Leon Chester Stewart isn’t someone you can easily ignore. Tall, tattooed and bald, he stands out without even trying.

The intrigue deepens when the 54-year-old speaks. Funny and forthright, he is a consummate storyteller with a back story as colourful as his heritage – his father is Anglo-Indian and his mother is Italian-Indonesian. 

Now a senior pastoral staff at St Paul’s Church, his was a life of gang violence and drugs that almost saw him thrown into prison twice.

His descent into darkness was not because of his family but in spite of it.

Seeds of shame

Leon was born to Christian parents who sought to create a loving home for him and his siblings – an older and a younger brother. His father was an engineer and his mother a part-time seamstress.

“Mum was pretty strict. Dad was more laidback, more chill.”

Life was “pretty okay” until his father suffered a heart attack when Leon was three. His father’s health was never the same again and the elder Stewart soon had to resign from his job in the heavy machinery industry.

Leon (extreme right) with his parents and brothers.

The family finances naturally took a hit. By the time young Leon was about nine or 10, the family had to rely on food rations from a church.

“My mum would always take me along to collect the rations. There was a Catholic church that would give out alms to the poor – rice, sugar.

“What was really embarrassing for me was that I saw my friends from the neighbourhood there. They would ask, ‘What are you doing here? Eh, you on welfare?’

“My self-esteem was really damaged.”

It did not help that his mother often compared Leon to other children like his friends and cousins.

“She would say, ‘Why can’t you be like this person? You’re good for nothing.’ She always used these words.

“It created friction between us because I felt I wasn’t good enough for her. And the words became a sort of false foundation to believe that I was really good for nothing.”

The comparison would happen even in public in the presence of his friends in Sunday School.

“It was very embarrassing for me.”

The Sunday School years

Leon was not a naughty child, just a curious one.

“I am the kind of guy – if I’m walking along the path and I see a bottle of water, I would kick it to see what would happen.”

Leon (standing, fifth from right) in Primary 1.

His father had married late and was well into his 50s when Leon was growing up. Coupled with his poor health, his father found it “a challenge to keep up with his sons” who were just your regular boisterous boys.

“We would catch spiders and play in the rain. We made paper boats and floated them down the drain when it flooded.” 

The family worshipped regularly at St Andrew’s Cathedral and Leon obediently went every week.

“The years in Sunday School were pretty fun,” he recalled. “I had a lot of good friends who were really nice kids.

“I was very immersed in Sunday School, taking part in all the quizzes and Sunday School camps.

“We used the Good News Bible then and I would be one who was very fast at flipping to the right Scripture passage.

“Then I would to read the passage and get stickers and sweets!”

Turbulent teen years

But as the tween years rolled in, he began to display “a very rebellious streak”.

“My mother would try to tell me to do something and I would argue back.

“She used to want to cane me. I would anticipate where she would swing and I would catch the cane. I would catch and catch till she said, ‘Ah, you’re the devil child!’”

During that time, he also “fooled around a lot” in school. When he failed his PSLE, he hardly batted an eyelid.

“I was like, ‘Oh okay, no big deal.’ My mind was totally warped then.”

Repeating Primary 6 was, for Leon, the beginning of a slide down a slippery slope. He met other boys who had similarly flunked out but who had ties with the secret society. One introduced him to smoking and to the gang life.

At Leon’s very first meeting with the gang leader who called himself “Killer Mike”, he was taken to a vicious gang fight right in the heart of Orchard Road.

“Killer Mike grabbed my hand and said, ‘You don’t run. You stay here and watch.’ That was when I got scared. I was trembling.

“They were throwing chairs. There was blood everywhere. The fight got really, really, violent.”

But in the end, Leon’s curiosity got the better of him.

“When Killer Mike asked me if I liked what I saw, I said it was very interesting. There was this feeling that this was quite happening, seeing them fight, the bravado.”

Just like that, Leon joined the gang. Every Saturday was spent getting into fights. He became “good at punching people” and began to move up the ranks. The boy who grew up being told repeatedly that he was good for nothing finally found something he was good at, among people who affirmed him.

“With the power of the gang came the girls. That kind of false glamour really enticed me to the point  where I was not interested in studying.”

Despite making it to Secondary 3, Leon chose to drop out of school.

By the time Leon (centre, back) was 16, he had not only stopped going to school, he had also stopped going to church.

“I waltzed into the principal’s office and told him, ‘I’m sick of studying in your school. I want you to write my testimonial and give me my leaving certificate. I’m leaving school. If you’re not happy, you can call my parents.’”

The principal did, but nothing could dissuade Leon, not even seeing his mother in tears.

By then, he had also stopped attending church. When his mother brought the Bible to him, he threw it down.

“I went to the cross on her door and broke the cross. Then I cursed her. I was very vulgar towards her, very violent, throwing things around the house.”

“God told me not to let you go”

Though his life became an endless cycle of fights fuelled by drugs, drinking and smoking, Leon amazingly never got arrested. 

One weekend in 1986, Leon went to meet his gang at their usual hangout in town only to find no one there. None of his seven to eight gang friends ever turned up and, though he asked around, no one knew of their whereabouts.  

In that instant, he lost touch with his gang.

“Till today, I have no idea where these guys ended up.

“I heard rumours a few years later that a few of them ran to Malaysia because of some gang things that went sour.”

Free from his gang, it was Leon’s chance to turn his life around. Instead, he got recruited into another gang.

He had beaten up three men who had disturbed his cousin. A gang leader had witnessed it.

Leon at 17. Although he would eventually get out of the gang life, his addiction to drugs would persist into his 20s.

“He came up to me and said, ‘You very fierce, the way you fight. Come and talk.’ Then he asked me to join his gang.”

This gang was “more violent than the previous one”, Leon said. They would harass people on the streets and beat them up “for no rhyme or reason, not even to rob them”.

His mother knew of his gang association but there was little she could do to stop him.

With his mother, Angeline, in a recent photo. He admits that she did the best she could raising him, although at that time he did not see it.

Then one day as Leon was preparing to leave his house to meet his gang, his mother came out of her bedroom, took the house keys away and stood at their front door with her arms folded.

“She told me, ‘You are not going out of the house today. God told me not to let you out of the house.’

“I scolded her and called her names. I told her, ‘Your Jesus is full of rubbish!’

“But she said, ‘If you are going to leave this house, it’s going to be over my dead body.’

“I knew she was really, really serious when I looked at her face.”

He threw a mighty temper tantrum, overturning furniture and throwing down picture frames. But he stayed put. A few days after the blowout, he opened the newspapers and got the shock of his life.

“I found that all nine of the guys I was supposed to meet had been arrested and were facing a charge of murder.

“A fight had taken place in the toilet. They were beating up a man and one of them kicked the guy in the skull, fracturing it and killing him.”

He raced to his mother, newspaper in hand.

“She looked at me and said, ‘I told you so. I told you God told me not to let you out of the house.’”

But with his hardened heart, Leon refused to believe his mother.

“My concept of God was Someone who sat on the throne with a lighting bolt saying, ‘Ah, you doing something wrong! Shoot!’

“He was a Being far away, untouchable. Why should He bother about me?”

In the grip of drugs

National Service put a permanent stop to the gang life, but not to Leon’s drug addiction.

Drifting from job to job, a newspaper advertisement caught his eye one day. It said “crocodile keeper”.

In reality, the now defunct Jurong Reptile and Crocodile Paradise were looking for a showman to perform with the crocodiles. It was a weird and wild role, and something that intrigued the naturally curious and fearless Leon.

“I had a sick sense of adventure,” he told Salt&Light. “The job became really fun and I really, really enjoyed it.”

While his career as part performer part animal handler soared, his personal life plunged to a new low.

In his 20s, the job of crocodile handler that Leon thought was so thrilling would end up sending him down a warren of vices.

“That’s where my drug problem got worse.”

As it turned out, his colleagues at the reptile park were doing drugs as well and it became “one big merry family taking drugs together and working together”. 

Not even meeting the love of his life put a stop to his habit.

Read Part 2 of Ps Leon’s story here on how God shocked the hardened young man with His audible voice.

“After all that you have done, I still love you”: The audible voice of God changed him from gangster to pastor

RELATED STORIES:

“I couldn’t get love”: Beaten by his dad, abandoned by his mum, jailed 4 times. What hope was there of reconciliation?

What this gangster-turned-pastor saw in his late father’s secret cabinet moved him to tears

Gang member at 15, incarcerated 6 times, yet God used this “hardcore addict” to bring hope through House of Anatole