Tony Hoang’s epiphany happened on a street in Cabramatta.
For decades, the suburb had been a backdrop to his tumultuous life.
It was there that alcoholism and abuse tore his childhood apart; where a desire for “belonging” lured him into a notorious crime gang; and where heroin gifted him tens of thousands of dollars and, later, almost took his life.
Cabramatta was “a melting pot of gangs and drugs” in the 1990s, Tony tells Compass.
But on February 8, 2004, someone on the street handed Tony a flyer. It changed everything.
A fractured family
Tony’s parents moved to Australia in 1980, in the wake of the Vietnam War.
“They came looking for a better future, with four children on the boat,” he says. “I was actually born in Australia.”
The family was initially based in a refugee hostel in Bondi, before relocating to Western Sydney.
Facing language barriers and financial pressures, Tony’s parents worked long hours trying to provide for their children.
His dad worked as a house painter, while his mum began sewing clothes from home. She’d whiz through “massive bags, the size of a person”, Tony says, and received just a single cent per item.
Due to their schedules, Tony doesn’t remember having much interaction with his parents. As he grew up, the chasm widened.
“I lost my Vietnamese because I was always speaking English in schools,” he explains.
“So I did understand my parents, but I couldn’t communicate with them on a deep level.
“I couldn’t let them know, ‘Hey, I’m having some trouble at school.'”
Language wasn’t the only problem in the Hoang household.
“Rather than a loving family, I would come home to Dad abusing Mum, drunk, and abusing us,” Tony recalls.
“Because my father was so violent, every single one of my siblings ran away, including myself, at a very young age.”
Becoming the bully
Tony went to school to escape his turbulent home life, but it didn’t offer the safe haven he longed for.
“I really bottled things up inside me,” he says. “You know, the disappointment, the anger, the abuse. So I would go to school [and] have that bubbling within me.”
Growing up in a large refugee family, Tony’s wardrobe mainly consisted of hand-me-downs. He stood out like a sore thumb.
“I remember distinctly in year 7, I wore my uncle’s shorts that were oversized, and it looked like a skirt,” he recalls.
“I got teased. They called me ‘Tony Skirt’ at the train station on the way home.”
Something rose up in Tony. A rage sharpened from years of beatings and belittling words at home.
“I bashed the guy,” Tony recalls.
“I think from then, I was just like, ‘I’m not gonna get teased, right?’
“I can’t afford clothes, I can’t afford the things that everyone else has. I knew very quickly, I’m not normal.”
In that moment — and in many others to come — Tony used violence to assert his power; to flip the script from poor refugee kid to young man who couldn’t be messed with.
“I became the school bully,” he says. “I became that person I hated.”
He started with schoolyard extortion.
“I want 10 bucks a day,” Tony would warn fellow students. “If not, I’m gonna bash ya.”
Expulsion, predictably, ensued, and Tony changed schools.
But his rule-breaking behaviour continued to escalate.
“I started … high school with my cousins, and during recess and lunch, they’d be in the toilet smoking, and … I saw things I shouldn’t have seen,” he says.
“I was about 12, going onto 13 years old, when I smoked my first drug.”
It was heroin.
On weekdays, Tony would follow his cousins to their after-school hangout — a drug house.
“I’d see guns, machetes … [and] all these drugs play out in front of me.”
He also noticed that this underground network was raking in huge amounts of cash. Tony wanted in on the action.
“In my mind, [I thought], ‘If I just make some money, I can solve my parents’ problems,'” he explains.
“So, very quickly I asked, ‘How can I do that?'”
Building a drug empire
Many of Tony’s cousins belonged to a notorious Vietnamese gang.
“[They] were a collection of guys that we looked up to,” Tony recalls.
“They were just refugee kids trying to make it in Australia.”
Other members of his extended family were part of a rival faction: the Chinatown gang. Tony followed in their footsteps.
He began dealing drugs at around 13 years old. Tony remembers working his “butt off” and making $500 a day.
That was until he dealt to an undercover police officer, outside Cabramatta station.
It was in juvenile detention — a place Tony returned to multiple times — that he began to reflect on his choices and his gang family.
“There was a side of me that wanted to do right. Come out and get [my] life together,” he says.
“But on the other hand, I felt angry at the so-called brotherhood, like this [Chinatown] gang, that said they were my brothers but didn’t come to visit me.”
Once he ot out, Tony cut off ties with the gang, and started his own drug empire.
He says by the time he was 16 years old, he was making between $7,000 to $10,000 a week.
“I learnt my times tables counting $50 bills,” Tony says.
“I would sit there and pack sandwich bags full of money, you know 10 grand each sandwich bag,
“And, I remember feeling, ‘Hey … I’m not dumb, like my father used to call me.'”
An encounter and an epiphany
But the glory times didn’t last.
Tony says drugs tore his family and friendship circles apart.
“There was a lot of pain that was going on … [and] I was a major part of the problem, as a drug dealer.”
Tony, too, battled addiction and depression. At 21, he tried to overdose but was saved by his siblings.
“It was the darkest period of my life,” he recalls. “I just didn’t want to live anymore.”
“I would cry out to God, and I would weep and get drunk, looking at the photos of my dead friends and family.”
In one of his lowest moments, Tony went to an empty church, praying for a sign.
The next day, on a street in Cabramatta, he received one — quite literally.
“I was handed a flyer that read, ‘If you’re looking for a sign from God, here it is,'” Tony says.
“That was — right there — my epiphany.
“No one saw me praying the day before, asking God for a sign. And here I got it, in black and white.”
Being ‘saved’ and getting sober
Christianity had played a small — yet important — role in Tony’s childhood.
He and his siblings had attended a Catholic school, and the Hoang family went to church each week.
“I grew up with a broken home, and I didn’t have a good example of what a father looked like … but I grew up with a faith,” Tony says.
“In fact, I actually wanted to become a priest … at 10 or 11 years old.”
Despite these early experiences, Tony refers to his 2004 street encounter as the day he was “saved”.
The missionaries, who belonged to the Potter’s House Christian Fellowship, offered up love, acceptance and belonging — sensations he’d spent decades chasing: first in his family, then in the gangs of his youth.
“One of the [Christian] brothers started sharing the gospel with me, telling me how much Jesus loves me, that he died for me,” Tony says of this first meeting.
“[These were] things that I knew in my head, but I didn’t know in my heart.”
From that moment, Tony renounced his old life.
Within a year, he was completely sober — abstaining from heroin, alcohol, cigarettes and even swearing.
At first, Tony’s family and friends were sceptical about the transition.
“Everybody — my sisters, my family, those that I love — brushed it off,” he recalls.
“[They were] saying, ‘Tony, you’re going through a phase. Stop Bible bashing me.'”
But the Christian tenets stuck.
Within three weeks of his conversion, Tony attended a Bible conference in Perth. It was there, surrounded by fellow worshippers, that he “felt God speak” to him. The message was clear: he was called to become a preacher.
“I stood to my feet with tears in my eyes, with my head bowed,” he recalls. “I said, ‘God, if You’re calling me, then prepare me.'”
Tony later became a school chaplain and was ordained into ministry in 2012.
Today, he is senior pastor at the Potter’s House Christian Church in Fairfield.
Christianity, control and cults
While the community was a lifeline for Tony Hoang, this Pentecostal sect has attracted criticism for its hardline beliefs and alleged cult-like behaviour.
Last month, an investigation by 60 Minutes and the Nine newspapers reported allegations that the Potter’s House Christian Fellowship had “unhealthy levels of control” over its congregation. As part of that investigation, a former member accused the Fellowship of spreading “fear and lies to vulnerable people”.
The ABC sought comment from the Potter’s House Christian Fellowship regarding these allegations. A response was not received at the time of publication.
The Pentecostal sect was founded in an Arizonan gold mining town in the 1970s, before offshoots were founded across the world, including in Perth and later Sydney.
Rick Alan Ross — founder and executive director of the Cult Education Institute — is a close observer of the group.
“I began my work in the early 1980s,” he says. “I started out as an anti-cult activist in Phoenix, Arizona.”
Mr Ross says he became aware of the Potter’s House Christian Fellowship after families began calling him, asking for help:
“[They’d say], ‘We want to get someone out of this church. It’s having a very negative effect on their life. It’s causing division, estrangement in our family, and we’re worried that it’s going to really damage our family member’s future.'”
For Mr Ross, one of the most “disturbing” elements about the church is its tendency to create an ‘us’ vs ‘them’ divide between members and everyone else.
“It sets family members against each other,” Mr Ross says.
“If someone is outside of what they regard as a ‘true Christian’ — which is [someone] rigidly within their sphere of influence — they would say, ‘That’s someone who is a threat. That’s someone who’s potentially satanic or evil.”
Mr Ross, who authored the 2014 book Cults Inside Out: How People Get In and Can Get Out, views the Potter’s House Christian Fellowship as “a destructive authoritarian religious organisation”.
While he concedes that the church and its members do “good things” — such as helping people find jobs or stop using drugs — he believes the trade-off isn’t worth it.
“The question for me is: what are [the church’s] demands?” Mr Ross says.
“And how else do they affect a person’s life?”
The ABC put this characterisation to the Potter’s House Christian Fellowship, but has not received a response.
Faith amidst tragedy
Tony Hoang refutes the notion that the Fellowship is a “cult”. He points out that members can attend as frequently — or infrequently — as they wish.
“A cult wants to keep people in [and] control people,” he says.
“I don’t do that. We don’t do that.
“People are free to come [and] go as they like, and if we’re not a place where they can get help, then [I say] please go to another church and find the church that’s going to help them.”
Tony adds that he has collaborated with pastors and churches outside of the Potter’s House Christian Fellowship.
He now runs a program, called Inspire180, to demystify the lure of drugs and the “gangster lifestyle”. And he regularly gives talks at juvenile justice centres, rehab clinics and schools.
“I have a faith that is now expressed in the community,” Tony says. “From helping drug addicts, to preventing people from joining gangs, to helping the homeless.
“That’s all driven by my faith in God — that I don’t push on people. If people want to know about it, they want to know about me, [then] I’m grateful for that.”
But Tony is aware that some former church members have had different experiences.
“I can’t say more of how my heart aches for people that have had a bad experience in our churches,” he says. “It’s due to human error.”
When asked about the recent reporting by 60 Minutes and the Nine newspapers, Tony says he’s saddened to hear about the alleged connection between the Potter’s House Christian Fellowship and the Eastern Freeway truck crash, which left four police dead in 2020.
“I share in the pain of those who have lost family members, as any human being with a heart would,” he says. “I have lost 16 friends to drugs and murder.”
“Tragedies happen in life … Part of being a pastor is [helping] to pick up the pieces of broken humanity.”
Gangster Pastor airs on Compass at 6:30pm, Sunday 14 May on ABC TV and on ABC iview.
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