In Michael Lacey's younger and more vulnerable years, his father gave him this advice: "Whenever someone pokes a finger in your chest, you grab that finger and you break it off at the knuckle." Lacey grew up in the 1950s as a bright, bookish boy. His father, a sailor turned enforcer for a New York construction union, had little use for his son's intellectual gifts. If Lacey lost a fight at school, he says, his dad "came home and beat me again." But the boy toughened up, and he carried the lessons he'd learned into adulthood. He became a newspaper editor and earned a reputation as a down-and-dirty First Amendment brawler. Early on in his career, he struck up a partnership with James Larkin, a publisher whose sensibilities matched his own. Together, they built the nation's largest chain of alternative newsweeklies.
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