Carrying my Colt M1911 gave me another ten inches, each one locked and loaded to remind anyone who crossed me how big I was, how much of me there was to fear. I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t worried from time to time that it wouldn’t work, that the way I held myself and the gun I toted wouldn’t be enough. That one day people would realize I was scared. After all, there was so much to be terrified of.

As I passed crowded restaurants on Michigan Avenue, full of diners who were, more likely than not, better than me, I felt a pang of jealousy. What an easy life they led, which allowed them to laugh and carry on gaily on a Friday night in their furs and Ritz suits. My life wasn’t so simple, but that was my own doing. To complain about the consequences of my actions when mostly I reaped what I sowed would be hypocritical, to say the least.

Hypocrisy itself never failed to amuse me, even when the natural byproduct of frustration was left in its wake. As far as I was concerned, Chicago was filled with hypocrites, the “do as I say, but not as I do” crew—dishonorable men who claimed to live by the honor code of the street. I would know; I was one of them. Perhaps that was why I had to find some levity in hypocrisy, so I didn’t bore myself. It was so easy to want to do better in theory, yet so difficult to follow through in practice. It was much more convenient to settle into being morally corrupt and depraved. After all, they say you become the company you keep.

Prohibition hadn’t done much for the city other than turn it into a breeding ground for organized crime, with each outfit looking to profit on black market alcohol distribution. The depravity that Prohibition had strived to eradicate had flourished, making the city more progressive and freer than it had been since my family moved to the States from the town of Yaroslavl in 1913. I was five years old at the time, and I thought that America was everything they wanted us to believe it was, a land of hope and fulfilled dreams, where a man’s hard work and his dedication to a better life paid off. The buildings were new, and the roads were paved with asphalt and opportunity. With time, my father found himself in the same dishonorable business he’d been wrapped up in in Russia but having fallen further down on the rungs of importance.