He’d told Street he grew up in Hawkinsville, Georgia, and that he’d played football there and went on to play at Mercer University. He’d told Street he’d gone back to his high school after earning a degree and had been teaching biology and helping coach football when he was accused by a crooked cop of dealing crack cocaine. He told Street he had snaked the cop’s girlfriend in a bar one night, and that was the reason the cop hated him.
That was the only thing he’d told Street that was true. He had met the woman, Paisley Grant, in a bar in Hawkinsville, Georgia, one night when he was passing through. He’d wound up having sex with her in his truck in the parking lot. At the time—and Pappy didn’t know this—she was dating a cop named Ronnie Ray. Pappy continued to stop by Hawkinsville now and then and continued to have sex with Miss Grant every time he came to town. Ray, who had been assigned to a federal task force working the drug trade in southern Georgia, set up an elaborate sting—most of which was fabricated—and got Pappy indicted and convicted of selling crack. That’s how Pappy wound up meeting Street at the federal maximum security penitentiary in Rosewood, California.
What Pappy hadn’t told Street was that he was actually born in Las Vegas, Nevada, to a jazz drummer named Art Donovan and a stripper and hooker named Felicity Bell. Pappy’s father, upon learning of Felicity’s pregnancy, had an attack of conscience and offered to marry the girl. She accepted. But Art Donovan’s passion for jazz was equaled only by his passion for the ladies, and he was soon out the door and on the road. Little Michael was left with his mother. She turned back to the world of stripping, hooking, drinking, and taking drugs. One of Pappy’s earliest and most vivid memories of his childhood was waking up in his mother’s bed one night to find her having sex with a man he’d never seen. His mother was moaning, and he thought the man was hurting her. He climbed off the bed and went to the kitchen to get a knife. The amorous couple didn’t even notice until little Michael plunged the butcher knife into one of the man’s triceps. It was the first of many acts of violence that Michael Donovan would commit.
By the time Michael was four, Felicity’s neighbors had made enough complaints to the Nevada child protection services that Michael was finally removed from his mother’s home. His father obtained a divorce and stayed on the road, and the authorities couldn’t even find him. They placed Michael in a temporary foster home in Las Vegas and started searching for a more permanent solution. They found it in Georgia. Art Donovan’s brother, a trucker named Lucas Donovan, agreed, along with his wife, Desiree, to take in their nephew. Felicity willingly signed away her parental rights to the boy, and he was accompanied by a Nevada child services worker to his new home in Dalton, Georgia.
Thus began a litany of problems for Lucas and Desiree Donovan, because they had agreed to take in a child who had been ignored, neglected, unloved, and totally undisciplined. They did their best to try to change Michael and make him feel wanted and loved, but nothing worked. He was destructive. He set fires. He abused animals. He refused to take instruction. He had zero interest in school outside of the things he could do to terrorize other children and the teachers. He was far bigger than the other children his age, and he was a remorseless bully. He was given detentions, suspended from schools, expelled from schools.
His first serious run-in with the law came at the age of thirteen. Michael—who would not earn the nickname “Big Pappy” until he entered federal prison—and two of his delinquent buddies had laid out of school and had been smoking weed. They needed money for more weed around three in the afternoon, and Michael said, “I know what to do.” He walked to his house—his aunt and uncle were both at work—and he retrieved a pellet gun his uncle used to shoot at rats that sometimes came around an outbuilding in back of their house. The pellet gun looked just like a semiautomatic pistol. After Michael retrieved the pellet gun, he went to a telephone booth and called a cab company. He asked the dispatcher to send a cab to pick up him and his two friends. When the driver got there, Michael got into the front seat next to the cabbie while his buddies got into the back. Michael asked the cabbie to take them to Brook Run Park. When the cabbie pulled into the lot to drop the boys off and asked for the fare, Michael pulled the pellet pistol from beneath his shirt and put it to the cabbie’s temple.
“Gonna need all your cash, man,” Michael said.
The cabbie was so terrified that he opened the driver’s side door and tried to get out, but he tripped and got hung up on his seat belt. The cab was still in drive and began to roll forward, dragging the driver along. The driver was pulled from the vehicle onto the ground, and the rear tires ran over his legs, breaking both of them between the knees and the ankles. Michael and the boys ran, but within two days the Dunwoody police had found them, using security footage from cameras in the park and near the phone booth where they’d made the call. The cab driver identified Michael, and the other two boys agreed to testify against him in exchange for leniency.
The juvenile court judge sentenced him to two years in the Youth Detention Center in Atlanta. While he was there, Michael beat two older boys senseless, raped another, and had two more years added onto his sentence. He was scheduled to get out at the age of seventeen, but he continued to fight with other boys and terrorized the guards. Two more assault charges got him the maximum sentence he could get under the juvenile laws of Georgia—they held him until his eighteenth birthday.
When Michael was released, he went back to Dalton. His uncle Lucas, who felt guilty about not being able to help the boy, offered him a job with his trucking firm, LDD Trucking. He took Michael, who had grown to six feet six inches and 250 pounds by then, under his wing and taught him how to operate an eighteen-wheeler. He taught him how to maintain the vehicles; turned him into a mechanic and a welder and anything else he needed to be in order to keep a truck on the road.