PEORIA MAGAZINE October 2023

S P O T L I G H T

A COME-TO-JESUS MOMENT, AND A BUSINESS IS BORN After a life of crime and imprisonment, Steve Snook founded Jesus Speaks LLC, a religious frame business

BY PHIL LUCIANO PHOTO BY RON JOHNSON

A mid a deadly swirl of drugs and danger, Steve Snook had a dream, a life-changing vision sparked in prison and now under development in Peoria. Along the way, the former narcotics dealer and current business entrepre neur has been changing lives, his own and others’, inside and outside of prison. He credits a providence in lifting him up from what looked like a low and wasteful destiny behind bars. “I was in such a state of life, life or death didn’t matter to me,” Snook, 46, now says. A ROUGH AND GODLESS START IN LIFE Born in Virginia with three siblings, he was moved at age 2 to Danville, Illi nois, where he was raised by a relative. At best, she was indifferent to young Steven as well as a parade of alcoholic and abusive boyfriends. “I was … raised by wolves, in a sense,” Snook said. “There was no love. It was madness. There were guns shot off inside my house. I was sexually abused. I was beaten more times than you could count.”

He yearned for meaning and belong ing but had no spiritual guidance. So, he began to experiment with pot at age 9, eventually moving on to harder drugs. “I never read a Bible,” he said. “There wasn’t a Bible in that home.” So, as he sought to rise above the cha os, something else caught his attention. “There didn’t seem to be an escape out,” Snook said. “But I was able to see in my neighborhood that some men had escaped. Some men had nice things. And they were all drug dealers.” At 15, he started dealing. By his 19th birthday, he had become a full-time marijuana and cocaine dealer, often flying to the Mexican border to buy, package and ship drugs to Illinois and other Midwestern states. Eventually, drugs and other trouble lead to arrests and a prison time. At age 24, he got out of prison for the first time. “I got out and started trafficking co caine again,” Snook said. “It was just all I knew.” Same with the lifestyle. “You’re living that life,” Snook said. “That life almost always encompasses using drugs and drinking alcohol heav

ily, because every day is life or death many times. You don’t know if you’re going to get robbed or killed that day. You don’t know if law enforcement is going to kick down your door and put you to prison that day. “So, there’s a lot of factors going into numbing that experience, that stressful life.” But there was another side to Snook. “All sense of a moral compass and love and affection and things like that — they just didn’t really exist for me, even though I knew that deep down I was a good person,” he said. “A lot of times, I would take large amounts of money that I would make through drugs and I would buy people vehicles. I would walk up on a stranger that doesn’t have a vehicle and buy them a vehicle. “Now, I can’t explain that. And I don’t really understand why that would hap pen. But I would do that.” Meantime, from his priors, the DEA agents had Snook in their sights. At age 26, he was arrested with six kilos of FINDING THAT ‘GOOD PERSON,’ DEEP DOWN

82 OCTOBER 2023 PEORIA MAGAZINE