Early Life
Steele was born on October 19, 1958 at Andrews Air Force Base in Prince George's County, Maryland, and was adopted as an infant by William and Maebell Steele. William died in 1962. Maebell, who had been born into a sharecropping family in South Carolina, worked for minimum wage as a laundress to raise her children. After Michael's father died, she ignored her friends' appeals to apply for public assistance, later telling Michael 'I didn't want the government raising my children'. She later married John Turner, a truck driver. Michael and his sister, Monica Turner, were raised in the Petworth neighborhood of Northwest Washington, D.C. which Steele has described as a small, stable and racially integrated community that insulated him from some of the problems elsewhere in the city. Steele's sister later married and divorced former heavyweight boxing champion Mike Tyson.
Steele attended Archbishop Carroll Roman Catholic High School in Washington, D.C., participating in the Glee Club, the National Honor Society and many of the school's drama productions. During his senior year, he was elected student council president.
In 1977, Steele enrolled at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore where he received a bachelor's degree in international studies.
Steele then spent three years preparing for the Catholic priesthood at the Augustinian Friars Seminary at Villanova University, teaching high school classes in world history and economics for one year at Malvern Preparatory School in Malvern, Pennsylvania. He left the seminary prior to ordination.
He then enrolled at the Georgetown University Law Center, attending classes at night and receiving his Juris Doctor in 1991. He failed the Maryland bar exam, but then passed the Pennsylvania bar exam.
Steele was employed as a corporate securities associate at the Washington, D.C. office of Cleary, Gottlieb, Steen & Hamilton. From 1991 to 1997, he specialized in financial investments for Wall Street underwriters, working at Cleary's Tokyo, Japan office on major product liability litigation and at its London office on corporate matters. He left the law firm and founded the Steele Group, a business and legal consulting firm.
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