Never mind that Richard Lorenzo Jr. wallowed in money. He still felt empty. To find fulfillment, he trained to be a warlock.
“I was making a hundred grand a month. I had the traveling, the women. I bought two properties,” Richard says on a Delafe video on YouTube. “But I was depressed. I had all this money, but the money was not answering it either.
“I stopped caring about the money. Now what I cared about was finding out what’s real? The witches were telling me real things. They told me true things about my past. They were telling me I was called to be a warlock.”
Richard’s descent into drug trafficking and witchcraft began with rejection in his childhood. He was raised in Fort Lauderdale to Puerto Rican parents. His mom took him to Catholic masses, but the violence of his neighborhood pulled him down.
“I loved women, I loved partying, I loved drinking and smoking. I loved robbing,” he says. “It wasn’t because I needed the money. It was because I wanted acceptance from my peers. I’m a product of my environment. If you do these things, you’re accepted and they look at you like you’re more of a man.”
While he was flexing worldly impulses, he also did well enough in his studies to get into Broward College and later the University of Central Florida, where he fell into fraternity party life at age 17.
He and his friends were doing crazy things; some even got shot. At his ex-girlfriend’s apartment, he had an experience in his sleep in which he fought off a demon by reciting the Lord’s Prayer. He remembered the prayer from his childhood.
Thinking he needed a “change of scenery,” he moved at age 21 to New York City, becoming a bouncer at clubs in Manhattan. The change of scenery didn’t bring a change of heart.
“I was still robbing, finessing anything – clothing from department stores. I was credit-card-scamming. It was an adrenaline rush,” Richard explains. “I was good at it. I had this strategy. I had demons in me.”
But after the rush came guilt, depression and suicidal broodings.
“I cut off everybody in my life because I was so depressed,” he says. “I had so much paranoia and lived in so much chaos that I just cut everybody off. I thought it was better to die.”
Despondent one day in his apartment, he heard a supernatural voice break through the darkness. “It brought so much life to my spirit,” he says. But Richard didn’t know Jesus yet, so he mistook the voice as belonging to his dead uncle.
Even though he didn’t recognize the voice, it encouraged him. Friends were going to jail and getting killed in New York, so Richard decided to flee the city and join the Navy as an air traffic controller. A lot of his deployment he spent in Greece.
In the military, Richard didn’t reform. As a matter of fact, he began selling marijuana. Reveling in vices again eventually landed him in depression, so one day on a beach in Crete, while his friends were in the club, he went alone to the beach to cry out to whatever Higher Power might be out there.
“I didn’t know anything about the Bible. I was crying profusely, just screaming, ‘Who are you? What’s the purpose of life?” he recalls.
He sought Haitian voodoo. He found God.
He heard a voice, the same voice he heard in New York. “I’m going to show you now.”
He was stunned.
Still, Jesus didn’t immediately show him. Though the supernatural encounter was overwhelming, he was still very lost. Instead of coming to Christ, Richard fell into even greater sin. It got darker before it became lighter.
He diversified his trafficking to cocaine, ecstasy, pill and “lean,” codeine cough syrup mixed with soda. Read the rest: Warlock Richard Lorenzo now a pastor