A wiseguy? A goodfella? A mobster? Sure, you can call me any of those. I've been a member of a major crime family for a long time now. Normally I'd never tell anyone about my life, but I can trust you, right?
Don't ask me about my ancestry. Yakuza, Russian Mob, Sicilian, Mexican Cartel...race doesn't matter as much as it used to. Some traditions still hold. We have a boss whom we call the Don, our captains are called caporegimes and the made men and women are called soldiers. Hell, we even have the Five Families in New Daria, just like New York, right?
No, they aren't THE Five Families. It's just a coincidence that five different organizations run the city like they do in the Big Apple. It was like that before I was born. I came from a poor, lower class family, the apartment I grew up in was dirty and the plumbing was always giving us trouble. My clothes were secondhand and I never got any of the cool toys I saw on TV. The neighborhood was noisy and dangerous. It was no wonder that I started a life of crime at a young age.
My parents were regular people. They weren't saints, but they certainly didn't have any connections to organized crime or anything like that. They tried to raise me to be a moral and well-adjusted little boy.
My family was well-known in our neighborhood. No, not my criminal family. I'm referring to my parents and myself. They were the ones who named me Tony.
I remember the first time I was involved in a crime. I was eight years old. A couple of friends and I were at a local convenience store. It was stupid kid stuff. Even my best friend was there a boy named Tyler.
Tyler was a scrawny and excitable little boy with messy black hair.
"Just take it," the leader of our little group said with a sneer, forcing the candy bar into my hands. He was a boy named Alex.
He was always doing shit like that. At that age, Alex was bigger, stronger and meaner than Tyler or myself. For a bunch of little kids, most of the time that was enough to make us follow him. He was tall, had short blond hair, and was already starting to get broad shoulders. He looked like the poster boy for the perfect all-American boy.
Tyler had already shoved a bar into his own pocket. Although he tried to look nonchalant, I could see that he was scared and nervous.
I pushed it back at Alex and glared menacingly at him,
"Coward," Alex said as we pushed it back and forth.
It caused enough of a commotion that the shop owner, Mr. Dwyer, came over to see what was happening.
"You think you can steal from me?" he spat. "You stay here, I'm calling the cops!"
We pushed our way past Mr Dwyer and ran off.
The shopkeeper was probably too surprised to even react. I remember my shoulder digging into his soft gut and his angry shouts as he fell to the ground. We got out of there so quickly that the cops didn't even get a chance to try to chase us.
The most popular sport in my school was lacrosse. It was a brutal game where the players had to be fast and tough. Although the sticks were supposed to be used to catch the ball, they were more often used to bludgeon your opponents' legs and take them out of the game when the refs weren't looking. The fact that the team was co-ed didn't seem to stop the violence, although some of the guys weren't as rough against the girls.
I was the team strategist, I had a good eye for the game. I could tell what the opponent's strategies were going to be and how to counter them. Tyler had changed from a nervous little boy into a vicious and angry 13-year-old. He wasn't good at following the coach's orders and was inevitably cut from the team at the beginning of each season for getting into a fight with a teammate or an opposing player.
