A BREED APART: One Man's Journey to Redemption

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 clichés, he still offers a straightforward, energetic account. (Jan.)