He wasn't a kid content to watch TV all day. "He always had to be out playing baseball, football. He was a great dancer. He could climb one of these walls and turn a flip." The now beefy Carlos was a skinny, agile boy, she says. "To look at him now, you wouldn't know that, but if you could have seen him then."

He bounced around different elementary schools as a youngster. His family was mystified when he developed dysphagia, difficulty swallowing. There was no physical reason for the condition, but Sylvia believes it stemmed from his growing up in a fatherless home. "It was something in his mind where it became hard for him to swallow," Sylvia says.

With characteristic immodesty, Carlos says he was the best skateboarder in the neighborhood, a regular at a hangout called The Pipes. That braggadocio also comes over his first introductions to music. There was a failed experiment on the piano, a foray made at his mother's request, but the violin was different. He says he was something of a prodigy, gaining admittance to the music magnet program at Welch Middle School. Within a year he had passed up several kids ("Chinese kids and everything," Coy recently told a courtroom) who had been practicing since kindergarten. His music teachers refused to believe that he had been playing for only a year.

His early frames of reference suddenly shifted after the family moved out of the predominantly Hispanic neighborhood on the southeast side. Carlos discarded the violin bow and began break dancing. His new hood was the African-American stronghold of South Park. Coy recalls that he was the only Hispanic in his new Woodson Middle School. "I thought break dancing was gonna be my future," he laughs. "When that went out of style, I was left without a job."

Despite ethnic differences, he fit in well with the young social rebels. By age 13, he had started drinking and smoking marijuana, two vices he indulged right to the end. There were his own tales of torching a neighbor's house and other crimes. He traces his problems in school to "the three Gs": "gangs, grudges and girls."

"I'm not a follower, so I always hated gangs," he says, explaining that he was often beaten for refusing to join gangs. Since a lot of girls liked him, a lot of guys disliked him, and there were more beatings. Coy had his own brand of violence. By 1987, he had been thrown out of Milby High School for assaulting a female student and was attending an alternative school.

He was 17 and still a freshman when he decided to drop out for good, he told the Houston Press's Craig D. Lindsey in a 1999 interview. "One more year in high school," he said, "and I would've went to jail for fucking all those little young bitches."

Coy insists he tried to find an honest career after calling it quits with school. Within a year, he got his GED and enrolled at San Jacinto Junior College. He wanted a business associate's degree, but flunked all five of his classes. He conceded that he never did homework, and a burgeoning interest in golf cut into his attendance.

Like his brother before him, Coy went to work at a chemical plant, making the same $6 an hour as his hustling co-workers, Mexican immigrants. "Where they come from," he says, "they make about $6 a week. This was good money to them, and they worked harder than me. Also, I have sensitive skin and so I got a lot of rashes."

Unemployed again, Coy fell for a spiel to get rich quick selling perfume to strangers at malls and door-to-door. Although he says he was good at it and sold a lot of perfume, he wasn't making the money -- his bosses were.

Coy would testify later that he started to slip, as he put it, "into the grasp of the ghetto." Rather than perfume, he decided to peddle something else that comes in a vial, a substance that he boasted "sold itself."

He became a crack cocaine dealer. Coy would later brag to every music interviewer that he sold only the best uncut coke. Asked years later by a prosecutor to explain what he meant by uncut, Coy said with a straight face: "The most pure. I didn't believe in putting in any harmful additives."

Sylvia Coy remembers when the crack wave washed over the shores of her neighborhood, at the same time her brother was entering adolescence. "Hardworking people would quit their jobs and turn into skeletons. They would sell a paid-off house for $3,000."