The Man Who Experienced God's Righteousness

The True Story of Christian Claudio

Khen Lim




Christian Claudio (Image source: youtube.com)

Few people would experience God’s righteousness with greater impact than Christian Claudio, a powerful Latin drug lord who was indicted and incarcerated in Rikers Island, America’s largest and most violent penitentiary, filled with 14,000 prisoners to whom he was the ‘Supreme Crown’ of the vast Almighty Latin King Nation gang.

Claudio was born in Spanish Harlem right smack in the Carver Projects, a tough neighbourhood known for its poverty and drug-abuse. He experienced a strained relationship with his father, a waiter at the Metropolitan Opera, who was essentially absent from his life for most parts of his youth. The loneliness that not only plagued him but drove him to a life of crime had largely begun by then. Claudio could not even remember if ever his father wished him a happy birthday in all his life.

Nonetheless, Claudio was considered a gifted boy but he was also a target for bullies throughout his childhood. One day during a snowstorm, he got involved in a fight.

“The big guys picked me up and threw me face first into the snow bank. I went home crying with snow in my shirt and glasses, I was humiliated,” he said to Amelia Pong of Epoch Times.

“I couldn’t understand what I was doing wrong, I just wanted a friend. And after that, I made a conscious decision to never let that happen again.”

From that point onwards, it was all downhill for Claudio. He first resorted to self-defence, buying for himself a pair of nunchakus, which he picked up from Chinese martial arts movies but once he discovered they were illegal, he switched to a knife and then a larger knife. By then, there was no stopping him. In his loneliness to wanting to make a friend, he also became angrier. 

Christian Claudio, drug lord (Image source: flickr.com)

In his decision to fend for himself, he needed cash to fund his weapon and that was when he turned to drug-dealing. With the quick dirty money now so easily available at his disposal, he was living a lifestyle of hard-clubbing where splashing USD20,000 on a weekend was nothing to squirm about. At the same time, he would have needed that kind of money constantly because of his newly-acquired habit of cocaine addiction.

Seeing how profitable his ‘business’ had turned out to be, he quit Lehman College in his senior year where he was doing an accounting course minoring in early childhood education. This freed him up so he could dedicate full-time to developing a large drug network centring in New York with influence spread to the outer states.

As is often the case with drug dealings, it wasn’t the drugs they were interested in. For Claudio, the bigger addiction was making loads of money; as much as possible. There was no impediment to whether the money was or wasn’t ill-gotten. Cash was cash and the more the better, the faster the better again. Money became the new obsession and in so many more ways, this was Claudio’s new god and very soon, he rose the ranks to become New York’s most prodigious drug dealer, learning the ropes and adopting an avowed dogma, “You don’t get high on your own supply.’

He was making so much more money this way because he was no longer frittering it away on drug dependence like he used to.

“I was making more money than Wall Street executives were making!” Claudio said.

With more money came power and respect and Claudio was getting all these on the streets of New York where his confidence grew in proportion to his towering presence. The new obvious step for him was to escalate his operations to big-time business and this invariably involved organised crime. Claudio’s organisation learned the ropes very quickly, including how police surveillance worked, how to stay incommunicado to avoid arrest, how to cover his tracks and adopt different identities as well as how to always be a step ahead of the law.

No doubt, Satan had a total grip on his life, lying to Claudio about how his life would turn out and what his future laid for him. Claudio’s new sense of self-righteousness was essentially arrogance personified but it was also driven by loneliness. What he didn’t know at that time was that he was never alone. God had always been there and He already had a plan for his life. Except that he was completely in the dark.

As they say, crime doesn’t pay. Claudio’s role in notoriety was to come to an end. And that end was to turn even more miserable for him in time to come. The moment when the federal Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) decided to keep close tabs with him, he was doomed. That day came when he mistakenly did a deal with undercover DEA agents and with that, both the DEA and NYPD had more than sufficient evidence on their hands to bring him in.

While Claudio was in and out of jail countless times, the one that impacted him the most was when he was between the ages of 25 and 41. That fifteen-year period is what this article is about. It was in that time that Claudio was touched by God’s grace and His righteousness and it began in 1989 when at the peak of his role as head of a drug syndication, NYPD Detective Sergeant Jimmy Peterson arrested him on charges of homicide. While awaiting trial, he was incarcerated at America’s infamous Rikers Island.

Latin Kings (Image source: dctvny.org)

Invariably Claudio was sentenced to thirty-seven years for conspiracy to commit murder in the second degree. In his time at Rikers, he remained unconstrained by any sense of remorse. Instead he established his footing as an offshoot crime warlord of the Almighty Latin King Nation (aka ‘Latin Kings’) where he had control over as many as 14,000 inmates. 

While the Latin Kings established its roots in 1940 to become Chicago’s leading violent gangs, it was Claudio who helped it fester from within the New York City Department of Corrections, taking control over drugs, racketeering and committing murder and other violent crimes in the process. By the time Claudio had begun to master his control of the Latin Kings from within Rikers, the gang had already become truly slick and violent and had begun to infiltrate the entire New York prison network.

All in all, he spent his incarceration at both the Green Haven and the Attica Correctional Facilities among others. It was at Attica that he learned how gangs could easily operate within the walls of a maximum security prison to the point of inmates supporting their families through selling drugs from the inside.

“They can make a couple hundred (sic) to a couple of thousands of dollars a week from within prison. People can support their families in prison from selling drugs,” Claudio said.

While he was initially serving two to four years in a prison in upstate New York – something he would have to be thankful to Judge Sterling Johnson Jr. for reducing his charges – investigations into his broadening criminal network continued unabated, resulting in Claudio being returned to Rikers to face new and more serious charges. On his return, he was introduced to Luis Felipe – aka ‘King Blood’ – who then authorised him to deepen the Latin Kings’ grip from within prison.

Rikers Island (Image source: villagevoice.com)

By then, Claudio was already not short of experience. His own networking had long paid handsome dividends. Now he could utilise them in a far larger scale and soon, he became the ‘Supreme Crown’ over the whole New York prison network, which meant that he had complete authorisation over all the 14,000 inmates in Rikers alone. 

As the ‘Supreme Crown,’ he used Spanish to spread the Latin Kings culture, distributing lessons on Latino pride and morals throughout all the jails. Through his increasing influence and more visible power, he then began to forge amiable links with correction officers and prison officials where he could undermine them for his own gain.

Ironically Claudio’s violence wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. Whenever he was charged with misdemeanour, he was moved to any section of the prison that then offered him even more opportunities to extend his control and authority as ‘Supreme Crown.’

“I was always bouncing around. I never lasted in a housing unit more than a month, sometimes a day, sometimes just a couple of hours… just because I was really stressed out, really violent.”

This eventually helped to secure a total Latin Kings dominion. Even though he continued ruling the prison through his criminal enterprise, he went a tad too far one day in 1991 when he used a secretly obtained weapon to grievously assault another inmate to the point of almost killing him, resulting in him doing time in solitary confinement for a year.

For that violent outburst, Claudio went on trial for ‘attempted murder, conspiracy to commit murder in the second degree and criminal possession of a weapon in the second degree.’ And if that wasn’t enough, there were a further twenty other homicide charges that were merely waiting to be levelled against him. It was only a matter of when and not if. It wasn’t just that incident but also the mounting charges that could see him incarcerated for the rest of his life that forced him to reconsider his life choices of which suicide was one he contemplated. Furthermore, he learned the horrific truth that his fiancé had left him for another man.

Solitary confinement at Rikers (Image source; thetakeaway.org)

“I felt alone, by myself. I’d always prided myself on my strength, my contacts, but isolated into solitary confinement, I couldn’t do anything. I couldn’t make anything happen and I wasn’t in control. I was just so desperate and I just wanted to escape everything. I just wanted to end it all.”

But just as he was edging towards the brink of his own life, there was a different plan, one that only God could bring about. Of course, he knew nothing of it. All he knew was that he did not want to add any more years for murder or any other homicide charges. His rap sheet was beginning to look more like a toilet roll because there was just so much on his plate that he had no idea what those charges were going to look like.

Just as he was waiting for his trial, he discovered that his co-defendant had found Christ and accepted Him as his Saviour. Claudio was flummoxed, thinking that his friend must have “lost it.” Though his mother gave him the name Christian, he never knew enough about Jesus to understand who He was. He had some ideas but they were mainly superficial. To him, anyone who became a Christian must have been insane. But somehow, somewhere inside him, his co-defendant’s ‘walk’ touched his life and he secretly wanted to experience the same transformative change that he had.

Image source: homebodyhubby.wordpress.com

In his incarceration in solitary confinement, Claudio’s suicidal thoughts were tempered by his sudden discovery of a Gideon’s New Testament Bible that he found left behind in a dark corner of his cell. While nothing was making sense to him – his co-defendant becoming a Christian and now, he found a Bible (!) – he nonetheless picked it up and began to read it for the very first time in his life, beginning with the Gospel of Matthew where there laid the foundation of his wisdom beginning with lessons on hope, love and faith.

“I began to read about hope, love and faith. God began to speak to my heart and the truth of the Scripture and the Gospel started to make sense to me,” Claudio said.

In His righteousness, only God could have spoken to his heart about the truth and the Gospel.

“I started questioning a lot of things in my life,” he said, “and it didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that I was a sinner and here I was, in prison doing things my way – and it was my way that got me there in the first place!”

On July 20 1992, about half-hour to midnight in his 6x9 foot prison cell, Christian Claudio surrendered his life to Christ for the first time and accepted Him into his heart as his personal Lord and Saviour. And there, he watched as he allowed himself to be transformed by Christ from the inside out.

“I surrendered and Jesus transformed my life. He changed my heart…”

At that very moment, Claudio experienced a quintessential phenomenon – that greatest quality of love from Christ.

“His love flooded my soul and profoundly impacted my life as no other event ever had.”

Claudio knew all too well that some things might not be within his control anymore like the amount of time he may have to serve in prison. As new charges loom around the corner, the very thought that he might not see the light of day outside the walls of prison could well be the kind of reality he had to face. But he also knew that God had changed his heart so dramatically that if he had to face the remainder of his life in prison, he would do so with the freedom that only Christ can offer that most others might not get to experience. In his own succinct words, “It was incredible. I had Christ.”

Rikers Island (Image source: businessinsider.com)

Not long following his conversion, Claudio was landed with a further thirty-seven more years to serve for all the other crimes that had now come to light. That was akin to life imprisonment. By the time he got out – assuming he was still alive by the end of the full sentence – he would be too old to do anything purposeful. But even as he stared down the barrel at a grim lifetime of incarceration, Claudio knew in his heart that God had a plan for him. If Christ came into his life while he was in solitary confinement, he felt sure enough that there was ‘something else’ that he knew nothing about, that would redefine the word ‘freedom’ for him.

At the same time, he was all too aware that if the Latin Kings knew of his conversion, they would put a hole in his head, so to speak. And so he mustered the courage to confront and talk to the gang members. He shared with them his testimony and openly declared his love for Jesus in his life. And to those who were willing to listen to him, he spoke profusely and ardently about the Son of God. Those who heard his testimony, felt the courage of his passion and the strength of his resolve. They experienced, first hand, the miraculous transformation that had taken place from within the kernel of his life.

Incredibly, many others wanted to know more and before anyone knew, even the correction officers approached him, looking for prayers while inmates began to walk away from the gangster lifestyle to seek the same brand of peace and happiness that they could now see in Claudio.

“God’s love and mercy has transformed me. I am no longer the ice-cold-hearted person I once was. Now I love and forgive people who have done the unforgivable to me. I even love the enemies I used to hate deeply. I am a new creature in Christ,” he said.

Christian Claudio (Image source: linkedin.com)

Because of his passionate testimonial, Claudio’s family all accepted Christ and abandoned the streets to become productive members of society.

“As a result of much prayer, fasting and supplication to the Lord, my stepfather, mother, and both of my brothers have become saved and are living for God. God has given them a zeal to serve Him and to build up His kingdom on earth. God kept the promise of saving my family too. He is a faithful and just God.”

Even his old driver when he was plying the streets as a fearsome drug lord also turned around and became an upright citizen. Sergeant Peterson who made the first arrest on Claudio could not believe what he heard when told of his acceptance of Christ.

“I’m a cop. And cops pretty much are sceptical about everything.”

And with that he personally paid Claudio a visit in prison. He came away stunned at the transformation that Christ had done on someone who was essentially incorrigible and too set in his criminal ways. Even as he realised that fellow men could never have saved Claudio from the brink of his self-made disaster, only Christ could. What Peterson saw in him was what God had done in His righteousness. He laid witness to how only God could change the life of this former criminal and gang warlord. Only God could bend his will and turned him around.

For the next number of years in prison, Claudio studiously pursued God’s Word and began to witness to his fellow inmates whenever he could. He even began studying Reformed Theology including the writings of renowned Reformed Baptist scholar and apologist, Dr James R. White. With a possible long prison tenure ahead of him, he decided to leave everything to Christ. In other words if God were to decide that he should spend his life imprisoned, he would humbly accept it.

While Claudio was at crossroads thinking of freedom in as many definitions as he could – the freedom to walk away from jail or God’s freedom in which he could serve Him freely – he continued to pray very fervently. Among the many items on his prayer list, he asked God for a godly woman whom he could meet and make his wife. And miraculously, unbeknownst to him, a young born-again woman became friends with Claudio’s mother in Puerto Rico and discovered her new friend’s son whose walk with Christ and his transformation from darkness to Light was truly episodic. Eventually the two met and fell in love and then were married in prison.

Claudio remembered a prayer to the Lord in 2002. He said, “Lord, if You are not going to get me out of here, please just get me through.” But then things dramatically changed for him five years later in 2007 when his family decided to pursue a legal technicality that eventually resulted in a reversal of his conviction after he had spent fifteen years in prison. Even so, Claudio believed there was more to it than a successful exploitation of a legal loophole.

“They released me because my life had changed around even while inside prison,” he said.

Although there was a fresh start awaiting him where he could simply walk away without turning his back, Claudio chose not to. Instead he not only left the gang he created, he also decided to convince the members to leave as well, which wasn’t an easy thing to do considering that this could have easily turned to a violent retaliation of sorts. However Claudio had resolved to face it. With the help of God, anything was possible. For him as the founder of the gang, he could use the respect, authority and connections to pave the way for at least some of the members to turn over a new leaf without repercussions. In fact his success in this area can be said to be formidable – Claudio had actually convinced several Blood and Crips members to abandon their gangs. Even some regional Blood leaders had chosen to walk away as well.

Christian Claudio (Image source: theepochtimes.com)

In the year he was released on parole, Claudio was baptised and he shared his amazing testimony in church. He moved those who attended his baptism and they saw in him, God’s grace unfold. Yet it is hard to imagine that even though he had become an upright loving Christian, it would be near insurmountable to move along in life with all that burdensome baggage to carry. In order to overcome his past and live for tomorrow for Christ is not easy to imagine.

“Claudio has a great testimony… a unique brother in the Lord,” says Peterson.

“He’s really truly passionate about what he says and wants to do… and when you’re passionate about something, nothing can stop you.”

Christian Claudio today is very actively involved in the passionate challenge to advance God’s Kingdom. He does many things. He dons many hats. He speaks to many people. He does not limit himself to what he can do to save lives for Christ. One of the positions he holds is that of a director of the Long Island American Chaplain’s Association in which he devotes his time to minister to people and introduce them to the Gospel of Christ.

But the one that endears most to him is the work he does in reaching out for kids who are under the threat of gangs. These are kids who spend their lives on the streets and therefore, are the most exposed, most vulnerable and the ones who are most easily susceptible to the pressures of gang memberships.

He also conducts anti-gang workshops in which he is involved in a thriving prison ministry. For someone with his kind of experiences, these should work like a hand in glove for him. And like a true servant of Christ, he takes no credit for the work he has been doing but instead points to God.

“No one can get the glory for me being here but God.”

Claudio’s most defining words of who he is today are best left last:

“Today, I find myself wanting to do more and more for my Lord simply out of gratitude for His immeasurable love expressed toward me. He has redeemed me from the pitfalls of hell and destruction. I am overwhelmed by the reality that Jesus Christ died on the cross in my place to pay the penalty for all my sins. God is truly love and I’m so honoured to have Him residing in my heart.”

And none of this would have taken place if it weren’t for the righteousness of God to pluck Claudio out of his misery and shape him to light the world to His glory.

Note: Much of this article is based on information gleaned from the Internet. They include but are not limited to the following sources:

Pang, Amelia; ‘This is New York: Christian Claudio, From Drug Lord to Anti-Bullying Advocate,’ Epoch Times, August 17 2013, http://www.theepochtimes.com/n3/247674-this-is-new-york-christian-claudio-from-drug-lord-to-anti-bullying-advocate/

Cresswell, Darrell; ‘A True Story from Rikers to Righteousness,’ A Study of Christian Grace, March 1 2010, https://darrellcreswell.wordpress.com/2010/03/01/a-true-story-from-rikers-to-righteousness/

Claudio, Christian; ‘Christian Claudio’s Autobiography,’ Throggs Neck – La Famiglia Inc. – Anti-Bullying and Gang Specialists, undated, http://tnlafamiglia.blogspot.my/p/christian-claudios-autobiography.html

Claudio, Christian; ‘Christian Claudio’s Testimony,’ Jesus Is The Answer, undated, http://www.jesusistheanswer.cc/christian_claudio095.html

Swan, James; ‘Christian Claudio: Rescued from Hell, Released from Prison – The Testimony of a Latin King Saved by the King of Kings,’ Iron Sharpens Iron – The Blog of Chris Arnzen – Host of the Iron Sharpens Iron Radio Program, April 18 2008, http://sharpens.blogspot.my/2008/04/mp3-available-here_18.html (MP3 available here: http://mp3.sharpens.org/ISI/20080418ISI.mp3)

Signorile, Vito; ‘Former Drug Dealer and Gang Leader Visits I.S. 192,’ Bronx Times, February 17 2011, http://www.bxtimes.com/stories/2011/7/bronxtimes-yn_bronx_front_page-6-claudio.html

You can personally reach Christian Claudio at chris@tnlafamiglia.org or call his cell #347 763-TNLF. You can also write him at chrisclaudio@optonline.net. He also has an alternative phone contact at (646) 842-0701. Overseas callers must use American IDD prefix before calling.

Many thanks to Darrell Creswell whose article provided me with the original basis to write.