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“Satan Slaves” Find a New Master

WHEN you talk with soft-spoken Tony Banuet it’s hard to imagine that the owner of that gentle smile once led a motorcycle gang. Tony has fought, robbed, smuggled dope. He has a 15-year police record, has served time in the penitentiary, and will still be on probation until 1983.

Of course, Tony doesn’t have the same personality he had a few years ago. Nor do three other members of his former motorcycle gang. Once they were so angry at the world that they didn’t really care whether they lived or died. They had no confidence in the present, and no hope for the future. All of that has changed. They have found real friends, and a new life.

Their story goes back to the 1950’s. When Tony (whom they called “Loco” [“Crazy”]) was about 15 years old, a movement of street gangs called “Pachucos” spread through the southwestern United States to Tijuana, a Mexican town just south of the California border, where Tony and his brother Rudy lived.

These gangs divided towns into territories that they defended. They fought with bats, clubs and chains. Gang members were identified by a distinctive tattoo, near the thumb on the back of the hand. They had girls who carried knives or razor blades in their hair. Tony says: “I was a Pachuco during all my teenage years. Our gang consisted of about 25 members.”

Tony had been born in the United States. Rather than be drafted into the army, he joined the navy, where, as he says: “I got heavy into drugs.” He continues: “I was caught smuggling and selling marijuana and the navy kept me a year in the brig in Hawaii. When I got out of there I went back to Mexico and joined a motorcycle gang. I broke into an office in San Diego and stole checks, which I forged and cashed. Years later I was arrested for this, and spent a year in jail. Since being on probation, every month I have had to pay back part of what I stole. I have $385 yet to pay.

“While in jail I made friends with members of the Hell’s Angels motorcycle gang, and decided to regroup a gang called “Satan Slaves,” which we started in Las Vegas, with a chapter in Tijuana later. We lived as outlaws. The motto was: ‘Ride hard, die fast.’ We were in and out of jail. I got stabbed once in my arm, shot once in the right foot, my head was split with a crowbar, and I had three bad accidents on the motorcycles​—each time while high on drugs. We were accused of everything, from running heroin to attempted murder, but money and lawyers helped sometimes. Rudy and other gang members did terms for heroin.

“Meanwhile, we put a lot of time and money into a rabbit ranch, far from the police, about an hour’s drive off the main road into the mountains southeast of Tijuana. People who got into trouble would come down and work for a few months, then go away again. Many people who came to that ranch wound up in jail​—some in the United States, some in Mexico.

“We wore leathers and German helmets. We carried knives and guns, and had the name of our club on the back of our vests. Our wristbands were made of leather, with metal rivets, so we could use our arms to fend off knives.”

Quitting the Old Ways

“One time I wanted to get a young U.S. citizen in Tijuana who desired to join our club to help me collect some money from a dealer in the United States. The young man was not home. I waited and still did not see him, but his father, Francisco Durazo, one of Jehovah’s Witnesses, talked to me about Jehovah. (Ps. 83:18) This was the first time I ever heard God’s name and learned about his promises of a new system. After I left I met two friends and we went on across the border to settle the problem. We got into trouble and were jailed for assault with a deadly weapon. The charges were dropped, but I began to think: ‘This thing about going to jail is getting out of hand. Maybe there is something to what Francisco said.’

“As soon as I got back to Mexico I went to see him. He told me lots of things: How the Bible was written, that it shows we are near the end of this system of things, and that God will soon do something about the troubles on earth. What he said seemed to make sense, so when he asked me if he could study the Bible with me, I said Yes. We started that day in the book The Truth That Leads to Eternal Life.

“Before long I was telling my friends what I had learned. Some accepted it, some didn’t. My brother Susuky was living in Encinitas, California, and I went over to tell him about it​—that Jehovah is God, and that something big is happening.

“Back in Tijuana the Witnesses told us that we had to get rid of our old personality. After we had studied for a few months, Rudy decided he was going to quit the old ways. He went back to Encinitas, got a job, and planned to be baptized. It took me a little longer, but one day I realized we don’t have forever to start serving God. I cut off the bad associations, went up to Encinitas, and after about two more months of study found a job​—as a truck driver. Until then I had never worked more than 10 months in all my life.”

On the day of his baptism, at a district convention in Los Angeles in 1978, Tony said: “I’m a happy man now. I don’t have the worries anymore. The government isn’t watching me. I don’t have to carry a knife every day. I don’t need a shotgun anymore. I have found better people to associate with​—people who are true, who are not liars. Now my determination is to serve Jehovah, and to teach other people.”

Susuky Tells His Story

Tony’s brother Rudy (whom they call “Susuky”) tells what the change meant to him. He says:

“For about 11 years I ran with Tony and the motorcycle gang. I got caught pushing heroin and was in the state penitentiary at Tehachapi, California, for four years.

“Since the hippie movement in the 1960’s I have been interested in the Bible. I carried a Bible with me all that time, for so many years on the bike. I used to read it aloud. I knew it had something, but I couldn’t understand it.

“When Tony told me the name of God, and the things he had learned from his first study with Francisco in Tijuana, we talked all day and night about it. That week I started studying. After we studied for a few months, I began to be troubled by our bad associations. It began to bother me that we went to the meetings on Sunday and still got ‘stoned’ during the week, or did other things that weren’t in harmony with what we were learning.

“That is when my son Aramis and I went back to Encinitas, and I got a job as a welder. I was all messed up, but the Witnesses helped me. I began to get different clothes, to associate with the Witnesses, to have meals with them. It was a different kind of life. I went to the meetings on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Sundays, and also talked with people at their doors about the hope of God’s kingdom, and the good the Bible can do for their lives.

“Tony loved the truth, but he was still tied with the old things. We had put a lot of money and work into the rabbit ranch, but I told him: ‘Drop this. Jehovah means more than just going to the meetings on Sunday. Jehovah means association with the brothers, . . . talking with the brothers every day.’ Then one day, when he was sick with pneumonia, he said: ‘You know what? As soon as I get well I’ll go pick up my things from the ranch and forget it.’ It was good to see him leave that place where there had been so many bad associations.

“Knowing the Bible has done a lot for us. It has helped me, my son and my surroundings. My attitudes have changed. I have changed. Everything has changed. We are thankful to Jehovah that he let us hear his Word, and we pray that we may continue to live by it.”

Crystal’s Story

What about the girls who rode with this motorcycle gang? Two of them have accepted the good news of God’s kingdom, have made great changes in their own lives.

Kathleen Galen (whom they call “Crystal”) tells how she got into this situation:

“I was born in New York city. My father left when I was seven, and I became very rebellious. I stayed with my mom. We could not communicate​—no communication of any kind. I didn’t like school. I left home when I was 13, and was on the streets of New York on and off for two years, looking for a friend or anything. I slept in stairways. I was hungry. I have been beaten up. It was rough. Finally, after two years, I went back home and tried to get along with my mom. She couldn’t take the police, the schools, and the trouble I was into. Just before I was 15, she sent me to live with my father in Las Vegas.

“I didn’t get along with his wife and my new sisters. I couldn’t fit in anywhere. I decided suicide would be the easiest way out. I planned it very carefully. While my father was eating dinner I told him I was going to sleep. Instead, I went to the bedroom and took about 55 pills I had because I had just broken my collar bone. My half sister, who was about five years old, found me lying on the floor, where I had been for several hours.

“For three and a half days I was unconscious in the hospital. I had always thought the dead go somewhere, so when I opened my eyes I thought I was wherever that is. I saw my father, his wife, my brother and my aunt who had flown in from New York, and I thought: ‘Oh, no! I killed myself to get away, and now they are here, too!’

“But then I saw the machines, the tubes up my nose, and all the other things in the hospital room, and I knew I hadn’t made it. I reacted violently, hitting the nurses and fighting, and they put me in the hospital’s mental ward for several weeks. At first I was strapped on my back​—my legs, my stomach and my arms—​because I was violent. After the first week I calmed down, and they unstrapped me. The psychiatrist said it was not normal for a person to want to take her life. I told him it was just because of the lack of love, and that there was nothing in this life.

“I told my dad that there were no bars on the windows, and that if he didn’t get me out, I’d escape. He got me out. Then he asked me what I wanted to do. I told him I didn’t know​—that I just didn’t fit anywhere. He said that if I didn’t like it in his house I could always look for some other place. Now I really felt I had nowhere to go, and nobody to turn to.

“A brother of one of my friends said: ‘These motorcycle guys are going to Tijuana, and maybe they can give you a ride.’ I went over and asked them if they could give me a ride as far as California. Tony said that if I wanted to go to Tijuana and stay and hang around that I could.

“I stayed on the road with Tony and Rudy for seven years. I used to ‘back’ Tony. Whether we were on the bike, or going into a place, or sitting, I would be right behind him, so nobody could get him from behind.

“I never imagined how much my life was going to change the day Tony came and asked me: ‘Did you know that Jehovah is the God of the Bible?’ I said: ‘No,’ and he started telling me what he was learning. All my life I had been searching for a true friend. I realized Jehovah was that friend. I dropped the marijuana and the fornication, but what I had to fight the longest was the terrible hatred I had of everyone and everything. With the help of Jehovah, and over a period of time, I have been able to turn around and get rid of the hate.

“You can’t realize what a change the Bible has made in my life. It says the fruitage of God’s spirit is ‘love, joy, peace . . . mildness, self-control.’ I am thankful to Jehovah for what his spirit has done for me.”​—Gal. 5:22, 23.

Barbara’s Changed Life

Barbara Banuet, a fourth member of this group, went along to the meeting of Jehovah’s Witnesses the first time the others went, to see what it was about. “We were dressed in our motorcycle leathers,” she says, “but after the meeting everybody stood around and smiled. They said: ‘Hello, how are you?’ It was just like a big family, and it really warmed me. You could feel the love. In any church I had been in, you never saw anything like that.”

Barbara says she had heard people fighting all her life, and that when she was a small child she wished there was some place in this world she could go “where nobody fought, and everybody lived like brothers and sisters.” She says: “When the Witnesses showed me that the Bible says that is exactly what is going to happen, I wanted to learn more.”

If you know something of Barbara’s background, you’ll appreciate why this meant so much to her. She explains: “Mom and dad were divorced when I was five. Mom had to work 16 hours a day to support four children. She boarded us out for about four years with a very strict Seventh-day Adventist lady who in her sincerity said we were sinners and that sinners were going to burn in hell. This is an idea that makes quite an impression on a little kid who doesn’t understand what you are talking about.

“I used to think that if God loves everybody, why would he want to burn people in hell. I can remember thinking that if I’m a sinner, there is no way out, and I’m never going to get saved. So I lived like everybody else, with no hope that my life was going to get straightened out. I couldn’t see anybody around me who was living the kind of life I wanted. I couldn’t see myself as a housewife screaming at the kids, but I got married twice. My second husband was put in prison, and even there on visiting days he would try to hit me when he saw no one was looking. When finally I had enough of this, Rudy, whom I had known for a long time, talked me into staying and living with him. That is how I got into the gang.

“We used to ride all over Tijuana, raising whatever trouble we could, and scaring as many people as we could. I didn’t really care whether I lived or not. I was always high on drugs.

“What a change the Bible has made in my life! It can change your personality. The Bible says to ‘put away the old personality which conforms to your former course of conduct’ and to ‘put on the new personality which was created according to God’s will in true righteousness and loyalty.’ (Eph. 4:22-24) It tells you how to live your whole life, how to raise your children, and how to treat your husband or your wife. It has taught me how to raise my daughter, and how to have patience with her. I try to help her to realize that she is not being good for me, but for Jehovah God. She is not doing it because I tell her to, but because the Bible does.

“It really is a blessing to have learned the truth, and to be able to raise her like this.”

What Has Happened to Them?

What has happened to these former gang members who no longer boast that they are “Satan Slaves,” but rejoice to be servants of God?

Tony and Barbara married each other. Rudy and Crystal have married other Witnesses. All say they have benefited greatly, and that the children have benefited from their new way of life. Rudy has had Bible studies with prisoners in the Jean, Nevada, penitentiary, and with a highway patrolman. Crystal says: “I don’t know where I would be if Jehovah hadn’t come to us.” Rudy sums up their feelings when he says: “We’ve seen the world and have no intention of going back to it.”

We pray that they, and all other persons now seeking to direct their lives in a godly way, will continue to do so.

[Picture on page 16]

TONY

RUDY