I'm starting with Anthony before Tony the philosopher—the boy who watched, absorbed, survived, and only much later understood why those early experiences mattered. I'm keeping your cadence and letting the philosophy emerge from the story rather than explaining it all up front.
CHAPTER ONE
I've Always Watched
I have a story to tell.
Not because I lived a perfect life.
Quite the opposite.
I've been the good guy and the bad guy. I've been broke. I've made money. I've been free and I've been locked up. I've been a soldier, a drug addict, a criminal, a salesman, a businessman, a publisher, a radio host—and somewhere along the way, without ever intending to become one, a philosopher.
A presumptive philosopher.
That's important.
Because I don't claim to know everything.
I know what I know.
And, maybe more importantly, I know what I don't know.
At least I try to.
That distinction took me a lifetime.
My education wasn't earned entirely in classrooms. My education came from people. Streets. Prison cells. Army barracks. Business offices. Sales floors. Employees. Customers. Success. Failure. Drugs. Money. Women. Men. Good people. Bad people.
And Ma.
Especially Ma.
I am my mother's son.
Looking back now, I realize something else.
I've always watched.
I watched people.
I listened.
I compared.
And I questioned.
Why did he do that?
Why did she say that?
Why does one person react one way and somebody else, facing almost exactly the same circumstances, react completely differently?
Why do people say one thing and do another?
Why do people who seem to have everything sometimes behave as though they have nothing?
Why can somebody with almost nothing seem perfectly content?
Why do decent people sometimes do terrible things?
And why do terrible people occasionally surprise you by doing something decent?
I didn't have names for any of this when I was a kid.
I was just watching.
Growing up Italian, I thought being Italian was pretty damn cool.
The food.
The music.
The family.
The swagger.
There was a sense of knowing who we were.
Pride wasn't something somebody had to teach in a classroom. It was identity. Belonging. Knowing where you came from.
We weren't rich.
Far from it.
My father was a union laborer. My mother was a garment worker. At times Ma worked three jobs.
And I found myself around kids whose families had considerably more than we did—doctors, lawyers, professional people.
Kids notice those things.
They notice clothes.
They notice houses.
They notice what other kids have.
And they notice when other kids notice what they don't have.
I remember being ridiculed.
I remember feeling the difference.
But even as a kid, something strange happened inside my head.
Instead of merely thinking:
They're better than me.
I started wondering:
Why do they need me to feel worse so they can feel better?
I didn't articulate it exactly that way then. I was a kid.
But the thought was there.
Maybe they're making themselves feel better than they really do.
There it was.
Anthony watching.
I couldn't have told you anything about psychology. I hadn't read the philosophers. I didn't know anything about political theory.
I was watching human behavior.
And I was beginning to form conclusions.
Some would prove right.
Some would prove wrong.
And some would take fifty years before I even understood what I had been looking at.
Ma understood me before I understood myself.
She'd say:
“You do damn well what you please, Anthony...period!”
She knew.
I could explain.
I could promise.
I could tell her exactly what she wanted to hear.
And Ma wasn't buying.
“You'll tell me anything to make me happy, and then you will go on and do as you well please.”
That woman had me figured out.
Years later, after I'd lied to cops, judges, institutions, authority figures and probably myself more times than I could count, I'd understand just how much wisdom was contained in those simple observations.
Ma didn't call it behavioral psychology.
She didn't need to.
She knew people.
And she knew Anthony.
She taught me other things.
You catch more bees with honey than vinegar.
Kill them with kindness.
And another lesson that wouldn't fully reveal itself until much later:
“I might not catch you today, but I will tomorrow, or the next day...”
Truth has patience.
A lie sometimes only needs time.
I wouldn't understand the significance of that for years.
But I remembered it.
I've always remembered things like that.
There was something else happening around me.
America was changing.
I didn't know enough then to call it cultural change. I certainly wasn't sitting around as a teenager analyzing social movements.
I was living.
But I was watching.
The Italian identity I thought was so damn cool began changing too.
Successful Italians assimilated.
Families moved.
Neighborhoods changed.
Churches weakened.
The old organizations and paternal institutions didn't carry quite the same weight.
Over time, Italians increasingly became something else in the American vocabulary:
White.
Something had been gained through assimilation.
Something may have been lost too.
I didn't understand any of that at the time.
But I noticed it.
That's the distinction that matters.
I noticed.
Then came 1968.
I was seventeen years old.
Think about seventeen for a minute.
At seventeen you're supposed to know almost nothing.
Unfortunately, at seventeen you're usually pretty certain you know quite a lot.
I entered the Army.
And suddenly the laboratory got much bigger.
People from everywhere.
Different races.
Different neighborhoods.
Different families.
Different assumptions about life.
Different ways of getting what they wanted.
I watched.
I listened.
I learned.
Sometimes I learned the wrong lesson.
That's important too.
Because experience is a hell of a teacher—but experience doesn't hand you a certificate guaranteeing that the conclusion you draw from it is correct.
That realization came much later.
At seventeen, something happens and you think:
Now I understand.
At seventy-something, you can finally ask:
Did I?
I remember one particular encounter as though it happened yesterday.
We were hanging around. Maybe shooting pool. The exact surroundings have faded.
The conversation hasn't.
I had noticed something among some of the Black guys I was around. Sometimes when somebody didn't get what he wanted, the accusation came quickly:
You're saying no because I'm Black.
I wondered whether they actually believed it.
So I asked one of the guys.
Essentially:
Does that stuff work?
He smiled.
And the answer, as I remember it, was basically:
“We use it 'cause it works...every damn time.”
That stuck with me.
Not because one man's answer told me everything about Black people.
It didn't.
That's something Tony NOW can say that Anthony couldn't possibly have understood.
There are good white people and bad white people.
There are good Black people and bad Black people.
There are good Italians and bad Italians.
There are good cops and bad cops.
Good businessmen and crooks.
Good politicians and...
Well, let's not get carried away.
The point is people.
But that encounter taught seventeen-year-old Anthony something—or at least I thought it taught me something:
People learn what works.
And once something works, people tend to use it again.
That principle didn't seem racial to me eventually.
It seemed human.
Reward behavior and you'll probably get more of it.
Make a tactic successful and somebody will use the tactic.
Make dishonesty profitable and don't act surprised when somebody lies.
Give somebody power without accountability and don't be shocked when somebody abuses it.
I would see versions of that lesson again.
And again.
And again.
In the streets.
In prison.
In business.
In politics.
And in myself.
Especially in myself.
That's where I have an advantage over some people writing about human behavior.
And a disadvantage.
My resume is my EXPERIENCE.
I've been inside behavior most respectable people study from the outside.
But that doesn't automatically make me right.
A con can recognize a con because he knows the tricks.
It takes a Con to know a Con.
But there's a conundrum buried inside that statement that took me decades to appreciate:
Can a con recognize when the other guy isn't a con?
Experience teaches you what to recognize.
Experience can also teach you what you expect to see.
There's a difference.
And somewhere between those two things lies one of the questions that has followed me for most of my life:
How do you know when you KNOW?
I didn't have that question at seventeen.
I just had certainty.
Lots of it.
Life would take care of that.
I went to Vietnam.
I became addicted to heroin.
I committed crimes.
I went to jail.
Then prison.
Then another prison.
City.
County.
State.
Federal.
Maximum security.
Free and on the run.
Caught again.
I spent years of my life living what I would later call being:
Sentenced to Life on the Installment Plan.
I lied.
I manipulated.
I hustled.
I watched other people manipulate.
I learned how institutions worked and how people worked inside institutions.
I learned fear.
I learned bravado.
I learned weakness.
I learned survival.
I learned that the toughest-looking man in the room wasn't necessarily the toughest man in the room.
I learned that victims could become predators.
I learned that predators could think of themselves as victims.
And somewhere underneath all that ugliness, I kept watching.
Anthony was becoming Tony.
Not in spite of what happened.
Because of it.
That's difficult for some people to understand.
Maybe impossible.
Sometimes I think:
If I have to explain it to you...you would never understand.
How do you explain prison to somebody who's never heard that steel door close behind him?
How do you explain addiction to somebody who's never negotiated with himself for one more fix?
How do you explain the thinking of a criminal to somebody who has never had to think like one?
You can describe it.
You can research it.
You can study it.
But living something is different from studying something.
That doesn't make the man who lived it smarter than the man who studied it.
The professor knows things the prisoner doesn't.
But the prisoner knows things the professor doesn't.
Wisdom might begin when both men understand that.
Years later I would develop grander language for all of this.
Human Condition.
Natural Law.
The re-Conditioned Human.
OF THE CENTER.
The Land of More.
The Land of Not Enough.
The Land of Just Enough.
The Power of Certainty.
Manifest Destiny II.
But none of those ideas began as political slogans.
They began with watching people.
And watching myself.
That's why this story has to begin here.
Before the blogs.
Before the radio microphone.
Before the publisher.
Before the businessman.
Before the ExCONservative.
Before Tony started telling everybody else what was wrong with America.
There was Anthony.
A poor Italian kid watching people.
A kid whose mother already knew exactly what kind of son she had.
A seventeen-year-old soldier who thought every experience contained a lesson.
A young man about to spend years learning some of those lessons in the hardest possible way.
And eventually a much older man who would discover that the hardest question wasn't:
What did I learn?
It was:
How do I know that what I learned is true?
I have spent most of my life answering that question.
Sometimes successfully.
Sometimes not.
But one thing has remained constant.
Once I believe I know, I move.
Because certainty without action isn't much of a power at all.
And if experience later proves me wrong?
Then I learned something.
Perfection IS imperfection.
It's how we learn.
So I'll take my chances.
Because after everything I've lived, everything I've screwed up, everything I've survived and everything I've learned, one principle still makes sense to me:
I'd rather be WRONG moving forward...than RIGHT standing still.
That establishes the narrator and the central question without giving away the entire philosophy. Chapter Two should now take us into the life itself—Vietnam, heroin, crime, prison and “Sentenced to Life on the Installment Plan”—and let the reader begin earning the right to understand WHY I KNOW.
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