Undisputed Truth: My Autobiography (33 page)

“I’m not trying to tell you what to do but don’t be scared,” the dispatcher told her.

“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.

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

It was time for us to put forward our case. By then, Voyles and I were totally disheartened.

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.”

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 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. It complicated matters that 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. There were now only two blacks left on the jury.

We put on a lot of witnesses who contradicted Desiree’s image. One of the beauty show 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. 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.

When we resumed the next day, Garrison focused on the fact that when I said, “I want to fuck you,” an eighteen-year-old would never answer, “Fine, call me.”

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.

Fuller called some more contestants to say that Desiree said that I was “really built” and “had a butt to hold on to.” Fuller was too prudish to get into the nitty-gritty details of the sexual encounter.

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.

I was surprised that he didn’t mention the fact of Desiree going to the bathroom and taking off her panty shield and then coming back to the bed.

Garrison then gave his final argument. “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.”

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 the verdict was going to be quick because of the mentality of the court and the prosecutor. The prosecutor was a weak, publicity-happy little 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.”

As far as I’m concerned, Mark Shaw had it right when he said 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 misfortune fell 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.

I spent some time in my New York apartment between my conviction and my sentencing. One day I was walking back from a girl’s house and was about to enter my building when I saw a man standing outside. I walked right by him but I heard him speak.

“Hey, how are you doing, son?”

I looked at him and immediately recognized that it was my father. I hadn’t seen him since my mother’s funeral ten years earlier.

“Hey, how are you doing?” I said. He had scared me at first, but I wasn’t tripping. I had had a pretty good life so I wasn’t bitter at him. He looked pretty timid and a little intimidated. I’m sure that he had heard some bad things about my street personality. But when I smiled and hugged him, it eased the tension.

“Come on upstairs,” I said and led him into my lobby.

“Hello, Mr. Tyson,” the doorman and the building’s valet both said.

“Wow, you’re a big man, huh?” my father said.

“No, I’m not big at all, it’s just an illusion,” I told him.

My father had wanted to see me years earlier. In October of 1988, the
New York Post
sent a reporter to my father’s housing project in Brooklyn and interviewed him.

“I’m not going to Mike with my hands out,” he told the reporter. “I don’t want Mike’s money. It’s not that I wouldn’t take it, that I couldn’t use it, but I’d take it only if Mike wanted to give it out.”

At that time I was just too focused on my fighting to reach out to him. But over the years I had heard many stories about my father from people back in Brooklyn. He was a real shrewd street guy – a hustler, gambler, and a pimp/deacon. My father was one of those Jesus freaks who would kill you for Jesus. He was from Charlotte, North Carolina, right smack in that Bible Belt. When he was younger, he sang in a gospel group. He always stayed with Jesus his whole life, but he was doing the dirt too. He was the real deal. He’d dress very well and get control over all the women in his church when they came to him for advice. When I was growing up in Brooklyn, women would stop me on the street and tell me, “Your father and his brother were pimps and we worked for them.” He had a reputation as the baddest hustler and pimp in Brooklyn.

I was nowhere as tough as my father. I always wanted to imagine I was as tough as he was, but I just wasn’t that guy. I had heard that my father had to leave North Carolina after getting into some dispute with a white guy. His uncle, who was an Uncle Tom-type guy, mediated the dispute and saved my father’s life by promising that he would leave town. So he came to New York. When he got here, he went to some bar and started talking with a nice-looking woman. Then this guy with a nice big hat came in, one of those cool black guys, and smacked my father off the barstool and started talking to the girl.

“This motherfucker is a country-assed nigga,” the guy told the girl. “Don’t waste your time with him.”

My father got on a bus, went all the way back to Charlotte, got his rifle, came back to New York, and found the guy and shot him. If he had a beef with the police in Brooklyn, he and his brother would just shoot it out with the cops. My father had a lot of respect in the Brooklyn community.

My mother met my father back in Charlotte. She was in school in Winston-Salem and she met my father’s sister, who was basically a recruiter for my father. She would pick up drugs for him or find cute women. So she brought my mother to meet my father. When I was growing up, my father wasn’t much of a presence, but he came around periodically. We didn’t give him much credit because my mom was pretty bitter towards him, but I believe he did the best he could with the family skills he had. It wasn’t easy being a black man with a family back then.

So we went upstairs and he liked my place. We ordered some food up and just started talking. He seemed surprised that I had reacted so positively to him. I could see that he could use some money so I gave him some. I really wanted to know more about him so I invited him to come out to my Ohio house. I offered to buy him a car to drive out there and I suggested I get him a Mercedes-Benz.

“Oh, God, no, son, please don’t,” he protested. “The only thing I can do is drive a Cadillac, I don’t know how to drive a Mercedes.” He really had that pimp/preacher mentality about Cadillacs.

My dad drove out to Ohio a few weeks later with my sister’s two kids. He was a very interesting man at that stage of his life. He’d stay in church all day. He’d be there from nine in the morning until five at night, then come home and eat something and then go back to church until eleven.

He seemed to like my lifestyle. After a few days he got comfy and invited one of his preacher friends over – another guy who dressed real sharp. They’d be sitting around talking shit. I would just watch him, study his characteristics. I saw that he loved candy. He was a sixty-eight-year-old man and he was just loving eating his candy. I thought,
Wow! I’m a candy guy. That’s where I’m getting it from.

In a way, I envied the way he had all these relationships with women. I was just miserable with relationships, but he had to beat women away. My father was a very successful pimp, but I couldn’t get two dogs to fornicate. My father had seventeen kids and they all became awesome people. Later on I met some of them and none of them were crazy like me.

At one point I sat my father down and said, “Teach me something. What do you know about life? What can you pass down to me? Be my father.”

“I can’t teach you anything, son,” he said. “All I know is the Bible and pimping. And that’s not for you. I know, I saw you with your women.”

I had been trying to impress him with all my glamorous women.

“You’re a sucker, son. It’s nothing bad, some people are just like that when it comes to women,” he said. “Some men never reach that level in life where they can handle them. You’re just one of those guys. You don’t know how to talk to women. You’re just not good. You’re kissing them in your mouth. Fuck, do you know what they’re doing when they’re not here with you? They’re fucking sucking my dick, or somebody’s pissing in their mouth. And you’re kissing them, putting your tongue in their mouth, son.”

When my father first came to visit, he had been very humble. But once he saw that I was open to him and giving him money he started to get cocky.

“I don’t know if you are really my son, to be honest. You got one woman going out and one coming in and they’re almost meeting each other,” he told me near the end of his stay. “You’ve got to tell them to come together. I had five or six girls in the house with your mama …”

Whoa. He was getting way too pimpish and giving me way too much information. I wasn’t strong enough to handle it.

“Hey, chill, man,” I said. “I love my mother. You’re my father, I love you. Let’s not talk about you and her. Let’s just work on our relationship as father and son.”

I had some things to tie up before I went back for sentencing. I was convinced that I was going to prison, so I called Natalie, the mother of my son D’Amato.

“Listen, I’m going to send you a hundred thousand dollars now. Then when I’m in there I’ll have them send you something every month.”

As soon as she got that money, she went out and got a lawyer and sued me for millions. Which was great because years later, as the case progressed, my lawyer had the court order a paternity test and it turned out that the kid wasn’t even mine. I deserved that. That’s what happens when you fuck with hos. It was another harsh betrayal. I was crushed when that first test came back. I really thought he was my kid. I had spent a lot of time with him. I even proudly posed with him on the cover of
Jet
magazine. That woman tormented and stalked me for years after that paternity test. I don’t think anything good will ever come out of her life.

After I was sentenced and processed, they sent me to the Indiana Youth Center. It was a medium-level security prison that had been designed in the 1960s for rich, white nonviolent youthful offenders. By 1992, the Indiana prison system was so overcrowded that they began sending adult offenders there, mostly people convicted of sex and drug crimes who were too weak to handle the really tough prisons. But as time went on, they began sending some murderers and other violent offenders there. When I arrived, there were about 1,500 prisoners, over 95 percent of them white.

They assigned me to the M dorm, one of the newer units. We were housed in two-man rooms that had reinforced doors and a small window instead of bars. When you walked into the room, there’d be two bunks to your left and a toilet and a cabinet where you could store stuff to your right. There was also a desk where you could study. The whole room was only eight by nine feet.

At the time, I didn’t realize that being in jail was a blessing in disguise. If I had stayed out, God knows what would have happened to me. Being locked up was the first time in my life that I could actually catch my breath and be still, but I don’t want it to sound like I instantly gained enlightenment or that I was singing “Kumbaya” all day. I was angry as fuck when I first got put in. I knew that I would be in for at least three years. If it had been a white girl, I would have been in for three hundred years.

The first few weeks I was in jail, I was just waiting for someone to try me, to mistake me for weak. I couldn’t wait to prove to these psychopaths that I was just as homicidal as they were, if not more so. I had to let all of them animals know not to ever go near my cell or touch my shit. I was aggressive and ready to go to war.

One day shortly after I got there, I was walking around and one guy yelled at me, “Hey, Tyson, you fucking tree jumper.” I had no idea what he was talking about. I thought that was a compliment, that I was some great athlete who could perform amazing acts of physical prowess, even jump over trees. But then I asked someone.

“A tree jumper is a rapist, Mike,” the guy told me. “You know, a guy who waits behind a tree for a little kid to walk by and then jumps out and grabs them.”

“Oh, Christ,” I said.

While I was getting acclimated to prison, there was controversy on the outside. Most opinion polls found that a large number of people were questioning my verdict, even ones that polled mostly women. A vast majority of black people thought that I didn’t receive a fair trial. Even one of my jurors told a reporter that none of the black jurors in the jury pool wanted to touch my case because they were scared. Every day I’d talk to Don on the phone and he assured me that he was working on getting me out immediately. So you can imagine how I felt when on March thirty-first, six days after I went to jail, a judge denied my appeal bond. I immediately stopped eating any solid food and just drank liquids. Then I started getting write-ups. I was disciplined for giving my autograph to a couple of inmates. I became belligerent and got infractions for threatening guards and other inmates.

I got into a scrap with a big young light-skinned black guy named Bob. We were fooling around, but then it got serious and he wanted to go and I put a big knot on the top of his head. One of the other inmates named Wayno came over and told me to chill out.

“You’ve got nothing to prove to these dudes,” Wayno told me. “These guys are going to be here for a long time, but you’re trying to go home, brother.”

He was right. Fortunately for me when the guard came over, Bob didn’t give me up. He said that he had tripped. That could have earned me another few months in jail.

It was hard to maintain my humanity in a place like that. I saw things that I couldn’t understand one human being doing to another. I watched people get cut fighting over a cigarette. Somebody might throw some gasoline in another man’s cell and try to light it and burn him up. Or somebody would grab a lady guard and throw her in the bathroom and rape her. I saw guards run out with half their heads sliced open with a razor or because someone beat them with a stapler. The people doing that shit didn’t care. They were facing forty, fifty, a hundred years already. They couldn’t give them any more time than they already had. So you’d be walking a tightrope messing with these borderline sociopaths. These people needed to be in hospitals more than prisons.

I was very paranoid the first few months there. I thought that somebody, either an inmate or a guard, was going to set me up and put some dope in my room or provoke me to hit them so I’d get more time tacked on to my sentence. I just wanted to survive. So I’d stay in my room all the time, I didn’t want to see anybody. Sometimes I would walk over to Warden Trigg’s office.

“Listen, I’m ready to go home. Don’t you think it’s time for me to leave?” I’d say.

“No, I think it’s time for you to go back to your cell,” he’d answer and then he’d call the guards and they’d escort me back. Then one day I went into my cell and closed the door. A white inmate yelled out to me, “Get out here. I did your time ten times already. You got to get in shape and get right. You’re going to fight again. You only got wino time.”

One time, I got into a shouting match with a white racist guard and all the other inmates started jumping in trying to get involved. The Aryan supremacists from another quad came rushing over because they thought one of their boys was involved. So the guard called out a whole goon squad and there was total chaos. People were yelling, “Fuck ’em up, Mike! Kill that fucking pig!” It was a real riot. They had to lock the dorm down and they shipped my ass down to the hole.