A Breed Apart
A Journey to Redemption
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- €15.99
Publisher Description
In this “energetic” (Publishers Weekly) memoir, Victor Woods vividly recounts a trouble-filled and misunderstood coming-of-age in the suburbs of Chicago, the rollercoaster ride that led him to captain a multi-million dollar counterfeit scheme, and his life-changing stint in federal prison.
In 1990, Victor Woods was charged by the US federal government with organizing a credit card scam worth more than forty million dollars. He refused to implicate his family and friends for a reduced sentence. His lawyer at the time remarked that he was “a breed apart.”
In his authentic, matter-of-fact style, Woods shares the details of his evolution from a rebellious teen to a white-collar criminal and what inspired him to turn his life around while locked away as a federal inmate. Woods’s misdeeds and missteps remind us that sometimes we can be our own worst enemy. His remarkable turnaround shows us that no matter our past we can always make good on a second chance.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
It's one thing to turn to a life of crime after being raised in terrible circumstances and seeing no other way to get out, and quite another to come from a trouble-free, upper-middle-class existence and simply choose crime as a way of life. Woods's memoir, in which he describes how his family (they were the first black family to move to the Chicago suburb of Arlington Heights in the 1970s; his father was an executive with a Fortune 500 company) gave him every chance he needed to succeed, illuminates the latter choice. But Woods wasn't interested in following in his father's footsteps. While still in high school, he was robbing restaurants with a BB gun, using a bike as his getaway vehicle. Soon after, he ran away and, obsessed with movies like The Godfather and Michael Mann's Thief, started pulling jobs all over the Chicago area with a small crew that used walkie-talkies to communicate. A short stint in jail only gave him membership into Gangster Disciples (a very large gang-run drug enterprise) and a desire for bigger jobs, which led to a massive credit card manufacturing operation (totaling about $40 million in stolen credit) that caught the eye of the Feds, who arrested him in 1990. As in most first-person criminal stories, Woods alternates between hard-to-conceal pride in his accomplishments at breaking the law so effortlessly and lucratively without ever having to hurt anybody physically, and a sanctimonious "Don't follow my path" lecturing tone. It's to his credit that, despite clich s, he still offers a straightforward, energetic account.
