From the NYT: The Littlest Hustler: Portrait of a New York childhood, in the extreme (from YC News):
But Alex isn’t like other boys his age. He’s had free rein over the streets of Nolita since before he can remember, and he quickly learned the rules of that playground, turning his relationships with the neighborhood’s shop owners into access to free gourmet meals and designer clothes and trendy sneakers, then turning those freebies into even better stuff (like courtside Knicks tickets), and leveraging those perks into even more valuable things, like connections to athletes, rappers, nightclub owners, and so on.
Freaky. People like that (when they are adults)kinda gross me out. But, they do go far. Either in the business world or to jail. Maybe both.