Former heavyweight boxing champion Mike Tyson has been linked to two murder plots in an obscure racketeering case involving a drug gang in his old neighborhood.
Witnesses in the trial have testified that he was the person who funded one scheme. In the other, Tyson himself was considered a potential target, but was spared for religious reasons.
Tyson has denied knowing anything about the mayhem surrounding a ruthless drug gang at the center of the case. But his name was mentioned several times during recent testimony at the trial of an alleged getaway driver in two slayings.
PHOTO: AP
At closing arguments on Monday, Assistant US Attorney Sean Haran reminded jurors the “evidence was that Mike Tyson put up US$50,000 to kill” two men.
Defense attorney Richard Levitt cautioned that the witness who described the Tyson murder-for-hire plot was “unquestionably a liar.”
Tyson issued a statement calling the accounts “totally untrue.”
He said he was “tired of people throwing my name around.”
Deliberations at the federal trial in Brooklyn were expected to begin yesterday.
Tyson’s name emerged during an investigation of the Cash Money Brothers, a gang led by brothers Damion “World” Hardy and Myron “Wise” Hardy. The gang, which lifted its name from the film New Jack City, had turned a Bedford-Stuyvesant housing project into a violent drug market, prosecutors said.
Federal authorities in 2004 charged several men in a racketeering indictment with multiple counts of murder, kidnapping, drug dealing and gun possession. Some later pleaded guilty and agreed to testify for the government against Abubakr Raheem, the reputed driver, and World, who faces the death penalty at separate trial later this year.
Raheem has denied the charges. He admits he knew the killers, but as a Muslim, didn’t approve of them.
“Was he at peace with them? Absolutely not,” his attorney said on Monday.
Prosecutors scoffed at Raheem’s claims that he sought to steer the men toward Islam.
“He’s sort of the spiritual adviser to perhaps the most dangerous group of gangsters in the city,” Haran said.
Authorities have said Wise’s killing in 1999 sparked a bloodbath in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of New York City’s borough of Brooklyn. Among those killed: Tyson’s friend and bodyguard, Darryl “Homicide” Baum.
At trial, a turncoat gangster testified after learning Baum was gunned down in 2000 that Tyson put out a US$50,000 contract on World. Asked why, the cooperator said the boxer was “close friends with Homicide.”
A crew associate also took the stand and described how, after word of the bounty spread, he overheard the gangsters saying Tyson needed to be “rubbed out.”
Later, the same witness said, he and Raheem were with a group that spotted a Range Rover they believed was carrying Tyson. One of the men wanted to kill the boxer but the idea was “squashed right there” because “Mike Tyson was a Muslim,” the witness said.
Tyson interrupted his training in a 2000 comeback bout in Scotland to attend Baum’s funeral in Brooklyn. He won his fight against Lou Savarese in 38 seconds and dedicated the victory to the bodyguard.
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