Born to Fly or Fail?

“Basically, I’m adopted.”

This is Nati’s opening salvo as he reaches back into memory to trace his roots. Born in 1976, Nati and his sister were abandoned by their biological parents and raised from when he was three years old in a loving home on the East Coast.

“My parents are wonderful people, who did everything they could for us,” Nati credits them. He traces his downward spiral into the criminal underworld to several factors, including having a tough time in school and a betrayal by his biological mother, with whom he’d harbored a core-level longing for reconciliation.

In a single, fateful meeting with his birth mother — who was Jewish, but not observant — when he was 14, she told him, “You were mistakes, you and your sister should never have been born, and I regret having you.”

“When she told me that,” Nati remembers, “a switch went off in my head.” The devaluing, destabilizing words — a complete rejection — cut to Nati’s soul.

I’ll show you. I’ll show you all. I’ll do it myself, Nati resolved internally, and he began a pained, desperate search for both validation and independence, moving toward what he calls “attention-seeking behaviors… the wrong kind of attention.”

Nati donned a tough exoskeleton and began to drift from the path of Torah, dropping inexorably from level to level, soon finding himself resorting to fighting and petty crime.

“I thought I was a tough guy. I thought I was somebody important. I really wasn’t,” he says. “I was robbing people. I was stealing from people. I was hanging out on the streets.”

Nati was sent to a yeshivah, but it wasn’t enough to keep him off the streets. He was just a young teenager, but his criminal escapades had already progressed to the point that he couldn’t stay in yeshivah. The next stop, at age 15, was a tough-love teen rehabilitation center.

It was a drastic mistake, because the rehab center turned out to be an abusive mind-control cult, imprisoning teens against their will under the guise of treatment. It kept them under 24-hour surveillance, prevented them from talking, made them exercise and work out until they dropped, keeping them perpetually exhausted, and convinced them they had all sorts of addictions even when it wasn’t true. Teens in the program were subjected to torture, deprivation of basic human needs, and interference with daily living functions. Staff would even detain people who just came to visit siblings in the program and convince them that they had non-existent addictions, brainwashing them to sign themselves into the program. About 80 teenagers were in the program during the year Nati was there.

When his parents began to suspect something was off about the facility, they approached famed cultbuster Rabbi Shea Hecht for help.

“The head of the cult brainwashed not only the children, but even their parents,” Rabbi Hecht tells Mishpacha. “He preyed on the desperation of fathers and mothers who saw no other solution for their children, and made them submit to everything he ordered. He also had it in for Jewish families. There were two or three frum families with kids in the program, and he would tell them they had to drive to the facility on Friday night, on Shabbos, to visit their kids, or else the kids would be lost. Many parents presented the question to their rabbanim, and got a psak that in such extenuating circumstances, it was indeed permitted.”

After a year in the “treatment” center, Nati was extracted by Rabbi Hecht, who worked together with a drug counselor named Michoel Berman a”h. But Nati says that at the time, he was so brainwashed that when Rabbi Hecht and a neighbor came to take him away, “I jumped out of the car in the middle of the turnpike to go back to the program. I was convinced that if I left, I’d wind up dead.”

Downhill Slide

Nati was free of the cult, but with no future in a yeshivah, where could he turn?

His next stop in the search for himself and his meaningful role in the world was the Jewish Defense League (JDL), the paramilitary group dedicated to the protection of Jewish people around the world by any means necessary. But these were no longer the early “glory days” of the JDL. Founder Rabbi Meir Kahane Hy”d had moved to Israel in 1981 where he established the spinoff Kach party and eventually made it into the Knesset, leaving the JDL in the hands of several ill-fated directors, including Irv Rubin, who in 2002 was murdered in prison while awaiting trial for the bombing of a mosque. Rabbi Kahane himself was assassinated in 1990 while back in the US on a lecture tour.

What attraction did the JDL hold for Nati in the early 90s? “I needed to be a part of something, and I liked the violence part. I’d always liked to fight — I’d been fighting all my life.”

The group was a loosely-organized consortium of disaffected youth with a penchant for bravado and hubris as an expression of their Jewish identity. As many as 100 members met weekly in upstate New York for military-style training drills, including lessons on weapons handling and shooting, and exercises like running along the beach carrying a man on a stretcher.

“We protected Yidden,” Nati explains. “That’s what it was for. I can’t say now that I agree with everything we did back then, because I think we instigated some things….” He declines to elaborate, explaining, “I don’t want to wind up on their bad list.”

In 1995, before he turned 19, Nati — who’d been a petty thief for years — was arrested for the first time for burglary.

“It was terribly embarrassing for my father,” he says regretfully. “He was the rabbi, and his son was a nice Jewish boy breaking into people’s houses.”

He served time, and in his own words, it was “downhill from there.”

The first stay in a correctional facility accomplished nothing remotely resembling “corrections” for Nati. On the contrary, it forced him to solidify his place in the criminal underworld just to stay alive. He had interactions with gang members before being incarcerated, but survival in prison requires a complex network of alliances and affiliations.

“There were no other Yidden in prison, and I needed allies, someone to watch my back,” he says. The only way to accomplish that was to be a part of something. Within a short time, he was officially a member of a criminal gang.

These weren’t gangs that roamed the streets randomly attacking innocent people. They ran a number of illegal operations, but it was like a business. The group ran guns, drugs, and most other underworld rackets, but also contributed to the community, sponsoring youth basketball leagues and giving out gifts to families on holidays.

“I’m not condoning anything they did, but it was different than today. There was a family aspect to it,” he says. Members had to learn the rules, a code of ethics and behavior they would need to live by. And yes, there were even tests.

Nati’s own role, when out of prison, was to be the enforcer, the front man who represented the enclave. “So, if a member of another gang showed up, I was basically the guy who would go out and ask what’s up,” he explains.

The downward spiral continued after Nati’s first bout in the clink. He tangled with the law multiple times over the next 25 years, eventually serving time for a variety of convictions including gun charges and assault charges, and was later acquitted of murder charges for which he stood trial. In total, he spent 20 years in prison, most in three separate terms between 1995 and 2022. He was moved around a lot, incarcerated in Rahway, Trenton, Northern State, Southside, Bayside, Somerset, and Atlantic City — nearly every prison in the state besides Mid-State Prison and Avenel. Most of his time was spent in maximum security prisons, with some stints in prison camps or halfway houses.

Yet through it all, although his life was covered by many layers of crime, Nati was still driven by his search for validation and held on to a secret desire to find his rightful place and contribution to society and community. For over two decades, the goal remained elusive, the spark lost — like when a judge told him pointedly, “You’re a menace to society.”

Throughout those long years, though, Nati somehow clung to his relationship with Hashem and basic principles of Yiddishkeit. He always insisted on kosher food, and fought to keep his tefillin with him wherever he was taken. The Aleph Institute, an advocacy program for Jews in prison, was an indispensable ally at all times.

“From day one, when I wanted kosher food, Aleph fought for me to get it,” Nati says. “They fought for me to have my tefillin, sent me matzah on Pesach, and always made sure a rabbi came to learn with me at least once a week, even though it was hard for Aleph to keep track of me because I was moved so often.”

Kosher was a major battle. The kosher meals were apparently more attractive than the standard meals, and other inmates resented Nati’s perceived preferential treatment — or so the wardens claimed when they denied his request for kosher accommodation in the name of order and discipline. Nati had to fight for kosher food several times during his incarceration, but was denied at every turn, even sent to punitive solitary confinement (“lockup”) over it several times. Finally, he turned to prison-style persuasion.

“First, I went on a hunger strike,” he says. “Then I started a riot.”

Nati’s fellow gang members all had his back, and one day at mess hall they all threw their food trays instead of eating. A riot ensued, until corrections officers finally restored order, and the next day, Nati was granted his kosher food and given a letter that would be good for every prison facility indicating that he was to be given only kosher.

Prison security initially confiscated his tefillin, assessing them as a suicide risk, a possible tool to be used for hanging. Aleph ran interference and smoothed out the pathway to tefillin, which Nati put on every day in prison in every facility after that.

Sitting on a sunny porch in Lakewood, it’s hard to imagine living interminable ennui in the cold, hard, dark environs of a prison compound. What was it like being the only visibly Jewish person in an environment of criminals and thugs?

And visible he was. Nati wore his yarmulke the entire time. He didn’t have issues with Muslims or inmates of other religions. “They respected me, and I showed respect for them,” Nati says. “We got along.” The bigger problems came from members of racist, anti-Semitic groups like skinheads, Aryans, and the KKK, which made Nati’s gang affiliation indispensable. His teammates watched his back, and all the other inmates knew they would come to each other’s mutual defense. Still, prison is a violent place, and Nati was injured and even stabbed several times.

Long Road Back

Nati doesn’t go into much detail over the next phase of his life, only to say that in 2017, out of prison after his second period of incarceration, he got married.

There was still a burglary case pending, but he was free for now. He became the proud father of a baby boy who he and his wife named Aryeh Leib.

Several months later, though, he lost the case, and was sent back to jail for another five years. This time, it was very different. He had a family, a wife and a child, on the outside. Prison life was now incomprehensibly foreign. He vowed to turn over a new leaf when he got out.

Having a family of his own gave Nati the sense of belonging and meaning he had always been searching for. Moreover, he wanted with all his heart to make sure his little boy would not have a similarly blemished childhood.

“When I saw my son, something clicked in my head. It turned around. Seeing him, I knew I didn’t ever want him to feel the way I felt about not being a part of something.”

Five years passed, and Nati was finally free to rejoin his family, but the relationship didn’t survive the stress of separation. Nati gave his wife a divorce and custody of Aryeh Leib, whom he now sees on alternate weekends.

Nati didn’t have the family he’d dreamed about over the last five years — a blow that would have broken others — but he made a commitment and kept to it. He would stay on the outside. Now faced with the challenge of making an honest living for the first time, he borrowed a car and took a job delivering food for DoorDash delivery service, living and sleeping in the car and keeping all his worldly possessions in it.

And then, the car was stolen, along with everything inside.

“I stopped somewhere to make a quick delivery and left the keys in the car for a moment,” Nati relates. “When I got back, it was gone. My phone was gone, literally everything was gone.”

At a loss for who to turn to, Nati got to a phone and called the Aleph Institute. The person who answered advised him to call Moshe Tress.

“Who’s Moshe Tress?”

“Call him. Here’s the number.”

Nati called him.

“Who are you?” Nati asked.

“Come to my office on Airport Road in Lakewood and we’ll talk,” said the voice on the other end.

When Nati met one of Lakewood’s foremost philanthropists and baalei chesed, he shared his entire life story, not really knowing why he was there or what he was asking for.

“Listen,” Tress said. “I’m going to buy you a car. Go find a car and I’ll pay for it.”

Nati didn’t quite believe it, certain it was just talk. But he did find a car, and Moshe Tress was as good as his word, getting Nati back on his feet for the short term.

“I didn’t know why he helped me,” Nati says. “I still don’t know.” But it was what he needed to continue working, to pay his way instead of taking it. He went for it, and made it work.

I followed up with Moshe Tress, and asked him what had prompted him to help Nati. He had a relationship with Aleph from earlier joint projects and a good eye for people.

“When I met Nati, I saw a good heart underneath a very thick skin,” he explains. “He had been through a lot of difficulty, but still had a good, kind heart and a powerful desire to get it right. I believed in him.”

That belief would prove to be a gamechanger.

Paying It Forward

In late 2022, Moshe Tress called Nati. “Listen,” he said, “we have a problem here in Lakewood you might be able to help with.”

“Sure, what is it?”

“Jewish gangs.”

Nati burst out laughing. “Jewish gangs? In Lakewood? You’ve got to be kidding me.”

“No jokes. Come for Shabbos and you’ll see.”

Nati came for Shabbos, spending Friday night at a shul that had become a hangout for troubled teens. Over the night, he interacted with over a dozen kids, resolving or preventing a number of “situations.”

Nati worked out a plan with Tress and the rabbi of the shul, and became a permanent fixture of the neighborhood, officially hired as a security guard. He was able to communicate with the youngsters in their language, and also developed a relationship with the rav, who he counts as a personal mentor until today.

Working alongside rabbanim and askanim, Nati brought a level of street credibility and straight-talk to the teenagers in the neighborhood that they hadn’t seen before. He demanded order in the shul and the neighborhood, and at the same time showed the kids — from experience — that unrestrained behavior has long-term consequences, that a few ill-advised adventures could send them down a pathway from which they would find it difficult to be redeemed.

Within a few months, Nati had gained the respect of the troubled teens, showing them that they could be better. The hangouts diminished, and incidents of teen crime and violence in the area dropped markedly. Today, most of the street population from then is gone, but now there’s a new crop of kids, many from out of town, he says.

Challenged teens can be found anywhere today, even in the most sheltered families in a town famed for its Torah institutions. Nati gets them —  and today, nothing is more important to him than to pull them up so they don’t wind up where he did.

“Most of the kids who turned themselves around just realized that they didn’t want to follow the path they were on,” Nati relates. “They saw where it was leading, and got scared. So the strategy is to help them see that future sooner. I tell them, you want to smoke so badly? Smoke a whole pack, right now in front of me. They’ll be throwing up after three cigarettes. They want to be packing (carrying a gun)? I say I’ll drop them off in the real ’hood, take them to Newark, to Irvington. Let’s see how fast they come running back. They’ll see right away that smoking will kill them and that carrying a weapon is going to get them hurt.”

His approach is to cause them to organically see their own future based on their current decisions. Teenagers aren’t naturally good at that, but when they see it, they will usually make the right choices.

Parents sometimes turn to Nati to talk to their challenged teens. It’s not what he does naturally, but he rarely turns down a request.

“If I can help save a kid’s life, I won’t say no. I’ll do my best to wake them up,” he says.

His experience, his intuition, his understanding of body language — all having come at a great cost — is one an outsider can never quite copy. Several weeks ago, a business owner who had suffered a break-in and burglary called Nati, and showed him security footage of the theft.

Without seeing the perpetrator’s face, despite the lack of identifying body characteristics or movements, Nati knew instantly who the thief was — one of the teens he’d encountered on the streets. He called the young man and told him to give back everything he had stolen. “Listen, I know it was you,” he said. “I want the stuff back.”

It was all returned the next day.

Moshe Raitzik, a Lakewood politician, member of the school board, and a cousin, says what he’s done for the town is unique.

“People have to deal with the hand they are dealt, but Nati has taken a particularly rough hand and parlayed it into something amazing,” Raitzik says. “He’s giving to a community that essentially rejected him in his youth, making sure others don’t make the same mistakes.”

Growing the Win-Win

Not everyone appreciated Nati’s mission. One morning, the rabbi called. “Nati, don’t come to work today,” he said. “There are five kids here with ski masks waiting for you.”

But Nati had protection that came from a surprising, unexpected and unpredicted place — a number of friends from his former life: gang members, fellow former inmates, and contacts from that brotherhood he could call to help him. This was a unique resource that had not been tapped before, and it made a swift difference in the neighborhood.

“Rabbi, relax,” Nati said. “I’m coming to work, but I’m not coming alone.”

Nati and his men continued to patrol the area, and slowly expanded their circle of responsibility to include the rest of Lakewood and the surrounding towns of Jackson and Toms River. The group was asked to provide security to a number of establishments, including some stores. They dealt with more than teens, and began fielding calls to respond to anti-Semitic harassment. In the aftermath of October 7, 2023, these incidents spiked.

The security business segued into a delivery service. The two glove nicely with each other; running deliveries gives Nati’s people reason to be out on the roads of Lakewood, spreading across the town and watching for security incidents. It also keeps them close at hand at shopping centers that are often centers of gravity for trouble.

Nati organized the two services into a company he called Lion Heart Services, inspired by the name of his son, Aryeh Leib, who remains the driving force and motivation behind his recovery. “Everything I do, I do for my son,” Nati stresses.

Nati was working security at Bun Burger, a popular kosher fast-food restaurant in Lakewood, when the owner, Yechiel Reiner, offered him the job of managing deliveries. The business took off from there, and Lion Heart now serves close to 30 businesses across various industries, providing delivery and on-call security.

The staff of Lion Heart are almost all non-Jewish ex-convicts, people with whom Nati has a thorough relationship and confidence. Six are working security, and another 17 are on patrols and deliveries. Many of them have been able to turn their own lives around, like Nati himself, because he gave them a job, a structure, and a sense of responsibility.

“If Mark Tress hadn’t given me my tenth chance in life, I would be nowhere right now,” Nati says. He’s grateful that he has an opportunity to pay that forward, giving others a ladder to a new life.

Ultimately, keeping the team around has another advantage in addition to the daily security they provide and the deliveries they serve. In the event there is a significant security threat against the Lakewood Jewish community, Nati’s “guys” are on standby to help out.

“These are people who will fight for the Jewish community,” he says. “They won’t stand back, or leave, or just call the police. This is a network of contacts that’s grateful to the community and will step up when needed.”

The group includes members of three different gangs, and Nati is the first to recognize the need to ensure that all his workers are not a safety risk.

“I trust them, but I never trust anybody,” Nati tries to explain the dichotomy of relationships in the underworld. “These are guys who had my back in prison. We were there for each other. But on the other hand, I never trust blindly — but I trust the system we’ve set up. They know that if there is any misstep, it will be dealt with immediately, and so it doesn’t happen.”

When they aren’t working, Nati’s team drives patrol through many areas in Lakewood and the surrounding towns. Some of the time is contributed for free, some is paid out of Nati’s own pocket. The team responds to incidents or takes calls for help several times a week.

Calls have come in for Nati to set up similar teams in other Jewish communities in the greater New York area, but for now, he prefers to focus his energies on the area in which he is currently invested.

We’re sitting on a third-floor deck. Nati gestures with his arms to the treetops swaying in the breeze, the cars passing on the road below.

“I’ve learned to value all this,” he says earnestly. “I love life, every second of it. I’ve been in prison, where you would be talking to someone one minute and ten minutes later hear that he’s dead. It happens.”

“So you’re happy to be just healthy and free?” I prompt.

Nati stops me. “I’m not healthy,” he cautions. “But I’m getting better every day. And I’m free. Everything else is secondary. People take their freedom for granted as life is passing them by.

“You know, I used to be taking things from people, kicking down doors. But now I’m knocking on doors. I’m giving to people, and I love that. It’s such an amazing feeling to help, to give… whether it’s a sense of security and protection or just the food that you paid for and ordered delivered. It’s something big, it’s being a part of something, part of Hashem’s plan for the universe, in some small way, every day.”

DO YOU KNOW WHERE YOUR CHILDREN ARE?

As he drives the streets of Lakewood today, kids who will talk to no one else are happy to see Nati and engage him conversation. He admits he’s no chinuch expert, but his time on the streets and behind bars has given him a certain perspective on the mindset of these kids. What advice can he give parents worried about keeping their children on track?

“You have to know where your child is spending time, what he or she is doing. You don’t want to find out that they are hanging out at 7-Eleven or QuickChek at all hours and you had no idea. Unfortunately, many parents are clueless as to what their children are doing. I come talk to them, and they deny it until I show them security camera footage of their tzaddik’l spraying paint on a yeshivah wall.”

The sad reality is that troubled youth today are different than even just a few years ago, Nati says. Many are involved with hard drugs, like pills or cocaine, and not just a little recreational marijuana. There is also a proliferation of guns — both self-assembled ghost guns made on 3-D printers and those bought on the black market. “Kids, fourteen or fifteen years old, know how to use the black market better than I do. I can’t tell you how many guns — literal firearms, not BB guns — we took off young kids in the last two years.”

The interest and involvement of a respected mentor can make a huge difference as well. “Every day I ask my son, ‘How was school? What did you learn today? Did you brush your teeth?’ Simple things, but making it clear that I’m interested. And I’m going to keep doing that every day until I’m dead.”

IF YOU SEE SOMETHING, DO SOMETHING

Nati isn’t about scaring Lakewood residents, but he is concerned about the overall state of security in the area.

“There’s a lot of anti-Semitism in the area, everyone knows that,” he says. “It shows up in little squabbles like neighborhood disputes and traffic incidents. But we need to understand that it can blow up one day, and maybe soon.”

One of Nati’s contacts in the underworld is a member of a group called the Aryan Brotherhood, a highly organized and violent white supremacist gang known for strong anti-Semitic views. The group formed in the prison system, but has since spread beyond its walls. Nati’s contact reports that cells of the Aryan Brotherhood meet and are organized in Wall, Brick, and Jackson Townships.

“These guys don’t like us just because we’re Jews,” Nati says, “and there is going to come a point at which they’ll show their face. I hope when they do, everyone is ready for it.”

I ask Nati what “be ready for it” looks like? Does he advocate for people to start carrying weapons? If you haven’t met Nati, you might be surprised to learn that he actually finds the trend of gun ownership in the community disturbing.

“Being ready is an attitude,” he explains. “It’s a mentality. Be mentally ready to be proactive. If you see something, do something. Don’t just walk away or hide in your car.” Absent that attitude, the proliferation of guns just adds to the danger.

“If you aren’t built to carry a gun, you’re just going to get somebody — or yourself — hurt,” he says. “If you’re not built to fight, if you’re just a scared guy with a gun, trying to be cool, that’s not a reason to own a weapon. The only reason is to use it to protect someone. If you aren’t planning on doing that, you have no business owning one.”

Nati recommends that every shul and community center invest in security — someone to stand guard, even unarmed. He also advocates for mandatory self-defense classes.

It’s why Nati connects so well to the lost kids he was brought here to defend against. “These kids have heart,” he says. “They’re brave. They’ll come out and defend.”

And it’s one of the primary reasons Nati keeps his team of gangbangers around. “When push comes to shove, my guys will be on the front lines,” he promises. “They’ll be on our side. They’ve given their word, and in gang life, your word is your life. In there, that’s all you have. You stand by your word or you die.”

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1077)