Welcome to the God's Goodness podcast, where our mission is to encourage as well as highlight
God's Goodness and modern-day miracles.
We are your hosts, Josh and Shelly Hankins.
Today we have with us a special guest.
His name is Sam Gaetano, and he is going to be sharing a little bit of his history with
us, and you are going to be blown away how this gangster turned warrior for God, and
it's just going to be great.
So he's going to start us off with a quick prayer, and then we'll get into it.
Heavenly Father, we just take a moment right now to quiet our minds and lift you up.
Father, we pray in the name, the mighty name of your son Jesus, that this testimony and
the words that we speak today will bring light and hope to those who might be lost, who might
not know you.
So Lord, we just give this to you right now in the mighty name of Jesus.
Amen.
Thank you for that.
And so I've asked my guest to have the Holy Spirit lead them, because he's just running
this show, because I can't do it alone.
We can't do anything without him.
So they say you can't even go to Walmart these days without Jesus.
Amen.
You never really should have ever tried to go anywhere without him at the first place.
All right.
So let's hear.
Okay.
I guess we'll start at the beginning.
Right?
I was born in McKees Rocks, 1958.
I'm the second of four biological children to Samuel Salvatore Gattano and Pia Irina,
Brandi Marty Gattano, first generation Italian immigrants.
My father moved us to Crafton Heights when I was about seven years old to get us into
a nice home.
My father was a salesman for Philip Morris Cigarettes.
My mother was a stay-at-home mom.
I have an older sister, Joyce.
She's now retired chemical engineer and a younger brother, Dino, and a younger sister,
Christina.
Brought up Catholic.
I attended eight years of Catholic school, grade school, and then my parents wanted us
in a private school.
So I attended Canavan until they threw me out for selling pot to the head guidance
consul's son.
I got caught smoking weed up behind the school with this.
So they threw me out and kept him.
Anyhow.
Narcissism, even in kids.
Yeah.
So I can say that I experienced so much love from my parents.
They always encouraged us.
You can do anything you want.
You know, they were living the American dream, but I heard they said, you can be anything
you want in this country, Sammy.
What I heard was you can do anything you want and not get caught.
So in my early years in McKee's Rocks, a lot of the servicemen coming back from World
War II, they had these complexes.
This was called Ohio View Acres and a large Italian family, right?
My mother had eight siblings.
My dad had five.
All my aunts and uncles all had like nine, 10, six.
I mean, I had like 51, I think we counted first cousins without their spouses.
And they kept a lot of the Italian cultures.
They loved America, but the cooking and the wine making and the bread making and all the
different like maternal grandparents lived in Sheridan and they settled up on this place
called Dickens Street and it was like a homestead, right?
They had a barn and chickens and pigs and cows and outdoor bread oven and I used to
love playing up there.
I had so many wonderful childhood memories.
We always had the, I like to joke around and call it here, the nicest Sunday afternoon
dinner.
We would go to church, go to their house for spaghetti dinner, eat like two o'clock and
then we'd watch wrestling.
My grandpa loved watching Bruno San Martino.
You know, Italian.
Of course.
Yeah.
It was so sweet, the monocke, we used to call her monoget.
She would run over.
She was probably at that point in time the most spiritual person that I knew because
she was always like would fall running around in the fields, would come back.
She didn't speak a word of English.
My grandpa spoke broken English.
Vincenzo was his name, but she would say, oh bellovaggio bene qua.
And she'd clean it and then she'd make the sign in the cross and then say facce
chris, the face of Christ.
I would see her praying a lot on her knees.
I'd come upstairs.
It was a big farmhouse, right?
So as kids, our cousins, we'd all hang out together, run around.
I used to see her praying and singing to the Lord in Italian.
And that always, that image today reminds me like she was charismatic before charismatic
was cool, before it even hit in the 70s.
Okay.
Cause this was like mid 60s, late 60s.
And at St. Martin's, I became an older boy when we moved to Kraft and Heights.
So we moved out of McKees Rocks.
And on my dad's side, we would always go there for holidays, keep a lot of the family traditions
and a lot of the Italian, I have a bunch of cousins there.
We all hung out.
And my father made it a point to teach us a work ethic, a strong one, to love God and
love our families.
I mean, and that's what I try to do with the family I have here.
When you would visit your grandmothers, you said you used to love it.
You love still playing there.
Did her spirituality play any part in your desire to be there?
Like just watching her do that, just loving on that moment with so much apart of it?
Hugely.
And that's a really good question because she had that nurturing, right?
You know, Italians, we bickered a lot, right?
We wore our emotions on our sleeves and there was always a lot of, I'd seen a lot of violence.
And again, I was really confused, I would say from like 7 to 12, 13 years old because
there was always so much love, but there was always all this bickering and breaking things.
And it was like out of a movie, right?
Like things would fly out the window like if it wasn't right.
And we would always pray it over our meals.
We would say grace, nothing, you know, we would thank God for the food and ask Him to
bless it.
And then there would be buns flying and food flying and cussing at each other and then
my mom, my mom and my grandmother would always stop that and get us back into some resemblance
of normalcy, you know?
But as I got older and I started going to St. Martin Catholic School, I learned a couple
things there spiritually that, let me just say this, I was confused, right?
We didn't have a church, so we did church in a gym and it was converted every Sunday
for two masses.
They called it mass.
And as an older boy, you got the morning shift, like 6 a.m. mass, right?
You were low on the totem pole in seniority.
So I would be setting up, right?
And my grandmother, who went, walked, she wouldn't get in a car.
She loved to walk.
She was from the foothills of Aquasanta and Marquesa in Italy.
She was like a farmer, like a village farmer, right?
And they set their homestead up exactly like, I guess it was in Italy because I went there
last summer and walked through those streets and seen it.
And it was amazing.
It was amazing.
I was so proud to enjoy it.
It was my childhood dream.
She would come into church knowing her grandson was there serving mass as an older boy.
And she would kneel down in front of that cross and outstretch her arms and start singing
Grazio Dio.
Thank you, God, right?
And the priest at that time, Father Pendelle, would shush her out like she was making too
much noise.
Or she was just different, right?
She didn't adapt completely to the American culture or to the Catholic Christian way of
life.
She was very opening, like I said, charismatic.
But in a beautiful moment.
Yeah.
And I'll never forget like filling up the wine, crewettes and whatever I had to do to prepare
for the priest to come out and seeing her doing that and her smiling at me.
And she was just the sweetest thing.
She was always hugging and kissing me, but she used to always, she was the healer, but
I used to see her walking, right?
She wore the blue and white polka dot dress because the white was supposed to represent
the host of communion.
She carried a walking stick, right, to ward off dogs like they did in Italy.
And she wore a babushka and carried her groceries and a basket on her head.
So further down the line, when I was going to Langley High School after Pino and kicked
me out, there was a Kroger's there that she would carry her groceries up to Dickens Street.
That's about a mile walk and the kids used to tease her because she was different.
She didn't speak English, you know, she had the stick and she used to get like, she did
a lot of walking.
She would walk three or four masses a day.
One was downtown at St. Mary's.
She loved that church for some reason.
I'd see her walking on Carson Street as I got older and started driving.
But she always represented the love of Christ because she loved Christ dearly.
I mean, this is a woman that came to this country, left her siblings and had eight children
and went through the depression, but never ever wavered in her faith for Jesus Christ.
And that was the attraction.
And my grandpa too, he used to always hug and kiss.
And then on my father's side, my paternal, I didn't know my paternal grandfather, but
my dad's mom, Giovanni, every time we visited there, she would make me a nice sandwich and
she would pray over me and she would just kiss me.
They were all about like four, eight, four, nine foot tall, tiny little.
So as a young boy, I could hug them and be I and I would just see this beautiful love
in their eyes.
And my dad used to always tell me, driving back from Scharpsburg, the eyes are windows
to the soul son.
So I ended up just really being in love with my grandparents and my parents.
So at about 10 or 11 years old, as an older boy, this priest molested me, Father Pindell.
I didn't really tell anyone about it.
But while he was grooming me, he would come to my parents' house for dinner and he wanted
me to go to this weekend to treat in Ohio.
St. Gilmarys was the name of the place.
And my dad was a hard no, right?
And when he left, I heard my dad say, this guy's light on his feet.
Our son's not going anywhere with him.
And I didn't know what that meant.
So I asked my mother, what does that mean he's light on his feet?
And she goes, oh, your dad, you know, she just blew it off.
And I'll never forget that afternoon.
He came over for some spaghetti dinner and left that afternoon.
Early evening.
If only they would have told you that it connected the dots.
Yeah.
Well, I didn't know.
And like no one talked about it, right?
That means like he's gay.
Yeah.
Sugar in his tank.
You ever heard that phrase?
It's like a street slang for light on your feet means like you're a homosexual or you
have same sex.
I remember like in second grade, we were talking about before where like you have communion
or you're at age to make communion and you have confirmation.
I remember when he was teaching me, he always had his hands rubbing on my shoulder and down
my back.
And then a couple of times he went on to my buttocks.
But as an older boy in that back room where we got dressed with all this garb for mass,
he actually made strong sexual aggressions towards me.
And the third time he had his hands in my pants.
And actually, I learned how to fight in the research or because I was a short little guy
and the eighth graders from one to eight all had recess at the same time.
So the older kids would come over and take your lunch money and pick on your bully.
And I learned how to fight.
So when he did that, I pushed him back and he tripped over some boxes and he fell flat
on his can and I took my smock off and I threw it on him and I cussed at him and I never
went back.
And then I started cutting church and that was 10 years old.
That was, by that time, I was probably like 11, 10 or 11.
It was 68.
So yeah, then I do know that there were some other complaints made and they moved him to
St. Gilmarys, which was like a reformatory or something.
And like they just kept moving this guy around.
And the only reason I know that is I told my sister Joyce what happened and there were
some other guys on our older boy crew who did go to Gilmarys for these weekend retreats
and they came back different.
And I knew he got them.
Because we were very open in our family about sex.
My parents talked to us a lot about it and you got to remember this was the sexual revolution.
Well, you had 51 first cousins.
So yeah.
Well, I mean, your family knows all about it in the culture at that time.
Right.
If it feels good, do it.
Right.
And like, you don't need to be married to have sex.
And though it was like it was the hippie movement, right?
69, 70.
So I grew up in that cultural revolution, the Vietnam War, peace, love and hope.
And then it was peace, love and dope.
And then it was, it just, and I got, I strayed from the church.
I had so much resentment towards the Catholic.
I told my sister Joyce about what happened.
It just got swept under the rug.
So a couple of years ago when our attorney general here in PA, right after that movie
Limelight came out, put a list together and posted it online of all the priests that were
sexual predators, there was Pindell and they moved him so many times.
So it was shameful.
So I had this huge resentment.
And I also remember thinking, if God was so good, why would he let this guy who's supposed
to be the next best thing to God put his hands on me like that?
So I said a few cuss words and said, I'm not going back and God, if you're so good.
But I always was shown faith by my mother who went through so much hardship with her
brothers dying early and her youngest brother.
They said it was a heart attack, but he was involved with some things and there were whispers
that he was murdered.
And like she lost four of her siblings in a very short period of time.
She was the second oldest of those eight.
And I'll never forget coming in and she was sitting in her little prayer corner with her
Bible.
And I was at that time just full blown into criminal activities and drug dealing.
I was about 15, 16 years old.
What kind of criminal activities other than the drug dealing?
Stealing cars, burglary, robbing pharmacies, trying to make an impression for the older
guys above me.
They call it paying up and stuff like that.
So you were seeking approval from an outside source from God?
Absolutely.
Even though I knew I was loved and encouraged and prayed for by my parents, I guess it's
the childhood trauma thing that I never had really good self-esteem.
I really felt different from a very early age.
And then the thing with Pindal just accelerated at it was like the catalyst that had me getting
high.
I remember being down in the woods, 10, 11 years old, smoking weed and drinking.
I stole all the Sacramento wine and all the unblessed hosts.
It was a rebellious state, but also it was attention seeking.
And I started to do crazy things so people would take notice of me.
Not just in criminal, but Point State Park, right?
They had a bridge down there, Fort Duke Game Bridge.
It was called the Bridge to Nowhere because it wasn't completed.
And it was the one leading over to the stadium at the Time 3 River Stadium.
So living right up over the hill in West Dancraft and Heights area, we built cars and swings
under them.
We used to swim in a river.
And then I started making bets about swimming across the river, which I did.
Now this is 12, 13 years old.
So we used to all cut school and we used to go to pirate games in early spring.
And when they opened up the Bridge to Nowhere, the Fort Duke Game Bridge, all these people
were coming across.
And I was like the class clown in the Daredevil.
I was very much an adrenaline junkie.
I used to love it, you know, when people would say, Sam's crazy, right?
And that mindset went on even into my criminal days.
It's because you were in love with the reaction of people liking you.
Right.
Absolutely.
And I also could use violence to intimidate and manipulate people to do the things that
I wanted them to do.
So anyhow, my buddy stands, we'll just call him stands for now, and Mark P for anonymity
sake, we were all getting high together.
And there was, we had, like there was an older Heights gang from Craft and Heights.
They drove Harleys.
They had leather jackets and carry guns.
We were the mini Heights gang.
We had mini bikes and blue jean jackets and we had CO2 pellet pistols.
But in one of the burglaries, we confiscated a bunch of guns and I took the guns.
And then the youth squad got involved, you and our authorities got involved.
They wanted the weapons back because I started carrying a gun at a very young age, 13 years
old, and it was stolen.
So anyhow, here we are on this bridge and all these people were coming back from three
river stadium and we used to person swing off the catwalks underneath it.
And I said, I could dive off this bridge.
And my one buddy standing there was five bucks as you can't.
And I said, well, it's got to be more than five bucks.
Let's ask these people coming across the bridge.
So we started taking bets and I think we collected about 150 bucks.
I stripped on into my underwear, put a big cigar in my mouth and I dove off the bridge
off the blue light.
I climbed over the railing and by that time there was a huge crowd of people.
And then I swam out and we took that money and we bought drugs and we got high for a
couple of days.
So I started doing that all summer.
I dove off every bridge downtown except for the Liberty Bridge and the McKees Rocks Bridge.
I hit them all.
And I don't say that boastfully.
It was probably the most stupid thing to do.
But when I look back at it, I know God had his hand of care and protection over my life.
Because my last dive, I think I was like 20 years old, we're in a bar, these cliff divers
were watching.
It wasn't ESPN.
It was, I don't know, one of the sports channels at the time and they had the cliff divers
down in Mexico diving off these cliffs.
And the guy who owned the bar, he shut it at 2 a.m. because the bar was closed and then
we're all sitting there in snorkeling cocaine and drinking.
And his name was Scotty.
And I said, be me up Scotty.
And I'm like, look, I can do that.
I can dive off those cliffs.
And my one buddy said to me, no, you can't.
I said, I dove off every bridge downtown.
He goes, here's $2,000.
I didn't hear you mention the West End Bridge.
So we drove down there at three o'clock in the morning.
I dove off the West End Bridge.
But I almost died because I hit a bunch of stuff that was like floating in the water,
like twigs and branches.
And I never did a night dive.
So I really couldn't judge the water coming up.
Plus I was really loaded.
I was on like a two day run.
So I broke some ribs.
And that wasn't the real problem.
The real problem was getting out where the two rivers meet there.
There's a big like sandbar or sludge bar where they park the barges.
So it was like that swampy, mucky mud.
And I couldn't like regular swim or back pedal float.
And I couldn't walk out because it was like quick sand.
So I was losing my breath and running out of gas.
And I had some broken ribs.
So my breathing was shallow because it hurt so bad.
And I started praying.
And that's like a lot of times when I'd get into a jam, a gunfight, whatever, because
I have been shot and stabbed and hitting the head with a bat and hitting the face with
a pry bar.
And again, I just kept doing what I was doing because I minimized everything.
And I would say it's just a rough patch.
It comes with the territory.
You know what I mean?
But that I'll never forget that night.
And we got out, I got out and my buddies were like, cheer me on.
There were four guys with me and my buddy Jimmy's van.
And I went and took that 2000 bucks and we got high for a couple of days.
So the attention seeking was huge.
Another thing that might be taken into consideration is the current for the rivers.
Like, you don't know what you're going to get when you jump in there.
Oh, I've had a kick out of some undercurrents.
Oh, yeah.
A little whirlpools, right?
Swimming across at the first time.
I mean, I was kicking.
And again, I was praying.
You know, okay.
Let me get through this.
You know what I mean?
Like, did you ever go to God when you weren't in trouble?
No.
Since you left?
Nope.
When I left home, I turned 16 January 13th.
And I was ahead of myself in school because I had some intellect.
God had given me some good brains and they did that testing, you know, where they moved
me from, they just put me right into first grade because of my birthday instead of kindergarten.
So I excelled really well in school.
Like even like in sixth, seventh grade, when I started to get rebellious and soap the windows
of the school and mock God and say, you know, and mock the nuns and priests and like they
would beat me up.
I mean, literally I got punched in the nose by them.
I got a lot of swats and like the swats hurt, but I'd look at Sister Mary and go, that didn't
hurt.
You know what I mean?
Like, meanwhile my bum was on fire, right?
And I needed that discipline.
In fact, my parents at one time discussed because the juvenile authorities were showing up at
my house so often because kids were telling on me and guys from our little crew were getting
busted and saying, Sammy's the ringleader.
He did it.
You know, they would come and question.
They wanted the guns.
And my dad up until he went home to the Lord 21 years ago, we used to laugh about this.
We're sitting in a living room.
These detectives really wanted these guns back from this house we brought.
And I kept lying.
I kept saying, I don't have any guns.
I don't know what you're talking about.
Yeah, we were in there, but we didn't take the guns.
We took the coins.
We took this.
We took that, but we didn't take the guns because one of the guys in our crew got really
drunk because we found like 20 cases of alcohol in the attic.
He was a truck driver and all this Canadian mist and we took all that out.
So, he was on his mini bike and he wrecked on Stratmore and the police came and said,
where'd you get the booze?
Oh, we robbed that house.
Okay.
So, yeah.
So, here they were in my living room and I'm lying right to their face.
Like I was so dishonest.
I mean, most of all, I lied to myself, but I'm saying, Mom, Dad, I don't have the guns.
Meanwhile, I had a stash in the rafters in the basement.
You know, there's no way I was giving up these guns.
I said, the one cop says to me, will you take a lie detector's test?
And I said, absolutely, I'll take a lie detector's test.
And my dad goes, give them the guns.
And I said, I don't have them.
So, they left.
They never gave me a lie detector's test.
The plea deal was, I was 14 when this happened and the plea deal was that we were to pay
everyone back restitution because what happened was some of the older Heights gang found out
that this house was empty, that people were on vacation.
It was very kind of sinister because we were paper boys.
We would deliver these papers and our customers would say, hey, we're going on vacation for
two weeks.
Don't deliver the paper.
Well, it started out very innocently, like going in there and just smoking weed, maybe
drinking our booze.
Actually, we started taking our valuables and then we thought, hey, this is a good idea.
Every time they tell us we're going on vacation, we should rob them.
And a lot of these people, I cut their grass for money and did chores for them and delivered
them and it hurt.
My father, I always worked.
I worked in pizza shops.
I scooped Italian ice balls up at Pizza Italian Ice in the Hill District.
I always worked bus, boy, dishwasher, all these things.
I worked really hard.
All summer, we had to pay 1600 a piece back to this one home, three homeowners, the ones
that we all busted for.
And that's a lot of cheddar back in the 60s.
1972 or 73 it was.
That's a lot.
It's a lot.
It's a new car, isn't it?
Yeah, exactly.
I think my dad paid $6,000 for our house, right?
So I had this money at the end of the summer and I gave it to my dad and he goes, oh no,
I'm not giving it to him.
You got to go make that amends yourself and you got to put this money in their hand.
That was really hard.
And that was the last time I robbed houses.
That was the last time I stole.
I found I could make more money selling drugs.
What age did you stop robbing houses?
14.
Okay.
And I went more towards selling drugs.
You mentioned that you were like in the kiddie version of the gang in town.
Right.
And you moved on so you eventually took a seat at the bigger table with the bigger kids
and the adults.
Right.
So I left home when I was 16 because I always wanted to go to the source, right?
That was just who I was.
That's how I thought.
Why would I buy from this guy when he's buying from another guy?
So I got to find out.
So when I found out that most of the cocaine in Pittsburgh was coming from Miami in South
Florida, I turned 16 in January 13.
I had a little couple shoeboxes for money and what kind of expanded my territory in
that criminal activity was, there was a guy from Vietnam.
Vietnam vet had the same birthday as me and I won't mention his name, but he moved in
right beside my parents and there was a big stone house left of my parents and there were
two apartments.
He lived in a top apartment and I made friends with him.
Well, he had connections from all over the world and he actually taught me a lot about
drug dealing.
You know, get the triple beam and do this and do that.
So at 15 years old, I had fake ID saying I was 18 because I actually liked to drink
in the bars and it was really easy to get fake ID back then.
So he would fly me to Fort Lauderdale one way and I would drive a GTO or a loaded down
car full marijuana back, you know, 300, 400 pounds and then he would front me, meaning
give me 50 or 60 pounds upfront that I started to distribute to all the different high schools,
five pounds here, five pounds here, Keystone Oaks, Canavan, Langley, Shunley, you know,
and then I used the older kids if someone didn't pay me to collect.
So I started my own little distribution at 15.
At 16, I decided, well, I'm going to go to Florida myself and there was a lot of things
going on in my personal life.
I had the juvenile authorities constantly pulling me over and just, they'd see me walking
down Green Street Road, the police would pull over and take me in and question me.
I had a girlfriend.
We used to call it going steady.
We had some tissues and it was a guy, Father Kirk at Canavan who put his hands on me and
I punched him in the shoulder and I got in trouble for that.
So I had all this stuff going on.
I just bought a one way plane ticket.
I was working at the Marriott as a busboy and then I went into the kitchen and I took
a one way ticket there and within a week I slept under a peer the first night and I
had my luggage and Howard Johnson's right on Lauderdale ruminate there and I got a newspaper
out and I had a lot of money and I went and got an apartment with a 39 year old Puerto
Rican named Philo Villas and within a week I was working at the Rain Dancer's Sorrowing
Pit.
I forged my parents' signature and started because I wanted to finish my school year
and went to Lauderdale High School.
So I worked, sold drugs and went to school and I did that for several months but I was
so angry like I kind of blamed my parents for this whole thing with Pindell and all the
fighting that went on and all this stuff in my home even though I knew they loved me they
would bicker all the time and I just hated it like I never called them and told them
where I was.
So I met some people there that had connections in Columbia and some of my neighbors had decided
we wanted to go to the source.
So we started flying to Columbia and smuggled the drug from Bogota and that is from like
75, 76 to 1980 I felt like I was in the movie The Godfather and everything was coming to
play right.
I had a lot of money, a nice girlfriend, I was a womanizer though, a couple girlfriends,
had a condo for Lauderdale.
I had all the material possessions and I was really getting high a lot like addictively
but it didn't feel like it because I had a safe full of drugs and money and I was being
noticed and that's really what I wanted like to have like to be noticed as a person of
someone of authority.
You know what I mean?
What I didn't know until I got sober and saved was I was just a fearful broken little boy
trying to gain approval and attention from the world instead of knowing who I was in
Jesus Christ.
And I'm so grateful every day because there were things that I did in that process of
distribution and smuggling and all that to try and impress people.
Coming from a background of my mother who was a born again believer, my father who knew
Jesus, he was a gambler and a drinker and that's what created a lot of fighting in our
home but he still loved the Lord.
You know he had his vices and he was a brilliant guy and a finance officer and he used to
teach me well, right?
He used to say, don't you dare get involved with these guys?
I might gamble in their joints but I earn an honest living.
You're smarter than that.
Quit running with gangsters.
Come home.
I love you.
As I mentioned the Prodigal Son the first time I read that in 1990, I forget sober and
saved.
I had just seen my dad's image in my mind and I started weeping tears of joy because
it reminded me of my father and mother's love.
But I do know when I did come back and finish my senior year that I couldn't live there
so I got an apartment at 17 years old and finished my senior year and they still loved
me and they encouraged me to get an honest job.
I always had an honest job.
I had a good work ethic but my side hustle became my main hustle which became a criminal
activity.
Well sure, it made more money and it gave you the recognition that you were looking
for.
But I always had a conscience.
The being brought up that way I knew right from wrong.
So when there'd be a shootout or something that would happen out of my being high and
full of rage because I had a rage issue too.
I didn't process anger well.
I went right from zero to rage, to physical violence, to physical harm and it was kind
of a defense mechanism, right?
What I know today and all my studies and all that and being educated about addiction and
about soaked in the word is like usually anger is usually a secondary emotion to fear.
I would say most of the times, right?
It's at the fight, flight or freeze kind of thing.
I fought, you know, except when the police were involved, I fled.
That's just good sense.
Well yeah and another thing that had me kind of upside down was the Vietnam War and then
I was sound drugs to a lot of different police officers and DA's and judges and I seen the
corruption there.
So I wasn't anti-police.
I just thought, okay, it's just a joke, right?
I mean, because they really were the enemy to me because of what I was doing.
But when I got sober and saved in 1990, man, I look back at how God had his hand of care
and protection over me and I love what they do and I realized they were just doing their
job chasing me down, you know what I mean?
And throw me in jail and I used to want to blame everyone and not be it.
You talked about accountability this morning at the men's breakfast.
I had none.
I blamed everybody and everything.
If you knew what I'd been through, you'd be like me too.
I justified everything.
And again, so much chaos and so much trauma that like shootings and stabbings and just
crazy things.
Car wrecks, I won't say I shouldn't be alive because I know God had a plan for me, but
like there were overdoses and slip wrists, okay?
Like I shouldn't be here from the natural looking.
So when you were 11 and you were molested, then you turned to drugs as a coping mechanism
to get over the trauma, the hurt, the pain, the mixed feelings of why this is happening
to me.
What did I do?
Right.
Would it be safe to assume that from that point when you continued to use drugs after
certain things, you know, after a firefight, after selling drugs to kids in a school that
you were trying to drown out the Holy Spirit convicting you?
Absolutely.
Because I had a conscience and I poured booze and drugs on it for it to go away, to numb
it.
And that is exactly what I was doing.
But what happened was I became physically addicted, didn't know it, right?
So yes, to that question, it was always I had a conscience and I know that was the Holy
Spirit because I believed in Jesus.
It's a people, when I came into AA and I believe AA is divinely inspired, God put some amazing
people on my path.
They were born again believers.
And I'll never forget, we used to, I had a lot of money.
So I'd rent a van and would follow the Rolling Stones concert.
We were like roadies or yuppies or what do they call them, roadies?
That's all.
Yeah.
So when they'd come, they'd never come to Pittsburgh.
They would always go to Cleveland, Buffalo.
So I'd get a van, tear the seats out of it, throw some mattresses and grab a bunch of
our crew and would go follow them around with a big bag of Coke and weed and whatever.
So one of them, I ended up blacked out in this hotel and they took the van, my buddies,
really good friends and left me there.
They're all good and cold.
They left me there to go to the next concert.
So here I am hitchhiking on the Ohio Turnpike.
I don't know, I was like 16 or 17, something like that.
Maybe 18, I don't know.
It was when I came back from Florida and this trucker picks me up.
It's pouring down rain and I get in this cab and like he's got a cross hanging from the
mirror and he's got gospel music on and I'm like, hey, thanks for picking me up.
We start chit-chat and I told him what happened and he goes, yeah, those are really good
friends that leave you at that.
I said, well, he probably tried to wake me.
I was really loaded and he goes, so what do you know about Jesus?
Right?
And I'm like, well, I know there's a picture of him in my living room and I'm Catholic.
That's how I answered that.
I'm Catholic.
And he goes, but do you know Jesus?
And I said, well, yeah, I told you there's a picture of him, right?
I said, my mom claims she knows him really good, but I don't know.
He goes, would you like to?
And I said, well, why not?
Now I can tell you, I remember this conversation clearly because the Holy Spirit was there.
Part of me didn't want to say this in his prayer because I thought he might tell me
to get out.
That was my own insecurities and my own fears, but the other part of me, like when he'd shift
gears, I remember he looked over to me and he had a big smile and there was something
in this guy's eyes and I could hear my dad saying the eyes are when they said, look,
I just got chosen.
Thank you, Lord.
So I said, yeah, to Jesus, right?
And he put his hand on me and he prayed on me and he was going, I don't know, he wasn't
going into the city of Pittsburgh, but he got off to Cranberry exit, Ohio to PA Turnpike,
to Cranberry exit and he took me all the way to downtown Pittsburgh and then went out to,
he said he could pick up the Turnpike again in Monroeville.
I held on to that track he gave me.
I still have it.
It's in my attic and it was a simple track.
Like I was explaining to David when you guys showed up on the phone and it had stickman
and it had an arrow and it had Father God, Jesus on a cross at the top of the cross was
an arrow and it had me at the bottom, like a stickman.
And he explained it to me and there was a prayer in there, Romans 10, 10 was in there.
Like I even continued into that lifestyle that I had, but I held that and when I got
out of a life of crime and my sister and my father came over to one of my houses, it was
a stash house and my sister said, you're moving in with me.
You need to think about a new career and it was just, I still had that in my jewelry box
on my dresser and I remember I opened the dental lab with her support when I got out
of school in 82 in her basement and on the bulletin board, I stuck that track above my
little desk down there.
And then when we moved out here, I put it in a box and I know I have it in the attic.
But like that was the first time that I really spoke that I believed that Jesus was the Son
of God, that he died and he was sacrificed as a one-time payment for my sin, a one-time
sacrifice for my sin.
And then I went back to my lifestyle.
So and the reason I hung on to that was a couple months later, it would have been 76
tour, out of an act of kindness, I had a pickup truck, I was at adrenaline junkie, right?
I used to race motorcycles, skydive, scuba dive, water ski, snow ski, I had all the money
for all the toys, so I did all those things.
So were you really an adrenaline junkie or was there a part of you that wanted it to
have fun until the moment it killed you?
Both.
It was both and I remember we used to have keg parties, Tommy Hyde Kano in high school
and I pulled out on the main street in Carnegie right before Pittsburgh fence and I had a couple
guys in the bed of my truck and a couple guys in the cab.
I wasn't too loaded because I was driving and I didn't really want to and it was like
right before 4th of July, I had tickets for the Winter Olympics in Canada.
I had boxing, ring side boxing seats and stuff like that.
And there was a car behind me flicking his lights and I'm thinking, well this guy needs
direction.
So I pulled over.
What I didn't know, the guys in the back were flipping them off and shooting bottle
rockets.
So this dude gets out.
He's a big dude like 6'3".
And he has a pry bar stashed behind his leg and I'm winding down my window and I'm like,
yeah, well you go on bro.
And he said, I'm a fin honky mother and he hit me as hard as he could.
Luckily the pry bar hit the top of the door frame and went in and smashed my face.
Broke my skull, broke my orbital socket, tore my nose pretty much all the way to the left
of my face.
Bumped my maxilla and I remember trying to put it in gear to ram his car and I fell out
of the truck.
Here's divine providence, right?
Here's the hand of God.
A woman sitting on her French porch shot and came over and did some pressure points so
I wouldn't bleed out.
The ambulance came and took me to St. Clair Hospital.
This was in July of 1976.
And they looked at me and said, this we can't handle this guy.
He's mangled.
You need to get him over to I and Air Hospital which is now Presby.
So they life flighted me there.
While I'm in emergency surgery, there's a oral surgeon in there, there's plastic surgeon
in there.
They're working on me and a guy named Dr. Dennis Hurwitz, his surgical assistant, Rosemary,
were still friends to this day.
I died on that operating table.
Okay?
Now back then a crash cart was as big as this table that we're sitting in front of, right?
And I had an out of body experience.
And I'm above my body seeing that thing go, you know, the flat line thing.
And I'm watching this surgical team scamper to get the crash cart to paddle me back.
And she knocked the surgical tray over.
And I remember Dr. Hurwitz saying, leave it.
And in a blink, I was awake, which I found out was 28 hours later I was in a coma.
And I spent a lot of time getting my face rebuilt.
And I'm not always been this handsome.
Dr. Hurwitz did that, what they did tissue expanders and dermabrasion, they hid the scars
like in my forehead and my eyebrow and between my nose.
Yeah.
They did a wonderful, I had a big Frankenstein's car across my face.
But anyhow, what I remembered about that was I felt the love of God.
It was like I was in this soft light, like many people have what are called near death
experiences.
And I've connected with many and we have similar stories.
And I read a lot about it.
My sister Joyce, believe me, Rosemary, believe me, she was a born again believer.
And my sister Joyce gave me this book, Life After Life.
And I read a lot of these stories.
And one of the things that the common denominator of people that are brought back in that era,
late 70s, or anytime now that I talk to people, this author was an oncology nurse in a terminal
unit.
And so then we resuscitate these patients and she would question them and take surveys
and then she mapped everything out.
The common denominator that every single one of them had was concern for others.
Think about what Jesus said, two commands I give, right?
Love the Lord, you God, it's all your heart, mind, soul and strength.
And love others as I have loved you.
Love one another.
All spiritual laws hinge on these two.
And I just felt this like peace that I can't even put into words.
And then boom, I was awake.
And I had the hoses and all that all over me.
And the guy that hit me, I knew some people that tracked his, some of the guys that were
with me, found out who he was.
And when I woke up, there were some guys in my room who told me he had so and so and like
he got kicked out of the army and he like was, he beat up his white officer, he beat
up his white teacher at Langley and blah, blah, blah.
I felt he was forgiven.
I let it go.
Now normally prior to that experience, I would have been, let's whack this dude out.
Let's teach him a lesson or at least have him walk with a limp for the rest of his life.
Because I didn't do nothing to him and I didn't know the guys in the back of the truck.
Well, here what happened once again, you're talking about conscious, right?
Holy spirit.
I had completely been okay with it.
I was in full acceptance of what happened and I knew that I was going to be healed.
My life was going to be changed.
About two days later, I get a get well card with his obituary in it.
Some of those guys took care of it and I remember crying and thinking, what kind of life am
I living?
Well, one thing led to another and when I got out, the world again pulled me back and
I went on for another three or four years doing what I did.
But in 1980, the change came to a point where I no longer wanted to do that.
My dad helped me get out of what I was into because I knew a lot of things and some people
could have very easily had me killed and they got blown up in a car in Philadelphia.
So it was all good.
I was free and I went and got this trade, but I was still getting high.
So my dental technology skills and my education, I wouldn't say obsessed, but that's where
I was looking for approval now.
I wanted to be the best at whatever I did and I got really good at what I did.
And by 1986, 1985, I was teaching at Pitt Dental School in Plant Technology and I met
my wife there.
And I was engaged at the time and living with it, my childhood sweetheart and my household
sweetheart.
And when my wife walked into my office and I looked into her eyes, my heart skipped a
beat and she had a crush on one of my students there and he was engaged and she didn't know
it.
So she brings her in and says, hey, Sam, don't you live by Amy Maske?
I'm like, oh yeah, I live right up the street.
Meanwhile, I live in the house.
He's like, can you give her a ride home?
I'm like, absolutely.
So I took the long way home and I just opened up to her for some reason.
I just felt a need to just like, I didn't want her to meet my representative.
I wanted her to meet real Sam.
No mask.
No mask, right?
No image.
This is who I am.
I was involved in a lot of type of, I call it disorganized crime, but I was involved in
a lot of things, but I'm no longer that person.
At that point, I was just kind of in the control mode of drinking.
I was drinking a lot and then smoking weed and snorting coke on weekends.
Like that, to me, that was clean living.
All right?
Compared to my past.
Miss Big Steps.
Big Steps, yeah.
So when I dropped her off, I rode down to my cousin Joanne.
She's about five or six years older than me and I've always loved Joanne and I always
used to go to her with like relationship problems and she had really good counsel and she's
just so, I love her.
She's full of love and light and I drove down to her house to tell her how excited I was.
I found this girl, God put this girl in my life.
Her name's Amy Mascaro and I'm going to marry her.
She says, what?
You met her today?
I mean, I drove right from Amy's house to my cousin Joanne's in Sheridan where my family
was, my mother's family was from and said, we're sitting on the porch, right?
We're drinking a beer.
I'm like, I met this girl, I'm going to marry her.
What about the other one?
What other one?
I said, I'm in love.
She said, how do you know?
I said, I just know.
Two years later in our wedding, Joanne came over to the wedding table and goes, remember
the night you came down to her?
I said, absolutely I do.
So my love for her was so profound and I was traveling at the time.
I got hired in the corporate world to do lectures on dental implants to both dentists and technicians
all over the country, all over the world basically.
And my ego got inflated again.
Anyhow, my love for her, I was still getting high and I was lying to her and I didn't want
to lie to my wife.
And this was before kids.
So in 1990, I said to her, I'm using drugs again, hard drugs.
I'm going to quit traveling.
I'm going to quit the corporate world.
I'm going to open a little business, take it from the basement to full time.
We had our honeymoon in Hawaii because I had frequent flyer points and it was pretty much
nothing to go there.
And I remembered that because I didn't get high on my honeymoon and we were there two
weeks.
I said, we're going to go there.
I'm going to sober up.
We're going to stay clean.
I'm going to open this business.
I gave six months notice with my company.
While I was there, I got drunk five days in.
King Kamehameha Day.
I wrecked the car.
It exploded the minute I got out of it because it was on fire and I went to jail.
So that's how I had to go to AA, right?
I pleaded bargain that I'd never go back to the state of Hawaii ever again.
I've been kicked out of a lot of places.
That was the first time I got kicked out of a state.
Off in the island.
Yeah.
A whole state.
Not just Maui, the whole state.
I could never go back.
I'm laughing, but that's not really funny.
But it was.
I mean, at the time it was sad, but like we laugh about it now.
If you can't laugh at yourself.
So I came back, that was in June of 1990 and I started going to AA and that's where God
put some people in my path.
And they took me in.
In the third step says we made a decision to turn our will and our life over to the care
of God.
And this guy, Eric McGrath and Terry Hanna were strong believers and they witnessed me
and I rededicated my life to Christ.
And I got plugged into a good Bible teaching church full gospel Carnegie and that pastor
David Morgan took me under his wing down there and showed me how to read that Bible over
there that's got four or 500,000 miles on it.
Right.
Not more.
And I got into small Bible studies and small groups and then he brought this Hell's Angel
guy in there from Texas who was reformed and he had a prison ministry and they had the
table in the lobby and I got hooked up with him and I got plugged into prison fellowship
and I haven't stopped since.
So you do life recovery at South Hills Assembly.
Yes.
And your experience with your own addiction instrumental and leading others away from
it?
Yes.
Absolutely.
Who better?
Oh, no, absolutely.
I mean, like when you think about like some of the command and say, yeah, I found myself
in an abandoned house.
I call them abandoned house.
We joke a little bit, right?
I mean, it's life or death, right?
And I go, yeah, my addiction took me to an abandoned home in a shooting gallery in the
Hill District, you know, with no running water, going to the bathroom in a five gallon bucket,
and a guy overdosed and we were stepping over him because it was all about the chemical.
That's how powerful addiction is.
And I believe Satan uses addiction to divide families, right?
We were talking about that this morning, right?
To what did Jesus say?
He said that the thief comes to do only three things, only three things, right?
Still kill and destroy.
And Jesus said, I have come that you may have life and have life more abundant.
Now, I've had a lot of surgeries.
I've had divine healings.
I've had two relapses where I've overdosed, been narcan back, and it's only by the grace
of God that I'm still here.
So when these young ones come in and even the older ones and they'll say, I can't stop,
I'm using against my will, I want to stop, we have resources for them, we pray over them,
we get them into the steps.
I believe the 12 step fellowships are divinely inspired by Bill W. and Dr. Bob.
And it's a process of sanctification.
Really only less than 1% of them get that profound spiritual experience like Pastor
Rick in Allegheny County Jail.
God took the obsession and he fell in love with God and he hasn't ever picked up sins.
That's not the normal.
No, that's what I expected.
Yeah.
I didn't get that.
I was disappointed.
Right.
You mentioned that this morning.
I did too.
Like when I got water baptized on at full gospel, David Baptist, I'm thinking, okay, I'm going
to have sunshine shooting out of my rear end.
Everything's going to be great.
It wasn't that.
I came under attack.
Yes.
I mean, serious attack.
But I had people around me and pastors in a support group of born again believers.
And like you said, just that one person, we call him a sponsor in AA.
I had them around me and my wife, she said, I'm not going to let the devil destroy our
family.
She would lay hands on me and pray over me and we would read the word together.
There's nothing better in my life than getting up in the morning and praying with my wife.
Pray with my wife for our day.
We prayed over our kids, our two sons.
I mean, prayer is so powerful.
I didn't know how to pray when I came in.
I had forgotten all the repetitious Hail Mary, our father things, right?
Because it didn't make sense.
Yeah.
And I looked at prayer as punishment.
Like I said, you know, I'd go, I'd make up lies in the confessional as a young kid, right?
I was a homeless priest, I did this, I touched myself in an unpure manner and I lied 10 times.
I don't know, I made them up.
And it's a 50 Hail Marys and 50 Our Fathers.
That's your penitent.
And then you didn't do it anyway?
Well, I did.
At first, and then I thought, he will never know.
And then again, I started at a really young age being dishonest, okay?
And mostly towards the end, it was with myself.
Like this is just a rough patch or I'll get better tomorrow or I can quit tomorrow.
So heartily saying, today's the day I quit and by 4 in the afternoon I'm loaded, right?
Using against your will.
So when these people come in, these people struggle with any type of addiction or any
type of bondage and I look them in the eye and I say, I know exactly where you're at.
I've been there too.
Let me tell you what God can do for you.
I'm a living example of the miraculous of Jesus Christ because he's still in the miracle
business.
Absolutely.
You know what I mean?
And that's what I love about the title of this.
When you came up that day in life's recovery and said, we're doing a podcast and it's
modern day miracles, the goodness of God.
I'm like, I'm in because I could talk and people joke about it all the time.
I could talk from now to next Tuesday about the goodness of God.
I believe you.
Not just in my life, but what he's done in my family's life and my friend's lives and
what prayer does.
I mean, look, I just got chills.
Amen.
Yeah, hallelujah.
You know, Sam, thank you so much for your time and your story and your dedication to God.
And I for one, never, ever, ever, ever, whatever, have suspected that your past is what it was
thanks to the grace that God has given you today.
Amen.
That you are not even resembling anything of the man that you described in this podcast
in any way, shape, form, or apparition thereof.
And I am so grateful that I met you on the adventure fest.
On the adventure fest, yeah.
And I'm so grateful that my wife has reached out to you and I know that you were just blessed
to give your testimony like this.
And I'd look forward to more.
Sure.
I've read a lot, I'm sure.
So I'm always willing to more podcasts with you.
I'm always willing to share the goodness of God.
And so Sam Gaiatano.
Yeah.
Gaiatano.
And we appreciate it.
We appreciate it.
We really appreciate you.
And I appreciate your love and kindness, both of you, Willie, and thank you for allowing
me because there's power and testimony and it's all about the Lord.
It's Willie not about me, but you know, I always think about that scripture, you know, you're
a new creation in Christ, the oldest past, all things that behold, all things that become
new.
And then in Romans, you know, there was no condemnation.
Therefore now there was no condemnation.
Because the enemy attacks the thinking.
And early on, I'd be at Fugaspor, I'd be at South Hills Assembly, praising and the enemy
would put some scene in my mind.
Because I had, you talked about your son's night terrors, right?
I used to have these violent dreams.
I'd be sleeping in that chair, would be watching Thursday night with family night, would play
games and maybe watch some.
They were young and I'd be like, sound asleep and then I'd have this reoccurring nightmare.
Oh, if a girl you had that and then run out of the room and go, my mom, that's freaking
out, you know.
I prayed, I prayed, I prayed and the Lord took that.
I sleep like a baby the last 15, 18 years, like a baby.
He's healed my body, healed my mind.
Psalm 103, praise the Lord, oh my soul and forget not, all my inmost being, forget not
all his benefits, right?
Praise the Lord, oh my soul.
He redeemed my life from the pit and he crowned me with love and compassion.
See, I have compassion for those that are struggling and all these overdoses the last
five, seven years, the way this fentanyl is killing all these young bucks I call them
and young ladies, it puts them on my path, it hurts, but I will not stop, not stop preaching
the gospel, the good news of Christ and the freedom in that and helping others.
One for others, Kubler Ross, new death experience.
So thank you, Shelly, for having me.
Thank you for being with us, Sam.
It was wonderful to hear all about that and get to know you better and I appreciate you
being your authentic self.
Yeah, what you see is what you get.
I had to be, I had to get to a place where I know who I am and the person of Jesus Christ.
Therefore the rejection of praise and the praise of men, the rejection and praise of
good men is insignificant.
I no longer desire to be liked and I'm not saying that egotistically or anything, you
know what I mean?
Like I think everyone likes being liked a little bit, but I'm more about the love because
love never fails, but if you don't like me, that's okay.
If you praise me, I say thank you, but it's all about him.
I agree, 100%.
Well, if you have been blessed by this podcast, we pray that you share it with others and
also we have a fundraising campaign and it's at gifsango.com and you look up God's Goodness
podcast and you'll be able to contribute to us financially and that would be a big help
for this audio editing and some other expenses that have come along the way with opportunities
that are shared on social media.
So if you want to check those out, you can and we will talk to you next time.