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NEW YORK (AP) -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.
At closing arguments Monday, Assistant U.S. Attorney Sean Haran reminded jurors the "evidence was that Mike Tyson put up $50,000 (?31,700) to kill" two men. Defense attorney Richard Levitt cautioned that the witness who described the Tyson murder-for-hire plot is "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 Tuesday.
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 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 alleged that 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.
