When he was nine, and his mother had her first deadly dance with cancer, he became a thief. At the time, he didn’t see it as a choice, an adventure, a thrill—though he would consider his career all of those things in later years. Young Harry Booth equated stealing with surviving.

They had to eat and pay the mortgage and the doctors and buy the medicine even if his mother was too sick to work. She did her best, she always did her best, pushing herself even as her hair fell out in clumps and the weight melted off her already thin frame. The little company she’d started with her sister, his crazy aunt Mags, couldn’t keep up with the cost of cancer, the sheer magnitude of the dollar signs needed to deal with what invaded his mother’s body. His mother was the backbone of Sparkle Sisters Cleaning Service, and even with him pitching in on weekends, they lost clients.

Lose clients, lose income. Lose income and you had to find money to pay the mortgage on the cozy two-bedroom house on Chicago’s West Side.

Maybe it wasn’t much of a house, but it was theirs—and the bank’s. His mom hadn’t missed a stupid payment until she got sick. But banks didn’t much care about that once you started falling behind. Everybody wanted their money, and they added more money onto it if you didn’t pay up on time. If you had a credit card, you could buy stuff like medicine and shoes—his feet kept growing—but then all that made more bills and more late fees and interest and stuff until he heard his mother crying at night when she thought he slept.

He knew Mags helped. She worked really hard to keep clients, and she paid some of the bills or late fees with her own money. But it just wasn’t enough.

At nine, he learned the word foreclosure meant you could be out on the street. And the word reposessed meant people could come take your car.

So at nine, he learned the hard way that playing by the rules as his mother had didn’t mean much to the suits and ties and briefcases. He knew how to pick pockets. His crazy aunt Mags had spent a couple of years on the carny circuit and learned a few tricks. She’d taught him as kind of a game…

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