Big Mike in the Big House: Big Headaches

Life in the Big House with Big Mike around has been anything but ordinary.

One employee of the jail in Rockville, Md., works almost full-time handling boxer Mike Tyson’s flood of personal packages and letters, estimated to number in the thousands. With Tyson’s jailhouse stay big news from Great Britain to Brazil, the jail’s press officer said he often fields up to 200 calls a day.

People have sent everything from prayers recorded on video to shoes in search of a celebrity endorsement to antidepressant medications.

“I’ve never seen anything like it, short of the pope visiting America,” said Russ Hamill, acting director for the Montgomery County Department of Correction and Rehabilitation in Rockville, Md., a Washington suburb. In February, Tyson was sentenced to one year in jail for attacking two motorists in Gaithersburg, Md., last summer.

“We’re trying to treat him like everyone else, but there’s only a half-dozen people in the world who do what he does for a living as well as he does,” said jail spokesman Eric Seleznow. “I’d say it’s been almost a full-time job for a lot of us to manage this and the media since he came in.”

The media attention has been so intense that jail officials say--and Tyson’s attorneys readily agree--that Tyson likely would have to bypass the county’s work-release program, a halfway house where inmates live during the last six months of their sentences. Tyson probably would go straight to home detention because his celebrity status would be too disruptive at the halfway house, an open facility, also in Rockville, where a television news crew recently showed up to interview inmates.

Montgomery jail officials said they knew that, despite their best efforts, life wouldn’t be the same with Tyson behind their bars. Hamill said he circulated a memo to jail employees directing that the staff treat Tyson like any other inmate. No pictures with Iron Mike. No autographs. No talking about the famous inmate over the family dinner table.

Then there’s the mail. Packages have included pairs of shoes from companies seeking Tyson’s endorsement and a medication touted as “better than Zoloft,” the antidepressant that Tyson takes, said Paul F. Kemp, one of Tyson’s attorneys. The medication hit the headlines after Tyson threw a television set and was put in solitary confinement for a week. His attorneys said the incident occurred because a jail psychiatrist had withheld Tyson’s Zoloft.

It didn’t take long for Tyson fans to learn that the jail wouldn’t accept some packages addressed directly to the boxer, Hamill said.

“People got the names of our corrections officers and sent Federal Express packages in their name or in the name of some staff member for Mike Tyson,” Hamill said. The packages were returned to the senders or forwarded to Tyson’s attorneys.

Spokesman Seleznow said Tyson has been sent photographs but declined to elaborate, saying he couldn’t disclose an inmate’s mail.

Were they personal pictures from women?

“Next question.”

Muhammad Siddeeq, a friend of Tyson’s, said the boxer is touched by all the mail, most of which is waiting for him at home. And it’s not every inmate who can count John F. Kennedy Jr. among his visitors, or who receives letters and phone calls from Jesse Jackson, Louis Farrakhan and Muhammad Ali.