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I was only four and a half when I walked into a private room full of armed men and stood before Vincent Kane, Chicago’s most feared mafia boss. Everyone around him looked dangerous enough to make grown men lower their eyes, but I was just a tiny girl in a red hoodie, hiding my shaking hands and clutching the paper. Remembering how my mommy cried the night before, I looked up at the man no one dared question and whispered, “Mr. Kane… why does Mr. Sterling think my mom doesn’t need money to live?”
A seven-year-old girl was selling the last thing she owned—her rusty pink bicycle—in the rain because her mother had not eaten in days and was too weak to stand. She told me men calling themselves mafia had taken everything from their home, from their clothes to the couch to her baby brother’s crib. What she didn’t know was that the man she was begging to buy her bike was Rocco Moretti, the real boss of Chicago—and when I stepped into her empty house, what I found on the kitchen floor meant the whole city was about to pay.