By Alex Brick –
Jesse Padulo’s dad left home when he was very young. His stepfather used drugs, as did his mother. Kicked out of his family home at 14, Jesse became an “animal,” a mobster who worked clubs and bars, got into fights, and spent two years of his adolescence in jail.
Increasingly despondent and suicidal, one night he downed a handful of pills with a bottle of grappa.
“At one point I didn’t feel my body anymore and I said, ‘This is not good, what is happening?’” he recounted on a Witness Testimonies video. “I took a butcher knife and stuck it straight in my stomach. I sat on the floor and just bled out.”
Paramedics had to kick his door down before they rushed him to the hospital to save his life. “I never learned my lesson,” he says.
He went back to his former lifestyle as a hoodlum in Montreal, where he lived. He became the tough guy who roughed you around if you didn’t pay on loans received from the mob. The loan recipients were often drug addicts.
In addition to the criminal activity, he worked in bars and nightclubs.
“I had no remorse for anybody I felt like nobody had any for me so why should I have any for anybody else,” Jesse says. “it was a sense of relief for me to hurt somebody. I felt strong; I felt tough, but these people were weak.”
Despite the money he was earning, he was “rich and miserable.”
“Alcohol was always my problem,” he says. “Alcohol gave me a sense of power. It felt good. But I always had to drink to feel good. You fall deeper and deeper down the rabbit hole.”
He married. He and his wife had a son when he was 30. “I didn’t have a father. I was scared to be a father,” he says. “I didn’t want him to grow up like me.”
Jesse decided to be a good role model. He left the mafia. He worked at being a good father and husband. He became a barber.
One day, he found out his wife, who also came from a background of trauma, was cheating on him.
“One day you’re a husband and father, and the next you’re gone,” he says. “I lost my identity again. That was hard. I may have been mentally abusive to her and that comes from somewhere. But I loved her. It hurt more than anything in my life.”
He returned to the underworld. This time he also took drugs. He went back to the easy money and fooling around with women.
Eventually the pleasures of sin ran their course. He missed his kids.
At a party, he decided to quit his sinful lifestyle. He went downstairs and prayed.
“Lord, if you’re there, I can’t do this anymore.” He repented of his sin and accepted Jesus as his Savior and Lord.
He decided he wanted to get back to being a dad, but his kids lived in another town.
God began to answer his prayer requests. Out of the blue, a friend called offering him an apartment near his kids.
Jesse prayed for a bunk bed, a couch, a fridge. Even though his credit was poor, he applied at the furniture store and got approved. Just a few days later, he reunited with his children. He returned to honest employment, barbering and working construction.
“It’s funny how the Lord traps you (in a good way),” he says.
To learn more about a personal relationship with Jesus, click here.
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About this writer: Alex Brick studies at the Lighthouse Christian Academy near West Los Angeles.
