Prologue

It's 2021 and I'm running late. I've got a meeting in fifteen minutes and I'm an hour away. I'm not stressing. They're not going to start without me. I'm the main attraction.

I'm late because of my morning routine with my infant son, John. Sure, my wife could do it, but the truth is I like doing it, and every minute I get with him right now is precious. My dad was never there for breakfast, and maybe if he had been I wouldn't have ended up a criminal. I never want my kids going through life thinking shit like that. The fucked-up part is I might have to go away for a while, so I've got to get these moments in while I can.

The drive takes me through my old neighborhood, Atlantic Beach. Ask my best friend Jonny about Atlantic Beach and he'd call it "picturesque," plus some other word I'd think he made up to sound smart. He'd tell you about waking up with the window cracked, salt air coming in off the Atlantic, seagulls going, waves slapping the jetty a couple hundred feet away. About getting up early for the sole purpose of doing nothing, riding longboards from one house to the next, collecting the crew a door at a time. We didn't have cell phones and nobody felt unsafe. He'd tell you how he'd come home from art lessons on a Friday to find me already at his house playing Nintendo, with a pizza on the way. Or how I got to swim in his pool before he did, because he was at camp the summer it was built.

It's funny, because I don't remember a lot of that. My memories are different. I blocked out that whole stretch of my life. Locked it away somehow. It's only recently that I can even talk about it.

Jonny knew Atlantic Beach had its demons. On the surface it looks like a happy suburban town out of the fifties or sixties, the kind of place that's getting rarer. We had a big group of friends all inside a two-mile radius. Every house looked different and everybody knew everybody. Then the opioid epidemic ripped it apart, and it's still trying to put itself back together. Those little blue pills fucked up my whole generation. Me, my brothers, my friends, their brothers and sisters. We've both lost too many people to be naive about it.

When my son was born, I wanted to name him Ray. We named him John instead, after my wife made a good point: anyone who looks him up would see what I've done. I'd never thought about that. About how my actions could land on someone who wasn't even born yet. Then I thought about when he's older. Will he find out what I did? And if he does, what will he think of me?

The weird thing about being a criminal who made millions and millions in America is that you automatically get kind of idolized, often for the wrong reasons. So yes, this book has stripper orgies, high-stakes Vegas poker, Floyd Mayweather, a golden musket, South Korean investors, Lamborghinis and every drug under the sun, and I'd be lying if I said it wasn't fun while it lasted. But it was all fleeting, and it came at a price.

The fucked-up thing is that sometimes you're the one who fucks up and other people pay for it. Sometimes it's people who are completely innocent, like my son. I want to make sure at least some good comes out of this, for his sake.

So here it is. This is the story of how I became a multimillionaire by starting a criminal enterprise, all in pursuit of the American Dream.