Don King told Mike Tyson not to mess with the imam’s stepdaughter, and mostly Tyson didn’t—not because Don King told him not to, but because the imam’s stepdaughter wouldn’t have it. Lakiha Spicer was 19 then, and Mike Tyson was 29, and soon enough the tornado of Mike Tyson’s life picked him up and set him down somewhere else, and they didn’t see each other again until five years later, when Kiki was 24 and living on her own in New York.
“It was a roller coaster after that,” Kiki Tyson says. “We started dating. It was crazy. He was a lunatic, y’know? So many women. I would break up with him, I’d be emotional. It was a lot. But we were always really good friends.”
Kiki is 43 now, elegant and poised and sharp. She’s been married to Mike for ten years, and he still makes her laugh. They have the same twisted sense of humor. They have been through some shit together, not all of it Mike-inflicted. In 2008, she served six months in federal prison after collecting $71,000 in salary from an alleged no-show job at a Muslim academy run by her parents. Her stepfather, Shamsud-din Ali, was convicted in 2005 of fraud and racketeering charges uncovered during a massive FBI investigation of possible links between drug dealers and Philadelphia city politics; Kiki’s mother also served a brief prison sentence after being convicted of fraud. At the time of her incarceration, Kiki was pregnant with Tyson’s daughter Milan, who was born in December 2008; Kiki and Mike were married the following year.
Maybe in part because of all this, she can meet him without judgment. She always has. Even when he came out of rehab, overweight and loaded up on psych meds, moving like the walking dead. Zombie swagger, Kiki used to call it.
“All he wanted to do,” she says, “was eat Cap’n Crunch and watch reruns of Law & Order: SVU. His personality was not there.… When he was on all those pills, he was existing, but he was like, not home, y’know? It’s kind of like the Sunken Place, from that crazy movie. He was in the Sunken Place.”
They tried taking him off everything, but when Tyson’s on nothing at all, he wakes up every night like clockwork, convinced his life is over. “I don’t know what this thing is that talks to him,” Kiki says, “but it says, Nobody loves me, my life is over, I’m going to die soon.”
So the weed is a compromise. Kiki doesn’t smoke much—maybe four times a year, and only when the kids are asleep. But the only thing she minds about Mike’s intake is the ashes. They have white carpeting at the Newport Beach house—Mike has some kind of mental block about putting his joints in the damn ashtray, and at Tyson Holistic there’s usually a half-smoked Mike jay parked on the edge of any given table or counter, like a little gray-and-brown pupa on a branch—and when he’s at home, Kiki has to follow him around with a Dustbuster.
