- April 19, 2024
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How a reformed mobster became the most trusted servant of Flagler County’s poor.
Charles Silano
Age: 60
Family: wife, Colleen
Title/Occupation: Pastor of Grace Tabernacle Ministries
Quirky fact: Recently stopped wearing ties to church.
On a whiteboard at the Grace Community Food Pantry, a volunteer with a dry-erase marker writes the word “Specials.” Then, a list: tripe, beef shank, chicken feet, pig feet, ground veal, chicken hearts and gizzards, pet food.
Pastor Charles Silano, wearing jeans and white sneakers that look like they could be one size too large, says some of the food may sound like throwaways to some people, but to others they’re delicacies.
“Tripe — who eats tripe?” Silano says, his eyes jovial, hooded in a permanent expression of sympathy. “But it flies. We get pig feet, pig ears — it flies out of the refrigerator. Some people were raised with it.”
Volunteers have filled three folding tables end to end with white sacks of groceries, each labeled according to the size of family it is intended to feed, from one person to four or five. Silano says he sometimes plays a game with the groups of people who are waiting in line for food.
“We treat them like family,” he says. “It’s hard to sit here, waiting for food. It can be demeaning. But we try to make it as comfortable as possible. I’ll get this big jar of pickles and say, ‘If you can guess the number on the back of this, you win.’ It might not sound like much, but if you’re hungry, winning a bottle of pickles or ketchup means a lot.”
One of the most passionate volunteers, John Cignarelli, says Silano has a gift for distributing food.
“I’ve seen the man move cases of meat — five, six pallets,” Cignarelli says. “He’s a servant first. He called me last night, asked for help. I go to meet him at the food pantry, and we loaded 100 bags of food onto the truck to bring to Bunnell. He said, ‘Let’s throw another 20 on there. It’s Christmas time.’ That’s just how his mind thinks.”
Neither Silano nor his volunteers are paid for stocking shelves, collecting or storing the food. But their efforts result in feeding 1,700 families per month. According to Second Harvest North Florida, Silano’s food pantry serves more people than any other organization — other than a Salvation Army in Jacksonville — out of 17 counties in Northeast Florida.
“It’s not about doing it once,” Silano says. “It’s about being there. Consistency builds trust.”
Today, Silano might be the most trusted man in Flagler County.
But Silano’s talents for distribution weren’t always put to such altruistic uses. At one time in his life, he wasn’t moving food. Instead, he was moving truckloads and warehouses full of drugs. He smuggled. He laundered. He was trusted by all the wrong people.
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Silano was born in 1951 in Italy. His father left the family behind to work in America.
When he was 3 years old, Silano was so poor he had to sleep in the same bed as his four sisters, his brother and his mother.
He remembers being awoken one night from his perch at the foot of the bed. An unknown but wonderful, ancient man was smiling at him. He wasn’t afraid of the man; he knew it was a heavenly being.
Even when he eventually moved to America at 7, when he was so poor he used to try to steal nickels out of parking meters with toothpicks, or when he roughed up kids on the playground and eventually went to a county college in New Jersey, he never was able to push from his mind the notion that God had plans for him. But he was able to stifle his conscience enough to use his $1,000 student loan as starter capital to begin buying and selling drugs, launching a career in the underworld.
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He was married in the 1980s, but she had her own career. She didn’t ask questions, and he didn’t offer any answers.
Silano was laundering money through a pizza business, covering for his drug distribution network in South Florida. He sailed back and forth from Colombia. He narrowly avoided being kidnapped and had a gun to his head more than once.
He became so integral and entrapped in one cartel that he was given an ultimatum: He could be adopted into the family and become a “made man,” or he could be disposed of. His wife, Colleen, gave him a similar ultimatum in his marriage: Drop the drug business, or go it alone.
He had a fleet of antique cars. He was living in an 11-room home in New Jersey, with millions in the ground. But one introspective day, he was standing next to his piano with a glass of cognac. He had long ago risen above being the poorest kid in school. But he realized now that he had sacrificed too much along the road.
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There was one more. Always one last deal.
It wasn’t easy to disentangle himself. Then, finally, he was unknowingly involved in a sting operation aimed at a drug dealer in Colorado. Silano ended up with his own sentence of two years in the federal prison system, plus five years of probation. But it became his way out.
In 1991, he and Colleen moved to Palm Coast, where Colleen’s parents had been living since the 1970s, and then Silano left for prison.
There, his awakening was intensified. He had little structured time, and he used every free moment to study the Bible. One rainy day in the chapel, he had a few minutes left before he was supposed to be accounted for back in his cell. He was listening to a sermon on a tape, and he was moved. He prayed: God, this is what I want. I want to be able to draw closer to you.
In that prison chapel, he felt a divine presence in a way he never had before and hasn’t since. He was sure that if he were to open his eyes, he would see the feet of God.
“The best way I can describe it is holy terror,” Silano recalls. “It wasn’t fearful in the sense that it was judgment, but it was such holiness that I was afraid to open my eyes. I saw my cowardice in light of His holiness.”
When he finally broke out of the moment, he realized he was late for the count. He rushed to his dorm corridor in time to see the guard walk by his cell and count his cellmate and him — even though he wasn’t in the cell.
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He was on probation for five years after he was released from prison. He started his own business called Charlie’s Home Maintenance, and he joined the Church on the Rock, in Bunnell.
One day, he was up early in the morning, reading Isaiah in the Bible before work.
“I went to get up from my chair, and I heard a voice,” Silano recalls. It was a piercing sound, and certainly not in his head, he says. “It wasn’t loud; it was cutting, like a sword. What He said was, ‘I want you to teach my word.’”
Silano was again terrified and dumbfounded. After all he had been through, he was being called to the ministry.
God had never given up on him.
“When I walked out that day, across my lawn, I felt that there might be an angelic presence around me,” he recalls. “I was in awe. I didn’t say anything to anybody, because how do you explain that?”
But Bruce Laurent, the pastor at Church on the Rock, encouraged Silano to attend Bible college. He gave him the opportunity to teach at the Thursday night meetings. Silano became an elder, and he was ordained. In 1998, he founded Grace Tabernacle Ministries International.
One of his mentors was Dr. Stephen Olford, at Luther Rice Seminary. “He was the prince of preachers,” Silano says. Among the many things he learned from Olford was a simple lesson: Be the sermon.
As a pastor in the early days of Grace Tabernacle, Silano continued to work as a maintenance man part-time. One woman questioned him on a particular job to make sure he was working to the standard of quality she felt she was paying for.
Assuming that it would clarify that he was doing honest work for her, he explained, “I’m a pastor.”
“So what?” she said.
Years later, he recalls: “It impacted me. I didn’t like hearing it, but I was like, ‘You know what? She’s right.’ You still have to prove yourself every day. Trust is earned.”
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To Silano, the few who try to cheat the system aren’t a concern. He has seen too many people like the car salesman who came to the food pantry in a shirt and tie. Silano assumed the man was going to donate or volunteer, but he said he had lost his job. He had a nice car, but he had no income to make the payments, and he was unable to provide food for his family.
The man came back during the appropriate hours to get food. Before the doors open, Silano always leads a prayer. He asks for requests as everyone stands in a circle, holding hands. And this day, the prayer requests were humble: toilet paper, soap.
“This guy — you could just see it,” Silano says. “He had to walk away. He realized — he processed in that moment, that he was part of that society. He was in that same category. It scared the living daylights out of him.”
Silano’s reputation for outreach led to an unplanned role in the Feed Flagler initiative, which faltered in its first attempt in 2009, when few people showed up for a free Thanksgiving meal. County Commissioner Milissa Holland, whom Silano calls the “heartbeat” of Feed Flagler, called on him to help. He ended up distributing meals to about 2,000 people within 24 hours. Thanks to his input, Holland says, Feed Flagler was later expanded from one location to about a dozen, and hundreds of bags of groceries are now delivered directly to the homes of those in need.
The distribution skills he gained in the drug trade were serving him well. As Silano puts it: “All the things I did in the dark world have been transferred to the world of light.”
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Despite an 80% reduction in federal contributions to the food pantry, Silano plans to increase the distributions in 2012. He plans to expand to include furniture and more clothes.
“I just got a call from someone in Flagler Beach,” he says. “A lady’s husband just left, and ... she had basically everything in her house in a motel room.”
Delivering food to her took one stress off her mind. “You’re not there to condemn. You’re there to console,” he says. “I’ve seen lives improve from that approach. Letting them know somebody cares.”
Another delivery was a piece of furniture. A young man whom Silano says could have been mistaken for a gang member couldn’t make eye contact with Silano — he looked defeated.
“Then I told him I could use his help at the pantry, and you could just see his sense of worth rise,” he recalls. “You have worth.”
Delivering food, he says, “keeps families together. It says, ‘We are aware that you’re food insecure, and we’re going to help you. It stops someone in that family from doing something stupid.”
It’s not easy to recover from doing something stupid, Silano knows. But he’s proof that it’s possible. “I know how to rebuild a life,” he says. “The cost of it. And you can’t do it without Christ.”
HOW TO GET HELP
The Grace Community Food Pantry has new hours: 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. Saturdays and 1-4 p.m. Sundays. Call 586-2653 or 931-4158 or visit www.gcfp.org.
Also, Access Flagler First offers free food, clothes, health screenings, haircuts and more to members of the community. The event takes place 1-4 p.m. the first Friday of every month, at Cattleman’s Hall, at the Flagler County Fairgrounds.
