In his 1995 memoir, Lorenzo Carcaterra tells the story of being incarcareted in a juvenile detention centre in 1967 because of an accident in which a man was seriously injured as Lorenzo and his 3 friends were stealing from a New York hot dog vendor. Lorenzo then went on to become a copy boy for The New York Daily News in 1976 and worked his way up to working as an entertainment journalist. He began writing books in 1988 and his second one, Sleepers, became a New York Times bestseller in 1995 and was made into a feature film in 1996.