his new article in the latest issue of New York Magazine .<br> <br> <img title="> Mike Tyson "My Life As A Thug"- Mike Tyson Details Growing Up A Brooklyn Street Nigga In New Article - Photo posted in The Hip-Hop Spot | Sign in and leave a comment below!" src="http://images.nymag.com/news/features/tyson131021_1_560.jpg" alt="> Mike Tyson "My Life As A Thug"- Mike Tyson Details Growing Up A Brooklyn Street Nigga In New Article - Photo posted in The Hip-Hop Spot | Sign in and leave a comment below!" style="max-width:675px; max-height:675px; width:expression(this.width>675?675:true); height:expression(this.height>675?675:true);" border="0"><br> <br>
We were beefing with these guys called the Puma Boys. It was 1976, and I lived in Brownsville, Brooklyn, and these guys were from my neighborhood. At that time I was running with a Rutland Road crew called the Cats, a bunch of Caribbean guys from nearby Crown Heights. We were a burglary team, and some of our gangster friends had an altercation with the Puma Boys, so we were going to the park to back them up. We normally didn’t deal with guns, but these were our friends, so we stole a bunch of !!: some pistols, a .357 Magnum, and a long M1 rifle with a bayonet attached from World War II. You never knew what you’d find when you broke into people’s houses.<br> <br>
So we’re walking through the streets holding our guns, and nobody runs up on us, no cops are around to stop us. We didn’t even have a bag to put the big rifle in, so we just took turns carrying it every few blocks.<br> <br>
“Yo, there he goes!” my friend Haitian Ron said. “The guy with the red Pumas and the red mock neck.”<br> <br>
When we started running, the huge crowd in the park opened up like Moses parting the Red Sea. It was a good thing they did, because, boom, one of my friends opened fire. Everybody scrambled when they heard the gun.<br> <br>
I realized that some of the Puma Boys had taken cover between the parked cars in the street. I had the M1 rifle, and I turned around quickly to see this big guy with his pistol pointed toward me.<br> <br>
“What the !! are you doing here?” he said to me. It was my older brother, Rodney. “Get the !! out of here.”<br> <br>
I just kept walking and left the park and went home. I was 10 years old.<br> <br>
I often say that I was the bad seed in the family, but when I think about it, I was really a meek kid for most of my childhood. My first neighborhood was Bed-Stuy in Brooklyn. It was a decent working-cla## neighborhood then. Everybody knew one another. Things were pretty normal, but they weren’t calm. Every Friday and Saturday, it was like Vegas in the house. My mom would have a card party and invite all her girlfriends, many of whom were in the vice business. She would send her boyfriend Eddie to buy a case of liquor, and they’d water it down and sell shots. My mom would cook some wings. My brother remembers that besides the hookers, there’d be gangsters, detectives. The whole gamut was there.<br> <br>
When I was just 7 years old, our world got turned upside down. There was a recession and my mom lost her job and we got evicted out of our nice apartment in Bed-Stuy. They came and took all our furniture and put it outside on the sidewalk. The three of us had to sit down on it and protect it so that nobody took it while my mother went to find a spot for us to stay.<br> <br>
We wound up in Brownsville. You could totally feel the difference. It was a very horrific, tough, and gruesome kind of place. Cops were always driving by with their sirens on; ambulances always coming to pick up somebody; guns always going off, people getting st@bbed, windows being broken. We used to watch these guys shooting it out with one another. It was like something out of an old Edward G. Robinson movie. We would watch and say, “Wow, this is happening in real life.”<br> <br>
My mother would do whatever she had to do to keep a roof over our heads. That often meant sleeping with someone that she really didn’t care for. That was just the way it was.<br> <br>
By then, I was going to public school and that was a nightmare. I was a pudgy kid, very shy, almost effeminate-shy, and I spoke with a lisp. Sometimes my mother would be pa##ed out from drinking the night before and wouldn’t walk me to school. It was then that the kids would always hit me and kick me. We would go to school and these people would pick on us, then we would go home and they’d pull out guns and rob us for whatever little change we had. That was hard-core, young kids robbing us right in our own apartment building.<br> <br>
Having to wear gla##es in the first grade was a real turning point in my life. My mother had me tested, and it turned out I was nearsighted, so she made me get gla##es. They were so bad. One day I was leaving school at lunchtime to go home and I had some meatballs from the cafeteria wrapped up in aluminum to keep them hot. This guy came up to me and said, “Hey, you got any money?” I said, “No.” He started picking my pockets and searching me, and he tried to take my !!ing meatballs. I was resisting, going, “No, no, no!” I would let the bullies take my money, but I never let them take my food. I was hunched over like a human shield, protecting my meatballs. So he started hitting me in the head and then took my gla##es and put them down the gas tank of a truck. I ran home, but he didn’t get my meatballs. I still feel like a coward to this day because of that bullying. That’s a wild feeling, being that helpless. You never ever forget that feeling. That was the last day I went to school. I was 7 years old, and I just never went back to cla##.<br> <br>
One day during the spring of 1974, three guys came toward me on the street and started patting my pockets. “Got any money?” they asked. I told them no. They said, “All the money we find, we keep.” So they started turning my pockets out, but I didn’t have anything. Then they said, “Where are you going? Do you want to fly with us?”<br> <br>
“What’s that?” I said.<br> <br>
So we walked over to the school, and they had me climb the fence and throw some plastic milk crates over to them. We started walking a few blocks and then they told me to go into an abandoned building. I didn’t know if they were going to k#ll me. We climbed up to the roof and I saw a little box with some pigeons in it. These guys were building a pigeon coop. So I became their little gofer, their schmuck-slave.<br> <br>
Flying pigeons was a big sport in Brooklyn. Everyone from Mafia dons to little ghetto kids did it. It’s unexplainable; it just gets in your blood.<br> <br>
One day we were on the roof dealing with the pigeons and an older guy came up. His name was Barkim, and he was a friend of one of these guys’ brothers. He told us to tell him to meet him at a jam at the rec center in our neighborhood that night. The jams were like teenage dances, except this was no Archie-and-Veronica !!. All the players and hustlers would go there, the neighborhood guys who robbed houses, pick*pocketed, snatched chains, and perpetrated credit-card fraud. It was a den of iniquity.<br> <br>
So that night I went to the center. I didn’t know you were supposed to go home and take a shower. I went straight to the center from the pigeon coops, wearing the same stinky clothes with all this bird !! on me. I thought the guys would accept me as one of their own, because I was chasing these !!ing birds off these buildings for them. But I walked in and those guys went, “What’s that smell? Look at this dirty, stinking mother!!er.” The whole place started laughing and teasing me. I didn’t know what to do; it was such a traumatizing experience, everybody picking on me. I was crying, but I was laughing too because I wanted to fit in. I guess Barkim saw the way I was dressed and took pity on me. He came up to me and said, “Yo, Shorty. Get the !! out of here. Meet me back at the roof eight in the morning tomorrow.”<br> <br>
The next morning, I was there right on time. Barkim came up and started lecturing me. “You can’t be going out looking like a mother!!ing bum in the street. What the !! are you doing, man? We’re moneymakers.” He was talking fast, and I was trying to comprehend each word. “We’re gonna get money out here, Shorty. Are you ready?”<br> <br>
I went with him, and we started breaking into people’s houses. He told me to go through the windows that were too small for him to fit through, and I went in and opened the door for him. Once we were inside, he went through people’s drawers, he broke open the safe, he was just really wiping them out. We got stereos, eight-tracks, jewelry, guns, cash money. After the robberies, he took me to Delancey Street in the city and bought me some nice clothes and sneakers and a sheepskin coat.<br> <br>
Barkim started introducing me to people on the street as his “son.” It was street *terminology that warned people not to *disrespect me. It meant: “This is my son in the streets, we’re family, we rob and steal. This is my little moneymaker. Don’t !! with this nicca.” He bought me a lot of clothes, but he never gave me a lot of money. He’d make a couple thousand from robbing and he’d give me $200.<br> <br>
Some people might read some of the things I’m talking about and judge me as an adult, call me a criminal, but I did these things over 35 years ago. I was a little kid looking for love and acceptance, and the streets were where I found it. It was the only education I had, and these guys were my teachers.<br> <br>
One day I went into this neighborhood in Crown Heights and I robbed a house with this older guy. We found $2,200 in cash, and he cut me in for $600. So I went to a pet store and bought a hundred bucks’ worth of birds. They put them in a crate for me, and the owner helped me get them on the subway. When I got off, I had somebody from my neighborhood help me drag the crate to the condemned building where I was hiding my pigeons. But this guy went and told some kids that I had all these birds. So a guy named Gary Flowers and some friends of his came and started to rob me. My mother saw them messing with the birds and told me, and I ran out into the street and confronted them. They saw me coming and stopped grabbing the birds, but this guy Gary still had one of them under his coat.<br> <br>
“Give me my bird back,” I protested. Gary pulled the bird out from under his coat. “You want the bird? You want the !!ing bird?” he said. Then he just twisted the bird’s head off and threw it at me, smearing the blood all over my face and shirt.<br> <br>
“f!ght him, Mike,” one of my friends urged. “Don’t be afraid, just f!ght him.”<br> <br>
I had always been too scared to f!ght anyone before. But there used to be an older guy in the neighborhood named Wise who had been a Police Athletic League boxer. He used to smoke weed with us, and when he’d get high, he would start shadowboxing. I would watch him, and he would say, “Come on, let’s go,” but I would never even slapbox with him. But I remembered his style.<br> <br>
So I decided, “!! it.” My friends were shocked. I didn’t know what I was doing, but I threw some wild punches and one connected and Gary went down. Wise would skip while he was shadowboxing, so after I dropped Gary, my stupid a## started skipping. It just seemed like the fly thing to do. I had practically the whole block watching my gloryful moment. Everybody started whooping and applauding me. It was an incredible feeling even though my heart was beating out of my chest.<br> <br>
I started getting a whole new level of respect on the streets. Instead of “Can Mike play with us?” people would ask my mother, “Can Mike Tyson play with us?” Other guys would bring their guys around to f!ght me, and they’d bet money on the outcome. I would win a lot too. Even if I lost, the guys who beat me would say, “!!! You’re only 11?” That’s how everybody started knowing me in Brooklyn. I had a reputation that I would f!ght anyone—grown men, anybody. But we didn’t follow the Marquess of Queensberry rules in the street. If you kicked someone’s a##, it didn’t necessarily mean it was over. If he couldn’t beat you in the f!ght, he’d take another route, and sometimes he’d come back with some of his friends and they’d beat me up with bats.<br> <br>
I began to exact some revenge for the beatings I had taken from bullies. I’d be walking with some friends, and I might see one of the guys who beat me up and bullied me years earlier. He might have gone into a store shopping, and I would drag his a## out of the store and start pummeling him. I didn’t even tell my friends why, I’d just say, “I hate that mother!!er over there,” and they’d jump in too and rip his !!ing clothes and beat his !!ing a##. That guy who took my gla##es and threw them away? I beat him in the streets like a !!ing dog for humiliating me. He may have forgotten about it, but I never did.<br> <br>
I was in Times Square in 1977 just hanging out when I saw some guys from the old neighborhood in Bed-Stuy. We were talking, and the next thing I knew one of them snatched the purse of this prostitute. She was furious and threw a cup of hot coffee at my face. The cops started coming toward us, and my friend Bub and I took off. We ran into an!!-rated theater to hide, but the hooker came in shortly after with the cops.<br> <br>
“That’s them,” she pointed to Bub and I.<br> <br>
“Me? I didn’t do !!,” I protested, but the cops paraded us out and put us in the backseat of their car.<br> <br>
They looked at my rap sheet, and I just had too many arrests, so I was going straight to Spofford.<br> <br>
Spofford was a juvenile-detention center located in the Hunts Point section of the Bronx. I had heard horror stories about Spofford. I was terrified. I had no idea what was going to go down in that place. But when I went to the cafeteria for breakfast, it was like a cla## reunion. “Chill,” I said to myself. “All your boys are here.”<br> <br>
After that first time, I was going in and out of Spofford like it was nothing. Spofford became like a time-share for me.<br> <br>
I never saw my mother happy with me or proud of me doing something. I never got a chance to talk to her or know her. Professionally, that would have no effect on me, but emotional and psychologically, it was crushing. I would be with my friends, and I’d see their mothers kiss them. I never had that. You’d think that if she let me sleep in her bed until I was 15, she would have liked me, but she was drunk all the time.
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