Nicky Cruz

Before

Nicky Cruz was born into deep poverty and pain in Puerto Rico, the son of parents he said practiced spiritism and witchcraft. As a small boy he was told by his own mother that he was a 'son of Satan,' unloved and unwanted — words that branded his heart with rejection and rage. At fifteen he was sent off to New York City, where he poured that fury into the streets. He joined the Mau Maus, a notorious Brooklyn gang, and rose by sheer violence to become its warlord, leading fights, knifings, and turf wars. He felt nothing for those he hurt and, by his own account, had lost the fear of death entirely. When the courts sent him to a psychologist, the verdict was bleak: this boy was headed 'to prison, the electric chair, and hell' — and no one, the experts said, could reach him.

The Turning Point

In 1958 a thin, unimposing country preacher from Pennsylvania named David Wilkerson walked uninvited into Cruz's world, having felt called by God to reach the gangs of New York. He looked the dangerous young warlord in the eye and told him, plainly, that Jesus loved him and that he loved him too. Cruz responded the only way he knew: he cursed him, spat on him, slapped him, and threatened to kill him. Wilkerson did not flinch. 'You could cut me into a thousand pieces and lay them in the street,' he said, 'and every piece will still love you.' That reckless, unkillable love got under Cruz's armor and would not let him go. Weeks later he came — half-mocking, half-curious — to a youth rally Wilkerson held at the St. Nicholas Arena. There, as the gospel was preached, the weight of his own sin and the reality of a love he had never known crashed down on him at once. The warlord who feared nothing began to shake and weep. He fell to his knees and cried out to God for forgiveness, and rose a different man. In a scene that would have been unthinkable days earlier, hardened gang members — Cruz among the first — came forward and laid their guns, knives, and weapons in a pile at the front.

After

The transformation held. Cruz left the gang life behind, went to Bible college in California, and gave the rest of his life to the streets that had nearly destroyed him — becoming a worldwide evangelist with a particular heart for gang members, addicts, and at-risk youth, the very people everyone else had written off. He founded outreach ministries, preached to millions across the globe, and saw thousands of 'unreachable' kids find the same love that had reached him. His story, told in Wilkerson's bestseller The Cross and the Switchblade and his own memoir Run Baby Run, has been read by tens of millions in dozens of languages and continues to point the hardest of hearts toward a love that refuses to quit.

In Their Words

“I had never known a love like that — a love that wouldn't quit, the love of God reaching all the way down to a nobody from the streets.”— Nicky Cruz