In October 1999, a 19-year-old boat runner from Little Haiti was told to stay for a ceremony nobody was supposed to see. Today he’s a pastor, he’s sober, and he’s done being scared. This is everything he saw.
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“I was the boy who brought the party.”Tap to watch Marcus’s confession
He’d just run forty kilos through a Coast Guard sweep with a helicopter light on the water behind him for eleven minutes. The man everybody called the Chairman heard about it and invited him up to the house.
He was nineteen, in a borrowed shirt, and he thought he’d made it.
The music stopped. The waiters, the DJ and the women were walked out a side door, fast, like it had been done a hundred times. The Chairman pointed across the room and said, “The boat boy stays.”
A senator, a banker, a TV preacher and an actor you’d know in half a second put one hand on a glass case and started saying the same thirteen words. Over and over. Everybody in the room except him.
Voted out of his own church, sleeping in the back of a pickup truck in its parking lot, he remembered those words. What he did with them next is the reason he’s alive.
“They’re not afraid you’ll get rich. They’re afraid everybody will.”A man who has been on the Forbes list for 23 years, in a phone call Marcus recorded
My name is Marcus Innocent. I’m 49, father of three, from Little Haiti in Miami, the part they don’t put on the postcards.
I’ve been a cartel boat runner. I did eleven years in federal prison. I became a pastor, and then I became a pastor with a cocaine habit nobody knew about, until my nose started bleeding in the middle of a sermon on Easter Sunday.
I lost the church, my marriage and my car. Now I run The Upper Room, a free forty-bed recovery house right next door to that same church.
I don’t care if you believe me. I just want you to hear it.
Baptists, Catholics, ex-cons, folks who’ve never prayed a day in their lives. It doesn’t matter which one you are. Watch it to the end, because the part you came for is near the end.
Watch Marcus’s Confession »Free to watch · plays on any phone“I’ve had lawyer letters. A black SUV sat across from my church three nights in a row. So be careful where you tap, because you may not find this video again.”