8 May 1 - 7, 2025 dallasobserver.com DALLAS OBSERVER Classified | MusiC | dish | Culture | unfair Park | Contents P raising God with college students in the auditorium of Christ For The Nations evangelical school in Dallas wasn’t where the mafia might expect to find a former as- sociate turned informant. But that’s where Robert Borelli was in August 2002, raising his hands in praise with about 500 others at the school, un- abashed but still hidden and afraid. Not a tall man or Godfather-sized, he hadn’t started his YouTube channel yet or appeared on the 700 Club. “I didn’t have a lot of stuff out there,” he says. “I felt pretty secure there.” A high school dropout, Borelli, who was 47 then, worked as a collector and seller for mobsters Anthony “Fat Andy” Ruggiano and Nick “Nicky” Corozzo from the 1970s until the late ’90s. He dabbled in drug trafficking and robbery and “visited” people who didn’t pay their loans. He’d even beaten a couple of murder charges. Fat Andy’s son, Anthony Ruggiano Jr, calls Borelli a “mob star.” “He wasn’t wild, but he was violent and dangerous,” says the younger Ruggiano, whose late father was a caporegime for the Gambino crime family. Ruggiano, who was also once in the federal witness program, re- cently appeared in Netflix’s Get Gotti docu- mentary to discuss the mafia from the old neighborhood in Queens. “We did bad things,” Ruggiano continues. “We shot people. We stabbed people. We hurt people.” Borelli entered the Federal Witness Se- curity Program, or WITSEC, in the late ’90s as part of a federal racketeering case in Flor- ida that involved eight other Gambino crime family associates and members, including Fat Andy’s son, whom Borelli was planning to testify against. That’s what led Borelli to Dallas in the early 2000s. “Texas is like a different world from where I came from,” Borelli says. Christ For The Nations was like a differ- ent universe. Founded by Gordon Lindsay, a former Assembly of God preacher, and his wife, Freda Lindsay, in 1948, Christ For The Na- tions has more than 50 affiliated Bible schools in 30 countries. The one in Dallas is in a renovated nightclub on Kiest Boulevard. The Institute is a family-run business, a three-year nondenominational Bible school with more than 40,000 graduates from 75 nations. Borelli wasn’t like the other graduates. “Normally, we would say no to [someone like] that,” says Golan Lindsay, the CEO and president of Christ For The Nations and grandson of the school’s founder. “But my grandmother stepped in and gave him the chance.” Borelli had gone from secret mafia meetings in dimly lit restaurants in New York and Florida to an auditorium in Dal- las filled with first-year students perfect- ing their evangelical ministry. “I’m a very adaptable type of guy,” he says. “My man- nerisms was different. My vocabulary wasn’t great, and like I said, my mind wasn’t transformed at the time. It took a lot of work. Some people would say, ‘Hey, you look like one of the guys from the ma- fia.’ I wasn’t allowed to let the students know about my past or the Witness Pro- tection Program. I had to keep that quiet. It made it difficult, and there were things that I couldn’t do because of my back- ground.” He could pray and worship with them in the main auditorium. He had a lot to pray for since he’d been kicked out of witness protec- tion the previous year in 2001. The mafia also knew its former associate, born Robert Engel, was in Texas. The Mob Star E ngel met Fat Andy’s son at Tony’s pizza parlor on 93rd Street and 101st Avenue. On a Friday night in the early 1970s, the Queens neighborhood of Ozone Park was where teens lingered on the street corners or across the street in the school- yard. Engel, then 17, quit school a few years earlier, spent time with street gangs and re- cently landed a job at an air freight company. He was taking the bus home from work when he bumped into Fat Andy’s godson Little Joe, who invited him to hang out at the pizza parlor. Anthony Ruggiano Jr. wasn’t much older than Engel. He left school at 16 and began learning the family business. His father was a triggerman for the Gambino family and one of the main wise guys in the area. He’d been the youngest person in the mafia to get “straightened out” — admitted as a full- fledged “made” member in the early 1950s, when Ruggiano says the “books were closed” for membership. The “straightened out” usually involved murder. Fat Andy, who was 25 then, committed multiple murders for mafia boss Albert An- astasia, a cofounder of Murder Inc., a Brook- lyn gang that acted as an enforcement ▼ Culture Mike Brooks Witness for the Prosecution ... and Jesus Anthony Ruggiano Jr. (left) makes a chess move against Robert Borelli. Former mob associate Robert Borelli left the Witness Protection Program to testify openly for God. By Christian McPhate >> p10
