the system. The Kennedy kid had been found innocent of rape in Palm Beach just a month before my trial started, but I knew I was supposed to be convicted, that was just how the system worked. I’m a descendant of slaves. That people can respect me as a human being, to this day, is something that I have doubts about. I was the nigga and that cowboy prosecutor was going to put his spurred cowboy boots in my face. None of those people were going to help me. I was fucked the day I got indicted. They were going to get me one way or another.

Fuller and Beggs didn’t help. Kathleen Beggs was about as warm as a table. She got into it a few times with Judge Gifford and you could see that the judge just hated her. When Voyles tried to tell Fuller that Beggs should warm up a bit, Fuller told him, “We don’t need that kind of advice from you.”

The genius Fuller’s whole defense of me was that Desiree should have known what she was getting into because I was a boorish, vulgar, unredeemable sexual animal. That was my lawyer’s characterization of me. Even Garrison couldn’t believe Fuller’s strategy. He knew that by painting me as a sex machine it would raze my reputation and alienate me from the jury. I would be “so insensitive and crude that no right-minded person could have any sympathy for him.” What’s worse, Garrison called Fuller’s defense strategy racist. “The defense robbed Tyson of his individuality and turned him into a cardboard figure from a racist X-rated cartoon,” Garrison wrote in his book.

I had to laugh when one girl who we called as a defense witness told the court that she overheard me telling another contestant, “I want to fuck you, and bring your roommate too, because I’m a celebrity and you know, we do that kind of thing.”

I didn’t help my case myself. When I was called to testify, I was so arrogant and was a hostile witness for my own case. By then, the writing was on the wall. There had been a fire in the place where the jurors were staying and one of the black jurors told the judge that he was too badly shaken to continue. He was the guy who always complained about the food and the lodging. When the judge let him leave, Garrison was thrilled. He was convinced that that guy would have hung the jury. There was new only one black left on the jury.

We put on a lot of witnesses who contradicted Desiree’s image. One of the contestants testified that Washington told her that “she wanted money, wanted to be like Robin Givens.” She also said Desiree used foul language and made sexual innuendos. According to her, I said, “Do you want to come to my room? I know I’m not gonna get nothin’ but I’ll ask anyway.” That sounded like me.

Another girl testified that when she saw me, she said to Desiree, “Here comes your husband. He doesn’t speak very well.”

“Mike doesn’t have to speak. He’ll make the money and I’ll do the talking,” Desiree said. Both girls said they saw no change in Desiree after the alleged rape.

Another girl said Desiree and I were cuddling like a couple at the pageant. Still another girl said Desiree gave me a “look that could kill” when I patted another girl’s behind. Caroline Jones testified that Desiree told her, “There’s twenty million dollars,” when she saw me at the rehearsal.

On February seventh, I took the stand. I basically told the same story that you’ve already read. Except that when I said that I told Desiree that I just wanted to fuck her, it was like the jury had been hit with a bolt of lightning, as if they had never heard the F word before. Fuller did a lousy job of preparing me and leading me through my testimony, and when he was finished, Judge Gifford called for a recess until the next day, which gave the prosecution the whole night to review my testimony and prepare their traps.

When we resumed the next day, Garrison made a big deal out of the fact that when I said, “I want to fuck you,” an eighteen-year-old would never answer, “Fine, call me.” I guess he was living in the dark ages, but then again this was the same man who, after hearing that I claimed that I had oral sex with Desiree for twenty or so minutes, wrote, “His description of the event veered wildly counter to everything I knew about sex.”

He also spent a lot of time getting me to confess that my success in the ring was the result of my cunning, my ability to feint, and that, of course, meant I was a liar.

After I was finished testifying, they brought Johnny Gill on to say that when I told Desiree that I wanted to fuck her, she didn’t even flinch. Fuller called some more contestants to say that Desiree said that I was “really built” and “had a butt to hold on to.” The whole defense was so scattershot that even I could see that there was no cohesion to the case he was building. The major flaw was that Fuller and Beggs were too prudish to get into the nitty-gritty details of the sexual encounter. They didn’t give the jurors the actual facts to base their judgment on.

Fuller was so boring during his final argument that one juror actually interrupted him and asked to go to the bathroom. That wasn’t such a good sign. When was he going to get to the crucial point that when I supposedly said that Desiree was turning me on, she responded not by leaving the hotel room but by going to the bathroom and taking off her panty shield and then coming back to the bed? I was waiting, but he never did.

Garrison then gave his final argument. It was the same old same old, but he fed those jurors his corn-fed bullshit in a way that Fuller never could have. “The world’s eyes are upon us. People everywhere want to know if the citizens of Marion County have got the courage to do a hard thing. I don’t want this man convicted because the world watches. I want him convicted if you believe the evidence proves beyond a reasonable doubt that this beautiful, honest kid came to town, got deceived by a professional deceiver, got lied to, schmoozed and romanced, isolated and defeated, raped and made the subject of deviant behavior. If that’s what you believe, and the evidence is so, then that must be your judgment. That’s all.”

The final nail in my coffin came right before the jury went out to deliberate. Fuller made a motion that the judge should include an instruction on implied consent when she instructed the jury before they left to discuss the case. That meant that I couldn’t be guilty of rape if the “conduct of the complainant under all the circumstances should reasonably be viewed as indicating consent to the acts in question.” But the former rape prosecutor shut Fuller down and the jury never knew about this established legal precedent.

On February tenth at 1:15 p.m., the jury of eight men and four women started deliberating my case. Not surprisingly, the former Marine and now IBM salesman Tim was elected foreman. After fifteen minutes of deliberation, without discussing the evidence, they took a poll. It was a six to six vote. Less than nine hours later, they had reached a unanimous verdict.

We all went back to the courtroom. When the jury filed in, they couldn’t even look at the defense table. That was it. When I heard “guilty” on the first count, I felt like I had been punched. “Oh, man,” I whispered. But I wasn’t at all surprised.

We had to face the press outside. I was allowed out on bail until my sentencing.

“No way I got a fair shot,” I said. “I knew I was innocent but I knew the verdict was going to be quick because of the mentality of the court and the prosecutor. The prosecutor was a racist, weak, publicity-happy little weak man. I was nervous because I knew this was going to take me away from people I loved but I was prepared for that.”

Tim, my ex-Marine nemesis, told the press that “when we put it together the issue of consent was clearly not given.”

Mark Shaw got it right in his book. “To his dismay [the criminal justice system] hit Tyson with a pro-prosecution judge, prosecutors who may have withheld critical evidence, a borderline incompetent trial defense attorney whose bumbling defense may have been more responsible for the guilty verdict than everything else combined and a jury that paid more attention to Tyson’s bad-boy public image than to the incompleteness of the case’s facts. Garrison’s best achievement at trial was his strategy in successfully presenting Desiree Washington as the shy, inexperienced, naïve, prim and proper college student that they in fact knew her not to be. Utilizing the full protection of the rape shield law, and fully aware that Washington had in fact signed an agreement to sue Tyson and sell her movie and book rights, the prosecutors, who were also aware of Washington’s questionable sexual past, and her need for therapy, made certain that the jury never saw any indication that Washington was anything other than a church-going goody two-shoes.”

Some karma came back on Garrison during the trial. He lost his wife. She had just had a baby and she ran off with the policeman who had been assigned to guard her during the trial.