From the Mob to Ministry: Robert Borelli

Warwick Fairfax:
Welcome to Beyond the Crucible. I’m Warwick Fairfax, the founder of Beyond the Crucible.

Robert Borelli:
I was calling my daughter a little bit, and this one time I call her, she’s crying. And her name is Brianna, and I said, “Brianna, why are you crying?” She said, “Because you won’t come and see me.” And those words, for some reason, if I could have ran and got a drink or a drug or anything to numb the feeling that happened, my heart just shattered in pieces, man, and I was crying. And I didn’t want the inmates to see me so I slammed the phone down and ran back to my cell.

Gary Schneeberger:
That harrowing story is just one of the crucibles Robert Borelli, our guest this week, discusses about his life in the mob, a life filled with crime, and prison, and a crippling addiction to drugs. But the moment he just described was also the moment where he broke free from his crucible and started to live his beyond. The healing he’s experienced, he tells us, is nothing short of a miracle.

Warwick Fairfax:
So, Robert, it is so good to have you on our podcast. I love just reading a bit about your story, which is, it’s a remarkable story. It’s a story of tragedy, but it’s a story, ultimately, of redemption. As you put it, it’s a story of second chances and it’s never too late. So for folks that may not know your story or background, just help us understand where you grew up and what was the backstory that really ultimately led to your crucible, but where did you grow up and what was life like for a young Robert growing up?

Robert Borelli:
It was tough. I come from a pretty tough neighborhood. I didn’t know until later on, as I got a little bit older, it was basically run by the Gambino Crime Family. La Cosa Nostra had their hand in my neighborhood, and it goes back for a long time of many of the old gangsters from Murder Incorporated. Their families were still in the neighborhood, even though those guys are no longer with us. So it was a pretty tough neighborhood.
I look at my life and I could see three, I guess, principles of my life, if you want to say it that way. My mom and dad worked really hard. They were legitimate people, worked really hard. We come from a pretty poor neighborhood. Mostly, arguments in my home would’ve been about finances, not having enough money maybe for the kids’ clothes or just struggles that they had, which a lot of families in that neighborhood did have. And at an early age, it’s not like I want to be like my mom and dad because I didn’t want to have those struggles growing up, so I was looking at life a little bit different.
Then as I got a little bit older, some of the older gentlemen, the other guys from the neighborhood, were drafted into the Vietnam War and they were just coming back and they were pretty messed up. Not all of them, but some of them from my neighborhood were either strung out on drugs or alcohol and I didn’t want to be like them growing up. And then you had the wise guys down the block. Now I didn’t know they were wise guys at the time, I just know there was bunch of guys that hung out at the social club. They were dressed nice. They had money in their pocket. They had cars which, in my neighborhood, was a rarity, not everybody was able to afford a car. So I gravitated to that lifestyle.
But also, my neighborhood was gang-related. We had gangs. Every kind of little intersection you went to, there was a different gang, either Eastern Parkway, F&R, coming from Fulton Rock so we called it F&R. And there was always gang fights and stuff like that. And I just happened to be one of the kids that was very small in stature and didn’t want to get picked on a lot by the other kids. So I would be the wild one, you would say, of the crew that we had there. And the guys down the blocks started noticing that about me and they would take me into the club and I’d hang out with them a little bit, shoot pool and stuff like that. And then after that, I was just infatuated. Most kids probably want to be a fireman or something like that, I just really just wanted to be a gangster.

Warwick Fairfax:
So just to give folks context, for understand, this is in Brooklyn, New York in late ’50s, ’60s, ’70s. It was probably different back then, I imagine, than it is today. But I guess people have to understand where you were, who you were growing up in this family with financial challenges, and the people that looked like they’d made it, were going places, were people involved in the mob. They dressed nice. They had nice cars. They had money. And so as a young kid, you’re thinking, “I don’t want to be poverty-stricken like my parents. I love mom and dad, but I want to make something of myself. Where are my role models for making something of myself? The people who dress nice, have money and nice cars.” I mean, putting yourself in your shoes, it makes some degree of sense of why a young Robert would gravitate there.

Robert Borelli:
And you can see some of that is still being waved around today. Guys that are in poor neighborhoods and drug dealers or anybody that’s involved in, you see that they have nice cars, money in their pocket. It’s attracting, let’s put it that way. You see a mob story, you’re more attracted to the mob story than the Jesus Christ story, to be honest with you. And I’m not downplaying my savior, not at all, but I’m saying, it’s just something that people are fascinated with that lifestyle. So it’s understandable even today how gangs get involved and how young kids looking for a better life and they gravitate towards those people that…
Look, the only problem is they don’t tell you. See, when somebody in my neighborhood, one of the older guys from the club, wouldn’t be around for a while, they didn’t tell me where he went. Maybe if they would’ve told me that he was in prison or something like that, maybe I would’ve shied away a little bit [inaudible 00:06:22] that part to-

Warwick Fairfax:
He could be in prison or worse.

Robert Borelli:
Or worse, right.

Warwick Fairfax:
They may not be on this earth for whatever reason.

Robert Borelli:
Yes. We had a lot of magicians in my neighborhood too. They knew how to make people disappear.

Warwick Fairfax:
Yeah. And just tell us a bit about how you began to get involved with the mob, with the Gambino family, because what’s fascinating is, obviously, your last name is Borelli, and there’s a story to that which we’ll get to, but your original name was Robert Engel, which doesn’t sound very Italian. Is that German? I mean, I don’t know, Engel?

Robert Borelli:
You hit it on the head, Germans.

Warwick Fairfax:
So how does a kid of a German-American background, and here’s the Italian Gambino family, I mean… So it’s not like, culturally, hey, you’re Italian, therefore they might think, of course, you not need to be in the mob, which obviously makes no sense, but it might make sense from their perspective. How did you get involved? Not of that background, you’re in the neighborhood, you were attracted to them, but yet, they kind of started including you, inviting you in. How did all that happen?

Robert Borelli:
Well, my mom was Italian. And my mom’s family was pretty known in the neighborhood. Not as tough guys, but in the neighborhood, everybody knew everybody. So my mom’s family grew up in that neighborhood, so they knew my mom, they knew her brothers and sisters and stuff like that. So a lot of them knew my family in that sense.
And believe it or not, a lot of people, even back then, didn’t understand that I wasn’t Italian. But I walked it, I acted it. I grew up more on my mom’s side of the family. Didn’t really know too much about my dad’s side of the family. He was from Yonkers. We never really went there. And if we did, I don’t remember much of it. So they really did that, looked at me as the Italian kid even though I had a German father.
But as I started hanging out with them, they gave me little bit more things to do. They would have card games in the back and then I would serve sandwiches. And if you’ve seen the movie Goodfellas, or if you’ve seen the movie A Bronx Tale, how that little guy, the young kid is raised and stuff like that, that’s kind of like how I started. Only thing is, I grew up to be a little bit more than that.

Warwick Fairfax:
So what was that progression, from hanging out with these older guys in the clubs, doing small little things that got to big things, I guess. I was looking at your video on your website. I think there was a guy, was it Nicky or somebody that was mentoring you, took you for walks in the early hours of the morning? I mean, from a faith-based perspective, we talk about discipleship. Jesus discipled his disciples. There was discipleship here too, but it was for a very different purpose. They were grooming you. And it might’ve seemed like, “Gosh, I have family here, they really care about me,” but yet, it was for a much darker purpose. Just talk about that whole discipling, if you will, and how you went from just as a kid hanging out in the clubs, doing little misdeeds, to greater misdeeds, to crimes. How did that whole evolution is pulling you and tighter and tighter in the mob happen?

Robert Borelli:
Well, a lot of the people in the neighborhood was getting a little bad. In other words, there was other nationalities coming to the neighborhood. So a lot of people started moving out, and even the club moved out and they moved towards Queens. And I started hanging out in Queens and I had becoming a friend of one of the big wise guys in the neighborhood’s son. And he would bring me around him and go see his dad, and his dad would have… I remember, every Friday night, there’s big spread, food, all you can eat kind of thing, a good chef cooking the food. And all these people would come in and recognize his father and give him respect, and they would sit down and money was exchanged. I don’t remember a lot of that at that time, but when I seen how much respect that his dad was getting, from all these people running really sharp-dressed guys, I said, “Man, that’s my next set. That’s the way I wanted to go.” So I started hanging out with his son and building a reputation for myself.
I didn’t want to be known as Andy’s son’s friend. I wanted to be known as Robert Engel. I didn’t want no subtitles. So I was a kind of a wild guy, and I got recognized for fights that we had in bars, out of bars. I was the one that would go, I don’t know, be a little bit more violent than everybody else. But at this one time, somebody got killed, and I was wanted for that murder. Me and another friend of mine was wanted for that murder, and my friend’s dad hit us out for a little bit. And as I was on the land from the lure, something happened where we were and we had to come back into the neighborhood. And that’s where Nicky comes in the scene.
They placed me with Nicky who had a storefront on Eastern Parkway and Atlantic Avenue, and they would hide me up in somebody’s apartment there. And that’s when Nicky started mentoring me. He was a man that loved pigeons. And on top of the roof where I was staying, there was a pigeon coop and he would come up there and he would come and get me and my friend Joe and bring us up there. That’s how all the mentoring discipleship started. And then I got really close with him, and then I got locked up for two murders at the age of 20 years old for two murders and possession of a weapon. And he orchestrated everything for me to get bailed out. I had to lay up for a while, but they finally got me in front of a judge that was going to give me a decent bail and they bailed me out. And from then on, I was paraded around like I did the right thing, because one of the murders that I was locked up for… Well, I can’t talk too much about them. [inaudible 00:12:19] for a lot of that.
But anyway, the point is, after that, I was paraded around as the up-and-coming star. And that’s why I was getting brought around to other fans, Mulberry Street. And then two years later, I ended up beating one of the murder cases. With five eyewitnesses against me, I still got acquitted. And that really raised the roof of my reputation was as a kid that went to trial, beat a case, stood up, stand up guy. And from then on, I just became a legend in my own mind, I guess, probably a legend in other people’s minds.

Warwick Fairfax:
Wow. So your friends, people in the mob saw you as this tough guy that did the right thing, didn’t turn anybody in, beat the rap, and you were getting respect. You were at a point in your early twenties when you had exactly what you wanted. Probably money, nice car, nice clothes, and above all, respect. In one sense, you had everything you wanted. So did it feel like, “I’ve made it. I’ve got respect. I’ve got a family,” in the broad sense of that word. How did it feel at that time?

Robert Borelli:
Well, I did. I felt like I was really being well-known in the neighborhood. So if I go places, people, if it was a restaurant, they take care of me nicely. I just got a lot of respect. And for me, I think every young boy or young man wants respect. I think that’s one of the major things that we strive for is people to respect us. The only problem is, I didn’t command it, I demanded it. And it’s a little bit of a difference when you demand respect.
In the movie A Bronx Tale, something said there that really stuck in my mind. He said, “You could get respect either through love or fear.” He says, “I choose fear because sometimes love fades away. Fear in the heart forever.” So anyway, that was some of the stuff that I… That was just me, man. I was a man that wanted to get respect and demanded it from everybody. And if I didn’t get it, I became violent.

Gary Schneeberger:
It’s really interesting that you mentioned A Bronx Tale a couple of times because I’ve seen that movie, really enjoyed that movie. For those folks who are listening and watching, haven’t seen it, directed by Robert De Niro who also stars in it. His son is a young boy than man. That is much like what happens that you’ve been describing, Robert. He gets around the mobsters and he’s sort of caught up in that. But one of the aspects of that movie was, Robert De Niro who plays his dad, really sort of tried to pull his son back and his son was having none of it early on. I’m interested to know, how did your parents react to your being sort of absorbed a little bit into this mafia culture and those individuals? What role did they play maybe to help you?

Robert Borelli:
Well, it’s a good question. I think because of the drugs and seeing a lot of the older guys that are in the neighborhood, being all drugged up, they… Drugs was pretty big back in the ’60s, goof balls and all that kind of stuff, sniffing glue, all that kind of stuff. So she thought that might’ve been the better place for me to be because these guys weren’t involved with that kind of a lifestyle.
And then, since I was getting respect too as I got older, it transformed to them too. They were starting to get a little respect. They definitely don’t want to say anything that’s going to offend anybody. My parents both are gone but I still have relatives. I just think my mom thought that was a safer place for me. And of course, she didn’t know the tragedies that came with that or the violence that came with that. She just thought I was better off hanging out in the club than hanging out in the streets.

Warwick Fairfax:
So here you were, Robert, in your early twenties. In one sense, you’re at the pinnacle, I suppose, of your career in the mob. You had respect, money, clothes, cars, but it sounds like you didn’t stay at that pinnacle for too long. Things started getting more challenging. So just talk about what happened, because it’s not like you kept moving up in the ranks and getting more and more respect. So what happened? What, in a sense… It’s weird to say what went wrong. You could say, well, it’s already wrong, but from your career perspective at the time, things started going wrong. What kind of changed?

Robert Borelli:
Well, I remember one time, Nicky and Lenny, they were partners, Nicky and Lenny, the gentleman that we talked about that was mentoring me, came to me and he said, “Everything we have, we’re going to end up giving it to you. Go straighten out and all that.” I had to remind them that I had a German last name. And they said, “Oh.” So I couldn’t get straightened out because, at least, your father had to be Italian. So they said, “Oh.” Didn’t even think about that.
So right away from that, now I know I need to really start making a lot of money. An episode happened at one of the dice games that I was working, where this gentleman came in, really sharp, good-looking guy came in. A lot of them were, but this guy stood out the most. He lost a lot of money out of his pocket, probably about $10,000 maybe, and didn’t faze him in the least. Me, I was a bad gambler. If I lost $25, I was upset. And he didn’t show any of that there. And after he didn’t have any more money, he asked one of the guys that run the game if he could send me out to his car to get a bag in his back seat. And they said yeah. So he gave me his keys and it was a brand new spanking beautiful Jaguar. I’ll never forget it. And in the back seat, there’s a bag. Now I don’t go look in the bag, but he said give him the bag. So I pick up the bag, I bring it to him. It’s just more money.
Now, I don’t remember if he got his money back lost at all, I really don’t remember the end of the story, but I just remember, at the end when the game broke up, I asked one of the guys, what the heck does this guy do they’d lose that money? You broke about in the ’70s, the middle of the ’70s. It’s a lot of money. I said, “What does he do that it didn’t even bother him that much? They lost that.” And they said he’s one of the biggest drug dealers in Harlem. And when they said that, now I want to be like him, to have that kind of money, gamble it, lose it, and know I have a lot more money. And I got involved with the drug business. And it didn’t take too long, probably about 10 years of that, then eventually the drugs got involved with my business.

Warwick Fairfax:
The theory is, you exploit other people without it hurting you, without you taking the drugs. But it sounds like you started taking some of it. So tell us what happened, because that seemed that that was part of the beginning of the road downwards, if you will, in terms of…

Robert Borelli:
Well, even though in my neighborhood, I didn’t see a lot of coke being shoved around back in the middle ’70s, but in Manhattan where I was hanging out now working games and stuff, a lot of those guys were doing coke. So I thought it was more acceptable now because I’ve seen a lot of these other guys starting to do coke. So I started hanging out in bars with them, and then I’d do a little coke with them. But eventually, after a period of time, the coke got the best of me and I got really strung out on coke. So even though I was trying to make money with the drugs, I was doing more of the supply than selling the supply. So eventually, there was nothing happened. That’s why I say the drugs got involved with my business.
And then back in ’78, I think it was ’77 or ’78, something like that, Richard Pryor had an accident with freebasing cocaine and he [inaudible 00:20:24] fire. And that kind of hit the neighborhood. And somebody turned me onto freebasing. And I did a little bit of it and I had no cravings anymore. And I figured, okay, this is better for me than snorting the coke. So I got involved with freebasing, but then after a while, that became very addicting to me. And then I started losing everything, started losing lot of respect in the neighborhood also, started losing a lot of respect for me because now I was getting addicted to freebasing. And then I didn’t have any more money and I was losing everything, and crack cocaine came around, which was a cheaper high back in the ’80s, and I started getting high on crack cocaine, and eventually, wound up homeless back in 1996.

Warwick Fairfax:
So the drugs really began to take hold, not just hurting you, your health, but bankrupting you, if you will. And I guess, from the mob mentality, you’re meant to be in control, and you weren’t in control anymore. You might’ve been a tough guy, but the drugs beat you. You couldn’t win against drugs. And so then, respect was probably the most important thing to you, and you lost respect from your peers. I mean, that must have been devastating, to lose that respect and have them look at you the way they probably did. That must’ve been searing experience.

Robert Borelli:
Yeah. But I also lost a lot of respect for myself. I tried to fight the drugs, went in rehabs and stuff like that, but eventually, it got hold of me and I just couldn’t let… Matter of fact, it came to a point in time that I didn’t want to live without getting high. So I was getting high 24 hours, seven days a week, and the only time I wasn’t getting high is when I passed out or had a blackout and fell out.

Warwick Fairfax:
So, as bad of as that was, from what I understand, things actually got worse. How could they get worse? So just talk about Rikers Island, which is a prison in New York, and your daughter. That’s almost sort of like the bottom of the pit of your story. Do you know what I’m saying? It just felt like it was even worse than where you were, in some sense.

Robert Borelli:
Yeah, well, I’ve been in and out of prisons a lot of times, but this one time… Because after I cleaned up a little bit and went to Florida to live with my mom, and Nikki then came down, I started doing stuff for them. But 1996, I didn’t know it because I was living on the streets of Brooklyn and Queens around the borderline there, that I was wanted for a case, a RICO case in Florida where everybody got arrested already and they were looking for me. And then also, I had a drug case, but when I knew the Feds were looking for me, I stopped going to court for the drug case, so I had warrants out for me.
Just to go back a little bit, just to let them people know that in 1993, my daughter was born, and seven weeks after she was born, I was pretty good. I just came out of a rehab, was doing pretty good, started getting some things back, started to get some respect back. And then once I got a little bit of that back, I went out one more time to get high after having an argument with her mother, and then I wasn’t allowed to see my daughter anymore. So that’s the big part of the picture of being in Rikers.
I got what I call a wake-up call by two angels. I call them angels today, but actually, they were warrant officers at that time. I passed out on somebody’s house, and because of the warrants, two guns were pointed at me. The warrant officers found out where I was and they put me in Rikers Island. Now I know I’m not going to get any bail or anything like that, and I know how to play the jail scene and the prison scene. And there’s two things that are pretty important when you’re going to be stuck in prison. One is, you need to get a good attorney to get you out of the mess you got yourself in, and that worked pretty good for me because I never did a real long stretch of time. I did a couple of years here and there, but that always worked out pretty good for me.
But you got to remember, I was on crack cocaine so I didn’t have any money. So now I’m calling up some people that I feel maybe I did them a favor or something in the past and they would want to help me out, but everybody was telling me no. And then I know you need to get commissary money so you can live as comfortably as you can while you’re incarcerated. And everybody was just refusing me, even my own family, in a sense, which just really felt that I was safer or better off in prison than outside the streets.
And I have to tell you, that brought me to a place of complete despair because the people… I’m not saying that they didn’t love me, but I felt unloved at that point in time, and I felt abandoned by everybody that they would stick me and leave me in jail, that they thought I was better off in prison than back out on the street and I had to rethink about that. But my daughter’s mom now is letting me call my daughter. And I was calling my daughter a little bit, and this one time I call her, she’s crying, and her name is Brianna, and I said “Brianna, why you crying?” She said, “‘Cause you won’t come and see me.” And those words, for some reason, if I could have ran and got a drink or a drug or anything to numb the feeling that happened, my heart just shattered in pieces, man, and I was crying. And I didn’t want the inmates to see me so I slammed the phone down and ran back to my cell.
Now I’m going to say something because it’s nothing against Roman Catholics, but I was raised Roman Catholic, I went to a Catholic school, grammar school, and I knew about God but I didn’t have a relationship with God. I knew about Him. And I ran back to my cell, got on my hands and knees, tears coming down my face, and I just cried, “Now, God, if you’re real, have somebody kill me or change me. I don’t want to live with the pain that I’m living with right now.” And I just kept crying, “God, please help me. God, please help me.” And I truly believe that God answered the sincerity of my cry of my heart at that point in time. And if I’m talking to you, you know He didn’t do the first part because I’m still around, so I believe that at that point in time, God really entered my heart and started just changing the way I was thinking, the way I was feeling.

Warwick Fairfax:
I mean, that had to have felt like maybe the lowest point in your life because you were craving respect. The mob has obviously abandoned you. It’s like, “This guy’s going nowhere, he’s not going to be able to help us. He’s on drugs and we’re not going to let our high-priced lawyers help him out. He is on his own. We’re washing our hands off him.” And then your own family probably maybe they thought it was tough love. You felt like you were abandoned. And then to have your daughter say, “Dad or daddy, why can’t I see you?” I mean, it must have felt like the whole world has abandoned you. And for some people at that point, they might say, look, life’s not worth living. How in the world did you choose faith, choose God, or maybe he chose you? I mean, that has to have been the lowest point in your life. Everybody’s abandoned you. Nobody cares about you. You don’t have respect. How in the world did you, at that lowest moment, choose faith? That just seems a remarkable choice for somebody in your position.

Robert Borelli:
I actually didn’t understand it. I just was crying out for help and nobody else was answering me. So like I said, I knew about a God, and I cried out to Him. What really attracted me to Jesus is when I got the Bible and I started reading how much he loved me, in spite of all my defects. And that attracted me to know more about this guy that really loves me in spite of everything that I did.
But one of the things I wanted to say that when my daughter cried out to me, “Because you won’t come and see me,” there was so many… The flashback that came to my mind in an instant was, how many times are you in the neighborhood and you’d rather get high than even try to go see your daughter? Whether the mother would’ve let me or not, I didn’t even try to go see my daughter. I’d rather get high. And that, I think, was the lowest point in my life. Not that everybody abandoned me, that was pretty big, but that as a man, any type of man, would a abandon his own daughter because he loved drugs more than he loved his own daughter. And that devastated me.

Gary Schneeberger:
I want to dive back into a little bit, because you’ve said it a couple of times, this idea that those close to you, those around you abandoned you. We have a saying here at Beyond the Crucible that we use a lot, and that is, those bad things that happen, your crucibles, they didn’t happen to you, they happen for you. And I wonder if, because if that abandonment hadn’t occurred from the people you knew, it sounds like maybe your encounter with Jesus wouldn’t have happened. So have you come to a place where you see that, perhaps one of the best things that those folks could have done is exactly what they did, leave you to your own devices, because you had nowhere to turn in the natural world to get out of the pain you were in? Does that make any sense?

Robert Borelli:
It makes total sense, and I speak about that all the time when I give interviews and when I go out and speak and share my testimony.
There’s a picture a long time ago that I watched, and Robert Kane, I think it was Robert Kane or… Michael Caine was in it. And it was about this guy, and Jim Belushi was in it, and he grows up and wants to go back to when he was a kid because he felt bad that he didn’t hit the home run with the bases loaded to save the game. He struck out. And Michael Caine shows him that if that didn’t happen, he wouldn’t be where he was today.
I look at my life, not exactly that, but I look at my life and I always say, if any decision that I made, or even the bad decisions, God worked it out for his good. I believe God knew I was going to fall in love with him, and he worked out everything for good. So if I were to change one thing, I probably wouldn’t be where I am today, talking to you guys about my Lord and Savior.

Warwick Fairfax:
So just talk about those first few weeks and months, as you’re exploring your faith. How did that change your outlook on life, because you were at the lowest of the lows? How did you begin to claw your way out of that deep dark pit that you were in?

Robert Borelli:
I don’t take any credit for any of that. When I share my testimony, I try to share this like a before and after, or before Christ in my life and after Christ in my life, and try to paint the comparison picture, would you want the life that I had before Christ or look at the life that God has given me, the new life that he’s given me? So that’s just how I look at my life. So I give all credit to Christ living in me and living through me. There’s just so much that he’s done in my life, and continues to do in my life, but he gets all the credit. There’s nothing I did.
I say it this way. They say the average person, this is the statistics that I looked up a couple of years ago said, the average person makes about 35,000 decisions a day, the average person. I tried to add that all up, I couldn’t even come up with the figures, but over 10 million decisions that I made in my life. But there was one decision that changed the outcome of those tens of millions of decisions. That was my decision to accept Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior. From that point in time, my life has changed dramatically, not just what I do, but how I think.
I don’t look at Christianity as a religion. I look at it as a way of life. And I tell people, when I was Robert the gangster, everybody in the neighborhood knew I was a gangster. I lived it out to the fullest. When I became Robert the crack head, everybody in the neighborhood knew I was Robert the crack head because I lived that out to the fullest. Now I’m Robert Borelli, the born-again Christian, and people in my neighborhood know that I’m a born-again Christian because of the way I live my life.

Warwick Fairfax:
Yeah. One of the things we talk a lot about at Beyond the Crucible is identity. Before you had your identity in being Robert the gangster, Robert is going to get respect in the neighborhood, but I’m guessing your identity is different. How would you describe your identity now, of who you seek, where your respect comes from? How would you look at it now?

Robert Borelli:
Well, now, I say I command it, just by the way I live, and it’s not like I’m looking for it, I just get it [inaudible 00:33:43] the person that I became. But when I went into the Witness Protection Program, they take everything from your past away from you. You put everything in a black bag and everything’s gone. Pictures of your daughter, your mother, whatever you had, they’re taking that away from you.
And then they give you a new identity. They relocate you. They give you a new identity. What I try to do is do a comparison of how it is to be born again in Christ Jesus. What the government did was wipe my slate clean. I have no police record, I have no nothing. I have a fresh new start as Robert Borelli. Nothing from my past came with me, physically anyway. Of course, I still had some of my old thoughts, but what the government did for me in the natural, Jesus Christ already did for me in the spiritual. He wiped my sins clean. I have a fresh new slate with Jesus Christ. I have a new identity in Christ Jesus. I’m no longer Robert Engel. I’m Robert Borelli. And my identity as Robert Borelli is in Christ Jesus.

Warwick Fairfax:
You mentioned witness protection. How long were you in prison in Rikers, and talk about, without getting into details that you obviously can’t get into, because people might be listening and say, okay, so he’s in prison, where does witness protection come in? I mean, how did that all happen? And how long were you in prison before that happened?

Robert Borelli:
Well, I was in Rikers Island probably for about four months. Now, there’s a lot of things that transpired, and I think afterward, even though I hated it at the point in time, because my lawyer wasn’t getting any money, so I would be waking up at four o’clock in the morning, shoved into a bullpen with 50, 60 people, crowded. You stand just putting your arms together. And I would go to the courthouse and never see a judge, and that happened for quite a few months. And I would stay there from four in the morning until sometimes 12 midnight.
And what happened was, after everybody said that they don’t think there’s anything that they can do for me, because of that, my mom… I was calling my mom and my mom said that this FBI agent kept coming around, trying to get information from her about me, stuff like that. And after everybody turned their back, and I’m not making any excuses for what I did, what I did was selfish in the sense, but I called up that FBI agent. I got his phone number, called him up, and he gave me an offer I couldn’t refuse. He said, “If you cooperate with us, we’ll make a recommendation for short time and place you in the Witness Protection Program. You can start your life all over again.” And I just thought that was the best option that I could have had at that point in time.
Because remember, even if I stopped the drugs, I would never have been Robert the gangster anymore, at least not in the level that I wanted to be, because once drugs has messed up your life, they’re not going to trust you that much with things. So you’re always going to be thought of as Robert the drug addict, even if I clean myself up.
And then the thought is, every time I went and came in and out of prison for a period of time, I kept being Robert the crack head. So I thought that was the best option. So I finally decided to cooperate with the government. And then from Rikers Island, they put me in the Dade County Jail. You would think that life would get better. You have God, you have the deal with the government, but it didn’t happen that way neither. I was left off with solitary confinement because I was a witness for the government for quite a while, and I started to cooperate with the government.

Warwick Fairfax:
And so they eventually let you out. How long were you in the Witness Protection Program for?

Robert Borelli:
I was locked up for two years after that, and then when I got out and got relocated, I was in the witness protection close to two years. And then because I married somebody from what they call your danger zone, which was from New York, even though she didn’t know them personally, they said I violated my agreement with them. I jeopardized my security. And they actually didn’t want me to tell my wife that I was in the Witness Protection Program, and there’s no way in the world I’m going to marry somebody and not tell them something like that. So they decided that you can’t be here no more, so they threw me out.

Warwick Fairfax:
What’s fascinating to me is, obviously, as part of the Witness Protection Program, you choose a new name. You chose a name of Italian background. It’s like, “Gee, let’s make it difficult for people to find me. Let’s use an Italian name.” I mean, if this was a movie, the script that the director would say, “Cross that one out, that’s not believable.” I mean, nobody’s ever going to do that, so why choose an Italian name?

Robert Borelli:
Because I look Italian. Most people who hear my dialect sounds… If guys from Brooklyn talk automatically, they take you’re Italian. They look at Brooklyn at the language as an Italian language. So one person asked me what country I was from when I was in Texas. I didn’t know Brooklyn was a country, but I come from Brooklyn, New York.
And that’s the reason why I choose that. But I didn’t actually really just think about it. What happened is, I was giving them some names, and I always wanted to have an Italian name, I don’t know. I love mammole, I guess. I don’t like the German part of my background. But I would give them names and they would come back saying that name’s no good. And I happen to be watching this episode of MASH. And then this episode that I’m watching at the point of time just before they come in, they have to send out a doctor, an emergency to get this doctor into the MASH unit from another unit to do an emergency surgery for one of the patients that they had in the MASH unit. And he happened to be Dr. Borelli. So when they came in, that name stuck in my head and I said, Borelli. They came back later on and said, “Okay, that’s your name.”

Warwick Fairfax:
It’s stunning to me that they will say, that’s okay, rather than, hey, Robert, try again. But that’s just confounding to me. So-

Gary Schneeberger:
An interesting fact, if I may, sorry. An interesting fact about Dr. Borelli on MASH, I just looked it up on my phone while we were sitting here, and he was played by who, Robert?

Robert Borelli:
Alan Alda’s father.

Gary Schneeberger:
Right. He was played by Robert Alda. Alan Alda’s father played Dr. Anthony Borelli on MASH in two episodes, in 1975 and in 1980, so there you go. It’s got some heritage there, certainly in the MASH universe as well.

Robert Borelli:
Well, also shows I’m not making it up.

Warwick Fairfax:
There you go. Amazing stuff. So from what I understand, part of that is, you’re intimating is, you met your wife, Patricia, I believe, at least during that time, which partly ended the witness protection. So talk about that because she knows you as a different person. She probably didn’t know-

Robert Borelli:
Well, she heard a lot about me when she was in New York, but…

Warwick Fairfax:
You were a different person as you got to know her, at least, in Christ and all.

Robert Borelli:
Believe it or not, we dated on the phone for five and a half months because she couldn’t know where I was. A Christian friend of mine met her at one of these conferences or something and felt that she would just mention that me, in a sense, to this girl, because she was looking for a husband and I was looking for a wife. And she just put us together. She couldn’t know where I was so I have to call her through a calling card, which doesn’t show where you’re actually calling from, and that’s what the government issued for me. And we dated for five and a half months. And then at the end of that there, I had asked that she would come to meet me in San Antonio, Texas where I was relocated, and made the stipulation, “You have to stay with my family minister, you can’t stay with me.” I wanted to keep it as pure as you possibly can.
And I would stay there and we got to meet each other and know each other a little bit for like 10 days. And then she’s ready to leave. And I’m asking God, okay, what do I say to her? “See you later?” She’s going back to New York. “I’d give you a call.”? What you would normally say to a girl that you really weren’t that interested in. And [inaudible 00:42:42] God was telling me to ask her to marry her, and the crazy woman would say yes.

Warwick Fairfax:
So, one of the things that folks listening are going to be wondering is, I understand, because you’re dating somebody from where you lived, and witness protection says, well, that’s violating parole, so you’re now no longer in witness protection. In the movies, you’re typically not okay when you’re not in witness protection. The bad people mobs, at least in the movies, so now we know where Robert is. And again, you don’t need to tell us details, but how in the world are you okay, given in witness protection, you are giving information about people? How can you be okay? Is that just a miracle from God? Again, you don’t need to tell us details that you don’t want to.

Robert Borelli:
In the beginning, once I got thrown out of Witness Protection Program, I was a little concerned about all that. The more my faith grew, my wife also a born-again Christian, her recommendation was, now, you can tell your story, because you’re not bound by the Witness Protection Program, because when you’re in the program, you can’t tell anybody that you’re in the program. So now, I could share my story. And we did get a little bit nervous and we left San Antonio, a friend of mine put me up in Utah. And I stayed there for a couple of months and there was a…
My friend knew Pat Robinson. They mentioned my story to Pat Robinson. And my heart was for ministry. I was doing nursing home ministry for a couple of years when this happened. And Pat’s recommended me go to Christ for the Nations, which is a Bible institute, and I signed up for that. And after a couple of months in Utah, I moved to Dallas and went to Christ for the Nations. And I just look at it…
It’s hard to tell people that they need to surrender their life to Christ. Now this might sound foolish to everybody else, but how could I tell everybody they need to surrender their life if I’m still holding back part of my life in fear or something like that. I don’t believe fear comes from God. I believe it comes from the devil. And I truly believe that fear could probably paralyze you for doing what God has called you to do, because he didn’t save me just to save me and go to heaven. He had a plan and purpose for my life, and fear could have interrupted that if I lived in fear. But think of it this way, what’s the worst that can happen to me? If I get killed, I go to be with the Lord. And if I don’t get killed, I stand here and do what God’s called me to do, so I don’t think I could lose either way. And that helps clear my mind a little bit.

Warwick Fairfax:
I mean, that’s truly remarkable. I mean, that is faith at a level that most of us can’t relate to, but somehow… I mean, how many years has it been since you’ve been out of witness protection?

Robert Borelli:
See, I got thrown out in 2001.

Warwick Fairfax:
That’s more than 20 years, and somehow, God had a plan that we all will pass at some point, but it seemed like God had a plan saying it won’t be the way that you think it could be, the way it is in the movies when you come out of witness protection. So, do you look back in saying that’s remarkable, that God had a plan for me and it wasn’t what it could have been?

Robert Borelli:
Well, [inaudible 00:46:15] if I could trust the government to keep me safe, but not trust God to keep me safe, I think I have a problem with my faith?

Warwick Fairfax:
That is so well said. On your website, you have a video, it’s a great video, and I love how the title of the video, it starts as Unredeemable, and it shifts to Redeemable. Just talk to me, why did you use those terms? Because that’s a big shift from Unredeemable to Redeemable.

Robert Borelli:
Most people who know me from my past didn’t think… I was beyond redeemable. So we’re just trying to put the point out, no matter where you are, wherever you’re stuck with, whatever your past looks like, whatever your present is right now, it’s never too late for a new beginning. And I try to always stipulate my new beginning started on my hands and knees crying out, “Lord, please help me, Lord, please help me.”

Warwick Fairfax:
So talk about your ministry and speaking. I know you have a real heart for kids. Talk about what’s on your heart. You have a passion for redemption, to give people second chances. Talk about what you do now and really what your heart is.

Robert Borelli:
Well, we’ll just go back to the whole scene, if that’s okay with you guys.

Warwick Fairfax:
Sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Robert Borelli:
When I was brought to San Antonio, Texas, relocated there, my mom was diagnosed with, she was a year before I got released, with the terminal lung cancer. And my mom had passed away before I even got a chance to really have any relationship with her. I didn’t understand God’s plan at that point in time, because I’m saying, if anybody needed this new type of love that she’d given me, it would’ve been my mother who I put through so much, we could say, hell on earth, murder trials and all the stuff that I did. And I just felt God was talking to me. [inaudible 00:48:09] if you go give that to other mothers and fathers.
And I had started doing nursing home ministry and I did nursing home ministry for 13 years, but I didn’t go once a month. I went twice every week in nursing homes, and I would do different functions for them to show them that they’re not unloved, that we still love them. Some of them, their families abandoned them. Some of them, their churches abandoned them. And I didn’t want them to feel the way I felt when I was locked up in prison being abandoned. So I just dedicated my life to nursing home ministry and did that for 13 years straight, twice a week.
And from there on, then God started moving me around and doing other things and people will come to me and say, “What’s your story? You need to really start reach other people, lost people and stuff like that.” And then that’s what we started doing. So I got involved with sharing my testimony, going into churches, into schools. All the schools started a little bit later, but wherever God opened up the door, that’s where I would go and share my testimony. It’s just a message of hope and how much Christ really loves them. For people who feel that they’re unloved or abandoned or stuck in a bad situation, and I say, “It’s never too late for a new beginning, you don’t have to stay there. God has a plan for each of our lives.” So those are the things that I do.
Now, we’re even on YouTube. We’re on TikTok. We’re doing social media. I was totally against that at one point in time. I didn’t want all that kind of stuff going on, and I don’t know how to do it neither so I had to hire people to do. But we found out we’re reaching a lot more people. Now, there’s a twofold kind of thing. What we’re doing is we’re showing them the mafia thing. We’re getting a lot of people wanting to see the mafia part of my story, and then we’re switching it over to how my crisis changed my life. So we’re doing all these things. We have the possibility of a script being written, stuff that we’re trying to raise money for now, and the chance of maybe the possibility of getting, not a synopsis, but a series kind of show going on about my back story to just a message.
And I think that’s so much needed today. This is not my story, it’s God’s story. I couldn’t come up with these thoughts in my own mind on my own. But we’re in a place today where, like you said earlier about truth, everybody thinks that they had their own truth, but in reality, there’s only one truth. There’s only one truth. And we’re divided every place in our country, in the world, in the churches. There’s just so much division. I think young kids today really have a hard time to know what the truth really is because you’re seeing one person’s truth.
And I don’t want to get into the politics part of it, but how everything is so divided in our country and I wanted to introduce them to the one truth, and that’s the word of God. If they really want to know the truth, get into the Bible. Jesus loves them. He wants to speak to them, and he wants to give them the one truth, a message of hope. And that hope is not into something, but in someone whose name is Jesus Christ.

Gary Schneeberger:
And that sounds, you heard, folks, sounded a lot like the captain turning on the fasten seatbelt signs, indicating that our plane has begun its descent to the end of this conversation, but we’re not there yet, because as always, Mr. Fairfax, I’m certain, has another question or two for Robert. So, Warwick, I turn it over to you.

Warwick Fairfax:
I guess a couple of things occurred to me, one, and listeners might be curious, how’s your relationship with your daughter? There was a period where you were in prison, in witness protection. How did that part of the story turn out?

Robert Borelli:
Well, after a certain amount of years, my wife found her on Facebook and wanted to know if I wanted to get in touch with her. And her mother didn’t want me to be part of her life, so I didn’t want to violate that. So I said, let’s pray about it a little bit more. The mother kind of have to pray in a lot of years for the child to change, to soften the mom’s heart about me because they’re involved with that lifestyle too, from the neighborhood. And a guy that liked what I did was total taboo for that lifestyle. Anyway, God did that and I started seeing my daughter.
Right now, we’re still hitting some rocky roads where she’s having a hard time forgiving me because she feels that I abandoned her. And I don’t know if she could completely understand what addiction is or how you could just fall in love with a drug more than you could fall in love with your own child. And I probably understand that to an extent, but that’s the bottom line. So she still has a sense of I abandoned her and I took drugs over her. So we’re working on things and we’re just praying a lot to this [inaudible 00:53:09].

Warwick Fairfax:
I’m so sorry. I mean, I understand where she’s coming from, but I’m so sorry. That’s a tough thing.
I guess another question that occurs to me, whether it’s my story or Gary’s, a lot of people obviously on our podcast that have been through tragedy. When you talk to other people about what you’ve been through, when somebody says, “Robert, what you said helped me, it gave me hope.” Does it fill you with some kind of… It doesn’t make all the pain go away, but does it fill you with some sense of, I don’t know, some redemptive moment when people say, “Robert, what you said helped me.” Does it feel like a little bit of, I don’t know, water for somebody that feels like they need just some refreshment, if that makes sense. I mean, what does it feel like when people just tell you, “Thank you, Robert. Boy, that helped me. It gave me one more day of hope.”?

Robert Borelli:
I just feel like I’m accomplishing what God wants me to accomplish for his glory, for his purpose, for his plan for each and every person’s life, that does change to his message using my circumstances. So like I said, there’s nothing I do today that I take any credit for, except just accepting Him as my Lord and Savior. But he’s doing it all and he’s living in me and throwing me in, and that’s the exciting part of my life.

Warwick Fairfax:
Last question. There might be somebody today, and maybe they’re at the bottom of the pit, maybe today’s their worst day, maybe something horrendous was done to them, maybe they’ve done something they feel is unforgivable and unredeemable. What would a word of hope you would offer to that person who feels like, “I’m not worth loving. I’ve done too much. Too much has been done to me.”? What would’ve hope be to that person?

Robert Borelli:
Well, it’s really hard to speak to somebody in a biblical sense because they’re not there. I don’t think they’re there anyway. But like I tell my, it’s never too late. You don’t have to stay stuck at where you’re at and you don’t have to. Nobody’s unredeemable. Nobody. If you listen to my story and God could reach out and touch my life and transform my life, he wants to do… Matter of fact, he already did it for them. All they have to do is believe it and receive it. He did it when he went to the cross.
And he values their life. If he didn’t value their life, he wouldn’t have died for them. It’s one thing. In my lifetime, I would die for my friends, and there’s times I put my life on the line for my friends. But if my enemy wanted me to die for them, ain’t no way I’m going to die for them. But yet, Christ, through his love, for his people, for his children, he went to the cross for them. Nobody is unlovable in the eyes of Christ, and everybody’s redeemable, in the power and the work of the Holy Spirit.

Gary Schneeberger:
Folks, I’ve been in the communications business long enough to know when the last word on the subject has been spoken, and our guest, Mr. Robert Borelli, has just spoken that last word.
Warwick, we’ve just finished talking with our guest, Robert Borelli, who had a remarkable story to tell about being fascinated by, being drawn into the mob, the mafia, when he was a young boy in New York, and just all the crucibles that came after that, and then his redemption after that. Lots of things to talk about and unpack. What is, as you think about it this soon after we’re like less than two minutes after doing the episode, what stands out that can help our listeners and viewers that Robert talked about?

Warwick Fairfax:
Robert Borelli’s life is a life of redemption. He, at one point, would’ve said his life is irredeemable, it’s unredeemable, and now it’s being redeemed. He started off life in the neighborhoods of Brooklyn, New York in the late ’50s, ’60s, ’70s, thinking the way to get respect is to be in the mob. His parents were not very wealthy. They didn’t have much, but he saw the wise guys, as he put it, with the nice clothes, the fancy cars. They’re in the clubs and they had respect. He wanted respect. He didn’t want to be poor, and so, he got respect. He was discipled, in a sense, by people in the mob, by older people that saw him as a promising young up and coming guy. He would be tough, do things maybe other people wouldn’t do, and he was working his way up.
But then he fell. He started taking drugs. As a drug dealer, from what I understand, you’re not meant to actually take the product yourself but he did, and he spent more money on drugs than he was getting in, and he was then shunned by the mob. He was shunned by his first wife. He wasn’t able to have a relationship with his daughter because, at one point, he would rather, as he puts it, do drugs than see his own daughter. Then he is in prison, he couldn’t see his daughter. So it’s easy to look back and say his was an unredeemable life, and his identity, at the time, was completely in being in the mob. That was his sense of self. “My respect only comes from being respected by my fellow folks in the mob.” And then in prison, and then afterwards, he comes to faith in Christ and now his identity is in Christ.

Gary Schneeberger:
Right. He said a couple of times, as he was talking about his descent into both the mob and then drug addiction, that some of his old friends had abandoned him. At one point, we asked him, because he used that phrase a couple of times, and I brought up the idea that we say all the time, it didn’t happen to me, it happened for me, and I put before him the question, “Is this abandonment that you experienced, can you perceive it like that?” And he said yes, he could. In fact, he had done that, which was remarkable to me because I don’t know that we’ve had a guest who had quite the level of…
I mean, listen to this episode, folks, watch this episode. He’s on trial for murder. He’s deeply addicted to drugs. He had a lot of very, very difficult things happen to him that he caused to happen, some things that just happened to him. He gets abandoned by folks. He sees then that the way that they treated him by shoving him aside, by not coming to his aid, was actually the thing that led to his redemption. I just think that’s a remarkable story, from a very remarkable, difficult story.

Warwick Fairfax:
It’s such a great point, Gary. In one sense, his abandonment was the key to hope. How can abandonment lead to hope? Here he is. He is abandoned by his first wife. He’s not able to have a relationship with his daughter. He is abandoned by his parents. At least, that’s the way he sees it. They might see it as tough love. He’s certainly abandoned by the mob in that he went from being Robert the mobster, the gang leader, to being called Robert the crack head. You get no respect, from what he says, in the mob if you’re a crack head on drugs, and so, his career was done when that happened. And so here he is, abandoned by his family, abandoned by the mob, and yet, that brought him to his lowest point where he sought God or he sought faith in Christ. That wouldn’t have happened without that, if he’d not taken drugs.
Let’s say he hadn’t taken that first sample of cocaine or whatever it was in Manhattan all those years ago, and he stayed being this tough guy, this wise guy, he might’ve had a decent career in the mob. But because he went so low, life totally changed. I think his perspective would be, if he had stayed on that life, I don’t know if he would’ve been dead or in prison, maybe one or the other. I don’t think it would’ve been a very happy path. It would’ve been a dark path. I think he pretty much implied, he may not be here if he’d got, whether it was through drugs or whatever else, he may not still be alive. And so, yeah, talk about pain for a purpose. That abandonment was the key to him seeking a different path, faith and faith in Christ [inaudible 01:02:27]. How could anything good come of abandonment? In his case, that was the key to him turning his life around, as a horrific experience as it was.

Gary Schneeberger:
So until the next time we’re together, everybody. You heard it here, crucible experiences are difficult. They’re hard. You’ve heard it in every episode that we’ve had, and Robert’s story certainly adds some perspectives you haven’t heard before on the show. But what you have heard him say that you have heard before on the show is that no one is irredeemable. You have heard him say that. What happened to him, it didn’t happen to him, it happened for him, some of those things that he went through that were difficult. That is our story as well. That can be your story as well. When you learn the lessons of your crucible and you apply them to your life, you can move forward to the most fulfilling destination of your journey, and that is where Robert’s landed, where Warwick’s landed, where I’ve landed, and that is a life of significance.
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