This was the first time Eric was shot, and he didn’t see it coming. At first, he didn't feel anything. He felt something strange and looked down and saw his leg covered in blood. It took him a second to register that he had been shot in his left leg. The hitter must have aimed at his torso, but due to his small height, it luckily hit the leg.

Eric panicked and ran in a complete panic as he heard people shrieking and running and gunfire echoing around him. His bodyguards were behind him, trying to fight the rival gang, and that gave him enough time to leave the conflict zone. It didn't take him long to come to his senses. He stopped, took off his shirt, grabbed a stick nearby and used it to twist the shirt around the leg as tight as he could in an attempt to stop the bleeding.

By this time his leg felt as large as a tree trunk, but there was still no pain, so he began limping towards the road to find a pay phone. He called a cop he had done favors for, and he sent some of his buddies, who were nearby and took him to the hospital in the back of the police car, but by the time they reached the hospital, he had passed out.

The next couple of weeks were depressing. Everything he had worked for was gone. The cops had raided his speakeasy and took all his cash, which he had stashed in its basement, because he couldn’t bribe them when he was in the hospital. He also got the news that all his bodyguards were dead, and some of them were very close and loyal to him and made him money by raiding Durden’s HQ’s at night, but now he was left with nothing.

What made things painful was that Eric was very close to his retirement. He was soon going to ask Don Luis_Patangeli for the permission to start a legal business and leave this thing, but now he was broke and had nowhere to go. He had to remain in this thing and start from the beginning…

So where it went wrong this time? How had he survived so many conflicts before this without a scratch? The answer was simple: he was not loyal to any of his prior families. Those families just sucked the money out of him but didn’t give a dime back. Not even a promotion. He remained as a lowly wise guy, so he decided to save his arse and went into hiding whenever he heard of a conflict. Thanks to his height, he could hide anywhere. At one time, he even hid inside a trashcan.

But Don Luis_Patangeli was a great man. He had kept the gang together and gave individual attention to everyone. Eric became an official part of the family, and his loyalties grew as the days passed.

That was the reason, which made Eric decide to pick up his rusty old gun that he had used to kill many people on contracts before and jump in the conflict zone. He regretted it instantly because he killed one of his own allies and then got shot himself. Thankfully, his hitter didn’t have a good aim as him, so the bullet just went through the leg, and he survived.

But he lost all his fortune. He had to start from the beginning doing things that had disgusted him, like robbing graves, and snatching old ladies’ purses, which was going to be a difficult task because he had done that so many times before that all the old ladies in town now knew him by face.

It was going to be one difficult journey, but Eric was determined to get to the top again.

A couple of months passed, and Eric seemed to be doing well moneywise. He was in Las Vegas on a business when heard the news that his business proposal had been approved by the authorities, and he would need to return back to Philly to complete the paper work. Eric couldn’t have been happier. Now he owned his own business – an investment company called “Sunshine Investment Company”. He was good at managing and making money, so he had thought to put his talent to use. He was offering an attractive product that no one had ever offered before him. He was offering people to double their money in 3 days with just a 10% cut. It was like a dream product, and he was now one step closer to becoming rich and retiring from the underworld. He would just need to advertise his business and bring customers.