Wired on Wall Street

CHAPTER TWOMOONSHOT

My story begins in Lilburn, Georgia, a small town about 25 miles outside Atlanta, where the scent of cut grass mixed with asphalt heat. I was the oldest of three boys in a middle‐class family. My dad worked for The Coca‐Cola Company; my mom ran a daycare out of our home. They were models of hard work and quiet responsibility, carrying more than we ever saw.

Every so often we'd visit Dad at the Coca‐Cola building downtown. It felt like stepping into another world: free sodas, a sprawling cafeteria, coworkers who stopped to say how proud he was of us. For a kid from Lilburn, it was magic.

We lived in a four‐bedroom ranch with a two‐car garage, which cost my dad, in 1978, $45,000. Aside from a brief fascination with Tom Cruise's character in The Firm—the young lawyer who secretly wore a wire to help the FBI—nothing in my early life suggested I'd end up a convicted felon, much less an FBI informant. Wall Street wasn't even on the map for us.

But we never felt like we lacked anything. Our days were backyard basketball games, the whir of lawnmowers on Saturdays, long afternoons at the neighborhood swim and tennis club. Behind the scenes, though, the cost on my parents was heavy. Dad rose before dawn to fight a grinding commute down Interstate 85, more parking lot than freeway, yet somehow made it home in time for soccer practices. Mom's daycare swelled into barely contained chaos: six full‐time kids from infants to pre‐K, plus four more dropped off by “tennis ...