Fat Joe is a hip-hop legend, but this is not a tale of celebrity; it is the story of Joseph Cartagena, a kid who came of age in the South Bronx during its darkest years of drugs, violence, and abandonment, and how he navigated that traumatizing landscape until he found a rocky path to a different life. Born into a sprawling Puerto Rican and Cuban family in the projects of the South Bronx, even as a baby, Joe's life is threatened by violence, and by the time he starts middle school, he is forced to make a life-shaping choice: to be prey or predator. Soon, Joe and his crew rise up to dominate the streets, but as his day-to-day life becomes more and more fraught-he discovers his true strength in the street corner ciphers where the Bronx's wild energy took musical form.