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Padilla grew up in a small gray-stone apartment building in the predominantly Hispanic Logan Square neighborhood of Chicago. His nickname was "Pucho," because of his chubby cheeks, says Nelly Ojeda, 63, who has known the family ever since they moved into the apartment above hers 24 years ago. Padilla played baseball in the school yard across the street and attended St. Sylvester Church with his mother, brother and two sisters. To Ojeda, he was nothing but polite. At Darwin Elementary School, school counselor Art Ryder remembers him not as a bully but as a force. "You always got the feeling that he wasn't looking for trouble--but if you started it, he'd finish it. He had eyes that could stare right through you." Growing up in a place racked by gang violence, that fearlessness could be an asset.
In his early teens, Padilla joined the Latin Disciples, a mostly Puerto Rican gang. When he was 14, Padilla and several friends assaulted and robbed three men. When one victim gave chase, one of the other boys stabbed him in the stomach, according to court records. Padilla helped the boy throw the man to the ground and then kicked him in the head. The pair took cash from the victim's pockets and left him in an alley, where he died. Padilla was convicted of aggravated battery and armed robbery and went to juvenile detention until he was 18.
Padilla went on to rack up a grim but not exceptional rap sheet of adult crimes--ranging from assault to unlawful carrying of weapons to the attempted theft of a doughnut. Almost every incident includes a charge of resisting arrest or fleeing the scene. He swiped at cops with knives, fists and feet, according to court documents. In between bookings, he worked as a dishwasher or in the laundry of Chicago hotels and restaurants. In October 1991, after he and his family had moved to South Florida, he was arrested for firing his .38-cal. revolver at another driver during a road-rage incident in Sunrise, Fla. "He was a scary, scary guy with a Yankees cap covering his eyebrows," remembers the other driver, Victor Lento, 32.
A calm seemed to settle over Padilla after he came out of jail in late 1992. Maybe he had aged out of petty crime, or maybe his girlfriend, Cherie Maria Stultz, had helped him control his temper. At a Taco Bell in Davie, Fla., Padilla and Stultz found jobs with and a mentor in the restaurant's manager, Mohammad Javed, a Pakistani immigrant. "They were poor but trying to make something of their lives--buy a car, establish a good credit rating, things like that," Javed says. Javed, a Muslim who now runs an Islamic elementary school in Broward County, insists he did not proselytize to his young employees. When Padilla, who had undoubtedly heard about Islam in prison, began asking him how to convert, Javed says he told Padilla to find a mosque on his own.