Chapter 1

Born to the Bricks

At times I sit in my cell and I can still smell the exhaust, rotting garbage, fetid puddles and brine carried on the afternoon breeze. I try to imagine the moment when I stopped picturing myself as another kid from the projects. Kids in the projects grow up being told they’re useless. It’s an enigma in an otherwise normal society; a bump in the road you curse as you drive over it. To counteract this less than perfect perception we hold of ourselves, we find something we’re good at and cling to it with all the hope of the world. Some kids separate themselves by becoming great athletes and others by excelling academically. I became a better thief.

Even as a kid I remember sitting in our living room, wondering when the cops were gonna kick in the front door and arrest me. I always had a conscience and knew stealing was wrong, but that’s what kids from the bricks do. They steal to compensate for the life they were denied.

My name is Christopher Piantedosi. I was born at Boston City Hospital on March 9, 1973. I weighed 6 pounds and 8 ounces and came out kicking and screaming. But it was a mere couple of months later my mom found me in my crib, turning blue. I was rushed to Emergency and diagnosed with severe asthma and a heart murmur. The heart murmur healed itself and the asthma went away, and six weeks later I was released from the hospital into the loving arms of my unmarried parents.

We lived at 190 Waldemar Avenue, Apartment #2, in East Boston. This area, and those endless rows of red brick apartments, were (and still are) known as the Orient Heights Projects. There isn’t a kid I know who grows up in the bricks and d