Poor Sam. He always seemed to know everything that would ever happen in any given situation, always made the plans. But now he overlooked something, one small thing, and poof! That’s it, shows over folks, glad you could come, see ya! I still can’t believe this happened, least of all to Sam, the closest thing to a leader we ever had. We had all moved on since those days, but looking back, we were still linked in some way. I can’t explain it, besides the fact that those days seemed magical. Then again, almost every high school kid in the 70’s thought that the days were magical, except for the poor fucks that shipped off to Vietnam. But there was something different from this magic, it was more than a feeling. Maybe it was just luck, like when the window inexplicably came unlocked when Sam tried it, or how he could manage to pull of some sort of stunt with half a dozen people watching him, but at later dates none of them could recall what he did, or if they even had seen him before. I would put his accomplishments right up there next to Dillenger’s, but that may be just because of simple adoration. I loved him like an older brother, and he was the closest thing I had to family. He adopted me off of the streets when I was only 8 years old, a young urchin that seemed vaguely like an old Dickens tale’s protagonist. I learnt how to carve a living out of the hard concrete angles of Toronto and the cold shoulders of its inhabitants. While I prided myself on my sense of right and wrong, hard living forced me to do some things that went against my morals. I wasn’t ever part of Sam’s organization, I did follow him around with a group of a few different guys who slowly changed with every passing month. I was the only constant besides Sam, and he would act like a father figure for all those that followed him, making sure everyone was alright and that no one was cheating anyone else. He was the brains behind everything, scouting out places or people before we took over. He knew that most of us wouldn’t be around him for very long, and he wanted us to learn how to take care of ourselves when we were out on our own. I had only seen him get angry twice, and both times he was a towering inferno of rage. He was an oddity for a gangster, and even for a street thug. He was sensitive and intelligent, and that was almost unheard of in the criminal world. Many were smart, but very few were intelligent.