July 11, 2008 – Federal District Court, Sioux City, IA
“Is this judge serious?” thought Armin as he stood before United States District Court Judge Mark W. Bennett. He turned to his attorney and saw a similar reaction on his face. A face that, just hours before had looked him in the eye and said straightforwardly: “Armin, I need you to mentally prepare yourself to go to prison today. Because of the laws in Iowa, if you are convicted, you will go to prison today.” After a long pause, Armin answered, “I can’t be taken in front of my parents. My dad can’t handle it. He will have a heart-attack. I’m dead serious!” “Look Armin,” his attorney responded. “I don’t know how to tell you this, but it would be a miracle of GOD if you got anything less.”

Summer, 1999
“Look guys, what we got here is family” said Armin, as he looked around at his diverse, tight-knit crew. These were the boys he grew up with, fought with, and did everything with. They were all at the same place in life.  They always backed each other up. After watching his real family turn their backs on him, these guys had become his new family.

As they sat there at barely the age of 19, Armin was extending an invitation to his new family. It was an idea far beyond his years, and it was brilliant. “Look guys, it’s simple, we all come from different backgrounds, and throughout history, we’ve followed our families in their businesses. But why do we gotta’ follow their lead? I spend more time with all of you than I do with my own family, and I know you spend more time with me than you do with your family. So why don’t we bring our connects to the table, why don’t we open doors and opportunities to each other, come together as a family, and come up in this world as a family?!” Sure, they had been doing little stuff to make money for years; buying and selling drugs, buying stolen property and selling it, but what he was talking about was big. “Let’s get this money, get our girls, and get this power, but do it together as a family,” he said. They loved the idea, and they ran with it.

1999 – 2006
It didn’t take long for everything to come together. Within a year or two they were bringing in hundreds of thousands of dollars a month. The money was pouring in from everywhere, and the lifestyle was crazy. Money, girls, drugs, power… they had gotten it all. Heading to Vegas and dropping hundreds of thousands of dollars in one night.  Partying with pro athletes, music stars and the like. “The money was jus’ coming in from everywhere” Armin says. “The life was fun… It was fun for a long time. For the power, vacations and the family that we had…”

For years he ran the show, but at the age of 26, the lifestyle caught up with him. “You’re just chasin’… Just chasin’… That high… that sex, that money. You can have it all… but that high only lasts for so long… and then you crash.”

Armin describes it as a strategic game of chess. “I constantly had to know: where do I place my people? Where do I place myself? It was constant vendetta, it was exhausting. “I’d either sleep three hours a night, or if I could get a day off, I’d jus’ sleep all day. I was so drained, and jus’ constantly playin’ catch-up,” he says. “People would say: ‘Oh, you’re making the easy money Armin. An’ I’d look at them thinkin’ ‘Man, you have NOOO idea what you’re talkin’ about! Yeah, this money is fast, but it’s far from easy.’” He could see his life was going nowhere. He could see that nothing was coming from it. He was tired. “All I had on my hands was sin, and all I had in my pockets was money,” he says. The family that he had started this whole game with, was no longer family. It was a business: just hundreds of people making money off of each other.

Tired of a life of constant racketeering and the overwhelming burden of his sinful life… He went to all of his high-ranking connections and said “I’m done with this life. If you wanna take me out, then take me out.  I don’t care if you kill me. I’m already dead on the inside. You can have the money and the power. You can have what this life gives you…” His life had been threatened more times than he can remember. He was sick of his life. He wanted to be honestly happy from the inside.  He wanted to experience true joy. He walked out and they didn’t kill him.  Armin dropped that life and never looked back. “From the depths of my soul, I gave myself to God.”

“At one point I was on my knees in tears: God, I don’t know you… I jus’ can’t do this anymore. Show me you’re real. Talk to me. Do somethin’! Show me Your face. This life ain’t worth livin’. Please God, I can’t do this on my own. I don’t have the answers. I got nothin’… I got nobody… I got nothin’ but you to turn too!”

Armin started going to churches and seeking God out.  “A woman who was like a mother to me would talk life to me. She read me scripture and gave me scripture to read. It was redeeming. ‘God loves you. God forgives you. He is your second chance,’ she would say. Everything she had me read made me think, God really DOES love me. God really does care for me, no matter how much I screwed up. She knew I was involved in stuff, but she NEVER judged me. She never shook her head at me.  She never stopped loving me. She jus’ loved me more.”  Armin knew that God was now a part of his life.

After getting out of the business, he began mending relationships that were broken from his past choices.  He was seeking out God and getting peace in his own life.  Three months later, his past caught up with him and there they were, US Marshals knocking at Armin’s door…

January, 2007 – Minneapolis, MN
As Armin hung up the phone, his eyes told the story. “There are 16 US Marshals waiting for me at my parent’s house” he told his girlfriend. Another friend or two stared on in disbelief. He had been smart, never listing anything in his name, always choosing instead to have his girlfriend’s name listed on leases and such. It had worked in this case. The US Marshals were visiting his parent’s home looking for him. A home he hadn’t visited in months, a home that wasn’t home, and a family he barely knew.

They “cleaned out” the apartment, just in case. Drugs, money and other paraphernalia moved to a safe place.

As his friend drove him, Armin had an idea of what was ahead of him. Although he had recently walked away from a life of organized crime, he had a past, and it was catching up to him. He would face indictments from 13 federal agencies including the FBI, ATF, DEA and ICE, although he didn’t know it at the time.

As they pulled up to his parent’s house, he saw that it was a less than perfect night for this to go down. His parents were hosting a large party, with close friends and family in attendance. The Marshals had left, although he knew they were watching. Armin got out of the car and in surrender raised his hands in the air. The Marshals were on him immediately. “Let’s go inside” they said.  They just wanted to “talk.”

Following a meager good cop/bad cop routine and a fiery phone call with his lawyer they ended up taking him. After 2 nights in jail he was out on bail. They had him on manufacturing with the intent to distribute, money laundering (over $2.3 million), wire fraud and 10 other counts. And they didn’t even know the half of it.

2007-2008
Throughout his legal proceedings, Armin was constantly seeking God, but it wasn’t always easy. “After I got indicted, that’s when people started talking,” he says. “People would say: ‘Leave the money, the power… leave all that stuff behind to be broke, and pursue some fake guy who doesn’t exist with white hair and a big white robe. Have fun in prison. That’s your God. That’s what he does for you…’ It was tough man.”

After attending a large number of churches, Armin came across Sanctuary Covenant in Minneapolis. This was the first church that he went to where he could truly say: “This is God, I believe this.” He made Sanctuary his first church home, and went there for over a month.

He can remember very clearly a call he got from Chris Rush, a believer from Sanctuary at around 6:00 one night. Chris said: “I have no idea why I’m calling you so late, but there’s this group of guys that get together on Thursday nights called Men of the City. We’re meeting tonight at 9:00, and I really think it’d be great if you could come out.” Armin doesn’t even remember filling out the prayer request card the Sunday before. Chris was answering his card. Armin went.

The meeting started at 9:00. He can recall seeing Mark Mellen and Chris, playing pool, getting to know each other. “I was playing the role, I’m a nobody and there’s nothing interesting about me,” he says. Although he was cautious at first, Armin was impressed with this group of guys. They were real. They shared their lives with each other in a way that he had NEVER seen. They LOVED each other, and without hesitating, they loved him. He had not experienced this kind of love in a very long time, and he had a true sense that it was God loving him through this group of guys. “I couldn’t believe how real these cats were,” he says. He began attending the group regularly.

A few weeks later, Chris and Mark invited him to join them at Overflow Café. “Just come on out and hang out,” they said. As Armin sat with them he recalls: “Even as I went out to join those guys, something that had started in me the night before was telling me, confess to them. I had been dying inside with the burden of not telling anyone what was going on in my life… what I’d done. ‘God, I just need to let this out…’ I remember saying to myself.” The problem was: he was knee deep in his legal situation, and confessing to guys he barely new was a potentially horrible idea. After an hour of hanging out, they looked at him and said simply “whatever you need to talk about, whatever it is… you can tell us. You’re safe. We’re here for you.” Armin just about got up and walked away. Instead they moved to a more secluded area of the café and he spewed out his life story. It was tough because the whole time he was thinking to himself: “Stop, you’re a moron for telling these guys your story. Stop!” It was a constant battle.

Armin describes the feeling of confessing his story: “The feeling was nearly inexplicable. It felt like someone picked a tree off my back. I was walking lighter, and my sigh of relief felt like it was 3 minutes long. It was like I hadn’t taken a breath in 10 years. It was my first taste of oxygen. It felt amazingly good. It felt like I was floating.” The confession was life changing.

Not long after, Armin attended Substance Church for the first time. He described the experience as follows: “I said ‘alright, I will go check out Substance Church.’ and I came to Substance and I walked in and immediately thought to myself ‘what is this, a youth ministry?’ I looked around and there were smiling faces – There was so much life. The body language was just people loving each other. There were no hands in pocket, no arms crossed. Everyone was WIDE OPEN to each other… it was crazy… there was love in that room… and it was a high school! (Laughs) So I followed the music into the auditorium and saw the band jamming out, and their hands were in the air, but they weren’t performing – I could just tell that it was authentic worship. I sat there and watched it and I loved it, thinking ‘that’s what I’m talking about!’ Then Pastor Haas gets on stage and I was like ‘what is this guy?’ He was just so chipper, and had the biggest smile I had ever seen… you could just tell that he had so much joy in his life. Then the first thing Pastor Peter said was: ‘Man, what a beautiful bunch of people! I love you guys!’ with this huge smile on his face, and it was so genuine.  He truly loved everyone there. He said it and he showed it. I remember thinking to myself: THIS IS MY HOME HERE… everything I saw…”

Over the next 10 months, Armin immersed himself in Substance. He continued to meet with Men of the City and even joined and led the load-out team! On top of it all, he kept getting good news on his case. His potential sentence started out at 15 years to life in prison. Then it became minimum mandatory 10 years, then 5, and as he prepared to walk into his sentencing hearing in Sioux City Iowa, he was looking at a minimum mandatory year and a day in prison.

July 11, 2008 – Federal District Court, Sioux City, IA
Armin still couldn’t believe what was happening. The day had been such a blur. The federal courtroom had seen more random events during that two and a half hour hearing than he can remember. He remembers it like this.

“The judge maybe spent 10 minutes in his chambers making his sentencing decision, which is typically not a good thing. After, he walked to his seat and began the sentencing. He started it out with No prison time, and I just started crying. I ended up getting an unheard of 15 weekends in jail. At the time I thought he meant 15 weeks… but he meant 15 weekends… and I got a year of house arrest and 5 years probation. Then in another unbelievable motion, the judge said: ‘Armin, if you do what I think you’re going to do, which is doing really well during this probation time. I’ll personally take you off probation in 3 years…’ Smack, the gavel strikes and he makes it final. My head dropped, and I realized that I had to thank the judge. I looked up and he was walking towards me. I couldn’t fathom what was happening because judges never do this. He walked directly towards me, reached out his hand, shook my hand and said ‘Armin, it was a pleasure and an honor to have met you. Take this, run with it.’ Then he shook my lawyer’s hand and said: ‘You did a great job. You have a great client.’ It was unbelievable.”

Today
The change in Armin’s life today is evident. He can’t talk enough about God’s love for him; how God continues to call him to his knee, to sit and be in His presence. The change comes from wanting to change because God loves him so much, not because he is trying to “be perfect” for God. Armin sums it up like this: “I just feel constant joy. Constant security. When I’m scared, He’s there.  When I’m lost, He finds me. He takes my worries, my anxiety… He takes them away. He’s always there.”