Lu then rallied 10 other close friends who are ferocious fighters to join the fray. They managed to get eight samurai knives and six seven-meter long sharpened bamboo sticks.
On the night of Sept. 30, 1972, the two groups had a vicious fight. The eight-minute battle left one dead and six seriously injured.
Lu was among the suspects wanted by the police. Afraid of being arrested, Lu, then 18, quit school and joined the Flying Eagle Gang (
"Back then I got a kick out of heroism and my wildest dream was to become an international professional hit-man," said Lu, 47.
As an entry-level gangster, he started out as a bodyguard at bars and gambling houses collecting debts from gamblers.
"We were lucky to get back 80 percent of, say, an NT$1.2 million debt," he said. "Out of the money we retrieved, the owner of the gambling house got 60 percent, while the rest came to us, and each of us could get as much as NT$60,000," he said.
For the following seven years, he was in and out of prison and did jail sentences at various prisons, including the maximum security Orchid Island and Green Island prisons.
In a dramatic twist of fate, Lu was baptized as a Christian in 1979 and enrolled in the Christ Discipleship Training Institute (
He got married in 1982 at the age of 28 to a woman who is also a Christian. She was the only one who kept almost daily correspondence with him during his six-year imprisonment.
Now Lu is a full-time pastor at the Capital Revival Church (首都平原基督教會). He is also the dean of the Church Planting Evangelical Seminary (拓荒宣教神學院) and the president of the Worldwide Chinese Missionary Fellowship Foundation (中國宣教使命團基金會).
"I've gone through four major stages in my life," he said. "When I was young, my soul was in prison although my body was free. When I was serving my sentence, my body and my soul were imprisoned. When I accepted Jesus as my savior, my soul was free although my body was imprisoned. And then when I got out of jail and became a Christian, both my body and soul were liberated."
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