- an "All-American boy"
- a "stone-cold criminal"
- a "corporate hotshot"
- a "well-known comic"
The lawn chair/cigarette combo never helps your credibility.
The way he tells it, when he was a teenager he became involved with the New Orleans Mob. Later, while in the Army, he learned to work with explosives, and eventually, the mob employed him in a crime ring, using his explosives training to crack safes. Unfortunately he got caught during the heist of a jewelry store, and was sentenced to 18 months in prison, which he served in solitary confinement.
After getting out of prison, he vowed to go straight, and he went straight to the top, becoming Vice-President of MacMillan Publishing (a Fortune 500 company) before the age of 40. All of this sounds like a tall tale, but he says one thing that makes me buy it as true: "I was really good at sales."
Only a liar would make his outrageous claims, and only a dishonest person could make them come true. As Shock says of his corporate career, "I was just lying, I was just stealing with a pencil." Eventually, he got sick of it, and once again he vowed to change, "I just couldn't lie for a living anymore, I couldn't...ya, know, if I hated the game, why am I playing in it?" That's when he decided to become a comic, a professional straight-talker; as Marc Maron puts it, "Comics tell the truth, even when they're lying."
"Only in America." - Don King, ex-con, con-man, legitimate success story.
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