Leader of the Pack
Leader of the Pack
Evelyn Bence & Jeff Peck
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At age 15 Robert Ramos took the helm of his uncle's Brooklyn street gang—the Phantom Lords. In two years under Robert's leadership, the 15-member gang grew into a 65-member, two-chapter crime wave. "There were shootouts on the block all the time," Robert remembers. "There were murders on a regular basis."
On or off hard drugs, Robert himself thought little of sticking a gun in someone's mouth: Your money or your life. In or out of reform school and prison, he was leader of the pack.
But in 1986, serving time at Greene Correctional Facility, 70 miles up the Hudson River, 31-year-old Robert went to chapel one Sunday, encouraged by an older inmate. Robert remembers, "He told me if I kept on [with gang fighting in prison], I'd wind up killing somebody and never see the streets again." Never live with his wife and kids again. In that chapel service, a battle-weary Robert "said yes to Jesus…but," he admits, "I did not come to know God."
When parole booted him back to Brooklyn, he returned to his gun-slinging street wars, this time with more drug-crazed abandon. With nearly the entire neighborhood wishing Robert dead, his wife urged him to get help at a local church. He walked in to a service at Christ's Tabernacle, where "I heard the Lord speak to me: 'My son, you belong to this flock.' I felt God calling me, but I said, 'First let me put these drugs away, then I'll come to You.' But I couldn't break away from that bondage."
One week later, Robert was arrested. Sitting in New York City's Rikers Island jail, a suicidal Robert felt an urge to contact the pastor of that Brooklyn church he'd attended. "But," he says, "I didn't know the address or the pastor's name. I just kept 'seeing' the pastor's face."
Robert smiles as he describes the next significant event in his life. He just happened to find a discarded pamphlet titled "The Daily Word." And stamped on the back was "Christ's Tabernacle" and the phone number. "I called the pastor, Michael Durso, who prayed with me over the phone—for God to deliver me and protect me; that God would use me and keep my family. Right then I felt something real heavy leave me."
