The other fell into the life of a small-time crook, racking up at least 31 arrests before being jailed for two years. But for the brothers Lane it was not a case of their unique names sealing their fates. "I went a totally separate route right from the start," said Loser Lane, 41, a detective in the South Bronx. Loser, a star student and athlete, went on scholarship to an elite prep school, on to Lafayette College in Pennsylvania, and then joined the force.



Winner's life has gone the other way. Now 44, Winner last month completed a two-year jail sentence for breaking into a car. He is living in a homeless shelter in upstate New York, shuttling back and forth between it and the city trying to get his life on track. Why did he commit so many crimes? "It's just some situations I got in," Winner said.

Loser said of his brother: "Most of the crimes are minor crimes. He's just kooky, not a heavy drinker, some domestic violence problems, but was never a heavy drinker, never into drugs ... He's just not all there, I think." The brothers rarely see each other, though Winner will phone Loser when he is short of money, but they are no longer close. "I'm a cop," said Loser, who is known as Lou on the job. "And I have a way with me, I don't tolerate a lot." The Lane boys ran in the same circles while growing up in public housing in Harlem, where their names never seemed to arouse curiosity or ridicule from the neighbourhood kids.

"When you're young you don't know that it's a bad name, and by the time you hit grade school, everybody knows you. It was a regular thing," Loser Lane said. It helped that Loser was the youngest of eight brothers and sisters and that he was a natural athlete, admired by the other kids for his on-field achievements.

The story of how Loser got his name is simple. The day he was born, their late father, Robert, asked his daughter what to name the baby. "My dad comes home and asks my oldest sister what to name me and she said, 'Well, we've got a Winner, why don't we have a Loser?' And there you go." While Loser's friends had no problem calling him by his name, his teachers and other adults "couldn't bring themselves to call me Loser", so he became Lou. Newsday