Two years ago, on a hot August night, I was sitting in a car across from Roosevelt Park in Queens while Ron Naclerio explained, “The worst they can do is put a bullet in you. If anything breaks out and you hear shots, just get down on your stomach.”

Naclerio had brought me there to see a game — the best basketball game in New York. It was a professional game, of sorts, most of the players paid by local drug lords eager to enhance their reputations and spend a night betting thousands of dollars on their teams. On court were several recent graduates of Division I colleges, others who would have played Division I had they been able to stay in school, and one boy, Lamar Odom, who at age sixteen was 6 feet 9 inches tall and already nicknamed “The Franchise.”