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A young life of crime

In the living room of his Buckhead apartment, on the shelves that hold his law books, David keeps a souvenir of his former trade.

“These are my brass knuckles,” he says, fitting the metal rings over his fingers. “I keep them to remind me that I don’t have to use force anymore. I can use my mind.”

He reaches into a box and pulls out some snapshots of himself as a teenager. One of them shows a skinny redheaded kid with baggy pants sagging well below his underwear, a revolver stuck in his waistband. They called him Red.

“That young man,” he says, “was headed for life in prison.”

David was born in East Los Angeles, the oldest child of Argentinian immigrants. His father was a painting contractor who sued a client over unpaid work and never collected a penny. The financial reversal forced the Windechers to move back to Argentina and inspired an early ambition in David to become a lawyer so his family would never be taken advantage of again.

The Windechers returned to the United States in 1990, this time to the opposite coast, settling into a working-class neighborhood in North Miami Beach. They lived in a two-bedroom house, David sharing a room with his little brother and one of his sisters. It didn’t take long for him to run afoul of the law. He was only 11 when he was first arrested, for lifting merchandise from a bicycle shop.

“I was angry that other people had so much and we had so little,” he explains. “So I decided to take what I wanted.”

It was the heyday of drug dealing in Miami, and many of David’s friends were peddling weed. He met a gang member named Ortiz in middle school and started hanging out with his crowd, learning how to hustle. David knew what that sort of life could lead to; he saw it in gruesome detail when he went to the movies one night to see “Honey I Shrunk the Kids” and witnessed a gang fight in front of the theater. A young man was shot in the stomach and bled to death, moaning pitifully, as David looked on in horror.

Despite that scene, David asked to join Ortiz’s gang. After enduring a “jump-in” — an initiation ritual that required him to take a brutal beating and get back up to take another, over and over again — he learned how to sell dope. But he was still small time, making modest amounts of money.

When he turned 16, David dropped out of high school and recruited some of his friends to form their own gang. He wanted to make more money on pot sales and figured he had to have his own team of people he trusted to do that. They called themselves the Star Creek gang, after an apartment complex they used as a distribution center.

They were versatile criminals. In addition to dope, they stole cars, fished money out of vending machines, broke into U.S. mail trucks to swipe checkbooks and commit check fraud. Several times, they went all the way to New York to buy marijuana.

Not surprisingly, run-ins with the law were common.

Once, when he was 16, David and some friends were trying to make a marijuana sale in a parking lot when they realized their would-be clients were planning to rob them. David struck one of them in the jaw with his Smith & Wesson handgun, knocking him out, and they sped away. Something told him to get rid of the gun, and he instructed the driver to pull into a strip mall, where he threw the pistol into a dumpster.

A few minutes later, a police cruiser pulled up. It was his second arrest, for battery and grand theft, but it could have been much worse and life altering if he had been caught with the gun.

By the time he was 18, he had been arrested for battery, grand theft, possession of marijuana and a host of traffic violations. He was lucky; none of the charges was serious enough to put him away for a long time. Still, he was starting to get weary of it.

Like many a wayward boy, David’s life trajectory changed because of a girl. Nichole wasn’t part of the drug scene and normally wouldn’t have fallen for someone like him, but she recognized his intelligence. She listened when he confided his dormant ambition to become a lawyer and encouraged him to take the GED exam and go on to college. They dated for three years.

During that time, David noticed his family was changing. His little brother, Christian, was beginning to sell pot and carry guns like he had. His sisters, Giselle and Karina, were dressing like gang chicks. His father was working himself to death for peanuts at a warehouse, while his mother was worrying herself sick, her hair going gray.

On the night of his 23rd birthday, in 2001, David tried to fall asleep but suffered a panic attack thinking about the way he was destroying the people he loved. The next morning, he did something he hadn’t done in years: He went to a Catholic church, fell on his knees and prayed for himself and his family. He promised God he would do better.