“Luckily for us growing up in New York City, there was very little discrimination. And my dad became friends with the top godfather of the Italian mafia. I must’ve thought I was part Italian.”

“That’s the reason I’ve always just got to think to myself, I don’t know what it is but everything happens to me by chance or coincidence. And I get spared.”

“That’s the time when I realized it wasn’t really a picnic, as I always thought. That’s when my mother or father said we weren’t going to be going home, that where we were is where we’re going to stay.”