Ex-Mafioso Testifies at Taft
“Come hear a former drug lord,” read the fliers scattered around the campus of The Taft School, the traditional New England prep school in quiet Watertown, Connecticut, about 27 miles from the Yale campus. It was Thursday night last November 12th, and even though it was also opening night for the fall school play, 60-70 students filled the Choral Room by the time Rex Duval the featured ex-Mafioso arrived.
Eager anticipation and perhaps a bit of trepidation were in the air, yet few were imagining that this man’s story was soon to inspire almost half of them to make a decision as radical as inviting Jesus Christ into their lives.
Evangelistic testimonies are hardly common events at Taft. As one student put it, “The attitude towards Christianity here is generally mocking and sarcastic. People associate it with scenes from Fletch Lives, The Blues Brothers, The Scarlet Letter…. It is not seen as an intelligent way of life.”
What kind of message could so powerfully reach this audience?
It is very clear that many nations cannot support themselves, and the responsibility lies on the shoulders of those nations who have an abundance to provide where there is need.
The room stilled as Rex first prayed and then began to speak. He was the son of the man who played Juan Valdez, the Colombian coffee grower in commercials. Growing up in the New York celebrity world of drugs, fame and parties, he was just twelve when his father first taught him to snort cocaine.
By his early twenties, he and his dad had teamed up to smuggle large quantities of drugs across the Mexican border. When not busy smuggling, he robbed banks, stole cars, forged money, ran bookmaking and debt-collecting operations, and sold drugs individually to rock stars and businessmen. He was quick, tough and good at what he did. Within a few years, he found himself living the ‘good life’ with a Rolls Royce and an L.A. mansion.
All of the outward symbols of success…. “But I was a slave,” he said. “A slave to sex, a slave to fast money, a slave to the pride of getting my own way.” And just as quickly as it all came, it left.
“I went from living in that mansion and driving that car,” he continued, “to sleeping on the ground by the side of some guy’s pool just wishing I were dead and thinking that I would be soon.”
But Rex Duval did not die. Instead, a bizarre sequence of “coincidences” rolled through and left him a completely different man.
He had moved back in with his dad and was dealing drugs out of their home. “I had just gotten ripped off in a drug deal,” he said, “and I was in a gun fight with this other guy. He hit me in the head with his gun and there was blood pouring out. I started chasing him down the street, shooting at him. Then, right at that moment, I heard a voice inside of me say, ‘If you don’t get out now, you’re dead.’ I stopped, dropped the gun at my side and with the guy still shooting at me as he ran away, I walked back into the house.”
He packed up everything he owned and, just like that, walked out, leaving his father behind. With no clear idea of where he should go, he moved in with two prostitutes he knew. A few days later he returned to find them gone and the place cleaned out.
“I had no job, no way to pay the rent and nowhere to go,” he continued. “I went to the bank and was taking out my last $20 when a girl came up to me. ‘Do you know Jesus?’ she asked. The only Jesus I knew was a guy named Jesús who I sold drugs to. She invited me to a Bible study that weekend and with nothing to lose, I went. Two weeks later I asked Jesus into my life.”
“When I came to Christ,” he said, “I was an empty shell of a man.” A drug overdose a little while before had left him half-dead with a complete mental and nervous breakdown. “I couldn’t even put two sentences together without losing my train of thought. Even among drug dealers, the lowest of the low had said to me just a little while before, ‘Rex, you won’t live another two months.’”
Yet to his Taft listeners that Thursday night, the Rex Duval before them had plainly changed, changed radically since then. There was not a trace of the broken, half-destroyed drug dealer that had been. Rather a wholesomely peaceful man was speaking to them with a refreshing joy that seemed to fill the room.
Not only so, but he exuded an almost palpable love for each of them as well. As Pearl Chin, (Ezra Stiles ‘96), a teacher at Taft noted, “He knew their pain. He knew what broken families were like.” It was so clear that he cared.
“I’m committed to you,” he said. “I’ll come back whenever you want me to.”
As Rex finished, he emphasized this point, “All of us, in God’s sight, have sinned and are living far below what He wants for us.” It’s His desire to fill each of us with love, joy, peace…. “But,” he said, “if we are halfway honest with ourselves, we will admit that we are not filled with these at all. Rather we have pain, confusion and a constant craving to gratify ourselves in each moment because we don’t know if in the next we will be satisfied.” For Rex it was money, sex, drugs and mansions that he craved. For another it could be something different.
We have sinned, he stressed, which cuts us off from an all-holy God. We have nothing in ourselves that can satisfy Him. “The beauty of God’s love and justice, though,” he continued, “is that He never asks us to pay a price that we cannot pay. Instead, in Jesus, He paid it for us.”
“God is here tonight, in this room ready to save you,” he concluded. “All you have to do is acknowledge in your heart that you are a sinner separated from God. Then humble yourself before Him, and ask Jesus to come into your life. He will come and forgive you for all you’ve ever done. He will bring peace where there was pain, joy in place of unhappiness, wholeness instead of brokenness.”
“Let’s bow our heads,” he said. “If anyone wants to receive Jesus, raise your hand.”
About thirty did.
“If you raised your hand,” he said, “then look up now at me. Are you raising your hand because you want to receive Jesus into your life as your Savior and want to start a new life with God today?” As Rex scanned the room, each one looked at him with tender, sweet eyes and affirmed, yes, I want Jesus today.
Ben Lyons, Choate ’91, Columbia U. Graduate ’99