Extract from Burrel's
extraordinary memoirs,
Tattoos On My Soul:

No Sugarcoating.

I'm no saint. Never was, never will be. I did a lot of wrong before I did right. A man can't be judged by his mistakes though, but by what he puts back along the way. When my personal balance-sheet is totted up, I guarantee the credit will far outweigh the debit.

Let's face it I'm an ex-everything. An ex-syrup-sucking, coke-tooting, gun-toting, gang chief, wrapped in the skin of a passionate, ambitious black man, There's little I haven't seen, haven't done or had done to me.

My days as a gang chief, hustler and crook may be far behind me, but history can't be denied. We are the sum of our experiences, the good, bad, ugly, sublime and absurd.

I can't separate myself from what I did as a young man but neither am I going to trail my past behind me like dirty linen, or unwanted baggage. For years the ghetto was my home, my classroom, my livelihood and proving-ground. I'm molded from this clay and shaped by these streets. I have tattoos on my soul.

And What a Journey!

Extracting myself from the stew of narcotics, violence, fast money and cheap life that was my birthright was tough, the wisdom acquired along the way, hard-learned.

Along the road I battled demons, won victories and made just about every mistake a guy could make. I took knocks that could have leveled many a man and killed some. I lost friends and fortunes, experienced pain and betrayal and I did something no father ever should. I buried my son.

But I wouldn't have missed this ride for anything.

Fearless, thirsty and passionate in the extreme, I threw myself into life with the force of a hurricane, gusting full-speed through every door. More than a few slammed in my face--breaking my nose but never my spirit--and as if by magic, a thousand times as many opened wide in front of me. You see I've never accepted that there's a designated place for me in this world. I believed when I was just a scrap of a kid, and still believe today, that I can achieve anything I set my mind to.

With acute self-awareness, dogged self-reliance and relentless resourcefulness, anything is possible.

In the ghetto you scrabble in the moment because you know, tomorrow may never come. Everything is short-term, immediate, instant, life chillingly cheap. The generations of young men lost to the bullet, needle or penitentiary borders on genocide. If he survives an early grave, a kid from the streets will all too likely find his way into a different kind of tomb, behind the walls of drug addiction or prison.

Look at me: conditioned to be a crook, catapulted out of the cradle into a world of doing wrong. As a ghetto-born, African-American male, a gang-banger and cog in the narcotics-apparatus, what were the odds I'd make into my thirties?

I should be dead by now. I've come close. My friends are, my son is, but I refuse to be a statistic.

No Overnight Transformation.

Mine is a rare, celebratory story of transformation. But if you're looking for an overnight conversion, a phoenix rising from the ashes, then I'm not your guy. I wasn't a bad kid who one morning woke up a good man.

Real life is far messier and more complicated than that. There was no blinding epiphany for me, no sudden moment of stunning clarity. I wasn't a nice, neat science project and I wasn't born again. Transforming Buddy Burrel into the man he is today, took determination, commitment, faith, tenacity and time. It took me years to get my Streetwise MBA--and I'm still studying.

From gangster to life-coach and from foolish boy to wise man, my growth was progressive: evolution rather than reconstitution. The man I am today is the sum of hundreds, even millions, of choices made, as I forged my own, very unique path through life. I would like to share that journey with you.

I am Burrel Lee Wilks III and I am a Master of Being Alive.