For a year, Coletti watched it all on a black-and-white TV with rabbit ears as he worked in his father’s shop. He wasn’t picked in the draft lottery when he turned eighteen, thus avoiding the trip to Vietnam. But he couldn’t avoid the internal war that determined the man he’d become.

He saw his father, Michelangelo, toiling for their home and family. He saw Frank Rizzo, the police commissioner from nearby Rosewood Street, fighting to maintain the status quo. He saw the mobsters killing and conniving for their piece of the pie. Then one day, he looked at himself.

He was twenty-three by then, and he didn’t have a thing. He didn’t want to live that way, so he began weighing his options. He hated the mundane life of his father. He didn’t want the responsibility of a cop. He was intrigued by the notion of taking what he wanted, so he contemplated joining the mob. When Michelangelo Coletti found out, his response was anything but mundane.

“You wanna shoot?” Michael’s father said in his heavy Italian accent as he marched his son to the recruiter. “You shoot for your country.”

Coletti always smiled when he thought of that day. That day was what allowed him to see a bit of the world during his four-year tour of duty as a supply clerk on bases in Italy and Germany. That day was also one of the last times he saw his father as the man he’d been.

When he came back to South Philly from overseas, his father’s once-strong voice had been ravaged by throat cancer. In seven months, Michael Coletti’s hero was gone. Five months later, his mother died from what could only be described as a broken heart.

After he buried her, Coletti sold the butcher shop that his father had spent his life building up, and something inside him changed. He got angry. He withdrew. Then he set out to keep his parents’ memories alive by finding a way to enforce their values. He chose to do so by pursuing the very job he’d initially avoided. He became a cop.

For most of his career in the police force, he tried to serve with the honor and integrity he’d learned from his mother and father. He’d slipped a few times and made some mistakes, but he always worked hard to earn everything he ever got, just like his father before him.

In Coletti’s mind, not everyone embraced such values, and that, more than anything, set him off.

“You all right, Coletti?” said a detective with a thick brown mustache and heavy eyebrows to match.

“Yeah,” he said, taking another sip of his coffee. “I was just thinking.”

“Did you hear what happened up in Chestnut Hill this morning?”