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become.
        Mary's eyes caught mine and she nodded, our thoughts seemingly cross-linked. It seems like he was doomed from the start, I said to her.
        That's one way to think of it, I suppose, she said, pouring herself some water from a plastic pitcher.
        What's another? I asked.
        That his life turned out exactly the way he wanted it to, she said. As if he planned it himself from the very start.
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    HE WAS RAISED amid rows of tenements crammed against one another like dusty sets of dominos, with as many as three families jammed inside each weary apartment. In the winter, the thin windowpanes cracked from ice caked on their sills, while children slept huddled against the arms of their mothers, shorn blankets their only layers of protection against the brutality of cold city mornings. The summers brought with them a heat so muscular that the walls would sag and the white apartment paint would chip and crack. Turn-of-the-century lower Manhattan was a place where no child was meant to be raised, especially one as poorly suited for its elements as AngeloVestieri.
        As an infant, Angelo was dependent on the young mothers of the neighborhood for the excess milk from their breasts, the risk of serious infection ignored in return for a nourishing meal. He lived minus the warmth of a mother's embrace, in the company of a father who had grown to fear displays of emotion. It was an infancy that helped ease him into the comfortable stance of a loner, needing and seeking the affection of no one. Such beginnings are a common trait among gangsters, who are adept at turning external deprivation into inner strength. I met many men in the gangster life in my years around the old man, and never found one who could be described as chatty. I was known and liked by many of them, and yet knew I would never earn their trust. To trust someone is to take a risk. Gangsters survive by minimizing risk.
       
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    YOUNG ANGELO SUFFERED from a variety of illnesses, but poverty meant he would not be soothed by proper medical care. He was plagued by a constant cough, the result, the neighborhood doctor claimed, of breathing in excessive amounts of smoke at birth. His weakened lungs left him vulnerable, his immune system under steady attack from the jet stream of contagious diseases that thrived in the overcrowded tenements lining Twenty-eighth Street along Broadway. Angelo spent large chunks of those early years in a small bed in the back of the three-room railroad apartment his father rented for two dollars a week. There, under an assortment of quilts and jackets, he coughed, shivered and wheezed through long days and empty nights. He never complained, always kept to himself, had great difficulty learning English and was very conscious of the chopped-up manner in which he spoke the language of his new country. Again, the severity of such a shuttered existence would serve Angelo well in his later years, when the ability to be isolated and silent for long periods of time would be perceived as a sign of strength.
        Angelo was always lost in waves of thought and most at ease when left alone in a world of his own design. It was only on rare occasions that he would venture out and join other boys his age to play the neighborhood street games on which they thrived--stickball, using shaved-down broom handles; Johnny-on-the-pony; ring-a-levio; stoop ball; penny pitching. I was a bad fit from day one, he once told me. It just wasn't important to me to be accepted. What those kids thought about me, what they believed to be true, meant nothing. I was a stranger to them and that was the way I wanted it. It was all I had in my favor back then.
        Angelo was in and out of the poverty wards of the area hospitals, constantly forced to fight the effects of the ocean crossing and the flames that had seared his lungs. Three times during those early years he was pronounced