11

I tried to stay out of the spotlight during my suspension from boxing. At first I was hardly seen out in public. One reason for that was that I spent a lot of time indoors at strip clubs. Whenever I’d meet a new girl, I’d take her to a strip club on the first date. It got so bad that Latondia had to bring the checks I needed to sign to the club and I’d autograph them while a girl was dancing on a pole ten feet away from me. I was really living a fantasy life.

In October of 1997, that Mitch Green lawsuit finally came to judgment. Mitch was suing me for $3 million in compensatory damages and $20 million in punitive damages. I was scared that my image had deteriorated so much that I’d be on the hook big-time with the jury, so I almost offered Mitch a quarter of a million dollars to settle the suit. Thank God I didn’t. The jury ruled that I was provoked into the fight. They awarded him $100,000 but found him 55 percent responsible for the injuries, so I only had to pay him $45,000.

But I was running real low on cash. Even though I had made about $114 million from 1995 to 1997, I had spent almost all of that, plus I had a tax bill of $10 million due. I had about $6 million left and Don offered to advance me $4 million to take care of the taxes. But I wanted to use that money to set up trusts for all my kids. So I didn’t pay the taxes and gave the money to the children. In retrospect that was a stupid decision but I was arrogant at the time. So arrogant that I thought I could get high, drink all night, and then drive home to Connecticut from New York doing 130 miles per hour on my motorcycle.

The ironic part was that I was only going 10 miles per hour when I crashed my bike. Just minutes earlier, the police had pulled me and some of my motorcycle friends over because we were speeding, and I didn’t even have a license or anything but they let us go with a warning. We kept heading to my house but I kept dozing off and I slowed down to a crawl. I nodded out for a second and when I woke up, I saw my friend right in front of me. I didn’t want to hit him and fuck him up, so I slammed on my brakes and went flying over the handlebars.

Latondia was working out of the Connecticut house during my suspension and she got a call from the highway patrol that I had been in a motorcycle accident and had refused medical help. I was so messed up that a lady pulled over and wanted to take me to the hospital but I had her drive me home instead. When I got home, I just wanted to go to sleep I was so out of it. But Latondia had called Monica and Monica jumped on the first flight from Maryland, but in the meantime she urged Latondia not to let me fall asleep under any circumstances. My ribs were killing me and I couldn’t even talk without gasping for air because I had punctured one of my lungs but I didn’t realize that then.

I kept trying to nod off, but all I heard was, “Don’t go to sleep, Mike.” Eventually Farid and Latondia got me into a hot tub to soak because I was in so much pain, but that didn’t even help. We finally drove to the hospital emergency room. I had a broken rib, a broken shoulder, and a punctured lung. The nurses were amazed that I hadn’t broken my legs because the fall had shredded my pants. I was overweight then. I really believe that the excess weight had cushioned some of the fall. They filled me up with morphine and I kept ringing the bell for more. I threw up and all this pasty white shit came out of my lungs. But I did enjoy that morphine.

I started feeling better a few days later and I threw everyone out of the house. Monica, her mother, my daughter Rayna, Rory, my security, I just told everyone to leave. Farid and Latondia were getting ready to go when I called them back in and told them to stay. A few days later Latondia was in her office and I went in.

“Latondia, talk to Shawnee. I want you guys to get along and I want everybody to work together. Things are going to change. Are you with me?”

“Of course. You know I am,” she said.

I don’t think she took me too seriously, but I had been talking a lot recently to this woman named Shawnee Simms. Craig Boogie had found her and introduced me to her. Boogie was always surfing to find people who would bring deals to me. Shawnee was living in Atlanta and she was a fast talker who talked up a big game. She claimed she could bring in all these revenue streams for me, and she wanted to start a foundation to clean up my image and get the Shrivers and the Kennedys on board. I was up for anything that would bring in money because I was broke and didn’t see Don going out of his way to get me any deals.

I had a deal on the table with the WWF to make a WrestleMania appearance in March of 1998. So I invited Shawnee up to Connecticut for the meeting. We had been talking to her on the phone every day for weeks, but this was the first time that we had met her.

During the meeting, Shawnee put her hand on my shoulder. When we left the building, I took her aside.

“Don’t you ever fucking touch me in public again. Don’t touch me when I’m talking to businesspeople,” I said.

I got all Arnold Rothstein on her ass.

But Shawnee hung in there. Some of my friends had warned me about her from the beginning. They thought that Shawnee had picked their brains for information about me. They figured that Shawnee had just studied up on me and the boxing scene on the computer all day so she knew the names of all the players. They were convinced that Shawnee wasn’t a great businessperson; she just had a lot of game. But I was willing to give her a shot. She was always in my ear. “Mike, you should have some endorsements. You should be making sixty million a fight. Blah blah blah.”

On one of her trips up from Atlanta, I wound up sleeping with Shawnee. Not because I was attracted to her; I was just high. I don’t think she was trying to seduce me. We never slept together again. I was just a pig that one time.

My contract with the WWF was finalized at the end of December. Don King Productions would be paid my fee of $3.5 million for me being guest referee at the main event of WrestleMania XIV. I would also get 25 percent of the revenue from all pay-per-view buys in excess of six hundred thousand. That seemed good but then I found out that Don had signed another contract where he would get $300,000 for providing my likeness for the WWF to use in their promotional campaign. Plus, he would get 10 percent of the revenue from the pay-per-view buys in excess of six hundred thousand. How the fuck did Don get to make money off my likeness?

I turned to an entertainment industry friend of mine. I had met Jeff Wald through Don when I was getting myself away from Cayton. He had helped me in the Robin divorce and he was generally a cool guy. I respected Jeff because, like Don and I, he had come up from nothing. He told me that his father had died when he was a kid and his mother would beat his ass all the time.

I was in L.A. at the end of January with a lot of questions about how my business was being handled. So I had Shawnee call Jeff. It was 6:30 in the morning and she told Jeff that I was standing outside his home/office. Jeff was pissed because it was his birthday, but he let me in.

“Who owns my likeness?” I said as soon as we sat down.

I told him about the three hundred grand Don was getting for the use of my likeness. He thought that was outrageous so he got on the phone with Don.

“You can’t make that money off Mike’s image,” he told Don.

“Is Mike sitting there?” Don asked.

“Yes,” he said.

“Okay, I’ll give him the pictures, but you shouldn’t be meeting with Mike without me, motherfucker,” Don yelled.

He got off the phone and then I handed Jeff eight typewritten pages filled with the details of my most recent financial statement. Jeff started skimming the pages and he freaked out.

“Why are you being charged eight grand a week for the house you stay in during camp? And you’re getting charged thousands of dollars for towels. Who the fuck is your accountant?”

I told him it was Muhammad Khan.

“That’s Don’s accountant,” he said. “Who are your lawyers?”

I told him about my business managers from Sidley Austin.

“Those are Don’s lawyers. I’ve dealt with them many times,” he said.

I was getting angry. Jeff told me to come back the next day when he had a chance to look over the documents thoroughly. I went back to my room at the Hotel Bel-Air.

After I had left Jeff’s house, King called Jeff and he threatened that he was going to fly out to L.A. and shove a shotgun up his ass. Well, he did fly out to L.A. He came to the Hotel Bel-Air to beg me to come to my senses. I was getting into my limo outside the hotel when Don tried to squeeze in with me.

“Mike, we got to talk,” he said. “Why are you doing me like this when these white motherfuckers have me in court again?” The government was prosecuting him a second time for insurance fraud.

I kicked him in the head and he flew out of the car. Then I got out and stomped on him some more. I think I shocked all the people waiting for their cars.

“You want to meet, meet me over at Jeff Wald’s office,” I said and got into the car.

I was sitting in the conference room with Jeff and his partner Irving when Don showed up.

Jeff was all over Don from the beginning.

“Look at all this shit you did to him, man,” he said, holding the financials. “This isn’t right.”

“You mind your own business, Judas,” Don said. “You ate my food, you sat in the seats that I gave you. . . .”

They screamed at each other for a little while and then Don took a conciliatory approach.

“Look, I’m going to fire Rory and John, and you and Irving can have their twenty percent,” Don said.

“Wait a minute,” Jeff said. “Mike is sitting right here. That’s his twenty percent. It’s his choice who is going to manage or not manage him. Besides, you’re giving us twenty percent of what? The guy has no license and you ain’t done shit to get it back. Fuck you!”

They started screaming at each other again. I was getting tired of all the words; I wanted action. So I grabbed a fork and I went after Don. Jeff threw all 5'6" of himself between us.

“Motherfuckers! Don’t you dare do this in my house!” he screamed. In the hallway, his secretary was freaking out and she ran right out of the house. Meanwhile, Don left the conference room and went down the hall to my private office and called Monica and tried to get her to calm me down.

Things cooled down and Don came back into the room.

“Don, look at all this fucking money you took from Mike,” Jeff said.

“But look how much money I made him,” Don answered.

“That doesn’t give you the right to fucking steal,” Jeff said. “I don’t care what you made him. You didn’t protect him. You were supposed to be the guy who protected him from the white devils. First of all, you don’t have a black person working for you. The only white devil in this room is you.”

I cracked up.

Don left the office.

“You guys take over this stuff,” I told Jeff and Irving. Jeff went right to work. He brought in an accountant who demanded all the files from my old accountant. Then he brought in John Branca and his law firm to go through all of my contracts. Branca was one of the top lawyers in the country.

Meanwhile, Don started blasting Jeff every chance he got. He was interviewed on Showtime during one of the fights and he told Jim Gray, “That Jeff Wald is a Judas and a racist.” Jeff was watching with his wife and she was not happy. The next time Jeff went to New York, he hired a big off-duty police lieutenant as his bodyguard.

On February second, I fired John Horne and Rory as my managers. Branca sent them a letter terminating their services. I loved Rory but I had no choice but to fire him along with John. The more we dug, the more we found out that Don was using these guys to get me to sign contracts that screwed me right and left. Meanwhile, they were making millions and millions of dollars. By then, I was almost numb from all this betrayal and all the drugs I was taking. Maybe it was better that I was numb. If I wasn’t, I just might have taken a gun and blown their fucking brains out. That’s what I might have done when I was younger. But I was happy that I didn’t have those guts by now.

On February fourth, Jeff Wald’s office released a formal statement from me.

At the present time, I have taken control of my own affairs both personal and business. I have hired new attorneys and accountants who report directly to me. I have formed Mike Tyson Enterprises and I am in the process of moving forward with my life. I appreciate the support I have always gotten from the American public and look forward to a bright new future with great anticipation.

At the present time, I am not answering any questions—but stay tuned.

The next day I was in New York at a press conference at the All Star Cafe to promote WrestleMania. All the reporters wanted to ask me about was my relationship with Don and John and Rory. I confirmed that I had fired John and Rory and that I was trying to extricate myself from Don. And then I extended an olive branch to Rory.

“I hope Rory doesn’t take the firing personally. Rory is still part of my life. It’s up to him what role he wants to play in my life.”

I got my answer when Don and John and Rory issued their own statements.

“I love Mike and he knows it, but there are often outside forces and individuals that will try to capitalize on Mike’s frustration that comes from his layoff as a result of the suspension,” Don said.

John and Rory seemed to be in denial. “I think there is sometimes a frustration and misunderstanding that can occur in the best of friendships and business relationships, and that’s how we categorize this,” they said in their joint statement.

There was my answer. Rory had cast his lot with two scumbags. I had been let down and betrayed by someone I would have died for. But I’d been betrayed before and it was time to move on. I never talked to Rory and John again.

We began to untangle the webs that Don had created. One of them was with Showtime. We found huge payments that were given to Don “on behalf of Mike Tyson” that I never saw a penny of. Showtime took the position that I owed them that money. Jeff called up the Showtime guys and screamed and yelled and got them to come out to a meeting in California with our legal team.

“You guys are worse criminals than Don King,” he told them. “You guys are fucking executives.”

All they cared about was getting their bonuses at the end of the year. But there was nothing we could do; we had a valid contract with Showtime.

I was a little less polite to the Showtime execs. I wouldn’t kowtow to them. I didn’t think of them as big executives. I’d get on the phone with them and just threaten to kick Jay Larkin’s ass. They’d be saying, “You can expect a letter from our lawyer.”

“Fuck your lawyer in the ass, motherfucker,” I’d scream.

We were finding so much shit that Don and them had pulled that Jeff reached out to Dale Kinsella, Howard Weitzman’s partner. Dale was a great litigator. I met with him a few times. Dale remembered that meeting when he was interviewed for a documentary film about me.

“Mike’s future was well planned out by Don King prior to getting out of prison. He gave trust to him in many areas and Don managed to insure that Mike had no lawyers, no financial advisors, and no accountants. I was walking him through some of the legal documents, just one of which managed to take 43.5 million dollars out of Mike’s pocket and put it into Don’s pocket.”

That was just the tip of the iceberg.

It was a good thing that I had been seeing a shrink since December. Monica had set me up with Dr. Richard Goldberg, the chairman of the psychiatric department at Georgetown Medical School. At first I was a little reluctant to open myself up to a middle-aged Jewish man, but he was really a terrific guy and I benefited a lot from my visits with him. Goldberg diagnosed me as suffering from “dysthymic disorder,” which was basically chronic depression. He got that right. He put me on Zoloft and I was doing well, considering the circumstances. Of course, I was supplementing his drug regimen with some of my own extracurricular drugs too.

I’m sure that the Zoloft had some bearing on me not going postal when I got into a weird confrontation at an all-night restaurant in Maryland. I had been hanging out and getting high at this club DC Live in Washington. When the club closed, I went to get a bite with this woman Adoria, who was the director of VIP relations at the club, and her coworker and Jeffrey Robinson, a mutual friend of Adoria’s and mine. We got to the restaurant at about five a.m. and were seated at a table. Then Michael Colyar, some comedian we had met at the club, came in with his “bodyguard” and two black women in their thirties. They wanted to sit with us, so the manager moved us all to a bigger table in the main room. These women had an attitude from the start, so I tried to ignore them. But when a pretty young European woman came over to our table and asked to take a picture with me, the black chick in the red dress started going off on me.

“I hope you’re enjoying your Mike Tyson ‘celebrity’ bullshit,” she said.

Meanwhile, the hot European chick was putting her arms around me and posing.

“My own sisters don’t show me love like this,” I told Adoria’s coworker.

Now the woman in the red dress went berserk.

“You’re not going to praise white women and disrespect black women while there are two black queens here,” she said.

“Yeah, you’re not going to disrespect all black women while you have that white bitch in your arms,” her friend in the black dress said.

I tried to ignore them but the woman in red just kept going.

“You ain’t nothing. You’re just a ghetto nigga who managed to get some money,” she said. “I’m a correctional officer and if you had been in my prison, I would’ve had your ass in lockdown.”

“Fuck you, you bitch.” I couldn’t take her shit any longer. She was bringing me down from my high.

Adoria got up and told the comedian to get those bitches out of the restaurant. He started escorting the one in red out, but she still had to get in some bullshit.

“You ain’t nothing, nigga,” she said.

“Yeah? I’ll jump over ten lying black bitches like you, to get to one dead white ho,” I said.

That made her go postal. She grabbed a cup of coffee from a nearby table and threw it on me, ruining my zebra-striped shirt. I jumped up and accidentally knocked a section of the table to the side and some glasses and dishes fell to the floor. I was so irate that my friend Jeffrey had to hold me back.

I threw some money on the table and we left. I heard later that the comedian and the two women sat and ate for another hour, laughing and making fun of me. When a guy from the next table asked her what had happened, she told him, “I called Tyson an ignorant motherfucker. I will not tolerate him being disrespectful to black women. I just don’t appreciate Tyson talking and laughing with these whities while he has sisters at his table.”

I knew all this because when I got home that night, I called Jeff Wald and he immediately called the owner of the restaurant and tracked down the customers and the staff and got depositions from all of them. Those two harlots wanted to harass me and goad me into a lawsuit. That didn’t work but that didn’t stop them. First their attorney contacted my attorney and asked for $20 million. Nine days later, the two shrews filed a $7.5 million lawsuit against me claiming that I verbally and physically abused them after my sexual advances towards one of them was spurned. They were claiming assault, battery, defamation, and emotional distress. They were so traumatized that they couldn’t even speak to the reporters at the press conference. But their ambulance chaser could.

“These women were put through a horrendous ordeal, cursed, verbally abused in a situation in front of a fully packed restaurant.”

He changed his tune a bit when he got all the depositions we had collected. By the end of the year, they offered to settle for $2 million, then they went down to $850,000. Eventually we paid the woman in red $75,000 and the other one $50,000. We had to settle. My name was mud. I was the arrogant nigga who nobody liked, especially upper-middle-class people. It was a bad time for me. I’m sure that if someone had killed me, they would have gone free.

By the end of February I had new management in place. I hired Jeff Wald, Irving Azoff, and Shelly Finkel, an old friend of mine who used to manage Evander Holyfield, to be my advisors. They would split the standard manager’s fee of 20 percent three ways. I would be taking home a lot more money because one of the things we uncovered when we went through Don’s contracts was that in addition to his fees as promoter of my fights, he was also taking 30 percent of my purse money, which was illegal. So when I fought Holyfield and my purse was $30 million, I wound up with only $15 million because Don was taking $9 million and John and Rory were splitting $6 million. Don was also helping himself to 30 percent of the bonus money from Showtime and the MGM Grand.

But it got worse. King was getting all the income from the site fees and from foreign telecasts. When he made my deal with the MGM Grand, he was given a $15 million loan from the MGM Grand to purchase MGM stock that was guaranteed by MGM to be worth at least double the value at the end of the term of the contract. I never saw any of that $15 million. Don also had all these side deals with Showtime that were predicated on bringing me to the table. So they paid him to promote non–Mike Tyson events because of my name. The Showtime deal also allowed either Showtime or Don to audit the books, but barred me from doing so!

As if screwing me out of all that money wasn’t enough, Don was nickel-and-diming me too. He was paying exorbitant purses to the other boxers on my cards and that money wound up coming out of my pocket. He paid $100,000-a-night consultant’s fees to his wife, and $50,000 fees to his two sons. Don’s daughter was pulling in $52,000 a year from being the president of the Mike Tyson Fan Club, a club that never met. His daughter didn’t even bother to open up the stacks of letters sent to the club.

I was charged huge fees for work allegedly done to my Ohio mansion. I was billed for maid service, legal fees, and pool maintenance at King’s Las Vegas mansion. I paid $100,000 for a WBC “title sanctioning fee” for my 1991 fight with Razor Ruddock. But it wasn’t even a title fight. He also charged me for the $2 million fee to get promotional rights to Ruddock in the future. All my travel was arranged and billed through a travel agency owned by Don’s wife. I was paying ridiculously high fees. Oh yeah, I was paying through the nose for my towels too.

On March fifth, we sued Don in U.S. District Court in New York for at least $100 million. That same day, my lawyer John Branca sent me a pep-talk memo. “This will give you an opportunity to establish your PLACE in HISTORY—to be a leader in seeking to redress the wrong-doings and injustices perpetrated by Don King, not only on you but on many other fighters during the last two decades. As such, you would secure your place not only in boxing but also in social and cultural history in the manner of an Arthur Ashe or Curt Flood. The success of what we are doing depends entirely on your STRENGTH and your conviction. Don King will look for and exploit any weakness in you. This will require DEDICATION and PATIENCE and could take three years in court with Don King but if you stay committed, you will win.” Branca and Jeff Wald also mapped out a strategy to boost my income with a clothing line, a record label, merchandising deals for posters, and an autobiography.

Four days later, we sued John Horne and Rory Holloway for another $100 million. By inducing me to sign the deal with Don while I was in prison, which was illegal to begin with, they made $22 million each on my fights after I got out. If they had been real managers, they would never have allowed me to sign off on any of the deals that Don brought to me, especially the revised deal that gave him 30 percent of my purses and bonuses. Instead of being locked into Don for four years, I would have been a free agent and could have worked on a fight-to-fight basis with the promoter who offered me the most money. But it was my fault for hiring a failed stand-up comedian and my wingman to steer my career. Cus once told me, “Hey, there’s animals disguised as human beings out here and you’re not sophisticated enough to decipher the two.”

I didn’t expect to hear anything from Rory, but I was amused to read what John Horne had to say after we sued his ass.

“Mike Tyson could never appreciate what we were trying to do. Mike Tyson is a convicted rapist, a felon, and we made him the biggest deal in boxing. If he lives for a long time maybe he’ll understand what an achievement that was. Mike, I am not your bitch. I stood by you out of love and loyalty only.”

And he also said this, “Don King is a great man. When you hear people ripping him, they’ve never had lunch with him. Don King respects my ability and I respect him.”

Even though I had my advisors working on my career, three women—Shawnee, Jackie Rowe, and Monica—were doing a lot of the day-to-day work. I didn’t want Monica to get involved in the boxing world. She shouldn’t have to get infected by that bug. I attracted scumbags. They may have been sophisticated and good at what they did, but they were still scumbags because big money was involved. Monica just wanted to protect me. I see that now, even if I didn’t understand that at the time.

Shawnee and Jackie were something else. They were both big, brash women. Jackie was totally street. We were cut from the same cloth. Instead of talking all political to executives like, “Mike is the biggest attraction out there and MGM should be more than happy to . . .” she’d say stuff like, “You motherfuckers should be licking this man’s ass.” Shawnee wasn’t as crude as Jackie, but she could be cruel. Dealing with Shawnee and Jackie was more than Latondia could handle. She got sick of being bullied around and quit. I was still barely involved in my own shit then. I was just out there getting high, throwing my life away.

I was hurting for money, so I sold off sixty-two of my vehicles, including some sports cars, six Ducatis, and four Honda trucks, and realized $3.3 million from the sale. My new team had gotten involved in the WWF deal and we renegotiated that now that Don wasn’t in the picture. Instead of a $3.5 million fee, I wound up with $6 million and 35 percent of the pay-per-view buys in excess of one million. I was really looking forward to working for the WWF. When I was a kid, I’d watch wrestling all the time on WNJU, Channel 47, the Spanish UHF station.

I got a lot of criticism for appearing at WrestleMania, but it was really one of the highlights of my life. People were saying that their wrestling was bullshit, but that $6 million check wasn’t bullshit. I was supposed to have reffed for the WWF at a Hulk Hogan match back in 1990, but they used Buster Douglas instead after he knocked me out.

I had so much fun promoting this event.

The WWF wanted me to do MAD TV and the writers even wrote up some suggested sketches. One had me hosting a Martha Stewart–type show on the new Lifetime channel, which had branched into sports.

“I find simple flower arrangements bring a little touch of spring in the middle of winter,” they had me say. “See, here I’ve taken these lovely irises and added a touch of pansies.”

One of the wrestlers would correct me and say that you can’t mix irises and pansies and then we’d get into a fight.

Another proposed skit was a fake commercial where a guy at a party tries to tell an interesting story but he just can’t. Everyone leaves him sitting alone and then the voice-over comes in.

“Has this ever happened to you? Well, not anymore. Because Mike Tyson will come to your house and punch you in the face!”

Then I punch the guy in the face. They cut to the party again and the guy is fucked up, swollen face, bandages all over, black eye, and he can barely talk. But as he struggles to speak, he’s the center of attention.

“So if your life is really boring, just call us and Mike Tyson will come over and punch you in the face!”

Jeff and Irving and Shelly put the kibosh on doing that program. I would never have gotten my license back if I’d done it.

We went to a few different cities to do live events to promote the show on March twenty-seventh. In Boston we held a huge outdoor rally in City Hall Plaza. It was awesome. The crowd went crazy screaming and cursing at me and Shawn Michaels and Steve Austin. They held up signs like TYSON BITES and EARS FEAR TYSON. Austin had called me out and pushed me at an earlier appearance, so now I jumped into the ring while Michaels and two of his comrades in D-Generation X had Austin against the ropes. I kicked him in the shins a few times and then planted a big wet kiss on his forehead.

The night of the event, I entered the Fleet Center wearing a D-Generation X T-shirt. During the match I was openly rooting for Michaels from ringside. When Austin got knocked out of the ring, I threw him back in. Then the referee in the ring got knocked out. I got into the ring and dragged him out. It was back and forth between Michaels and Austin, but finally Austin pummeled Michaels to the canvas. The ref was still unconscious. So I jumped into the ring and instead of attacking Austin, I counted Michaels out, making Austin the new champ. We celebrated together and he gave me an Austin 3:16 T-shirt. Michaels regained consciousness and confronted me for my betrayal. I floored him with one punch and then draped the Austin T-shirt over his body and Steve and I walked out with our arms around each other.

At the press conference after the match, I was asked about Don and John and Rory cheating me out of millions of dollars.

“I did a little screwing too,” I said. “I guess what goes around comes around.”

Someone asked me about the way I pulled the unconscious referee out of the ring.

“I’m on parole. For the record, I didn’t slam the referee. I politely took him out of the ring and put him on the mat.”

Austin and I told the press that we had been secretly working together all along, but I kind of undermined the credibility of that by continually referring to him as Cold Stone instead of Stone Cold. I was so high that I had the munchies.

In May, we announced that I was forming my own record label, Iron Mike Records. With the help of Irving Azoff and John Branca we would find a major label to distribute our artists’ work. In the meantime I had Jackie Rowe handling the business end. We also added my former lawyers and financial managers at Sidley Austin to our lawsuit. I was hoping to get something from these lawsuits soon because I was paying out lots of money to defend myself from all the lawsuits that were coming in against me. Besides the two women in the restaurant, I was being sued by my former tiger trainer, the company that owned a house in L.A. that I backed out of buying, my jeweler in Vegas, my Vegas house contractor, that quack Dr. Smedi, and even Kevin Rooney, my old trainer.

The craziest lawsuit was filed by Ladywautausa A. Je, a wacky black broad who would have her assistant photograph her with unsuspecting celebrities on Hollywood Boulevard. I had come out of a meeting with a filmmaker when she lifted her leg up against me and had her guy take a picture. Next thing we knew, she was filing a suit for sexual battery claiming that I pressed my body against hers, “pulling up her body suit saying, ‘Take a picture of this.’” As soon as we produced a few witnesses she dropped the case. But it got publicity.

I did great with the Smedi suit. He sued me for the original $7 million he claimed I owed him, so we countersued and he wound up paying me $50,000. I didn’t do as well with Rooney. Despite the fact that he claimed to have an oral agreement in which he was to be my “trainer for life” and despite the testimony from many friends of Cus’s who said that Cus had become disenchanted with Rooney and wanted to replace him, the second U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals reinstated a $4.4 million award that a jury had given him years earlier.

So it was time to get back in the ring. I had sat out a year by then. Jeff had been talking with Dr. Elias Ghanem, who was the head of the Nevada boxing commission. I loved Dr. Ghanem. He was an Israeli-born Lebanese man who came to the States with nothing and built up an amazing medical practice because he was a throwback—a doctor who really cared about his patients. Elvis, Michael Jackson, Wayne Newton, Ann-Margret—he treated all the Vegas stars. He loved boxing too. He assured Jeff that I would be able to get my license back because my punishment was “a little over the top.” After the Holyfield thing, he took me aside.

“You fucked up, but it’s going to be all right,” he told me.

Shelly had decided that we should get a license in New Jersey. He was unaware of Jeff’s maneuverings and Shelly and I had good relationships with Larry Hazzard, who was a former referee and the current New Jersey boxing commissioner. Jeff was against going to New Jersey but he was in no shape to intervene. So on July twenty-ninth I appeared before the New Jersey Athletic Control Board for a hearing. You would have thought Saddam Hussein was testifying. I walked into the building holding hands with Monica and we were cheered by most of the spectators but booed by the six protestors from the National Organization for Women who protested me pretty much everywhere I went.

Inside the hearing room, there were enough cops lined up to stop a full-scale riot. They must have been pretty scared of me. The hearing went well at first. Monica testified that “boxing is his passion and he really, really, really misses it. He needs boxing and I think boxing needs him.” Then it was former heavyweight contender Chuck Wepner’s turn. He cracked up the whole room when he recalled referee Tony Perez’s instructions before Wepner fought Muhammad Ali in 1975.

“He didn’t want me to choke or rabbit punch. Those were my two best punches.”

Bobby Czyz testified that even though I had snapped in the ring, I should be allowed to continue fighting.

“A piece of the street came out in him,” he said. “If I hit a guy and his eye fell out, I would eat it before I gave it back. That’s the kind of mind-set you have to have as a boxer. Mike is not anywhere as bad as all them people say. He made a mistake. I also know he has changed considerably. Mike Tyson has gone out of his way to cut out the evil forces from his life.”

They even showed a video that Camille, who was ninety-three by that time, had made, up in Catskill. She said that I continued to support her and call her my “white mother.”

My own testimony started out on the right foot. I told them that I was foggy from the repeated head butts by Holyfield.

“I just snapped. Nothing mattered anymore at that particular point.” I got all choked up and had to compose myself. “I’m sorry for what I did. I wish it never happened. It will haunt me for the rest of my life.”

But then at the end of my testimony, the assistant attorney general, Michael Haas, kept battering away at me, wondering why I had bitten Holyfield. He kept asking me over and over again if I could do something like that again.

“This ordeal ruined my life internally,” I said, trying to contain my anger. “You think I want to do it again?”

I was supposed to read a closing statement, but that creep had gotten under my skin.

“I don’t want to say it now because I’m angry,” I told my lawyer, Anthony Fusco Jr. “You know what I mean, man? Fuck it. Why do I got to go through this shit all the time?”

“Relax, relax.” Fusco tried to calm me down.

Fuck them. I just felt like being like a prick. I was tired of suppressing my rebellious side. I thought about Bobby Seale and the Chicago Seven, who didn’t take any shit from their judge.

Despite my outburst, we were sure that Jersey would grant me my license even though New York State Attorney General Dennis Vacco tried to butt in. Vacco was part of a group that included Senator John McCain who were trying to clean up boxing. They had held hearings in Washington and I had even submitted a statement blasting Don.

“My financial career was placed in the hands of a promoter and manager who were allowed to run amok. The opportunity for abuse is gigantic. Fighters can wind up like slaves.”

McCain had introduced a bill to create national regulations over boxing. So Vacco was complaining that Jersey shouldn’t license me until Vegas did.

“I would be very offended if they actually licensed him or permitted him to box in New Jersey,” Vacco told the press. Then he told the reporters that he would personally deliver that message to the Jersey attorney general.

All this controversy worried Jeff and the others, so on August thirteenth, on the eve of the New Jersey Control Board meeting to decide my fate, my advisors withdrew my application.

I was mad at the world and I was getting high every chance I got. At the end of August, Monica and I were driving near her house and someone rear-ended her Mercedes because the guy behind him rear-ended him. The guy got out of his car and came around to our driver’s side and started mouthing off at Monica, then he started shouting at the guy who hit him. I just got of the car and started beating the shit out of everyone involved. I kicked the first guy in the balls and then I slugged the guy who hit the first guy. Monica was yelling and I had to be restrained by my bodyguard who was in the car in front of us. I feel so bad about this now, but I was going through a real depressive phase of my life. Can you imagine that? I had a wife and kids, but I felt hopeless.

We got back in the car and Monica drove away. Someone had called the police and they pulled us over a few miles from the scene. I was as high as a kite and I started complaining about chest pains and then I told them that I was a victim of racial profiling. They offered to take me to a hospital, but I told them that Monica was a doctor so they let us go. I actually did go and get checked out in a local hospital but I was fine. Since the cops weren’t on the scene of the accident, all they could eventually charge me with if the other guys decided to press charges was misdemeanor assault.

They did. On September second, Richard Hardick, the guy that rear-ended us, filed an assault charge against me for kicking him in the groin. The next day the other guy, Abmielec Saucedo, filed for getting punched in the face by me.

Everyone working with me was worried about this case. We were getting ready to try to get our license back in Vegas, but how would the commissioners react to my road rage? What’s worse, I was still on probation in Indiana. If she wanted to, Judge Gifford could haul my ass back to the IYC to serve another four years.

I appeared before the Vegas commission on September nineteenth. I drove up to the hearing on one of my motorcycles, wearing blue jeans and a black T-shirt. All my lawyers in their suits were waiting for me outside and when I got off my bike, I threw my helmet down on the ground. The lawyers ran off, they were scared shitless of me. Jeff Wald and I cracked up.

It was a very contentious hearing. My lawyer Dale Kinsella was pounding on the enormous fine they had levied on me and how much my financial situation was fucked. I pretty much let my lawyers and character witnesses do the talking. When I did answer some questions, I’d look over to Dr. Ghanem, and if I was about to say the wrong answer, he’d subtly shake his head as if to say, “No, don’t say that, don’t say that.” The hearing lasted six hours and after it was over Dr. Ghanem met the press.

“In six hours Tyson did not blow up,” he said. As if that was a major accomplishment for me.

The commission didn’t rule on my application that day. In fact, they passed a motion that I had to submit to a detailed psychiatric evaluation before they would even vote on reinstatement. They gave me the choice of going to the Mayo Clinic, the Menninger Clinic, or the Massachusetts General Hospital. The decision was a no-brainer. One of Irving Azoff’s fraternity brothers was the head of psychiatry at Mass General.

So I called up two of my L.A. girlfriends and had them fly out and meet me in Boston. I was staying in a hotel and then I’d go to the clinic at Mass General every day and get tested. The night before I was to start my treatment, I picked the girls up at the airport in my limo, then I had my limo driver score some coke. We partied like crazy every night I was there.

I went to the hospital that first morning in a pissed-off mood. I was directed to meet my doctors in what looked like an upscale waiting room or even someone’s living room. I figured I was getting the VIP treatment.

“Man, this is bullshit,” I said. “I don’t deserve to be here with all these motherfuckers.” Everyone else in the room looked a little wary of me.

Just then, a white woman, about twenty-nine, came up to me. She reminded me of Velma from Scooby-Doo. She was wearing a turtleneck sweater and had that bowl haircut and big horn-rimmed glasses. She sat down next to me and looked concerned. I figured she was one of the professors from the psychiatric ward.

“What’s wrong? You seem down,” she said.

“They think I’m crazy because I bit this nigga’s ear, but they don’t know. The only reason I bit him is because he kept head-butting me and the referee wasn’t calling it and I felt desperate and I had no choice.”

She thought for a minute.

“You were in a fight,” she said calmly.

I was high as a kite but those words penetrated to my core like some ancient Zen wisdom.

Fuck, I was in a fight. I felt cured immediately. She said it so authoritatively. I was amazed that she totally understood me, after just a few seconds with me. That’s why they must pay these shrinks the big bucks, I thought.

Just then my euphoria was interrupted by a nurse.

“It’s time for your meds, Nancy,” the nurse said to the woman I was talking to.

“Shove ’em up your ass,” she snarled and she knocked the medication out of the nurse’s hand. The nurse then gestured and two big attendants came out and put the lady into a straitjacket. She was fighting these two guys until they finally overpowered her.

Then I looked around the room. There was a guy drooling in the corner, talking to himself. I realized that I wasn’t in an upscale waiting room, I was in the psychiatric unit and everybody in there, including the Velma lookalike from Scooby-Doo, was as crazy as a motherfucker.

The Vegas commissioners were due to rule on my reinstatement on October nineteenth, so my lawyers were working overtime to reach a settlement with the two guys from the road rage incident. I wound up paying each guy $250,000 on signing the settlement agreement and they’d each get an additional $150,000 from Showtime following my first fight after the suspension. They also each signed an affidavit that affirmed that although it was their belief that I was the person who struck them, because of their “disorientation and the confusion that surrounded the events that occurred that day” they couldn’t “be absolutely certain that it was Mr. Tyson who struck me.”

Before my hearing on October nineteenth, one of the commissioners insisted that my psychiatric records be made public. This was a load of bullshit and my lawyers fought it tooth and nail, but there was some obscure law and there was no way they could vote me back unless we released the findings. Now everyone in the world could see just how low my self-esteem was. Even though I was chronically depressed, the doctors said, “Mr. Tyson is mentally fit to return to boxing, to comply with the rules and regulations, and to do so without repetition of the events of June 28, 1997. While we take note of the impulsivity, emotional problems, and cognitive problems outlined above, it is our opinion that none of these, alone or in combination, render Mr. Tyson mentally unfit in this regard.”

In other words, I was a sick motherfucker, but I could still get in the ring and try to beat the shit out of somebody.

I had Magic Johnson with me at the next hearing. He was interested in getting into boxing promotion and he was certainly a very nonthreatening black man to these commissioners. But when he got into how he would handle me, I started to get irritated.

“Mike knows money, but he doesn’t understand it and I hope to teach him to understand it. He needs to become a businessman. Mike is the only guy I know who can make one hundred or two hundred million dollars but would rather not have it. He would rather give it away. He has to get a money manager and that is what I would bring to the Mike Tyson team.”

But I kept my cool. And that same day the commission voted 4–1 to restore my license.

Now I could get back in the ring and make some money. I was $13 million in the hole to the IRS by now. That might freak out a lot of people, but I was used to getting multimillion-dollar payouts, so I knew I could rebound. It’s funny, right around this time my new accountants discovered an IRA account in my name that over the years had appreciated to over a quarter of a million dollars.

The accountants began to dig around and found out that Cus had set up that account for me back in Catskill. When they told me it was Cus, I cried like a baby. For the first time in my life, I understood what “It’s the thought that counts” meant. Cus must have known I’d screw up my money. I never thought anyone loved my black ass. It restored some kind of faith in mankind for me at that point.

On December first, we pleaded no contest to the Maryland road rage misdemeanor charges. Since we had settled with the two guys, my lawyers were convinced that I would get a slap on the wrist at my sentencing, which would be sometime in February of 1999.

My first comeback fight was scheduled for January sixteenth against the South African fighter Frans Botha. He was nicknamed the White Buffalo and he was no tomato can. He had actually won the IBF title in 1995, but he later tested positive for steroids and they stripped him. Then he fought on the undercard of my first fight with Holyfield and put up a great fight for Michael Moorer’s IBF belt until he was stopped in the last round, so I wasn’t taking him lightly.

Four days before the fight I sat down in Vegas for a series of satellite TV and radio interviews. My first interview was with Russ Salzberg with Channel 9 back in New York.

“Mike, Botha’s a 6 to 1 underdog. Any concerns on your part?” he asked.

“I don’t know nothing about numbers. I just know what I can do. I’m going to kill this motherfucker.”

“Okay,” he said, a little taken aback. “You take into the ring a lot of rage. Does that work for you, or does it work against you at times?”

“Who cares? We’re going to fight anyway. What does it matter?”

“Well, for example, rage against Evander Holyfield worked against you.”

“Fuck it! It’s a fight! So whatever happens, happens.”

“Mike, you gotta talk like that?”

“I’m talking to you the way I want to talk to you. If you have a problem, turn off your station.”

“You know what? I think we’ll end this discussion right now,” Russ said.

“Good! Fuck you!”

“You got it. Have a nice fight, Mike.”

“Fuck off! Asshole!”

“You’re a class act, buddy.”

“So’s your mother.”

Part of the reason I was so belligerent was that I had been taken off my daily dose of Zoloft a week before the fight.

I was so rusty for that fight. It was a horrible night for me. Botha was holding me continually. He clinched me in the corner at the end of the first round and I leveraged his left arm with my right arm and I tried to snap it off. I’m a real dirty fighter. I shouldn’t say this, but it’s true. I think I really wanted people to talk about how dirty and vicious I was. When they asked me after the fight whether I was trying to intentionally break his arm, I just said, “Correct.”

I won only one round of the first four and in that round Richard Steele deduced a point from me. The Showtime guys—Kenny Albert, Ferdie Pacheco, and Bobby Czyz—all thought that Botha was getting to me with his holding and was turning it into a street fight. But after the fourth round, I told Crocodile and my new trainer Tommy Brooks that he was getting tired and I could get to him. Apparently, Ferdie Pacheco didn’t believe that.

“Tyson looks like he’s in slow motion. He can’t get off two punches. That’s the mark of a shot fighter, he can’t get off punches. Oh!”

I didn’t need two punches. Just as Ferdie was saying that, I hit Botha with a right hand square on his jaw. He crumpled to the canvas. He tried to get up but he couldn’t beat the count. Then he careened into the ropes and collapsed back on the canvas. It was an ugly fight, but I redeemed it with a resounding one-punch knockout. Botha went down like he had been shot with an elephant gun. The White Buffalo just got poached.

There was intrigue with my team now too. Shelly and Shawnee had gotten together and ganged up on Jeff and Irving. Jeff was still recuperating from his surgery and had to go back to L.A. to coproduce Roseanne Barr’s new show, so he pretty much left the picture. My career was in the hands of Shelly, Shawnee, and Jackie Rowe.

And the Maryland judicial system. I showed up in a small court in Rockville on February 5, 1999. I was wearing a charcoal gray suit and a black vest. Monica was there with me, along with at least a dozen of my lawyers and advisors. I had pleaded no contest to the charges and my attorneys had worked out a deal that would avoid jail time. I’d just pay a fine, be put on probation, and be ordered to do community service. But then I got fucked again.

The new district attorney, Doug Gansler, and his assistant prosecutor, Carol Crawford, showed up in court with an eleven-page document that made me sound like I was a Nazi war criminal. Crawford especially seemed to loathe me. She was a very masculine-looking woman with a severe short haircut. She seemed hell-bent on taking out her anger towards all men on me. I was her showpiece.

Instead of keeping up their end of the deal, these two liars trotted out every derogatory thing they could pin on me, including quotes from Teddy Atlas saying that Cus had spoiled me as a kid. They quoted from my own interviews, including the Playboy interview from 1998 where I told Mark Kram, the writer, that I was “a very hateful motherfucker” who would “blow one day.” Then they cited Kram himself when he wrote that I was “the darkest figure in sports” that he had ever encountered.

“This comment is noteworthy from a man who met with the reviled boxing legend Sonny Liston, an ex-con who died of a drug overdose in suspicious circumstances, and, coincidentally, one boxer the defendant has expressed an affinity for,” Gansler and Crawford wrote in their memo in aid of sentencing.

They even turned around my psychiatric report from Mass General that, except for the depression, gave me a clean bill of health.

“Perhaps we can’t find something ‘wrong’ with the defendant beyond that which one might find ‘wrong’ with any neighborhood bully. For this bully, however, the world is his playground. One commentator, clinical psychologist Robert Butterworth, Ph.D., may have provided the greatest direction for the court. After reviewing the Kram interview comments by the defendant, Mr. Butterworth commented, ‘If he’s telling us all he’s going to do this, we’d be idiots not to see it coming.’ Although we do not punish prospectively in this jurisdiction, the Court must always consider the safety of the defendant, as well as the public, in sentencing appropriately. The defendant is nothing less than the time bomb buried in our own backyard.”

Can you believe this shit? What was this, Stalinist Russia? These two liars wanted to use an interview where I blew off steam and a diagnosis from this Dr. Butterworth who never laid eyes on me to put me behind bars before this “time bomb” blew up. Anybody could see that these people were just out to abuse me, but no one cared because they probably thought I deserved this.

“Although we do not punish prospectively in this state”—but that’s exactly what they were arguing for—“executed incarceration, as a starting point, will address the twin goals of punishment and deterrence. Rehabilitation, through the fine programs of this jurisdiction, may be commenced while incarcerated and followed during any probationary period. Given the defendant’s denial of responsibility, his defiance, his comments on his character, and his predictions of future conduct, the goals of deterrence and rehabilitation may never be achieved. However, for at least the period of incarceration, the public at large will be protected from his potential for violence.”

Judge Johnson agreed. He sentenced me to two years in jail, with one year suspended, and fined me $5,000, and ordered me to serve two years probation and perform two thousand hours of community service. He also denied me bail if I appealed the decision.

The standing-room-only courtroom filled with shocked gasps. I was stunned. Monica started crying hysterically. They slapped handcuffs on me and took me right to jail.

Gansler was getting his fifteen minutes of fame. People actually were outraged that I could be sent to jail for a year after we had reached a plea deal for no time with the old state attorney.

“Any prosecutor would do what I did,” Gansler told an AP writer. “People are going to say what they’re going to say.”

They threw me in a five-and-a-half-foot-by-eight-foot cell in Cellblock Two, which was their version of protective custody. That meant that I was separated from the inmate population who were mostly white privileged kids from Montgomery County. My unit was isolated with just a few people who were either too weak to be in population or too aggressive. I begged them to put me in population. I needed to be out there to work the system to get my privileges. I was raised that way. Instead I was in protective custody and the guards were coming around and taking pictures of me and selling them to the papers.

I was in for two weeks when I got sent to their version of the hole. It started when they sent some prison shrink to see me. I was seeing Dr. Goldberg, one of the best psychiatrists in the country, so I refused to even talk to this fool. He cut my normal dose of Zoloft in half. When they came with a different-looking pill, I refused to take it. Two days later, I was in the dayroom, on the phone, when a particularly sadistic guard came in and hung up the phone in the middle of my conversation. I was a different person in jail; I was more fastidious than I was at home. One little thing went wrong and I was ready to go off the hinges and tear it up.

I got enraged and pulled the TV set off its metal bracket, threw it on the floor, then picked it up and chucked it at the bars of the cell where the warden and two guards were observing me from behind. A small piece of plastic broke off and went through the bar and hit one of the guards. The guards immediately sent me to “administrative segregation.” I was locked up for twenty-three hours of the day and wasn’t allowed to buy snacks from the canteen or have visits or telephone calls, except from my lawyers or doctors. Doctor Goldberg visited me the next night and got me back on my regular dose of Zoloft.

After the TV incident, the jail administration charged me with disorderly conduct, destruction of property, and assault on a corrections officer because the little plastic shard hit him. They threw me in the hole, and I wasn’t a happy camper. I thought I was one of those Baader-Meinhof German political prisoners who would go crazy when they were put in jail. They’d kill guards, they’d kill themselves. I even started wearing a little Spanish bandanna on my head and was butt naked, throwing things at the guards.

They sentenced me to twenty-five days in isolation, but my lawyer appealed and I got out after five days. I really didn’t like this prison. I wanted to be sent back to Indiana. I had nobody to work with in this jail, nobody to bring me stuff and get me girls. I was still on probation there so they could have easily yanked me back. The problem was that they could make me serve the last four years of my previous sentence. Jim Voyles, my Indiana lawyer, made about twenty trips back and forth from Maryland and finally reached a deal where I would serve an extra sixty days in jail at Maryland, and Indiana would wash their hands of me forever. Judge Gifford was more than happy to sign off on that. Nobody wanted me back in Indiana.

I was pissed. I wanted to sue the judge’s ass to get back there. But when I settled into jail in Maryland, it turned out not to be too bad. Monica started cooking for me and I was allowed to have the food sent in. After a few months, I started gaining so much weight that I asked them if I could bring in my treadmill and a stationary bike and they let me. I was always the privileged prick in prison.

We even shot a cover for Esquire while I was in there. Monica brought my new baby boy, Amir, to the prison and we posed for pictures to accompany an article about me.

I started mingling with the other guys in protective custody. There were a number of young kids who were in there for murder. Two of them even hung themselves while I was in there—one guy was a wealthy Israeli kid and the other a black kid. I paid for the black kid’s funeral because his parents didn’t have much money. It broke my heart to see these young beautiful kids from privileged families getting caught up in drugs and then doing something like murdering someone over a hundred bucks. When I left that jail, there must have been $12,000 on my books, so I had the prison split that money up among the five guys who were in isolation with me. They weren’t no tough guys. They were little kids who had no money who were never going to go home.

I sort of became the protective custody Don at that place. The other guys would send messages to me through the guards and ask me to talk to them about their problems. Some of the guards would come to me and tell me about a kid who might be having a problem and I’d send him a message and tell him to chill out.

I didn’t get many visitors in jail in Maryland. Monica came, Craig Boogie came, some other friends dropped in. My Jamaican girlfriend, Lisa, came. She had written her name in the visitors’ log and Monica came a few hours later and saw her name and threw a shit fit. Thank God they had that little glass window separating us.

But the visitor who got the most attention when he came was John F. Kennedy Jr. He came to visit me one night. When the word got out, ten news teams showed up and waited outside for hours. Inside, it was pandemonium. I had John say hello to all the other inmates in isolation with me. “Yeah, hug their mom. Give the kid a kiss.” I was the big Don.

John and I were friends from New York. I met him on the street one day and he invited me up to see him at his George magazine office. He was such a beautiful, down-to-earth cat, riding his bike around Manhattan, taking public transportation sometimes. The first thing he told me when he came to see me was, “My whole family told me not to come to see you. So when you see them and they’re all saying ‘Hi’ to you, you get the picture.”

Right before he came, one of his cousins got in trouble for screwing his babysitter or something like that.

“Yeah, my cousin is the poster boy for bad behavior,” John said.

“Whatever you do, don’t disrespect your family in public. Don’t do that because that’s what society wants. People want to break you and make you like you’re nothing,” I told him. “Just call them an asshole in private. Don’t ever do it in front of the public.”

We talked about the Kennedy family a lot, especially his grandfather, but he didn’t seem to know that much about him, other than he didn’t teach any of his sons anything about business. “Nobody in my family knows how to run a business, that’s why they all went into politics. He wanted us to be pampered guys.”

I guess that’s why he was doing his magazine, to learn the business end. He felt that he had no accomplishments in life and that was one thing that he could point to.

We talked about my case a little bit.

“Look, I know that the only reason you’re in here is because you’re black,” he told me. He was letting me know that he knew what time it was.

At one point, I just flat out said to him, “You know you’ve got to run for political office.”

“What?” He seemed a little taken aback. “Do you think so?”

“You’d be letting my mother down, my mother’s people down. They saw you under that desk. You can’t let a lost generation that believed so much in your family down. Not me, fuck me, I’m going to do what I do, but you can’t let those people down. Your father and your uncle were their hope and you’re the bloodline to that hope,” I said.

He didn’t say anything. Maybe he thought I was crazy.

“No, nigga, you’ve got to do this shit. Are you crazy? What’s the purpose of you even living? That’s what you were born to do. People’s dreams are riding on you, man. That’s a heavy burden but you shouldn’t have had that mother and father you did.”

He would have made a great politician. He really cared about people; you could tell it wasn’t some phony-baloney shit. Just the way he really engaged with people, really catching the eyes of people he didn’t even know. He wasn’t scared to be seen out in public; he was out there looking to engage. Whoa, I’d think, this is one interesting guy.

He looked tired that night. He told me he had to get some coffee because he was going to fly back to New York that night. He had flown down with his flight instructor.

“No, man. Go over to the house. Stay with Monica and the kids,” I told him. “You’re fucking crazy to fly that plane anyway.”

“You don’t know how I feel up there, man. I feel so free,” he told me.

“You must feel stupid, you up there and you don’t really know what you’re doing. If you have to fly, fly by yourself. Please don’t take somebody you love up there.”

He didn’t say anything, but he went to see Monica that night and she told me that he said, “Well, Mike said I was stupid for flying my plane. He’s the one who got in the motorcycle accident.”

We also talked about hanging out when I got out of jail. He was talking about other women and I got a sense that he was going through a lot of shit with his wife.

“When you get out, give me a little time to handle some stuff with my wife. Then you and I have got to hang. You need to come with me to Aspen.”

“Aspen?” I said. “They got no niggas in Aspen. I’m not gonna get no love up there.”

“Uh-huh. There’s Lynn Swann,” John said.

“Lynn Swann ain’t no nigga,” I said.

“Yeah, you’re right,” he conceded.

Of course, I made the pitch to get out right then. I had been in jail for almost four months already. That was enough time I thought. One of John’s cousins, Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, RFK’s oldest daughter, was the lieutenant governor of Maryland at the time.

“Get me out of here,” I begged. “Ask your fucking cousin.”

“Mike, I don’t really know her,” he said.

Maybe he was sophisticated enough not to say anything in that visiting room.

“You don’t know her? What the fuck do you mean? You all play football together up there in Hyannis Port.”

He smiled and then he left. The media surrounded him when he got out.

“I’m here in support of my friend,” John said. “Mike’s a much different man than his public image would suggest. He’s a man who was really putting his life back together and has an opportunity to do so in the future. I hope perhaps coming here and telling folks that, people might start to believe it, because he’s had a difficult life.”

Then he got into his limo and drove to my house to get some coffee. Shortly after John-John was there, boom, I got out of jail.