By Serge Leclerc
I WAS BORN a product of rape.
My mother was a 13 year old Cree girl who ran away from home when she was raped and never returned. She gave birth to me in an abandoned building somewhere in Quebec or northern New Brunswick.
My mother migrated to the inner city of Toronto. She couldn’t read and write, couldn’t speak English, and worked two jobs as a dishwasher, 16 hours a day.
Inner city church
My mother was also a Christian. On Sundays, she would take me to an inner city church. She talked about Jesus and said, “You can be anything you want to be. You have been created well. There is a God who loves you.”
At eight years old, my view of God changed. I played truant from school and was incarcerated in St. John’s Training School, run by the same men who ran the Mount Cashel Orphanage. They called themselves Christian brothers, wore black cassocks and represented God.
I had my jaw broken at nine years old. I was locked up, naked, in the pitch black in a room no bigger than a clothes closet. I became a runaway, living in abandoned buildings and heated garages and eating out of garbage cans. Then they would catch me and bring me back.
There was a man at the school that used to beat on me with a sawed-off goalie stick. He had drilled holes in the paddle so that when it hit wet skin, it would make little blood blisters. He would beat me till I collapsed or he got tired.
‘Brain damaged’;
At 10 years old, I went to the stable, broke off a pitchfork tine, marched into that man’s office and buried six inches of it in his belly. He took me to court and said I was brain damaged.
I thought that was pretty cool. It was better than being labelled a squaw, a half-breed, a bastard, and no good. I had learned to do the unexpected because if people thought I was brain damaged, they left me alone.
They sent me to a maximum security training school that they informed me was escape proof. Two years later, I escaped for the third time by burning down the gymnasium, stealing a truck and driving it through the fence. They took me back to court and said I was irretrievably brain damaged, beyond hope, beyond redemption.
They placed me in a group home. The first night, I jumped out a second floor window in my underwear to take on the world.
Money and fear
By the time I was 15, I was leading one of the toughest and largest street gangs in Toronto. I was a confirmed alcoholic and carried a gun in an era when most police officers didn’t. I learned the power of money and fear.
I was running alcohol stills and extortion rackets, but the thing I liked to do most was fight. In 1967, I became one of Canada’s earliest drug dealers and embarked on a journey as a 20-year drug addict and 13-year intravenous drug user. As co-leader of one of Canada’s most powerful drug crime families, I was generating $130 million a year of poison to pollute the minds and bodies of children across North America,
I had already spent more than half my life in prison, and in 1984 began a new nine-year sentence for a $40 million drug bust.
When I walked into the maximum security penitentiary, a 25 year old inmate decided that I didn’t look that tough and that he would gain a reputation by taking me down. I beat on him with a three-foot steel table leg and went into solitary confinement.
A choice in solitary
Seven months later, a volunteer allowed himself to be strip searched and humiliated in order to come into solitary confinement and tell me that I had a choice.
I could believe I was an animal that walked on two legs, with no purpose in life. Or I could choose to believe that there was a Creator and I had great value and purpose. He said that I had royally screwed up my life and everybody else’s that I had come into contact with. Then he left.
What an interesting way to present the gospel.
A few months later, I watched a 19 year old boy commit suicide in the cell beside me. He had put himself in that cell by buying crystal meth from my drug dealers. Then I thought about what that volunteer had said, and I realized he was right. For the first time in my life, I considered suicide.
Coffee and doughnuts
In a super maximum security penitentiary with 175 of Canada’s toughest convicts, I was invited to go to a chapel, to see these funny Christians who liked coffee and doughnuts and liked to sing songs.
One day, I asked one of the volunteers, “I would like a Bible so I can read what you’re talking about.”
He said, “There are none.”
“I said, “I need a Bible.”
He said, “I’ll smuggle one in.”
He brought me a Gideon New Testament. I studied it and learned about this gang leader named Jesus. When they threw the gang leader in the joint and then put him on the cross, all his gang members ran and hid. I could understand that. What I couldn’t understand was why they came out of hiding. Then I realized they came out of hiding and allowed themselves to be killed and persecuted for the truth.
Cold cement floor
I accepted Jesus Christ as my personal Lord and Saviour by myself, at 2 am, kneeling on a cold cement floor. I told Jesus, “You said that if I follow you, I’ll know truth, step out of darkness and know freedom.”
Since that time, it’s been an interesting journey. In 1985, when I came to the Lord, I was classified as one of the most violent men in the Canadian penitentiary system. I had spent over six years in solitary confinement, been investigated for prison murders, been charged with instigating prison riots and assaulting guards and been one of the kingpins in the drug trade in any prison I had walked into. And here I was following Jesus. I stopped swearing. I quit smoking dope. I quit carrying a homemade brass shank strapped to my left arm.
With a grade five education, I became the first convict in Canadian history to achieve a university degree while in prison, earning a double honours degree in sociology and social work from the University of Waterloo.
Going places
When I got out of prison in 1988, God led me to places I thought I would never go to. I became one of the chief speakers for Crimestoppers International, travelling across North America to speak to over three million young people. I founded ministries for battered women and street children, started the first chapter of Prison Fellowship Canada and became regional director of Teen Challenge Saskatchewan.
In 2007 I was elected to the Saskatchewan legislature, the first person in North America to go from lawbreaker to lawmaker. (Usually it’s the other way around.)
And when people ask me how this happened, I tell them about the God that changes lives I tell them what God can do through a Gideon’s Bible and the faithful people who brought it to a man in solitary confinement.
Serge Leclerc will be speaking at a Gideons fundraiser banquet September 12, 6 pm, at Chilliwack Secondary School.
September 2009
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