I tried voodoo, used drugs – Tyson

Mike Tyson

Mike Tyson wasn’t listening. Judge Patricia Gifford’s lecture on “date rape” seemed to have nothing to do with him.

It was March 26, 1992. Six weeks earlier he had been convicted of raping 18 year old beauty pageant contestant Desiree Washington. At 25 he was facing 60  years in jail, but even in his “moment of doom”  he was “an arrogant prick”.

Now, in his autobiography, Mike Tyson: Undisputed Truth, published on Tuesday, he has revealed that he spent the weeks leading up to that sentencing, travelling round the US “romancing” his various girlfriends.

And where legal measures had let him down he had turned to ‘divine intervention,’ to bring him a light sentence.

He visited a, “hoodoo woman” who said she would cast a spell to keep him out of jail if he put $500 in a jar, urinated in it and kept it under his bed for three days.

He sought out a voodoo priest who turned out to be a fraud, “I knew that guy had nothing,” he recalls.

And he followed the instructions of a Santeria priest – going to the courthouse one night with a pigeon and an egg which he dropped on the ground as the bird was release and he yelled. “We’re free!”

He almost believed it would work. Because he felt invincible. “In my mind,” he says, “I had no peers. I was the youngest heavyweight champion in the history of boxing. I was a titan, the reincarnation of Alexander the Great.”

He was sentenced to six years and served three.

Today Tyson believes that the day he was sent to jail may well have been the day that saved his life.

That life as told by Tyson is one of drama, turbulence, excess and addiction, one in which he gave in to every carnal appetite.

Born in Cumberland Hospital in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, Tyson never really knew his father. The man on his birth certificate, Percel Tyson was a man he never met.

And the man his mother, Lorna Mae, told him was his “biological father,” Jimmy Kirkpatrick Jr was an infrequent presence in both their lives.

He claims he was a pimp, a successful one Tyson notes with some pride, who fathered 17 children but raised none of them.

By the time Tyson was seven his mother had lost her job as a matron at the Women’s House of Detention in Manhattan, and she and her clutter of children had been evicted.

He claims she started drinking heavily, never found another job and often slept with men she didn’t want to just to keep a roof over her family’s head. “That’s just the way it was,” he says.

As a seven year old, small and nimble he began a career of petty crime – clambering in windows of houses through which older boys were too large to fit to steal whatever he could get his hands on.

It was “like Oliver Twist.”

The one true pleasure he found during that time was flying pigeons. Introduced to it up on a Brooklyn rooftop by older boys he was hooked from the start. “It was like racing horses,” he recalls. “Once it is in your blood you never stop.”

To this day, wherever he lives, Tyson has a coop for his birds.

His early boyhood took on a relentless rhythm of crime sprees, being hauled in by police only to be taken home and brutally beaten by his despairing mother.

By the time he was 12 he was a “zonked out zombie” on Thorazine and a regular attendee of reformatory school, or “special-ed crazy school.” There are not many light spots in the childhood that Tyson recalls. But one that stands out happened during a stint in the Reformatory school of Sporford.

He recalls, “We watched a movie called The Greatest  about Muhammad Ali. When it was over…we were shocked when Ali himself walked out on that stage.”

He didn’t want to be a boxer. He wanted to be great.

Shortly before his 13th  birthday Tyson was arrested for being in possession of stolen goods. He was send to Tryon, a more hard-line school than Sporford and one where he quickly set about making a name for himself as a troublemaker.

But it was there that a teacher saw potential in the kid who shadowboxed in corners. In May 1980 he was introduced him to the man who would change his life – legendary trainer, Cus D’Amato.

Tyson recalls his first meeting with the man who would become his mentor, trainer and putative father, as daunting, “He was short and stout with a bald head and you could see that he was strong. He even talked tough and he was dead serious; there wasn’t a happy muscle in his face.”

After watching Tyson train for a while, D’Amato said,  “If you listen to me I can make you the youngest heavyweight champion of all time.”

Tyson’s immediate thought was that the man was a pervert.

The next seven years of Tyson’s life were dominated by D’Amato and his regime. He insisted that Tyson chanted affirmations every day, “The best fighter in the world. Nobody can beat me.”

He told him that fear was like fire. ‘If you learn to control it, you let it work for you. If you don’t learn to control it, it’ll destroy you and everything around you.’

Ultimately it wasn’t fear but Tyson’s appetites that threatened to do that.

By the time he was 14, Tyson was “thinking like a Roman Gladiator, being in a perpetual state of war in your mind, yet on the outside seeming calm and relaxed.”

He lived and breathed boxing going through amateur bouts, to the Junior Olympics where he knocked out his opponent in just 8 seconds to win the gold in 1981.

But there was always a conflict within Tyson – however supposedly calm and disciplined the exterior.

By the time he was two time junior national champion his mother was dying and he was ‘still robbing houses because you just go back to who you are.’ He was drinking, smoking angel dust, snorting cocaine and going to dances.

Tyson claims he fought while high on drugs and used a fake penis to fool dope testers.

“I was a full-blown cokehead,” says Tyson in his autobiography.

The former  world heavyweight king  claims he spent a large chunk of his career addicted to cocaine and marijuana.

Tyson, 47, admits taking drugs before his shock loss to Londoner Danny Williams in Louisville in July 2004 in his memoir published yesterday.

He claims he first tried cocaine aged just 11.

 “The history of war is the history of drugs. Every great general and warrior from the beginning of time was high.”

The New Yorker, who retired in 2005, also admits devising a fake penis, or his ‘whizzer’ as he called it, to avoid failing drugs tests.

Tyson says he came up with the idea before his fight against Lou Savarese at Hampden Park in June 2000 and one of his team would bring it to each contest.

He admits he had taken ‘blow’ and ‘pot’ before the bout and filled his ‘whizzer’ with someone else’s urine to dupe the testers.

That same year, Tyson tested positive for marijuana and was fined $200,000.

He blames that failure on being tested before his whizzer caddy – the member of his entourage who carried the fake todger – could hand it over to him.

Tyson also claims he had taken cocaine before his press conference brawl with Lennox Lewis in New York in January 2002 when he bit the Brit on the leg.

“I lost my mind,” said Tyson. “I looked over at him and wanted to hit the motherf*****”.

When he faced Frank Bruno for the first time in February 1989 in Las Vegas, he claims he was in such bad condition that Bruno “should have kicked my ass”. Tyson won inside five rounds.

The two met again in 1996, when Bruno was world champion, and Tyson – who won in the third round – claims the Englishman “smelled of fear.”

Tyson, the youngest boxer ever to win the WBC, WBA and IBF heavyweight titles, has retired from boxing and been through years of rehab.

Recently, he has appeared in hit movie The Hangover and a one-man Broadway show and even sung and danced on stage at the Tony awards.

This summer, sporting his infamous face tattoo, he claimed to be close to death because of his alcoholism.

He said, “I’m a bad guy. I did a lot of bad things and I want to be forgiven. I want to change my life. I want to live my life sober.

“I don’t want to die. I’m on the verge of dying because I’m a vicious alcoholic.”