The Brick

Shawn started life with a mom who had to work two or more jobs to keep up as a single parent, and a dad who chose drugs over family. His childhood began with missing pieces. As time passed his mom chose to marry a man who was an abusive drunk. When in his teens Shawn decided he’d had enough he became violent with his step-dad in an effort to defend his mom. After that he was kicked out of his home. He ended up on the streets of Portland, and eventually reconnected with his biological father. He chose to live with him for a while, but shortly after his dad died of cancer.  The holes within Shawn only continued to grow.

Through his struggles he found himself in and out of trouble with the law. Mostly crimes associated with aggressive behavior. The anger inside him was too much. While still not old enough to be a man by society’s standards he started selling drugs. The road he was on eventually led him straight into the middle of a very dark place. All of the poor choices ultimately caught up with him, and while most kids were turning twenty one at the bar; Shawn turned twenty one in the Oregon State Penitentiary.

He spent three years inside, and when he got out he moved away from the city to start over. It was then that his life began to change. It wasn’t easy, with a criminal record and no high school diploma the deck continued to be stacked against him. Regardless he has rose above the challenges, and became someone to admire.

Shawn was involved in a fatal car crash where a woman lost her life.  This was a turning point where he says,

GGMC is a group made up of men whom Shawn will tell you are his brothers. He is closer to these men than the family he knew as a child. While he grows stronger daily, the life of someone who has spent time inside is an ongoing struggle. These men, this family, give Shawn support and strength. They share his desire to be more than what society has labeled them, and the constant longing to always do better.

Shawn “The Brick” Palmer is the Gorilla Gospel Motorcycle Club’s National Sgt. At Arms and a custom bike builder who fabricates bobbers from scratch in his spare time.

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Tony Robinson Testimony:

Tony Robinson was raised by his mother in Eugene, OR. Like many people in the world today, he grew up with the little amount his single mother could provide for him and his older brother Robbie.

By the time he was in high school he watched his brother slowly become someone who was not his sibling anymore. Drugs had taken over his brother and were setting him up for a life behind bars. To date Robbie has spent around 15 years in prison and counting as we speak. Tony did have chances in life but as a teenager he picked a lifestyle that mirrored his surroundings. He began selling drugs, carrying guns, and was involved in several different aspects of hustling.

Violence was a major part of Tony, and his circle of friends, lives. Bar fights were a weekly occurrence, and assaults with deadly weapons were not rare. In the process of living this lifestyle, Tony shot and killed a man with one of his pistols. After months on the run and in moderate hiding, Tony was arrested and sent to the state prison. By the grace of God – and help from one of the areas leading attorneys, he was convicted of manslaughter rather than murder and sentenced to 10 years in prison.

After paroling home Tony had several choices in what he wanted to do next with his life. He could easily start selling drugs and live the easy fast life he knew, but instead with the support of his true friends and loved ones Tony took a path not many try to do after a decade in prison. He planned to work part-time along with a vision of being a full-time student working to get a higher education.

At the end of his first year of schooling, Tony had a 4.0 G.P.A. earning him a new more respectful nickname, 4-point Tone. After two years he graduated with a degree in business. With the support of the club he was pushed and encouraged to go farther into his education.

He sent an application to the University of Oregon and with in a month he was accepted into the college, making him now a Duck. But this was not enough for him, he wanted to prove that his past was just that, his past. Tony set a high goal for any business student and applied for the Lundquist College of Business Honors Program inside the University of Oregon. This is a very prestigious program that only lets in the top 36 students that enroll into the school of business each year.  Tony was one of the 36 accepted.

If you ask him how has he been so successful since he has earned his freedom, Tony’s statement is this,

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Brains Over Chains:

We begin this event again. PLEASE help us promote education over incarceration by donating new or used books for our program. The books will go to the Oregon Youth Authority (Maclaren) and the State Prison system. Earlier this year we brought Umatilla (Two Rivers) 10,000+ books. But the need is still huge in other facilities.

Many people are not sympathetic to men who are incarcerated and do not see the need to help inmates with books or with anything else for that matter.  While we do not share this sentiment, we ask that you consider your family, your neighbors, and those in your community that could be victims of future crimes.  Nobody wants that.  So, help us help inmates with the hope that we will change just one.  We are encouraging education and providing tools for men to learn and utilize that can help reduce or eliminate the cycle of criminal activity that continues in our communities.  The reality is, most men who go to prison once, go back again.  We need to try and stop this.  Stop this for them, stop this for the safety of the community.

  Why us?

We believe in living by example, and since the beginning of our club on the day we were founded, we have managed to keep a group of ex-cons from not only going back to prison, but from continuing down a path of crime, self-destruction and hopelessness. 

Gorilla Gospel Motorcycle Club strives to make the world a better place than we had previously left it.  We are sinners, ex-cons, and career criminals who have found hope in something greater than ourselves.

This year, are goals are high for brains Over Chains.  We have a vision of not only providing the needed books for the Oregon adult and juvenile prison system, but also creating a surplus of books that  could supply facilities around the country on a as-needed basis.  This week, our Eugene Chapter President, Huggie, said;

We believe reading is education, and education changes lives.  Help us make a change.

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In light of this, 

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Watch Todd Gobeille’s Testimony on the 700 Club:      The 700 Club – Video

His Story…

Our National President, Todd Gobeille in now officially an author. His book,  My Journey Home,  is the truth, raw and uncut.  The book can now be purchased at Amazon.com by following this link:

BUY “MY JOURNEY HOME, HOW I WENT FROM PIMPING AND DRUG PUSHING TO PEACE AND POSITIVITY”

AMAZON.COM says:

This story takes the reader through a lifetime of crime, pimping, prostitution, prisons and institutions, to redemption. This is the story of international minister Todd G who is the founder and President of Gorilla Gospel and Gorilla Gospel Motorcycle Club. Todd G was a pimp for 14 years and has been in and out of rehab, jail and prison since he was 16 years old.

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Tonight I was talking to a friend who is struggling with Faith and has, for the first time, questions and doubts about God.  We talked, and I told her she could read my testimony right here on www.gorillagospel.com.  In a nut shell, that is the simplified version of how God came into, and changed, my life.   I told her than after she read my testimony here, if she wanted to, I would tell her a story – somewhat of a follow up – about how I know that God is 100% hands-down, real and right here alive and well.  The story in long form will soon be published in a book about my life, co-authored by Soren Baker.  In the book, the story is edited and flows much more grammatically smooth – if there is such a term.  But for now, I will tell that “follow-up” story in my not-so-perfect, run-on sentence type of way.

So, as I touched on a bit in my testimony both here on the site in words and on DVD, I talked about how when I left the game and came home to stay with my parents as an adult, I was pledged with unspeakable nightmares.  I’m talking about to the point of near insanity.  When I would awake in my parents home, I would be coming out of dreams that blurred the lines between reality and craziness where I would kill my parents – and some of my friends – with brutal acts of violence.  I would lay in bed, holding my breath, until I could here the movement and voices through the downstairs ceiling.  It was then that I would confirm that I had, in fact, not killed my family.

And this wouldn’t stop.  The dreams wouldn’t go away.  I began going to a men’s group Bible Study with older, wiser, amazing men who prayed over me and gave me advice: Listen to Christian music and read your Bible before bed, pray, ect.  This will help to fight off this attack by the enemy.  I tried all that, but the dreams wouldn’t go away.  These men refused to allow the devil to have such a hold on my life and said as much.  They made a plan to come to my parents house and “intercede” – whatever that meant.

The night they came over, they all came downstairs to my bedroom and had me sit in a chair in the middle of the room. Then, they poured oil in the room.  On the door jams, the bed posts, ME, everywhere.  I thought this was not only weird, but a very unnerving as well.  Having all these men in the small room together was weird in its own right.  And then, to make matters more uncomfortable, they laid hands on me and prayed – each one of them.  They told God they were not going to allow the devil to have me back, and on and on.  While I was very uncomfortable, I also began to have a little bit of warm peace inside me for a minute.  When they finished praying, one man – who didn’t seem to be a crack pot – a rich retired business man who didn’t really act like a nut job – said that as we were all praying, he had a vision.

When he said that, I thought, hmmm, that doesn’t seem like a very lucrative or amazing thing.  Really, it just seemed like another bit of strangeness to ad to a night of weird new activities that I had never been a part of before.  After he said that, another man proclaimed that he had a “life verse” for me.  Now, that term is kind of “Christianese”  and cliche, but bare with me.

The life verse was, Isaiah 61

I now have that verse tattooed on my chest – but that’s another story…

So, I went to bed that night after the men had left and I woke up without nightmares for the first time since I had become a Christian.  I slept peacefully.  While the night before seemed down right weird, it was truly a miracle.  But don’t trip, there’s a little more to this story.

A few weeks later, my Dad asked me if I would go to a California Christian Business Men’s conference in Lake Tahoe with him.  This was a yearly event that he always attended and this year he wanted me to see it.  I did not want to go, but I agreed.  I felt like it was the least I could do since my parents had shown me so much love and let me stay there as I tried to get my life back on track – or I should say, start a real life for the firsts time ever.

Now, like my mens group, the conference was full of rich white business men – and I felt like I would have nothing in common with them or what they had to talk about.  But the first twist to this Tahoe trip was that when we arrived there it was cabin time where there were already about 5 or 6 men in the cabin sitting around eating and hanging out.  There were, as I had thought, all rich white men – with the exception of one.   He was easy to spot because he was a dark-skinned Indian man with a huge scar across his face – bigger than mine. And, he was holding court at the dining room table with the other men while they squirmed from his aggressiveness and tough-guy confrontational manor.  He was talking about walking the level 4 prison yard at Folsom on a 16 year sentence for shooting a peace officer.  The other men were more than uncomfortable to say the least.  Now, while my Dad is technically more peers with the other well-to-do white men, he also isn’t any kind of punk – and very aggressive in his own right.  A big time alpha male.  So, we weren’t in the cabin but for a few minutes before my Dad stopped him and said, you know that’s a really interesting story, but if you want to hear a testimony that will, “really knock your socks off” you ought to hear my sons.

At that point, the whole room was thinking, what could possibly top that? Thankfully for me, it was time to go to the first round of meetings. Saved by the bell – so to speak.  I was relieved and truthfully hoped that the men would forget my Dad had said that.  Up until this point, I not only had never given my testimony, I didn’t even full know exactly what my testimony was.

But, as soon as the meeting sessions were over, we were all back at the cabin to eat lunch.  Right away, one of the men said, they wanted to hear my story.  Suddenly, all eyes were on me.  So right then, for the first time in my life, I shared my past and how I had left that life after close to two decades of crime, violence, prison, pimpin, ect.  When I as done, the Indian man, Rodney, looked very serious, then hit his chest with his hand and said that I was his brother and that he would go into battle and fight 100 men with me by his side.  It was a trip.  For the rest of the conference, Rodney was right there with us.  Road dogs.

Anyhow, the conference ended, and like they do every year (I learned), all the men gathered in a room that looked out through big glass windows at Lake Tahoe from inside the Kings Beach Community Center type of deal.  A man, who was an author and one of the main guys that put the conference together every year, stood up and said that for the next few hours there would be an open mic and he would hand the cordless mic to whomever wanted to talk about what God was doing in their life – or what they had learned at the conference that year.  Like at a funeral, there was that initial awkward silence when nobody moves to the mic to begin talking.  But, as luck would have it, the first man to stand up and walk to the front before hundreds of men was my Dad.  My heart skipped a beat because I just knew he was going to talk about me.

As he got to the front and had the mic given to him, he asked the men, “Who of you has a prodigal child?”  When he asked this, immediately many, many hands were raised.  He then, paused, as his voice cracked a bit, and said that he has had a prodigal child that puts most prodigals to shame.  He went on to say that last year a man had gotten up and asked that same question he did, and he, my Dad, sat in the back corner of the room and cried.  Now please understand, my Dad is not a touchy-feely-full-of-emtion type of guy. He’s tough.  He finished by saying that, this year, his son was here with him and had accepted Jesus into his life and had chosen to follow the Lord.

The men began clapping.  Then the author, who ran the show, stood up and grabbed another cordless mic.

I was beyond nervous, but I stood up from my seat in the back, and walked forward. When I reached the front, the man said, would you please pray for all the men who had raised their hands and said they have prodigal children still out in the world.  With that said,  he handed me the mic.

Now, I’ve told this story many times, and I always say what happened next – but what I can’t say is the details, because even then I did not know them.  Having very little experience praying to God – let alone praying to God on a microphone in front of hundreds of men, I bowed my head and began to pray as I had been asked. I don’t know the words I used, I just prayed from the bottom of my heart.

When I finished and said, amen, two things happened.

…O.K., now please understand when I tell you this, I knew right then at that very moment God was not only real, but He was in control of everything in the world. I instantly thought back to a few weeks before when “Buzz” – the retired business man had said this would happen. I knew it was impossible – even with the best Hollywood writers or magicians – for anyone to have known that would or could happen like that.  It couldn’t have been scripted.

There is no chance encounters.  We DO have free-will and can alter our destiny 1,000 percent.  But when you allow God into your life, that’s when your story ends, and His begins.  He’s there.  Always has been, always will be.  I may not be able to fully express this, write this, or speak this eloquently enough to convince you.  But I knew that day in Tahoe, and I know now, GOD IS REAL…GOD GOT A PLAN FOR US…GOD PERFORMS MIRACLES ON THE DAILY.  Whether or not we chose to see them, well…That’s on us.

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Gorilla Gospel Motorcycle Club…

Due to the success we saw last year, GGMC asks you to partner with us as we again begin,  Brains Over Chains

Why:  We believe in education, both in classrooms and in prison cells.
The reality is inmates come back to our communities and will eventually
be our neighbors.  When the time comes for prisoners to be released,
we hope that we have done something to educate them.  Through books,
men and women can learn  about hope and a future.

How:  We are working in conjunction with the Oregon Department of
Corrections to provide inmates and prison library’s with books.

We are asking the public to donate unwanted new or used books that
we will be delivering to Oregon State Prisons on March 1st each year.

Partner with us.  By donating time and funds, you can help Gorilla Gospel do our part to make this world a better, safer, more effective place for us all to live in.

What makes us qualified?

We not only care, we have been there.  I speak not only on behalf of our club, but as an ex-con myself.  We know this life and we know just how hard it is to climb out of a crime-riddled lifestyle.  If we can – and have done it, so can they.

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These past few years we have grown and done so carefully.  We believe in quality over quantity when it comes to our club and it’s membership.  We are all guys who have come out of prison, and a life of crime.  We have a desire to move forward in life without losing the sense of brotherhood that those who come from the same background and elements as us share.

If you are friends, or family, and want to get involved with our Club there is a number of ways you can join the movement – without being a full patch member or Prospect.

If you know someone in your social circles or family that is looking for a club like ours, have them contact us and inquire about getting involved. We do background checks and are very careful who we consider to prospect for the club, however we can also often point someone in the right direction to another club or ministry if they are not a good fit with us.  Contact us for more info.

Join the movement.  Get involved with something that matters.

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I think we are all looking for something.  As a kid, I was looking for a place to fit in and somewhere to belong.  I’m not so sure that has changed too much over the years.  The difference now is, after looking for so long without any real peace or satisfaction, I found something that mattered.  I finally looked in the right place.

I realized this the other day as I walked into the recording studio at our church.  It was late and no one but a few of us working on a album mix-down were there.  It flashed me back to the incredible peace that I had felt when I first gave my life to God.  I immediately was taken back to a time when alot of heavy burdens were taken off my shoulders as though there had been a thousand pound weight removed from me.  It wasn’t as much about the church as it was about the memory of what it stood for, where my life had been, and where it had come to.

As most who know me understand, I wasn’t entirely warmed up to the idea of living in Central Oregon at first – which I looked at as the middle of nowhere.  And the winter?  I wasn’t head over heals about the snow and single digit temps either to say the least.  But in the middle of nowhere, in the cold, I had a warmth that really can’t be described accurately – at least with any words that I know.  But what I had found in God was rest.  It was peace.  Something I had never known before.   But one thing is for sure, I could finally breath.  My nerves had settled.  Funny thing is, I didn’t even know how restless I was completely.  That is, until I found this peace.

My life changed outside of Sacramento, California.  On a farm.  By myself, in the middle of nowhere.  Then, I came to a place in Central Oregon where I had no history, but where my family had relocated.  What I found here, for now, is a home…in a very unlikely place.

Here, is where my life actually started.

And now, at the center of this, He’s there.

I am patient with others, as God was patient with me.  I don’t beat people over the head with Bibles, or hand out spiritual tracts.  Im just out here in the struggle, in the trenches, and in the thick of it all.  And while Im still looking for something,  now, I know what it is – and I see it.  If you want it, we got it. And at the end of the day,  it might not look like you think it does.

That’s the biz.

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This year, for 2013, we are coming to city near you.  Our Valley Of Death Southland Crew will be opening up two chapters in the next few months outside of Oregon.  Stay tuned.

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