O ne night in the fall of 1988 I was roused from sleep at near-
ly midnight by a telephone call from an editor at the New York
Daily News, where I worked as a crime reporter.

“Sorry to bother you at home,” he began, “but there's a story
in another paper about the Mike Tyson divorce, and I think
we'll have to chase it. It's about Reuben Givens.”

A couple of weeks earlier I had been summoned from my
desk at One Police Plaza in lower Manhattan for a meeting at
the newspaper's main office on East 42d Street. My boss told
me that I had been selected to join a group of five or six re-
porters that would probe a pressing story: the breakup of the
marriage of boxer Mike Tyson and actress Robin Givens. Our
Tyson team, which also included Jack Newfield, the eminent
investigative reporter, and Bill Gallo, the paper's revered
sports cartoonist and resident boxing buff, set out to dig up
dirt about the divorce.

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