He talks about Lucky Luciano, Meyer Lansky, Bugsy Siegel, Frank Costello — some of the Founding Fathers of the Mob — with the same intensity and passion he gave as a teenage fighter to Ray Robinson, Mickey Walker, and Roberto Duran. The old gangster he’s most impressed by is the gambler Arnold Rothstein. “He was smart — Damon Runyon called him the Brain — and figured out everything without ever picking up a gun. He helped teach these younger guys, like Lansky and Luciano, you know, how to act, how to dress, how to behave. In The Great Gatsby — you know, by this guy F. Scott Fitzgerald? — the gambler called Meyer Wolfshiem, he’s based on Arnold Rothstein. I mean, this guy was big.”
In one way, of course, studying such histories is a consolation; in a country where the percentage of young black males in prisons is way out of proportion to their numbers in the general population, it must be a relief to learn that the Irish, Italians, and Jews once filled similar cells. But Tyson’s study of organized crime is part of a larger project.
“I want to find out how things really work. Not everything is in the history books, you know.” A pause. “Some of those guys didn’t like blacks. They sold drugs to blacks. They poisoned black history. They didn’t respect us as human beings. But most of them couldn’t read and write. The first ones came to this country ignorant, out of school, making money. They didn’t have any kind of morals. They wanted to be big shots and they wanted to be respected by decent people. They tried to be gentlemen, and that was their downfall. When you try to be more than what you really are you always get screwed up.”
He emphasizes that gangsters are not heroes. “You can read about people without wanting to be like them,” he says. “I can read about Hitler, for example, and not want to be like him, right? But you gotta know about him. You gotta know what you’re talking about. You gotta know what other people are talking about before you can have any kind of intelligent discussion or argument.”
So it isn’t just gangsters or pigeons that are crowding Tyson’s mind. He has been poring over Niccolò Machiavelli. “He wrote about the world we live in. The way it really is, without all the bullshit. Not just in The Prince, but in The Art of War, Discourses. … He saw how important it was to find out what someone’s motivation was. ‘What do they want?’ he says. What do they want, man?”
And Voltaire. “I loved Candide. That was also about the world and how you start out one thing and end up another, ’cause the world don’t let you do the right thing most of the time. And Voltaire himself, he was something, man. He wasn’t afraid. They kept putting him in jail, and he kept writing the truth.”
He has recently read The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas, aware that the grandmother of the French writer was a black woman from Haiti. “I identify with that book,” he says. “With Edmond Dantes in the Chateau d’If. He was unjustly imprisoned, too. And he gets educated in prison by this Italian priest.” He laughs out loud. “And he gets his revenge too. I understand that; I feel that. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t want revenge against any person. I don’t mean that. I mean against fate, bad luck, whatever you want to call it.”
He is familiar with the Hemingway myth that so exhilarated earlier generations of Americans: Hemingway the warrior, Hemingway the hard drinker, Hemingway the boxer. But he talks most passionately about Hemingway the writer. “He uses those short, hard words, just like hooks and uppercuts inside. You always know what he’s saying, ’cause he says it very clearly. But a guy like Francis Bacon, hey, the sentences just go on and on and on. …”
Obviously, Tyson is not reading literature for simple entertainment, as a diversion from the tedium of prison routine. He is making connections between books and writers, noting distinctions about style and ideas, measuring the content of books against his life as he knows it. But he is not taking a formal course in literature, so I asked him one night how he made the choices about what he reads.
“Sometimes it’s just the books that come to me. People send them and I read them. But sometimes, most of the time, I’m looking. For example, I’m reading this thing about Hemingway and he says he doesn’t ever want to fight ten rounds with Tolstoy. So I say, ‘Hey, I better check out this guy Tolstoy!’ I did, too. It was hard. I sat there with the dictionary beside me, looking up words. But I like him. I don’t like his writing that much because it’s so complicated, but I just like the guy’s way of thinking.”
Along with literature, Tyson has been reading biographies: Mao, Karl Marx, Genghis Khan, Hernán Cortés. In casual talk, he scatters references to Hannibal, Alexander the Great, Oliver Cromwell. “When you read about these individuals, regardless of whether they’re good or bad, they contribute to us a different way of thinking. But no one can really label them good or bad. Who actually knows the definition of good or bad? Good and bad might have a different definition to me than it may have in Webster’s Dictionary, than it may have to you.”
He knows that for his life, the models in books might not always apply. But in all such books, he insists that he finds something of value.
“I was reading Maya Angelou,” he said one evening, “and she said something that equates with me so much. People always say how great a writer she is, and people used to say to me, ‘Mike, you’re great, you could beat anybody, you don’t even have to train.’ But you know how hard it is for me to do that? To win in ninety-one seconds? Do you know what it takes away from me? And Maya Angelou said about herself it takes so much from me to write, takes a lot out of me. In order for me to do that, she says, to perform at that level, it takes everything. It takes my personality. It takes my creativity as an individual. It takes away my social life. It takes away so much. And when she said that, I said, ‘Holy moley, this person understands me.’ They don’t understand why a person can go crazy, when you’re totally normal and you’re involved in a situation that takes all of your normal qualities away. It takes away all your sane qualities.”
In prison Mike Tyson is discovering the many roads back to sanity.
One of those roads is called Islam. Tyson was raised a Catholic by his mother, Lorna, and during the upheaval in that time before he went to jail, he was baptized as a favor to Don King in a much-photographed ceremony presided over by Jesse Jackson. But water, prayer, and photographs didn’t make him a born-again Christian. “That wasn’t real,” he says now. “As soon as I got baptized, I got one of the girls in the choir and went to a hotel room or my place or something.”
Now he has embraced Islam. In a vague way, he’d known about Islam for years; you could not grow up in the era of Muhammad Ali and know nothing about it. “But I was avoiding it because people would press it on me. I always avoided what people pressed on me. They wanted me to do the right thing — and Islam, I believe, is the right thing — but all these people wanted me to do the right thing for the wrong reason.”
In prison, through his teacher, Muhammad Siddeeq, Tyson started more slowly, reading on his own about the religion, asking questions. He insists that Siddeeq is not a newer version of Cus D’Amato. “He’s just a good man,” he says, “and a good teacher.” Nor does Tyson sound like a man who is making a convenient choice as a means of surviving in jail. He admits that “there are guys who become Muslims in jail to feel safe — and give it up the day they hit the streets again.” Tyson might do the same. But in repeated conversations, he sounded as if he’d found in Islam another means of filling some of those holes.