In February 1959, a nineteen year old from Brooklyn helped shoot a man to death. Seven months earlier, he had knelt at an altar rail beside his best friend. His best friend became the most famous convert in America. He went to prison.

Their names were Nicky Cruz and Israel Narvaez, and they ran the Mau Maus, one of the most feared gangs in New York. Nicky was the warlord, with sixteen stabbings behind him. Israel helped found it, was its vice president, and would lead it himself.

Three hundred and fifty miles away in Pennsylvania, a thin country preacher named David Wilkerson had just sold his television. He had worked out he spent two hours a night in front of it, and decided to pray in those hours instead. And it was in one of them, in a room with a pale rectangle on the wall where the television had been, that he opened a magazine and found a courtroom drawing of seven teenage boys, on trial for beating a fifteen year old polio victim, Michael Farmer, to death. Wilkerson looked at the drawing, and cried.

He drove to New York and walked into that courtroom to ask the judge to let him speak to the boys. He was refused. He was removed. And the photographers got him: a country preacher with a Bible, thrown out, in the next day's papers. That photograph is why every gang kid in the city knew his face.

Which is how, months later, he ended up on a Brooklyn street facing Nicky Cruz. Nicky spat on him and told him he would cut him to pieces. He meant it. And Wilkerson said the sentence that has followed them both ever since. You could cut me in a thousand pieces, he said, and lay them in the street, and every piece will still love you.

In July 1958 he hired a boxing arena and preached to a hall full of gang members. That night, two boys walked down the aisle together. One was Nicky Cruz, who went to Bible school and spent sixty years preaching to kids like the one he had been. The other was Israel, who went home, drifted back, and seven months later was one of four Mau Maus on a corner when a rival, Anthony Lavonchino, was shot dead.

Israel served his time. In prison, by his own account, he came back, and later wrote his own book. Both men lived to be old, and were photographed sitting together, friends. Same night. Same altar. Two roads.

Witnessed. Subscribe.