Sid Roth - This Outlaw Biker Was Bound for Hell, Then Jesus Appeared to Him with Mac Gober
This outlaw biker was blinded by a mysterious force and instantly set free of 15 years of drug addiction on this edition of It's Supernatural!
Sid Roth: Hello. I'm Sid Roth your investigative reporter and I'm here with a man that looks nothing like my notes tell me he's supposed to look like. His name is Mac Gober. And Mac, you came from a very, very destructive, sick background. When you were just a young kid, is it really true that you bit off a classmate's finger?
Mac Gober: Yeah, I did. It was on a bus. He was picking on a bunch of us kids and my cousin, he was sitting there with me and we lived together, my family and his family. Our daddies wasn't at home. And it was the last day of school and this kid was trying to pull our pants down and it was embarrassing us, and of course they were four or five years older. And my daddy had always taught me to fight, do what you got to do to win, and that old boy got his finger around my head and got it too close to my mouth and I clamped onto his finger and there it went, and of course, he let go.
Sid Roth: Did you feel bad about that?
Mac Gober: No, I was glad I didn't have to walk off there without my britches.
Sid Roth: Now why was your dad not around?
Mac Gober: Well he was always gone and he was in and out of jail himself, and he worked in steel construction. And so he traveled a lot, and he would leave me and mom usually at one place, and then he'd come back every once in a while. We traveled all over the southeast, all over the Midwest, down through Texas. I'd be in one school sometimes three or four times in one school year. He'd pull us up and we'd be gone. I didn't have any brothers or sisters. I just had this old German Shepherd that was my brother, my sister, uncle and aunt, and all my cousins wrapped in one.
Sid Roth: Now your dad was an alcoholic.
Mac Gober: Yes. Yeah, he was. That and a drug addict as well.
Sid Roth: How did that affect you? What did you observe with your eyes?
Mac Gober: Well he never was there. I think that's the hurt thing. I remember when I was a little fellow I'd wait sometimes when my mother said he was going to be coming back, and I'd wait all evening, and I'd see this old '54 Ford, '52 Ford, it would be driving down, and I'd looked, and it looked like my daddy. I'd get so excited and he'd drive right by in a slumped condition in that old car. And I'd run with my little bare feet just as long as I could, and finally he'd turn to go off, and I still wouldn't see him. I'd come back in and I'd cry, and I'd say, "Mama, why don't Daddy ever come home"? And she'd always tell it to me something, but it still did hurt. A lot of nights I'd cry myself to sleep, wondered my daddy would never come back and play with me.
Sid Roth: Sounds like you loved your daddy.
Mac Gober: Well sure I loved my daddy.
Sid Roth: But yet you got into a fight with him and he beat you to a pulp.
Mac Gober: Yeah. Well I was 16 years old and I told him he wasn't coming in the house because he'd go and he'd come, but when he'd come back it would always cause destruction to my mom. And I said, "You''re not gonna ever hurt my mother again".
Sid Roth: What do you mean by destruction?
Mac Gober: Well he beat my mother and yelled and screamed. There would be fighting, and she'd be doing dishes, and just cussing. And even as a 16-year-old boy, it's still the only mom and dad you know, and when they are hating each other, you don't realize how it's destroying a child in their heart, and that's what it was doing to me. Even though I was a 16-year-old boy, it felt like somebody cut my heart in two. Every time I'd see them yelling at each other and screaming at each other, and a lot of nights I'd close a pillow around my ears so I couldn't hear them screaming and cussing at each other. And that's when he came home and I was 16, and I said to myself, if I ever comes back home, mama, I'll never let him touch you again. So we got in a fight and he was actually had me down choking the life out of me.
Sid Roth: You look like a pretty big guy. Was he bigger than you?
Mac Gober: He was taller than I was, but he wasn't that much bigger. But he was quite a bit older, a little bit more experienced than I was. I thought I could take him, but I found out I couldn't.
Sid Roth: Well after it was finished, what was going on inside of you?
Mac Gober: Well just a lot of hatred, mad at him, just carrying this bitterness and this hatred that I couldn't rid of. And so not too long after that I asked my mother to give me an early sign in and I joined the United States Navy, and I enlisted in the Navy, and just to get away from everything. And so I actually got into boot camp on my 16th birthday. When I was 16, I got in.
Sid Roth: That's unusual.
Mac Gober: Well if you get an early signing.
Sid Roth: I see.
Mac Gober: I turned, what I did, I turned 17 on my birthday when I was in boot camp, but I was 16 when I enlisted and then went to boot camp.
Sid Roth: You learned karate.
Mac Gober: Yeah. I was, well I was stationed on an island called Seal Island and I learned to dive there. I was in what they called a Scuba diver in the natural world and then I went through Coronado and was learning and taught weapons there. And then from there I was sent on a C-141 straight to Vietnam, and they would drop me off along the rivers near the jungles of Vietnam along up north to Da Nang, Alabama, Da Nang, Vietnam. And then when I was there, I'd stay there all night long, and then if I made it to the morning time, the patrol would come back through and pick me up, and take me back to base camp.
Sid Roth: Was Vietnam as much a hell as the movies say it was?
Mac Gober: Oh yeah.
Sid Roth: Was it really that bad?
Mac Gober: Yeah. It depends on where you were and what you were doing. I know a lot of guys that went over there that never fired a shot.
Sid Roth: What about you?
Mac Gober: Well for me it was because I was where the activity was and our base camp was overrun two or three times. And while I was in Vietnam there out on the river, a lot of nights the Viet Cong would find out my position and I wouldn't know if I was going to make to the morning time or not.
Sid Roth: Were you afraid of death?
Mac Gober: Well at that time you're not really thinking about death. You're just fighting for your life and you're trying to get the enemy. But I know one night there were several Viet Cong had found my position and they were coming in. And a southern Vietnamese, a civilian came and got me, and he showed me where the Viet Cong had went to, and he was watching my back. Now I had an army working the Army Republic of Vietnam, in other words, a southern Vietnam soldier, and I sent him for help because I knew my position was being overrun. And he went to get some help because there were some Marines not too far down. But he never did come back. Nobody came back and I was left by myself. And this southern civilian, Vietnamese, stayed with me right by my side watching, and I couldn't talk Vietnamese very well. I could speak a little. But we went through that whole side looking for that Viet Cong that had dove into the water before I could get him. And then a sunrise came and I was still alive, and I just looked at this little southern Vietnamese and I thought, man, God must have sent this guy or something because he just came out of nowhere. And he didn't know me, but he was watching my back, and that made me feel like a million dollars.
Sid Roth: Why did you get so angry when one of your buddies died?
Mac Gober: Well I tried to get him some help. He was running a temperature of 104, 105, which is critical, and I took him to the doc, and they gave him a shot, and they said, "Take him back to the barracks". I said, "This guy needs to go into the hospital in Da Nang," and I said, "He doesn't need to go back". And so we got in an argument and they said, "Look, we know our business. Put him back in his bunk". And so we did, and of course the next morning, he was stiff. He was already dead. And so I lost it, and I went over there, and they had to actually grab me up and put me down for a while because I was trying to get to those guys, those medics.
Sid Roth: What would have done if you got to them?
Mac Gober: I probably would have done some bodily damage.
Sid Roth: Speaking about that hatred and bodily damage, when he becomes a member of an outlaw motorcycle group then you'll find out where the violence really was. We'll be back right after this.
Sid Roth: Hello. I'm Sid Roth your investigative reporter. Mac Gober went to Vietnam as a lot of men did. But it really, really affected him. He went through three wives, nine abortions, got involved with outlaw motorcycle gangs. How did that happen? Why did that happen, Mac?
Mac Gober: Well it's because they befriended me. When I got out I stayed in San Diego, California. I didn't want to go home. There was no home to go back to. And so I didn't know where my dad or mom was, so I just stayed in San Diego. And out there these guys in the biker bars, they seemed to appreciate men who fought for this country, especially Vietnam vets. And a lot of your bikers, I'd say 70 to 80 percent of our outlaw bikers are Vietnam veterans. And there just seemed to be that camaraderie there of brothers watching each other's back that were still here in America. And that's how I got involved. And these guys would buy you a round of booze, slap you on the back and you had something to say, and you had somebody you could feel close to. And you hang around anybody that seems to appreciate you or like you. And so that's how it got started and that's where I got my first Harley Davidson and started riding back there in the early '60s.
Sid Roth: What type of work did you do back then?
Mac Gober: Well there wasn't no work, more or less. They would just, the work that we did, our biggest thing was selling drugs and running guns, and prostitution, or the topless bars. A lot of the bikers, they own a lot of the topless bars that are run today.
Sid Roth: Really?
Mac Gober: A lot of people don't know that, but it's just, it's a fact. And but a lot of money was brought in that way and then I remember I came home one time. I was checking on some crops that I had growing back in the east.
Sid Roth: What kind of crops?
Mac Gober: They were marijuana plants. And my mother was to pick me up, and so she came down to this bus station to pick me up. And she waited, and she walked by me two or three times, and she just...
Sid Roth: Your own mother didn't recognize you.
Mac Gober: My own mother didn't even recognize me. And so finally she just stood there. The crowd was pretty well gone and she was looking like, well I guess he didn't make it, and she was about ready to walk back to her car. And she walked back, and she stopped, and she looked in my eyes. And she just looked at me for the longest time, and she says, "Are you Mac Gober my son"? And I said, "Mom, don't you even recognize your own boy"?
Sid Roth: Why didn't she recognize you?
Mac Gober: Well I had a full beard that came out. I mean, it wasn't a crop job. It was like a bush upside down, just one of them kind, you know, long strangling hair and all the front teeth were knocked out. I just had two fangs that hung down and dark sunglasses.
Sid Roth: When you say fangs, you mean really?
Mac Gober: Long teeth. These two incisors were actually pretty long even when I had natural teeth. But when I got them knocked out they did look kind of gnarly when I opened my mouth, and that's why she didn't recognize me.
Sid Roth: But you obviously recognized her. Why didn't you walk up to her?
Mac Gober: I was just standing there watching her. I wanted to see her reaction, what she would do, and she was ready to leave because she didn't see me until she stopped and looked at me. And she looked at me, and she teared up. She said, "What happened to you? Look at you". And I said, "It's okay, mama, I'm clean". Meaning I don't have any drugs on me. I don't have any weapons on me at that time. And she said, "Well you sure don't look clean to me, son". And so we was riding back to the house and there were several cop cars that were just kind of following in the distance. And she said, "What are they doing"? I said, "It's all right, mama, I'm clean".
Sid Roth: Didn't it bother you though that police cars were following you, that you, I mean, didn't this affect you at all?
Mac Gober: No because I was clean. I didn't have anything on me. So I knew if they pulled us over they weren't going to find anything. And I had been living in California, so I knew that these guys, they knew that I was coming back. I don't know how they knew. But somehow they knew. Somebody tipped them off.
Sid Roth: Now you, there came a point though, where I guess everything really got at you and you started to, for lack of better words, get deranged.
Mac Gober: Oh yes.
Sid Roth: Tell me about that.
Mac Gober: Well the stuff that I was doing, you know, if I can put it in a way that you can understand, you don't see the bad time coming. When you start doing drugs and alcohol, and all the girls, all you see is fun. All you see is having a good time and feeling good. But you don't see the end of that thing after it's got a hold of you for several years. And I didn't know that I was going to lose my mind and end up going stark raving crazy. And my own brothers, a lot of times, would have to put me in a barn and lock me in, and just throw food up under there to keep me alive because I had lost my mind. And if I got out I'd get myself in trouble or get others in trouble because I just, I was going stark raving crazy because of the drugs.
Sid Roth: Why did they even take care of you?
Mac Gober: Because.
Sid Roth: Why didn't they just dump you?
Mac Gober: Well it's a brotherhood, it's something that maybe you citizens would never understand and unless you've been there you won't understand. If you've never been in Vietnam you won't understand that either. You can sit here and talk about it, but you don't know what I felt, what I went through. You never walked in my shoes. Now you're who you are because of who you are. I'm who I am because of what I went through. But I know what these guys felt like and I knew that they loved me in their own way.
Sid Roth: Which was worse, Vietnam or what you were going through at that time?
Mac Gober: It's about an even toss-up, whatever hell you want to play. It's both of them ain't good when you realized you've lost your mind. I'm inside this big old barn beating hunks of flesh out of my head because of the pain in hear in my heart. When I try to sleep at night I keep hearing the screams of these men that are dying that are right there with me. I'm not talking about them where you can't see them. These guys are right there where you are and you can't hear nothing but the screams, and you shut your eyes. It doesn't matter how drunk you get, it doesn't matter how much dope you put in you, you can't stop the screaming. And you try to stop it by doing more drugs, but you just end up deteriorating and self-destructing on your own self, and that's exactly what was happening to me. I was dying little by little and I knew I was going to die, and that's, that was how my life got to be the end of it. Because all of a sudden, the drugs didn't make you feel the way it used to. I called it making you feel, you felt wretched and miserable inside. You felt like you was dying, but you didn't know what to do about it.
Sid Roth: What about you? Do you think your circumstances are bad? They probably can't be any worse than Mac Gober's. But there is light. It might not have looked there was any way out for Mac. It looked like he was headed towards death for certain. And maybe that's where you're headed right now and you recognize it. But I want you to know what happened to Mac will happen to you. That's why you're watching. We'll be back right after this.
Sid Roth: Sid Roth back again with Mac Gober. Mac, you are a deranged, forgive me, a deranged, literally almost a little above animal.
Mac Gober: Yeah.
Sid Roth: You can't even fend for yourself. What changed it?
Mac Gober: Well what changed it is I was handed a little piece of paper and it said on there, I was downtown in San Diego, and it said there's such a crazy idea that most people think that they'll never be able to go to Heaven because they think that they've got to rid of all of their bad habits and go to church first before God will have anything to do with them. God is good and holy and you have no way of going to Heaven like you are. And but that's a lie because it says, "God committed his love towards you and while you were yet a sinner Jesus Christ died for you," Romans 5:8. And I thought, boy I wish that could be true. And but I knew that God didn't like wicked people. Wicked people go to Hell. I'm wicked, God is good and holy, so there's no way that me and him can get together. So I just put that little piece of paper in my pocket, thought I'd use it for rolling paper for later. About two weeks later I walked into this drug addict's apartment, opened it up, there was another pamphlet. It was about as big as your clipboard there, and I reached down and I picked it up. Well this is an apartment where you got pictures of Harley Davidsons and women, and rock and roll, drugs. I mean, you don't have religious things hanging around, Christian things. Well I picked it up and I started to read it, and it started saying again that God had predicted a lot of things, had many prophecies, and they had all come to pass exactly like God said they would. And it went one right after the other, gave the date what he said was going to happen. And then it gave the prediction or the prophecy, and then the date when it came to pass. And then it got down to the bottom, and it said, he wasn't wrong, not one time in all of that. He's not wrong about his son Jesus Christ fixing to come back to this earth, but only for those that have really given their life to Jesus, those that are true and born again. Well I didn't know anything about being born again. I didn't know how to pray. And so I'm wondering, where did this religious piece of paper get in our apartment? How did it get there, because I thought I was by myself. But this guy staggers out of the back bedroom and I guess he had been back there sleeping it off. He's holding himself against the door jam, and he's rubbing his old eyes, and he says, "Oh, big Mac, what's going on"? I says, "Not much, man. Where did this thing come from"? And he looked at it, and he was rubbing his eyes, and he said, "Oh that. This afternoon a great big old fat woman," and he didn't use the word "black", he said, "was knocking on the door passing these things out". He said, "I just punched her in the face and when I hit her in the mouth," he said, "that blankety-blank thing just fell on the floor". Well he says, "I don't even know what that blankety-blank thing is". Well for the first time in my life it made me start thinking about God in a real way. If God is real I'm in a heap of trouble because if God ain't real, then who cares. It's still mano-a-mano, only the strong survive, you know, if I want something I go take it. There ain't no judgment day, there's no heaven, forget it. Well it's a 50-50. If God is real that means there's a judgment day. If God is real it means the Bible is real. If God is real, that mean's Heaven is real, that means Hell is real. And but what a place to play Russian roulette with your eternal soul. And I didn't want to take that chance that I was wrong and my old granddaddy was right years ago when he used to try and tell me when I was a little fellow. And so I didn't know much about that, but I found out that that stuck inside of me, and I get things about that precious old black lady. I thought, my goodness, if there is anybody real out there that was a real church person, somebody that got it, it must have been that old black lady. But I never saw her and never laid eyes on her. But two weeks after that I went into a little apartment upstairs and went upstairs, I was fixing to cut a light on. It was 2:00 in the morning, 2 a.m., and before I could turn the switch on, I looked up into the corner of that room and for the first time in my life I saw Jesus Christ hanging on a cross, but this time I realized it wasn't for the world. I realized he gotten on that cross for me. And it was like he lifted his head up.
Sid Roth: Was that just a picture that happened to be there?
Mac Gober: No, no, just like the vision like a vision, it's like I saw him hanging on the cross. He looked at me and he says, "Mac, I love you". And I started crying. I said, "You couldn't love somebody like me". And the Lord said, "But Mac, I love you". And I said, "But you couldn't love somebody like me". And I fell on my knees like a little child and I mean, that room lit up without electricity. I mean, I was...
Sid Roth: Is that just an expression?
Mac Gober: No.
Sid Roth: Or did it really light up?
Mac Gober: No, it lit up because I remember looking around and thinking, God, you are awesome. You really are real. It was like I saw God stood along the side of my room there and I realized, and I was trying to tell him, I said, "Lord, remember the time that I," and right in the middle of my sentence he would cut me off and say, "Mac, I love you". And I couldn't stop the love, and I realized at that moment that he did that for me, died on that cross. And I said, "God," I says, "I don't know how to pray," but for the first time in my life I spoke from my heart and I said, "God, I don't want to die and go to Hell". I said, "If there's really a place in Heaven for me, would you please save this old boy, because if you don't save me I know I ain't gonna live much longer". I said, "I know you ain't getting nothing in this bargain, but God, if you'll have me I'll give myself to you". And I kept screaming, "God, please don't let me die and go to Hell". And I kept saying, "Jesus, if you're real, save me before it's too late". Because I thought after reading that he was fixing to tell his son to come at any moment. And man, that night I cried myself to sleep. And I guess the thing that hurt me the most was not all the bad things I did, it was the fact that I had rejected Jesus and treated him like he wasn't real all my life, and that's what hurt me so bad that I treated him like he wasn't real, and there he was hanging on that cross for me.
Sid Roth: You said you wept.
Mac Gober: Oh I cried until my eyes swelled shut. I was so hurt inside, I had treated him, because I used to tell dirty jokes about Jesus and dirty jokes about God, filthy things, get up on bars, stand up on bars and tell vulgar jokes about the Lord. And so I didn't care. I didn't fear God. I didn't fear the devil. I figured if we went to Hell, I'd whip the devil and we'd just take Hell over and party on.
Sid Roth: You actually felt you were blind because you cried so much your eyes were closed. But then you went back to Tuscaloosa and saw your mom.
Mac Gober: I got toó..
Sid Roth: Tell me about that.
Mac Gober: Well when I first got to see my mom, she didn't necessarily want to see me because I was telling her that I got saved and the Lord had come into my life and she would throw whiskey bottles at me and run me off. But four years later, she called me about 2:00 in the morning, about the same time that the Lord changed my life, and she was just crying. She said, "Mac, he's real. He really is real". And she poured out all her whiskey bottles, never touched another dropped, and she lived for the Lord 12 more years before she passed away.
Sid Roth: But you told me when you back to visit your mom after this happened, the police were still eyeing you.
Mac Gober: Oh yeah.
Sid Roth: What did you do about that?
Mac Gober: Well there's nothing you could do. If you knew in your heart that you knew you weren't doing anything bad and they would come to me, and they would stop. I remember one time a storm had come through and blew an old hotel away, and I was showing my little son, and they pulled in. When the saw it was me, they called and I said, "Now I'm telling you I'm clean. I ain't got a thing on me". And they were running, they was running the books. And I said, "Look, I ain't got a thing to hide". And they said, "Well we'll get you, we'll catch you". And I said, "No more".
Sid Roth: What happened to your drug addiction, by the way?
Mac Gober: Well the moment the Lord came in my life that night when I asked him to, I mean, I began to change right away. It's like I knew that I didn't want to die the lifestyle that I lived.
Sid Roth: What about you? Do you want to die the way you are right now? Don't you believe there's something more? It wasn't an accident when that black woman came to that apartment and got socked in the mouth. Now she's a hero.
Mac Gober: That's right.
Sid Roth: She is a hero.
Mac Gober: She is a hero.
Sid Roth: But God sent her just as God sent me right now to tell you, you have value. He loves you. There is a destiny, a good destiny for your life. Why do you believe in the invisible realm? You've been tormented so much. They're trying to destroy you because they know there's something good. Now you do something about it. God has sent me to tell you, you have value, that he loves you that he died for you. Now you have to make him your savior and Lord. You have to repent of your sin, tell him you're so sorry, ask him to forgive you. He will. And ask him to live inside of you and become real. Do it now. I wouldn't wait one second. I would do it right now even before we go off the air. Get right with God because you do not know when your end will come. You don't. You may know a lot of things. God loves you so much, so much.