Kingpin: A Memoir

by Curtis Ingram

He was not called Kingpin because of crime. He was called Kingpin because people saw what he could carry.

Curtis Ingram never sold drugs. Never used them. The name found him anyway, given to him by teammates, coaches, and people who watched him do things a boy his age was not built to do.

Kingpin: A Memoir opens with a grandmother, a kitchen knife, and a warning that does not need to be repeated. It moves through Philadelphia, family, poverty, mental illness, athletics, violence, discipline, responsibility, and the long road toward understanding the difference between strength and weight.

Born in the Richard Allen Homes and shaped between North Philadelphia and Wynnefield, Curtis was the oldest of ten children in a family held together by love, pressure, survival, and his mother, a woman whose schizophrenia moved through the house like weather in a time and neighborhood that had no language for what it was watching.

By twelve, he was six feet tall and more than two hundred pounds, already lying about his age to move through rooms he was not old enough to be in. By his junior year at Overbrook High School, he was a middle linebacker calling defenses, a fullback who refused to be brought down on the first hit, and a heavyweight wrestler who did not just compete. He wrestled to finish.

But this is not a sports book.

It is a book about what it costs to become the piece everything else depends on.

With a foreword by James Brown, former NFL offensive tackle and Curtis's college teammate at Virginia State University, Kingpin refuses easy inspiration. It is honest about poverty, mental illness, fire, fatherhood, fear, restraint, ambition, and the specific weight of being the oldest child in a house that needed someone to stay standing.

It is honest about the cost. The way pressure shapes a man into someone reliable. The way reliability can become heavy if he never learns how to set some of it down. Strength can protect. Weight can crush.

Kingpin: A Memoir is for anyone who has ever been seen as strong before they fully understood what strength would ask of them.

This is not a book about a title. It is a book about how one gets made.

207 pages, Paperback

Published May 19, 2026

About the author

Curtis Ingram is the author of Kingpin: A Memoir, a raw true story rooted in Philadelphia, family pressure, survival, discipline, sports, and transformation.

Raised in Philadelphia, Curtis came of age in a world where reputation traveled by word of mouth, family weight arrived early, and the line between survival and self-destruction was often thin. His memoir follows the forces that shaped him, from childhood responsibility and neighborhood influence to football, wrestling, and the hard-earned path toward becoming the first in his family to attend college.

Before becoming an author, Curtis built a long career in safety, security, leadership, and protection work. He is also a U.S. Army veteran, former law enforcement officer, former athlete, husband, father, and grandfather.

Kingpin: A Memoir is not a crime story. It is a story about what people saw one young man carry, what that weight cost him, and how discipline, love, pain, and purpose helped him find another path.

Curtis now writes and builds his author platform from abroad, with a focus on real-life storytelling, memoir, audiobooks, visuals, and stories of survival, ambition, redemption, and transformation.

Learn more at https://CurtisIngram.com