"I was a boy, a child. I was terrified."

Yet there was something steely inside that boy who became hip hop's $450 million dollar man. For 14 years -- beginning when he was that "terrified" tween --Shawn Corey Carter sold crack cocaine for a living.

He did it to support his family, despite getting shot at three times and regardless of the havoc that he saw it wreaking in the 'hood. He himself never touched the snuff. And he didn't stop until he was 26 and he was set to drop his first album.

"The people who were supposed to be our support system were on crack, and they was telling us, 'I'll do anything to get it,'' Jay-Z confided. "So we were like elders in the village, with a whole community on drugs. There was no one to police us. And we were out of control. "Even when I was making terrible decisions, I was making them out of desperation rather than ignorance. I felt I was in a survival of the fittest situation."

Survive he did, and now he's talking about it in his new memoir Decoded (Spiegel & Grau) in which he seeks to integrate his past with his blingie new persona: businessman and spouse of "it girl" Beyonce.

"They say behind every great fortune is a great crime,'' Jay-Z tells Simon Hattenstone . "I believe it."