How did you meet Andre?
I had been putting out feelers to all kinds of organizations in the Jane-Finch area, Scarborough, areas where there was gang-related activity. I contacted a lot of street organizations that work with troubled kids. I had two of them very clearly say to me, "We don't want to have anything to do with you guys in the media."

Were they suspicious of your motives?
I think so. Or they were so tired of the sensationalism in the daily news media that they weren't really hearing my explanation of what I wanted to do. I explained to the ones that listened that I wanted somebody who had really been there, who had really lived this life, to tell their story, from beginning to end. To try, in a more human way, to get at this story, rather than just repeat the data about what they did wrong. This was going to be first person. This was going to be essentially their voice: they were going to do it, and I was just going to help them do it. I started this process in June of 2005. Finally, though, I contacted a woman at East Metro Youth Services who really understood what I wanted to do. She spoke to a bunch of people, and finally, someone involved in David Miller's violence prevention program, Likwa, said he had someone he thought I should talk to. And that was Andre. We met in the Malvern Library; they set us up in a nice private room, shut the door. And he was a really interesting young guy. He's 24; he's not a teenager. He had been in juvenile detention or prison for most of the years from ages 13 to 21. And yet he was unusually articulate. A smart guy. That's what I was looking for. He'd been involved with guns, with gangs. As the story shows, he'd had a pretty harrowing life. But he'd had a revelation: prison was worse than death, and he could not go back. Not everybody feels that. But he did, and he's been determined since then to make a go of it.

How much time did you end up spending with him?
We met three times. We talked at great length. He would just tell his story. And Andre is a real storyteller. He would start, and, if I occasionally tried to jump us ahead to something, Andre would always say, "Oh, Mr. Hayes, I'll get there." He had some things he wanted to tell, and a way that the story had to unfold.

So you didn't have to guide the conversations too much?
They were hard to guide. But it didn't matter. Andre is a storyteller and he spoke chronologically. The biggest problem—and many of us have this—is trying to nail down times. Whenever any of us are talking about what happened eight years ago, we may have the details, but then someone asks, "Was this the summer or the fall of 1995?" and you say, "Well, I don't know, uh, it was..." But I wanted to get that chronology. It's necessary for the story.

Or just "Did he approve the final version of the story?
This is not a journalist writing a story with a guy who's a source in it. It's Andre's story, with his name on it. So he read it and had approval of the final draft. Whenever you ghost write a book or an article, you take a bit of a chance. You run a risk that somebody wants to change things when they see how they look in print. Obviously, his story had to be compressed or it would have been 15,000 words. I explained all that to him, but I wasn't sure if it would still upset him when he read it. But he thought it was great. To my astonishment, there was only one thing that he thought hadn't been adequately described. I thought there were going to be 50 things.

What was the one thing he quibbled over?
I had said that since he had been out of prison and had gone through the violence intervention program, he had the goal of becoming a youth worker himself, that he wanted to take the Child and Youth Worker program at Centennial College. But he wanted it made clear that he isstudying right now. It initially sounded as if he was out of prison and wanted to go back to school. He wanted to prove that he was making this work. That was really important to him. He wanted to prove that he was making this work. I had no trouble with that. So we put it in.

Because of the compression, are there any elements you wish weren't cut?
There's a part of the story that's not in there, only because of space and because it didn't speak directly either to his experience with gangs or the wonderful new story of him being out and taking courses. There's a little missing piece there. Which is, after he got out of prison, someone told him about Robertson's Amusements, a big company that runs carnivals. He got hired and they toured around Ontario—they were in Smiths Falls and Perth and all around southeastern Ontario. He was in charge of assembling and disassembling the Tilt-a-Whirl, which is pretty involved. He got paid quite well, and it was kind of like being in a rock band, travelling around. I thought this was wonderful. It was really the first straight job he had. And he made decent money at it, which was really new to him. As people tend to do, he blew a big chunk of it. On an expensive mixer, because he makes music. It was probably not the best investment at that time, when he really didn't have anything except this money he'd made. It's so human, though, that when you've been through everything Andre had been through, and you get a little money, you want to buy yourself a treat. I love that story.