"Your father was Al Capone's son."

The man on the phone, Thor, sounded just like the mighty god of thunder from Norse mythology. The way he growled, the words drawn long across a backdrop of sandpaper and splintered wood, sent a chill down my spine. And even if I, at thirteen years old, might have suspected such a thing, hearing it spoken without any hint of hesitation made me almost wince.

The truth often did.

I still bore the scars of the physical abuse heaped upon me by a mother half the age of my father. The mental scars were hidden from everyone else's eyes but my own. In time, they too would become as apparent. Each time my mother's wrath crashed down on my sister and me, it felt like a riptide was pulling us under, sucking us back from the safety of my mysterious father's embrace, until we simply drowned in the tragedy of a cloistered life. Thor didn't say much after that. No one ever did when it came to the topic of who my father actually was. And even as I pursued promising leads - people who had known him, people who knew of him - I would often run into a stone wall of silence, proving that the omerta code of La Cosa Nostra prevailed even though Capone died in 1947. It was almost as if the people I spoke with, and those the various private investigators I had hired spoke with, thought Capone had the ability to reach out from the great beyond and strike them dead with an angelic Tommy Gun.

"Can you tell me anything else about him?"

"He was a good man. I gotta go."

When the phone disconnected, it signaled one more wall thrown up in my path. I'd been dealing with obstacles all my life. Forced to play alone in the big house in my suburban neighborhood, unable to interact with any of the neighborhood kids for fear of what they might ask about our family, I managed to eke out an existence at best producing an imaginative mind and at worst mired in the fear of the unknown.

But while Thor might have ended the conversation, he had done nothing to end the desire burning deep within me to find out the truth of whom my father was and if he truly was the son of Alphonse Capone. Teenagers, after all, are nothing if not terribly stubborn. And as I sat there holding the dead phone in my hand, I knew I would not stop until I had the answers I sought.

I'd come across Thor's number after getting my hands on the small black address book my father used to carry with him everywhere. I'd stolen it away from the heap of clothes and personal belongings my mother was getting ready to donate to charity. I still recall the excitement I felt cracking the small leather-bound book, as if I was at last being granted access to my father's world. There, on the crinkled pages, I cast my eyes over scores of numbers and strange names, filled with wonder at who they might all be and regret over never really knowing the man my father truly was.

I only knew what he had become: my protector. And now, he was gone.

Determined to discover him, I tucked the book away in my own belongings. I would steal glimpses at it during the night under the covers. I could still see my father when he would depart for days and weeks on end, without ever knowing where he was going.

Or who he was seeing.

At 13, only a few months after my father had died in my arms, I set off on what would become a journey of discovery and frustration. I would find answers to some questions but often, only more questions lay in wait.

Along the way, I would attempt to penetrate the veil of secrecy that had surrounded not only my father's life, but my own as well. I had no idea at the time that the adventure I began in my spare time would someday grow to envelop my entire life.