If you look at history, the great men and women of the world have always been defined by their enemies.

Lex Luthor

My journey began when I was approximately seven years old. Though my social position as leader of organized crime would require more than a decade to achieve—a position I continue to refine even to this day—the process of designing and constructing myself into one of the elites of the world actually began when I found myself clever enough to visit a library: by an estimated age of seven.

My age has always been an estimate.

My birth had been of little significance to the people who sired me; my parents never bothered with telling me the actual date, if they even remembered. I calculated my age by the size and height range compared to the other Brooklyn crack children.

My parents were scum. Scum that created scum, attracted scum, and made fellow scum even filthier through their "professions": my father sold drugs. My mother was a self-employed whore. I was—by my estimate—seven years old when she was killed.

The news of her death came to me by the mockery of my peers (children in Brooklyn being not only feral, but largely incapable of understanding the concept of empathy, much less exhibiting any.) One of them had seen the incident that took my mother's life: she had stolen an unknown amount of my father's methamphetamines, injected them into her system, and committed suicide by fainting in front of an oncoming city bus.

My father's face stayed emotionless when he heard me relay the news. He then returned to his stash of drugs, checked over the inventory, and said in a voice devoid of any feeling at all: "At least the slut didn't OD here. Hidin' a body's a bitch."

When I inquired as to whom he meant to hide her from, he sullenly nodded out in the direction of the street. "Cops. Lawyers. The rich fuckers in th' system that wanna lock up you'n me, just cuz we gots the balls to do shit they say we shouldn' do."

I couldn't make out why anyone rich enough to be in The System would want to lock us up.

"Cuz we ain't slaves, boy. We don't do what they tell us to do, jus' cuz they say it. We gots more freedom th'n the fuckin' pilgrims, an' the rich don't like nonna that shit."

When I told him I felt that wasn't right, he cuffed me on the side of the head hard enough to send me to the floor. "Right, that's a laugh. Ain't right I hitcha, but I jus' did."

I did not care about the blow; his heart hadn't been in it, and I was used to being hit. All I cared about was finding out if there was anyone stronger than the cops and lawyers and various other members of the system. When I asked, my father only shook his head and reached into his pocket for his lighter.

"Nobody's stronger'n The System."

Even at seven, my instincts for how the world really worked were already developing. I pointed out that someone had to be stronger, or at least just as strong, otherwise the System would get lazy and weaken. And besides, the cops had guns—they had to use the weapons against some kind of enemy.

"Dunno 'bout being stronger. Only fuckers that'd scare the boys in blue used to be gangsters from back in th' day. When Al Capone said jump, them fucks wouldn't even ask how high."

"Al Capone?" I am fairly certain that this was the first time in my life I'd ever heard the name. "Who's Al Capone?"

"Dead guy. You don' need ta know." And that ended our talk.

This was the longest, most helpful conversation my father and I ever had.

It provided me with the only true lesson I'd ever received from his lips: the strong—the wealthy, and powerful, and influential—ruled over the weak. The weak are those who followed rules. The strong make the rules, and make punishments for those who don't follow the rules.

I knew, by some instinct, that both of my parents didn't follow the rules. And the reason all of our lives were in such pitiful condition was probably from the fact that they were hiding from their punishments.

This did not strike me as fair or unfair. Understand: I was raised in the slums. The concepts of fairness and justice do not exist in such a jungle. To complain of injustice or unfairness is as useful as complaining that an empty stomach keeps you awake at night.

No: the knowledge gained from that conversation with my father, coupled with the casual destruction of my mother's life—done by her own hand—struck me instead as a reason to make myself strong. She was taken from me because her life was that of weakness and addiction. I understood that if I remained where I was—a dealer's son in Brooklyn—my life would someday become a copy of my parents…and I would be just as weak, just as dead, just as likely to throw myself in front of a city bus.

The most reasonable solution, to my young mind, was to make myself stronger.

But even if I did, I could be beat up by people who were stronger. If I instead made myself smarter, I could be outsmarted by people who had better mental capacities and education. And if I tried to become part of The System, I would be bound by rules and regulations and become a slave to those who created the rules. How could I get past these problems?

The answer seemed obvious.

My father had taught me that the title that meant "thestrongest" was the title of gangster.

I undertook my own investigation into the nature of gangsters, and how one became such a person. To ask anyone in the slums and ghettos of New York would have been futile; I would have gotten more useful answers from my reflection in a broken mirror.

Over the course of some weeks, my investigation took me on longer scouting expeditions into uptown. There, I discovered a library, and for the first time I found what the odd collection of papers and cardboard covers called "books" were actually used for. I came to understand why all the smartest, richest, and most powerful people in the world liked to read.

Because reading was magic.

A form of psychic magic, to be precise. Experiences could be had by staring at a page. The thoughts of men long dead could still be "heard" years later—across space and time, beyond the grave—through the simple act of writing. Anything that a person could want to know could be found inside a library. And I learned that an individual's intelligence could be gauged by how fast he could read.

The smartest people were at the library every day. These were "librarians," and they knew everything about everything, to my young mind. I knew only two things of importance: the first was that I knew what I wanted to become, and the second being that I would have to learn how to read in order to get there.

I also knew that I could grow to be as old as my father and never have the ability to read a stop sign. My father was illiterate. And he intended on making me his clone.

The day after my mother's suicide, I entered the family business under my father's guidance. He taught me every detail of growing marijuana, dealing cocaine, and creating methamphetamines in a junkyard lab, an activity which turned out to be surprisingly technical, requiring considerable expertise, as the creation of the drug is highly dangerous. Many meth labs are prone to explosions. The only reason that ours stayed intact, I believe, is because neither of us partook of the substance.

Distribution was another task I was taught. Many a wandering policeman's eye has stayed fixed upon my shady-looking father and his "customers" while I, invisible to all but my peers, would deposit vials of the drug in designated dropoff points in child-friendly areas. I cannot count the amount of playgrounds I used to visit all around the city, spending only enough time to dig in the sandbox deep enough to uncover a tin can, collect several rolled bills, and leave a vial in its stead before returning to my father's side and walking to the next dropoff point. The customers would, in turn, have their own children run to the dropoff points, dig the drugs out of their hiding holes, and deliver them to the buyer. It was a thriving little business.

I very shortly discovered that I surpassed my father in this work, creating the drug and distributing it faster than his average rate, although he'd been a meth dealer longer than I'd been alive. For a time, I'd arrogantly assumed it was because of some innate superiority of intellect or character. I discovered how wrong I was when my father decided he no longer needed to work at all, beyond purchasing ingredients and materials, calculating prices, and finding potential clients.

My skills at working had nothing to do with being superior. It was simply because I was a good slave, and I would be rewarded with food and drink and a place to sleep that night.

The only way that I found myself superior to my father was in the diligence I was willing to exercise in pursuit of my plan to become a gangster. My father watched over me every second. He had learned all too well to read my face—over which I, not yet eight, had little control. If he suspected that I might be hiding a measure of cocaine, or producing excess meth and selling it myself, I would endure a memorable beating and would spend the next day—or several—chained to the meth lab table that was bolted to the concrete floor. I never gave up trying, and eventually I hit upon a workable tactic.

Running around the city, I met various beggars and homeless people who carried cans filled with the spare change of people, having sank so low in life that they did not have any honor left to keep them from asking for handouts. My travels from playground to playground involved crossing the paths of these beggars and their cans filled with money.

Through a judicious bit of bartering, I managed to strike several deals with three of them. I could trade the excess of my father's meth for various other drugs, and in turn trade those drugs for money and, of all things, education. It took me seventeen interviews with different beggars before I found one, Scary Larry, who knew how to read and was willing to teach me how.

Later, after my father was safely snoring in his cot, I would pull out my profits of coins and dollar bills from the inside of my socks and hide them away again around our hovel.

At that age, I was already an experienced contingency planner. I had secreted four different stashes around our home, each more difficult to find than the last. These were used when my father actually caught me with money—which I made sure that he did, every few months. On these occasions, after the customary beating, he would force me to tearfully "reveal" the location of my treasure, and I would oh so reluctantly lead him to one of the stashes and part with five or more dollars in coins.

What my father never caught on to was that my main stash was hidden on—or rather, inside—my own body. My education with Scary Larry taught me enough to know how to convert a few bills of cash and several pounds of coins into a single, twenty-dollar note, and then that note into something worth more. And it was through my education, brought to me by the low society of my city, that I learned that the most efficient way to conceal something was to put it in a place where nobody wanted to look.

In short: a body cavity.

By the time I was ready to leave Brooklyn forever, I had five hundred and fourteen dollars to call my own. A king's ransom. With judicious trading in the neighborhoods south of my downtown slum, especially at garage sales and pawn shops, I was able to purchase clothing, adequate food, a bicycle with fresh tires, and something that I desired most in the world: a bus ticket to Chicago. As I left the city of my birth, I looked back only once, to make certain that my father wasn't following me.

I was, approximately, eleven years old.