Warlock loved women, partying, pilfering others

By Zoe George —

Never mind that Richard Lorenzo Jr. wallowed in money. He still felt empty. To find fulfillment, he trained to be a warlock.

“I was making a hundred grand a month. I had the traveling, the women. I bought two properties,” Richard says on a Delafe video on YouTube. “But I was depressed. I had all this money, but the money was not answering it either.

“I stopped caring about the money. Now what I cared about was finding out what’s real? The witches were telling me real things. They told me true things about my past. They were telling me I was called to be a warlock.”

Richard’s descent into drug trafficking and witchcraft began with rejection in his childhood. He was raised in Fort Lauderdale to Puerto Rican parents. His mom took him to Catholic masses, but the violence of his neighborhood pulled him down.

“I loved women, I loved partying, I loved drinking and smoking. I loved robbing,” he says. “It wasn’t because I needed the money. It was because I wanted acceptance from my peers. I’m a product of my environment. If you do these things, you’re accepted and they look at you like you’re more of a man.”

While he was flexing worldly impulses, he also did well enough in his studies to get into Broward College and later the University of Central Florida, where he fell into fraternity party life at age 17.

He and his friends were doing crazy things; some even got shot. At his ex-girlfriend’s apartment, he had an experience in his sleep in which he fought off a demon by reciting the Lord’s Prayer. He remembered the prayer from his childhood.

Thinking he needed a “change of scenery,” he moved at age 21 to New York City, becoming a bouncer at clubs in Manhattan. The change of scenery didn’t bring a change of heart.

“I was still robbing, finessing anything – clothing from department stores. I was credit-card-scamming. It was an adrenaline rush,” Richard explains. “I was good at it. I had this strategy. I had demons in me.”

But after the rush came guilt, depression and suicidal broodings.

“I cut off everybody in my life because I was so depressed,” he says. “I had so much paranoia and lived in so much chaos that I just cut everybody off. I thought it was better to die.”

Despondent one day in his apartment, he heard a supernatural voice break through the darkness. “It brought so much life to my spirit,” he says. But Richard didn’t know Jesus yet, so he mistook the voice as belonging to his dead uncle.

Even though he didn’t recognize the voice, it encouraged him. Friends were going to jail and getting killed in New York, so Richard decided to flee the city and join the Navy as an air traffic controller. A lot of his deployment he spent in Greece.

In the military, Richard didn’t reform. As a matter of fact, he began selling marijuana. Reveling in vices again eventually landed him in depression, so one day on a beach in Crete, while his friends were in the club, he went alone to the beach to cry out to whatever Higher Power might be out there.

“I didn’t know anything about the Bible. I was crying profusely, just screaming, ‘Who are you? What’s the purpose of life?” he recalls.

He heard a voice, the same voice he heard in New York. “I’m going to show you now.”

He was stunned.

Still, Jesus didn’t immediately show him. Though the supernatural encounter was overwhelming, he was still very lost. Instead of coming to Christ, Richard fell into even greater sin. It got darker before it became lighter.

He diversified his trafficking to cocaine, ecstasy, pill and “lean,” codeine cough syrup mixed with soda.

A friend recommended he try LSD; the psychedelic experience in the spiritual realm would help him become less reckless, he was told. The hallucinatory trip did indeed awaken a spiritual curiosity in him, and he started reading books about the New Age, yoga and spiritual journeys.

When he got stationed in California, he took leave to drive to Humboldt County, where he connected with the Chinese mafia to buy massive amounts of marijuana he could sell with a 600% profit margin.

The meetup was known as “Murder Mountain” on Rattlesnake Road because so many got shot there. But Richard was reckless and flashed his cash at cars as they passed the compound until somebody took him in and made the sale.

Flush with tens of thousands of dollars of weed, Richard became a supplier. He trained friends in trafficking and opened sales points across the country. He supplied his buyers through the mail, a risky delivery method because if you get caught, you get charged with additional crimes.

But Richard was riding high on success and ran his business carefully. He got a dealer license to buy automobiles at auction and launder his cash. He bought two houses. And he became even more depressed and paranoid.

When one shipment of weed disappeared in the mail in 2019, Richard became obsessed with finding the culprit. It was worth $20,000, which for him was paltry at the time. He was making $100,000 a month, but he rankled over one insignificant package.

“I gotta figure this out, like who stole my package?” he mused.

Through his girlfriend he connected with a Haitian voodoo practitioner who promised to unveil the thief. There was only one catch: Richard had to fly to Haiti and meet him in the voodoo mecca Jacmel.

Richard was so obsessed over the package he purchased tickets.

In Jacmel, the voodoo priest, a cousin of Richard’s girlfriend, read tarot cards, dressed in ritual garments, chugged alcohol, smoked cigars and summoned “ancestral spirits.” Through the tarot cards, the priest told Richard true things about his past that nobody knew.

“He was spot on,” Richard says. “These were things that happened that nobody could have known. I started believing because of the true things he was telling me.”

Today, Richard understands that the ancestral spirits are really demons, and they reveal to the spiritist the true events of a person’s past to impress him and ensnare him.

“The devil knows your past, but only God knows your future,” Richard says. “But I didn’t know that at the time. So I was like, man, ok. I start asking questions and engaging.”

Richard was wowed.

With regard to the stolen package, the voodoo priest said ominously: “You’ll find out who stole your package when you return to California.”

Richard decided to dive in. Money had given him a purpose. He felt called to become a warlock. He would make money divining spirits, he thought.

He bought crystals and beads, bought books, set up altars around his house and dipped in sage baths. He traveled to New Orleans and elsewhere to consult with prominent mediums, shamans, Reiki healers, and psychics. He spent days in a cemetery and prepared himself to be tortured by whipping — all initiation rites.

In his foray into witchcraft, he forgot about the package.

With his girlfriend now pregnant, Richard moved to Jupiter Beach, Florida, to be near family.

That’s where Christians started popping up in his life.

The first was a multimillionaire at a liquor store who bubbled over with the joy of Jesus. He enthusiastically confronted Richard, “You’ve got a light on you,” and invited him to his house for Bible study and fellowship.

Richard had never seen someone so bubbly and was suspicious that he and his wife were swingers. But he was intrigued by the man’s riches. The man always demurred when Richard asked about getting into business with him. The man was rich but talked nonstop about Jesus.

Then Richard’s new barber talked to him about Jesus. The coincidences started mounting.

Bored one night, he clicked on a video of Torben Sondergaard, the Danish evangelist who emphasizes deliverance ministry in the streets. “I got delivered from being a Reiki healer, from chakra balancing, from crystals for over 10 year,” a woman testified.

Sharon was local, so Richard contacted her and set up to meet her.

“She was so Spirit filled,” Richard says. “I found out Christians have power too.”

She prayed for Richard, and he accepted Jesus and spoke in tongues. She insisted he stop fornicating with his girlfriend. When he attended church with her, there was the barber on the bass guitar. The worship song was “Reckless Love.”

“I got wrecked,” he remembers. “That’s the first time I felt the presence of God.”

He started reading the Bible and burned all his demonic paraphernalia behind his house in a huge bonfire. “I came to the revelation that Jesus Christ is the highest power,” he says. It was Dec.1, 2019.

“I got encountered by Jesus in my apartment,” Richard remembers. “All I remember is a light came and knocked me to the ground, that same light that helped me in New York when I was going to commit suicide, that same light that told me in Greece, I’m going to show you. He didn’t say anything this time. The light was too strong. I curled up in a ball and I was shaking.

“I was manifesting demons,” he recalls. “I was crying profusely, and coughing up. I felt like things were coming out of me, it was in my spirit and my soul, I just knew it was Jesus. I got a peace I’d never felt before. I felt fulfillment.”

Richard was born again and became a new creature in Christ.

He stopped watching porn and stopped sleeping with his girlfriend. She was seven months pregnant. A week later, his girlfriend got saved and delivered and they continued on their journey with Christ. They eventually got married.

God convicted Richard to confess to her his former infidelities. The night before, God took her to Heaven in a dream and told her, Forgive him. He’s a good man.

So when Richard came clean the next morning, she was thunderstruck.

Richard dismantled his drug distribution empire. An Atlantic City dealer owed him $30,000. “Give it to a church,” Richard told him. “I don’t want the money.”

He got the number of a kid from high school whose house he had robbed of $2,000 of merchandise years earlier and called him. “What’s your Zelle?” Richard asked. “I’m gonna send you $5,000 right now.”

“My only purpose for living is to glorify Christ,” Richard says. “He took me out of so much misery, so much angry, so much depression.”

Today Richard is pastor of the Revival Outreach Center in Central Florida.

Warlock loved women, partying, pilfering others.

To know more about a personal relationship with God, click here.

Zoe George studies at the Lighthouse Christian Academy near Pacific Palisades in Los Angeles.