Pete Hamill - Piecework

The process of self-education did not begin smoothly. In his first weeks in jail, Tyson enrolled in a school program, then quickly dropped out. “You know, I’m out on the streets, I’m out there, or I’m training, or I’m in the bars, I’m chasing these women. Then I come to this place after not going to school since I was what? Sixteen? Seventeen? They hit me with this thing, they said, ‘Bang! Do this, do this work…’ It was like putting a preliminary fighter in with a world champion.”

Dispirited, angry at the teachers and himself, he dropped out for a while. “Then I started very gradually studying on my own, preparing for these things. Then I took that literacy test — and blew it out of the water.”

He went back to classes, studying to take a high school equivalency examination, and met a visiting teacher from Indianapolis named Muhammad Siddeeq.

“He was just talking to the other kids one day and said, ‘Does anybody need any help? If so, I’ll help you in the school process.’ And I said, ‘Yeah, I need help.’ So he showed me things, in a simple way. …”

One thing Tyson learned quickly was the use of percentages and decimals. “I never learned that before,” he says, still excited. “It’s a small thing, maybe, something I shoulda learned in grammar school. But you come from a scrambled family, you’re running between the streets and school, missing days, fucking up, and you end up with these holes. One thing never connects to another, and you don’t know why. You don’t know what you didn’t learn. Like percentages. I just never learned it, it was one of the holes. I mean, later on I knew what a percentage was, you know, from a $10 million purse, but I didn’t know how to do it myself. That was always the job of someone else.” He laughs. “One thing now, I can figure out how to leave a tip. There’s restaurants out there where I should eat for free for a couple of years.”

He isn’t simply filling those gaping holes in his education that should have been bricked up in grammar school. He reads constantly, hungrily, voraciously. One day it could be a book on pigeons, which he raised with great knowledge and affection in the Victorian house where he lived with D’Amato and D’Amato’s longtime companion, Camille Ewald, whom Tyson calls “my mother.” But on other days he could be reading into the history of organized crime, thrilled to discover that the old Jewish gangsters of Murder Inc. hung out near Georgia and Livonia avenues in Brownsville, walking distance from his own childhood turf. He discovered that Al Capone was from Brooklyn and went west to Chicago. And there were black gangsters too.

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.”