My life began in an upper middle-class family. My father was vice president of a company called General Foods and introduced a line of frozen foods called Birds Eye.
Meanwhile, I was raised with the classic silver spoon in my mouth. My biggest concern as a young adult was trying to get to my father's money before he blew it. I wasn't fast enough. I watched my father die destitute in a veterans' hospital without a penny to his name.
I decided this was not going to happen to me. I would be number one and secure the things the world could give, regardless of the cost.
At age sixteen, I got a girl pregnant and got married. I soon headed off to college where I learned a few things that weren't the norm. For instance, my study habits became easier when I learned the mimeograph room often had the tests before the teachers did. I also met a man who taught me how to become a professional gambler and card cheat. I began to put myself through college by taking money with my deck of fifty-two.
Upon graduation, I divorced my wife, advanced my career, and found another woman to marry. She was a very nice, kind woman who allowed me to do whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted.
When I was twenty-two, I was hired by an Atlanta corporation. I was determined to be number one in everything I did. I was the number-one salesman, the number-one district manager, and ready to become the number-one regional manager.
I loved golf because it allowed me an opportunity to hustle the members of the country club at the famous nineteenth hole, where my deck of cards was loaded. I easily paid the golf club's fifteen thousand initiation fee by cheating those foolish enough to play gin rummy with me.
My life began to accelerate in its craziness. Because of my reputation as a gambler, I was invited to go to Las Vegas as a guest. When I arrived there, I was impressed by the power, the limousines, the fountain in the middle of my suite, the flashy women, and the endless supply of money. I thought to myself, If I can just get connected into all this, my life will be fine.
One evening, I went to the baccarat table where the heavy-duty players gambled. I was drawn to this table because they used cash instead of chips, and it was not unusual for the table to be piled with millions of dollars.
One day, I watched a man who kept losing and losing and losing. He lost $200,000 in twenty minutes. I had finished a couple of drinks, and I turned to him and said, “You really don't know what you're doing, do you?”
He replied, “Wise guy, if you're so smart, why don't you show me?”
He invited me across the street to Caesars Palace. When I walked into Caesars with him, I could tell people knew him. The blackjack dealers glanced up, and crowds parted as he walked to the baccarat table. He whispered into the croupier's ear, and he cleared the table and removed the gambling limit. He ordered fifty thousand dollars as comfortably as you might order a glass of milk and handed the money to me. He said, “Play, wise guy.”
I hit a hot streak. In about fifteen minutes, I had won back a little over a quarter of a million dollars. This man not only became my friend; he became my godfather. I became connected with the Mafia—the underworld—the syndicate—and began to wholesale Mafia money around the country.
Despite my illegal connections, I kept my corporate life going—achievement after achievement, promotion after promotion. I was now the manager of a major corporation in Houston. I was so crazy that one day, when I was on the phone talking to a woman in Kansas City, I asked her, “What do you look like?”
She told me she was attractive, and I asked, “What do you want out of life?”
When she said, “Power and money,” I was on the next plane to meet her. I took her to dinner and suggested, “Let's get married.”
I went back home to my wife of twelve years to inform her I was leaving. Then I got into my Cadillac, drove to Kansas City, picked up this woman, then drove to Denver to become the new chief executive officer of a multimillion-dollar, multi-international corporation.
One afternoon, I stood in my office and stared at my mahogany desk. My chauffeur-driven limousine was outside. I had an unlimited expense account, diamond rings, Rolexes, and gold jewelry. I thought, What's next? I have both legal and illegal money. I have power, both corporately and illegally. Yet something is missing.
I dismissed the thought. I couldn't afford to think that way for long. I continued in my goal to become a nationally ranked racquetball player and came close to succeeding. Yet no matter what I did, I found it was fun for only a while.
No one ever knew how lonely I really was. My third wife decided to leave me for another man. It was only by God's grace I did not put a contract on her to have her killed.
It was then I met my current wife, Peggy. As we started to date, I decided to build a new, but unusual, enterprise. Because I understood the loneliness of men's lives, I built Fantasy Island in Lakewood, Colorado. Fantasy Island became one of the largest houses of prostitution in the United States.
One day, I took Peggy to Las Vegas to show her how people would cater to my every whim. Ironically, while we were at the same baccarat table where the insanity had begun so many years earlier, my attorney called. He said, “There's a warrant out for your arrest.”
My reaction was, “For what? I haven't done anything.”
He said, “They've raided the house of prostitution. It's all over the news.”
I was aghast. “Why?”
I flew back to get arrested and received probation. All that meant to me was “Don't get caught again.”
My hands were clean, but my heart was unchanged. I knew if I got caught for anything, I'd be off to prison for six to eight years. But I was still willing to make any deal, providing it was sweet enough.
My corporation didn't like its chief executive officer making national newspapers every day for a week, so the management fired me. I was undaunted and got in the executive search business and started to make top dollars again. So in many regards, I was still the winner, yet somehow I did not feel OK.
Over the years, I had looked for peace. Somehow, by God's providence, I had found peace in a place called Lost Valley Ranch. It sits on about eighty-five hundred acres of Colorado mountain country. Every time I went there, I felt great. Then, when I'd leave to return to my life of madness, reality would hit. Driving toward home, I would get an acid burn in my stomach and tears in my eyes. I couldn't understand why leaving was so difficult. One day I figured it out. I realized the whole ranch was loaded with “Christians.” I got so I could spot them. They had this funny little look in their eyes, and if I aggravated them, they would quote Scriptures at me.
One Easter Sunday while I was at the ranch, I decided to do what many non-Christians do on Easter Sunday—I went to church. I rode my horse out on the meadow and heard a young man named Bob Foster preach a sermon I'll never forget. He said, “There's a difference between ‘happiness' and ‘inner peace.’ Happiness is like the smell of a new car, a new dating relationship, closing a big business deal, illicit drugs, or sex. You get high. You're ‘happy,’ but it never lasts.” He added, “Some highs are higher than other highs. Some highs last different lengths of time, but they always end.”
I thought to myself, The kid is right. That's my life—achieve, get, do, be, then…nothing.
Bob explained, “Inner peace is different.”
His words struck me. I knew I didn't have inner peace, and I wondered how to get it.
He continued, “You'll find inner peace only with a personal relationship with Christ.”
I thought, Oh, give me a break.
I got on my horse, rode out of the meadow, and drove back to Denver.
For the next year, off and on, Christians came into my life to tell me about the person of Jesus Christ. When they did, they were insulted, persecuted, and antagonized. Many of them walked away, believing they'd failed. But I never forgot the name, the face, the words, or any one of them who told me about the Lord Jesus.
Then God sent Paul and Kathie Grant into my life. Paul, a Jewish believer in Christ, was sitting at home one morning, praying, “Lord, I want to go to the racquetball court today and share my faith.”
Later, I pushed open the door of the racquetball court and saw him. I blurted, “What are you doing here on Yom Kippur? Why aren't you out doing whatever you Jews do on holidays?”
He replied, “I am also a Christian. Yom Kippur is the day Jews ask God to forgive them of their sins for another year. I don't have to do that because I've already received forgiveness through Jesus, the Messiah.”
“Oh, please, give me a break,” I sneered.
For months afterward, Dr. Grant would stand by his locker while I asked questions, deliberately trying to make him late. I thought, What a stupid fool! How can this idiot sit here and let me do this to him when he has a waiting room full of patients?
Yet Paul was my first true friend. He called after I'd been arrested for the raid on my house of prostitution. Now, I had received hundreds of phone calls—calls from attorneys wondering if their clients' names were found in the records and calls from men who were still wondering where the girls were. Yet Paul's call was different. He asked, “Are you OK?”
That question went through me like a shot. He followed it by asking, “Would you consider coming to church with Kathie and me?” I turned to Peggy and said, “We'll go, but whatever you do, don't sign anything.”
At the church service, I listened to this guy talk like he was never going to quit. Afterward, I recognized a man in the congregation whom I had given a brochure for Fantasy Island. When I had asked him if he'd like to be my guest, he'd said, “That's not part of my life.” His response had made an impression, and even though the incident had happened years ago, I hadn't forgotten.
Afterward, Paul and Kathie took Peggy and me back to their home and gave us what was the first Christian testimony I'd ever heard. Kathie looked so pure as she radiated her personal relationship with Jesus that I thought, I wonder if she's ever had a zit?
When she set a pot of tea in front of me, I got nervous. I was into bookmaking and had some $100,000 in bets on the day's sporting events. The last thing I wanted was to be delayed from the TV by a pot of tea.
Then Kathie shared her life. She talked about the times she had been sexually molested, how she had been a mistress to a man called “the king of oil” in Indonesia, and how she attempted to take her own life on four different occasions.
I sat there, not believing a word she said. I felt she had made up every bit of it just to hook me into joining her cult. As we left, I told Peggy, “That is fine for them, but let's you and me go home and have a drink.”
Unknown to me, the Lakewood Police Department in Colorado had decided justice had not been served. One night, the police sent out an attractive police woman, undercover. She offered to sell me a stolen television, implying she came with it. I gave her $200 and was arrested. My bond was $250,000. Because the police pulled the sting on a Friday night, I had to spend the weekend in jail.
Monday, when I was released, a sense of panic hit me. I realized I had violated my probationary terms. I would go to prison for the next six to eight years.
I remember sitting at my kitchen table crying crocodile tears, not because I was repentant, but because I was panicked. I tried to think of a way out. I thought of drugs and alcohol, but I didn't want more problems in my life. I considered the idea of escape, and at that time I had money to run. I even contemplated suicide. But by God's grace, I didn't take that route.
That's when God used my unbelieving wife. She said, “Why don't we call the man who married us?”
I snapped at her. “I don't want that stuff in my life!”
But the Holy Spirit is more powerful than my ignorance. Later, I called that pastor. Through my tears, I said, “I want inner peace in my life.”
The next day, I drove eighty-five miles to his little country church. When I walked in, the church didn't even have a rug on the dusty floor. But, in a matter of moments, the floor held a puddle of my tears. At 10:00 A.M. on March 4, 1981, I found out what it meant to know and to meet Jesus Christ as both my Lord and my Savior.
God chose to take my life and flip it. The first evidence of what was to come happened on my drive down the mountain. I had the first unselfish thought I had ever had in my entire life. I began to remember the daughter I had abandoned so many years earlier. For the first time I wondered, Where's Tammy?
When I got home I found evidence of God's perfect timing. Although I had not heard from Tammy in twenty-three years, she had left a message on my answering machine. She said a strange thing for a daughter to say to her own dad. She said, “I saw your name in the newspapers from all your arrests, and I would like to meet you.”
A short while later, I met my daughter and asked her to forgive me. Then I had the greatest privilege I have ever had in my entire life. I held my daughter's hand while she surrendered her heart and her life to Jesus Christ.
Although I fully expected to go to prison, God had other plans. Even though my Mafia attorney never showed up for my day in court and my local attorney subpoenaed all the wrong people, a miracle took place. Not only did the judge dismiss my case; he barred it from further prosecution at the district level. I walked out of the court that day, free to the world, but more importantly, Christ had freed me from my sins.
For two years afterward, I prayed for an opportunity to go back to the Lakewood Police Department and let the police know Christ had changed my life. One day, the assistant chief of police was having lunch when my name came up. He pushed back his chair and said, “Even God can't forgive that man.”
Someone said, “Why don't you find out for yourself?”
I'll never forget the day I met him for lunch. He walked in and said, “I came to find out if what you have found is truth in your life.” Then he said, “When I told people at the department that I was going to meet with you, one detective offered to wire me and another offered to cover me.”
That day, I held the hand of the man who orchestrated both my arrests and we prayed together. Three months later, he introduced me to the policewoman, a dedicated Christian, who had arrested me and put me in the back of her car. Only this time, we went to church together. She has become one of my closest Christian friends.
If God can change my life, he can change yours. There are five simple steps to knowing Jesus Christ:
To receive him, pray this prayer by simply reading these words to God: “Heavenly Father, I am a sinner. I want forgiveness for all of my sins. Father, I believe in my heart that Jesus Christ died on the cross for me and rose again. I give you my life to do with as you wish. If I've been walking astray from your Word and your will, I come back to begin again. Father, I want Jesus to come into my life. Fill me with you, Father. Come into my life, come into my heart, Lord Jesus. I love you. I ask this in Christ's name. Amen.”
If you have prayed to receive Christ, I want to welcome you to the eternal kingdom of Jesus. Tell someone about your new commitment. It is important to find and attend a Christ-centered church that believes and teaches the Bible.
God bless you as you continue your journey with him.