Undisputed Truth: My Autobiography (34 page)

The hole was a trip. They threw me in a six-foot-by-nine-foot room with just a mattress on the floor and a toilet. During the day they would remove the mattress and make me sleep on the concrete floor because they didn’t want me to be comfortable.

It was pretty inhumane to be in a room twenty-three hours a day with the light always on, but you get used to it. You become your own best company. In a weird way, you get your freedom in the hole. Nobody was controlling your every move like they did in the general population. The hole was the worst situation you could be in and that became my element.

I was such a troublemaker my first year in prison. I kept getting written up for not moving fast enough, being rude, threatening the guards, pushing people. I was being so disruptive that they almost sent me to the P dorm. That’s where they sent all the really dangerous inmates who didn’t want to work or follow orders. They were segregated from the rest of the prison population. I was thinking that I was one of those crazy motherfuckers, so I began acting like them. They’d be locked in a room all day and the guards would watch them constantly.

“Fuck you, you fucking pussies,” the P dorm guys would yell at the guards.

They had screens on the windows and when we’d walk by, they’d yell at us too.

“Hey, champ, chill out, champ. I hear you’re getting wild out there. You don’t want to come over here, champ. You don’t want to fuck with us,” they’d yell.

“Hey, when you get some etiquette, you can come amongst the rest of the people,” I yelled back.

“Fuck you, you arrogant pigeon-loving motherfucker,” the guy answered.

I chilled out after that. I didn’t want to be living like some animal. It got so bad that they actually took the screens off the P dorm and put up solid glass so they couldn’t spit on the people walking by.

I settled for the hole. Why not? I grew up in places where it smelled like raw sewage.

I came from a cesspool.

In December we found out that Desiree had discussed book and film deals with civil lawyers before the rape trial.

“I cannot see her as a credible witness from what I know now,” Dave Vahle, one of the jurors, told the press. He was one of the jurors who worried they had made the wrong decision. “We felt that a man raped a woman. In hindsight, it looks to me like a woman raped a man.”

Both he and Rose Pride, another juror, sent letters to the Indiana Court of Appeals requesting that I be given a new trial. Desiree then went on
20/20
and gave
People
magazine an interview. Then in July, she sued me in civil court. Her father said that the suit was instituted because she was sick of being called names by Don King and my appeals lawyer, Alan Dershowitz. Desiree had a new lawyer named Deval Patrick. You may recognize that name. He’s the governor of Massachusetts now. He’s also the guy who sued me for unspecified damages to Desiree Washington, for both emotional and physical distress – he claimed that I had given Desiree not one, but two venereal diseases.

On July ninth, five hundred people showed up at a rally to support me in downtown Indianapolis. A city councilwoman from Compton came all the way to address the crowd.

But about a month later, Judge Gifford dashed my hopes again. She denied me a new trial and affirmed an earlier ruling that Dershowitz couldn’t depose Desiree about her retainer agreement with her civil lawyer. She made it personal, saying that she was shocked by Dershowitz’s “attempt to perpetrate a fraud upon the Court.”

In October of 1992, my father died. I wanted to go to the funeral but they wouldn’t let me. They were really trying to break me in there. I was still getting penalized heavily for marginal offenses, racking up more and more time. I actually paid for two funerals for him, one up north, and then we sent him down to North Carolina. My nephew told me that my father’s common-law wife was so mad because all of his ex-prostitutes were sitting in the front row to pay him homage.

After the New Year, there were major developments in my case. On January twelfth,
Globe
magazine broke a story that Desiree was not as innocent as the prosecution portrayed her. They interviewed friends of hers who all said she was sophisticated when it came to sex.

On February fifteenth, the Indiana Court of Appeals heard arguments on my appeal. Dershowitz had four major issues that he felt could warrant a reversal – the witnesses who were excluded who had seen Desiree and I necking in the back of a limousine, the exclusion of some instructions to the jury, the admission of the 911 tape, and the attorney on retainer for a civil case against me. Many legal experts, including Mark Shaw, thought that Gifford had made enough errors to warrant a new trial.

After the arguments on that appeal, another bombshell hit, this one concerning Desiree’s prior claims of being raped. Wayne Walker, a high school friend of Desiree’s, alleged that Desiree told her father that he had raped her and then told Wayne that she had done it “to cover myself … or I would have been in big trouble.”

Later that same month, the
New York Post
reported that in October 1989, Mary Washington had Donald arrested and charged with assault and battery against Desiree. Desiree told police that her father had “hit me and pushed me under the sink … he continued slamming my head into the wall and the floor. I freed myself and reached for a knife to protect myself.”

What could have caused her father to assault Desiree? Well, when we look at her mother’s deposition for my trial, she claimed that her husband “flew off the handle” when Desiree told him that she had lost her virginity. Her mother was so concerned that she arranged for Desiree to undergo “psychotherapy because of severe depression and suicide threats.”

So Desiree’s mother was confirming that Desiree had lost her virginity in October of 1989, which was exactly when her friend Wayne said they had sex and she had falsely accused him of rape. Desiree, of course, swore in an affidavit in response to my lawyer’s amended appeal that she never had sex with that boy.

“I categorically and unconditionally deny that Wayne and I ever had sexual intercourse with penetration. I also categorically and unconditionally deny that I ever accused Wayne of having raped me.”

There was only one problem. Dershowitz had uncovered another boy, Marc Colvin, a friend of Desiree’s, who came forth and stated that what Desiree swore to was untrue.

“I am very reluctant to come forward with this information because I still consider Desiree Washington to be a friend. She called me on the telephone towards the end of 1989 and confided in me that she had sexual intercourse with Wayne Walker … She also said that after it happened, she went into the bathroom and cried.”

Oh, what a tangled web we weave!

I was feeling pretty confident about my appeals with Dershowitz heading the case. So I was stunned when I lost the appeal before the Indiana Court of Appeals on August seventh. In a 2–1 decision, two of the justices felt that Gifford didn’t abuse her discretion in blocking the testimony of my most important witnesses. One judge saw it my way. Judge Patrick Sullivan wrote, “My review of the entire record leads me to the inescapable conclusion that he [Tyson] did not receive the requisite fairness which is essential to our system of criminal justice.” I finally lost whatever little hope I had left. So I wasn’t surprised at all when, six weeks later, the Indiana Supreme Court voted 2–2 and refused to even hear my appeal.

Now I had no hope of getting right out of prison. It took me about thirteen months to figure out the right way to do my time. My whole first year was hell, getting months and months added to my sentence. I was suspicious of everyone there. They had put me in a cell with a guy named Earl who was a model prisoner. Earl was in there for thirty years for selling drugs, which meant that he had to do at least fifteen years. The administration thought that he would be the best guy to mentor me and keep me out of trouble.

The first night that we were together, I took a pencil and held it menacingly.

“I’ll fucking kill you if you touch my shit, motherfucker. Better nothing be missing,” I said. “And I’m not cleaning no room. Just don’t talk to me.”

Earl just looked at me.

“What the fuck? Yo, Mike, I’m not that guy,” he said. “I’m with you, brother. I’m here to help you. Don’t get caught up in that bullshit. It’s just gonna get you a whole asshole full of extra time. I knew guys who came here with a year, three years, and they wound up doing life for the same bullshit. You just don’t know how to move yet, young brother. You need me to teach you how to move and it’s gonna be easy sailing from here on in.”

Little by little Earl schooled me. It took me some time to realize it, but Earl was awesome. We’d walk around the dorm and Earl would point things out.

“Stay away from these motherfuckers over there, Mike. And don’t ever talk to those cops there. Don’t even say ‘Good morning’ to them. Just keep your mouth shut at all times, Mike. Listen, if you see me sucking somebody’s dick or fucking his ass, don’t be surprised. I would never do that, but if you saw it don’t be surprised. Don’t ever be surprised at anything you see here, all right? And don’t comment on nothing, just keep your mouth shut. If you see a bunch of niggas stabbing someone, just keep moving. Don’t look at them, don’t let them see you look at them. Whatever you see here, you don’t see. Somebody is fucking someone, just mind your business. Don’t make no jokes or comments about it because that’s his wife, nigga. Just like if you disrespect somebody’s wife in the street they’re gonna kick your ass, it’s the same if you disrespect their wife in here.”

He was right. You couldn’t apply your outside standards to what was going on in there. You think about homosexuality in the outside world and you might think of a meek person who could easily be taken advantage of. But these people were warriors. They’d kill you in a second. You’d see two big strong guys walking in the yard, holding hands. You respected those people because if you didn’t, you’d have a very serious problem. In prison, anybody is capable of murder. It doesn’t matter how big or small they are.

After a while in prison, I began to see the humanity in everyone, even the racist guards. I don’t care if it’s black gang members, Nazis, Mexican gangbangers, you started to get familiar with them when they told you that someone in their family died or that they had problems with their wife.

Once I really saw how the system worked, I began to manipulate things to my advantage. This inmate named Buck helped me in that process. Buck was a lifer from Detroit who had done about fifteen years. I used to get a ton of letters a day from people all over the world. One day he was in my room reading through some letters.

“Hmm, Mike. I can tell that you don’t know how to read your letters,” he said.

“What do you mean, nigga?” I said. “I can read.”

“You can read, but you don’t know how to
subliminally
read. There are messages here. People don’t want to hurt your feelings because you’re a famous fighter and they think you have lots of money, but they’re using words that you’re not aware of because you haven’t been to school a lot, Mike,” he said.

He was telling me this shit, but it wasn’t offensive.

“Look, this one broad says, ‘If there is ever anything you need, anything that I could do, please let me know.’ See, that doesn’t mean ‘If I could do anything for you,’ that means ‘I want to do something for you, you just need to tell me.’ Or take this other letter. ‘I would love to get to know you and cultivate a relationship with you as human beings.’ Listen, that means that she wants to elevate your status in life, your health, and well-being. That means if you need anything, she would help you out.

“We are in a unique situation here, Mike. We’re on the edge of making a lot of money. Times aren’t so good for you. You spent a ton of money on lawyers. You’ll probably have to spend a ton more on that bitch who’s suing you. You need commissary money. How are you going to eat well? You can’t eat this food in the cafeteria.”

“You’re right, I do need commissary money,” I agreed.

So I went with Buck. He started taking my letters and writing replies to these people and the money started flowing in. We were getting cash, we were getting jewelry, there was foreign currency coming, we were drowning in money. Around that time, Voyles got a phone call from one of the wardens.

“We have a problem with Mike’s commissary,” Warden Slaven told Jim.

“What’s the problem?”

“He’s got one hundred thousand dollars in his account,” Slaven said.

But soon I started to get scared because some of these people wanted to come and visit me. What do I do? I had no idea what Buck had told these people in the letters. I was thinking that he had me ready to marry some of these women. I was starting to think it was a setup.

I knew I needed to break off Buck for doing this, so I told him to have the people send money to my “sister” or my “aunt” and then Buck could arrange to get the money from the people they were sending it to. Buck left prison so I had a young gangbanger named Red write the letters. All of a sudden, Red was sporting a nice new watch and was looking like a pimp with diamond rings and chains.

One day this girl from England showed up wanting to see me. She was a girl that Red had been corresponding with. He was in the hole then and he told me to go out and see her. But he didn’t tell me that they had a tumultuous relationship and they were beefing. So I went out there thinking,
This is going to be great.

We sat down in the visiting room and this girl started in on me. She was holding a baby.

“Where’s my diamond chain? Where’s the watch I gave you? I want them back, you motherfucker!” she screamed.

Whoa! I didn’t have to take this shit from some crazy lady I didn’t even know. I called out to the guard, “I’m ready to leave,” and I walked away.

I guess she complained to the administration and they started an investigation. The guy handling the case came to me and said, “You don’t know this girl, do you? She never gave you any jewelry, right?” He knew I had something to do with it, but they didn’t want any heat from Internal Affairs.