[COLOR=rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.95)]
Remi Adeleke’s life is straight out of a Hollywood movie.
[/COLOR][COLOR=rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.95)][/COLOR][COLOR=rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.95)]
Born in Nigeria and living the first few years of his life with extreme wealth, everything took a drastic turn for Adeleke, now 36, when his father died, they lost all of their money, and his mother moved him to the Bronx.
[/COLOR]
[COLOR=rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.95)][/COLOR][COLOR=rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.95)]
“That’s where my American journey began,” Adeleke tells PEOPLE. “And it didn’t start off well.”
[/COLOR]
[COLOR=rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.95)][/COLOR][COLOR=rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.95)]
At 8 years old, he began to steal, and when he went to high school, he began selling drugs and running a fake sneaker business.
[/COLOR]
[COLOR=rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.95)][/COLOR][COLOR=rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.95)]
“By the time I was 19, I was bringing in thousands and thousands of dollars,” he recalls. “I was using that money to fund a record company because that was my dream.”
[/COLOR]
[COLOR=rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.95)][/COLOR][COLOR=rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.95)][/COLOR][COLOR=rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.95)][/COLOR][COLOR=rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.95)][/COLOR][COLOR=rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.95)]
It took Adeleke getting into a “very bad deal with a drug dealer” who showed up at his apartment and threatened both his life and his mother’s for him to “wake up and change everything”.
[/COLOR]
[COLOR=rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.95)][/COLOR][COLOR=rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.95)]
He vowed that very night to leave his rough and dangerous life in the past. For the next six months, he thought hard about what to do next.
[/COLOR]
[COLOR=rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.95)][/COLOR][COLOR=rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.95)]
“I decided to join the military,” says Adeleke. “I finally came to the realization that I had nothing left. I had failed at everything in my mind. I had failed at my record company, I had failed at selling drugs, I failed at all of these things and I was like, ‘What else do you have left, Remi? You have absolutely nothing left.’ I had to hit rock bottom first.”[/COLOR]