His dad hooked him on drugs, then left him. How this Bucks native made a life despite the odds
"Stick out your tongue, Billy,” William Livezey ordered his 14-year-old son inside the elder’s Quakertown bar.
Although not certain what might happen next, the boy did as he was told, acutely aware of his father’s quick-trigger hot temper. The man dipped the tip of a finger into a small amount of liquid and tapped it on the boy’s tongue. He tasted it and gagged.
The liquid was methamphetamine. A father casually doing the unthinkable: introducing his child to the most addictive synthetic psychostimulant drug.
“Did my dad do that so I’d have disdain for drugs?” said Livezey, 57, in a recent phone interview from Maine, where he spent 30 years as a game warden and undercover investigator, and recently released a book about his life titled, “Let’s Go for a Ride.” “Maybe. But the thing is, I liked it.”
Moments earlier in the darkness of the bar, a youngster on the fast track to nowhere watched as a disheveled, raccoon-eyed man, who appeared as if he hadn’t slept in days, entered the bar. The man tied a leather belt around his left arm, pressed the needle of a syringe to the underside of his forearm, and injected meth his father had sold him.
“All my father said when the guy questioned shooting up in front of me was, ‘Billy doesn’t care what you shoot into your veins,’” Livezey recalled. “That was the world I lived in, and I became just like them.
“Soon as my mom and dad divorced, I went from a good kid watching ‘Flipper’ and ‘Gentle Ben’ to smoking pot, becoming a stoner, and getting straight F’s in seventh grade. A switch just flipped.”
Dysfunctional family life
Delivering narcotics, not sound parental advice, was William Livezey’s business in Bucks and Eastern Montgomery counties back in the 1970s. The man went from owning a lawn-and-wood cutting business and operating apartment complexes to taking and dealing drugs. He also dressed the part by wearing unbuttoned silk shirts, permed hair, mustache, gold rings and necklaces, and always with a gun strapped to his leg. A cinema crook straight out of central casting.
“He went from being this businessman to a drug dealer,” Livezey said. “He was grinding and grinding to make a living. Then he just wanted to make more money. He fell in love with money. That did it.”
This was the crazy world in which Bill Livezey was raised as the family bounced from Chalfont, to Perkasie, to Quakertown, to Lansdale, where the elder’s criminal life came to a fiery, suicidal end in 1979 as his wife and two children watched in horror. The dysfunction set the boy on a path of personal destruction, of becoming addicted to hard drugs and committing thefts throughout his teenage years.
“My life,” he confessed, “was a mess.”
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Saved by a friend in Souderton
Livezey’s fast-spiraling life was saved, he is certain, when a Souderton High football teammate, Steve Sellars, invited him at age 15 to attend a Fellowship of Christian Athletes’ meeting at Franconia Elementary School, where Souderton football coach Jim Henning was moderating. The FCA is a national organization that challenges coaches and athletes on all levels to accept Jesus Christ as their savior and help make a difference in their lives and those of others.
“Steve asked me to go, and I took him up on it,” said Livezey. “I knew I needed to change. That’s where I heard the Gospel for the first time. I knew there was a God, and I knew I was a sinner. What I didn’t know until then is that Christ died for me. That night, I took Christ as my savior. That’s when I started changing back to the way I was before I became a juvenile delinquent.”
More than 40 years later, Sellars recalls the moment he invited Livezey to an FCA meeting.
“It was the Lord speaking to Bill,” said Sellars, of Macungie. “I didn’t have anything to do with it; it’s just what people did for me when I needed direction in my life. Bill and I lived on the same street — Hillside Avenue — so we saw each other every day.
“My mom and dad were separated, and my dad wasn’t the best person in the world, just like in Bill’s family life. I got saved through FCA. So did Bill. I know what falling into the wrong crowd can do. We lost our youngest son, Ryan, to drugs five years ago when he was just 21. He fell into the wrong crowd. I tell people there are choices, and drugs are not the answer. Bill found that out. God is the answer.”
Over drugs and undercover in Maine
Livezey married his high school sweetheart, Gail, and they moved to Maine. During his youth, he momentarily avoided his family’s dysfunction by embracing the outdoors. He fished, hunted, and trapped. Nature was his escape.
“My father always told me animals wouldn’t help me find a career,” Livezey said. “He was wrong. I spent 30 years as a game warden, including 20 doing undercover work catching people jacking deer at night and poaching moose in northern Maine. I had a gift for undercover work because of my past. I was able to read criminals because of my history of crime. You can’t teach that. I also worked in a state prison for 3 ½ years. I knew how to read criminals, who, like me, grew up with a lot of dysfunction.”
A fiery end in Lansdale
Decades later, Livezey recalls the events in detail in his book and in conversation.
In February 1979, warrants were outstanding for his father’s arrest on drug charges. He fled Lansdale to hide from the authorities. When the father returned in September, he learned he was also a suspect in the 1976 murder of his brother, Thomas, with whom he had a strained business relationship, and that each brother had a $237,000 life insurance policy on the other. It was learned later that Livezey hired Martin A. Colson, 43, to kill his brother with a shotgun Livezey provided. Colson's initial sentence of death in the electric chair was commuted to life in prison.
“Mom told us she suspected dad was involved,” said Livezey. “He refused to take a polygraph at the time. We knew he was involved.
“On Sept. 17, dad came to the hotel mom owned in Quakertown. He played pool with me and my older sister, Chris. Dad was crying. Said he wrecked his life and his family. We were going to eat supper with him and his girlfriend, Barbara, at their place in Lansdale at 7 p.m.”
When Livezey and his sister arrived at the apartment located adjacent to the police station, they encountered chaos.
Fire engines and police sirens were screaming. Police were holding throngs of onlookers back from his father’s apartment. Livezey had barricaded himself on the second floor. Police fired tear gas canisters through windows in an attempt to flush him out. One of the canisters came into contact with a curtain and caught fire.
After the fire was put out, police entered the residence and found Livezey dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head.
“I was 15 and numb,” Livezey recalled. “Dad always said the cops would never take him alive. He wasn’t going to prison. I remember going home and drinking a six-pack of Michelob.”
‘My life was broken’
Livezey’s book, “Let’s Go for a Ride,” is a riveting read, detailing a young boy’s destructive lows and, by the grace of God, redemptive highs. One particular passage summarizes his addictions as youth caused by his father’s downfall:
“I couldn’t escape it. Why did these things keep happening? It was one kick after another. Throughout most of it, my coping mechanism was a bottle, pill, or joint. Getting high was the only way I knew to avoid the truth — my life was broken. Still, it was too much for a 16-year-old to handle.
“The intense speed of winging from snorting a line of meth was overwhelming. It gave me the spins and made my skin crawl. I gravitated to quaaludes as my preferred self-medication because it numbed the pain and made me feel indestructible without the spin cycle. On quaaludes, I could get punched in the face and still feel on top of the world.”
A life resurrected by God
Livezey knows firsthand the power of God.
Retired from the game warden department in Maine, he continues spreading the word of the Lord by ministering to kids. In July, he and his wife will relocate to West Palm Beach, Fla., where they will work at a Christian parenting house, living with, mentoring, and doing daily devotions with international students. And today, he and Gail's daughter, Amanda, works with the very FCA that helped save his life.
“I see that need for kids to learn the Lord is real and can transform people’s lives,” he said. “I look back and totally credit him for transforming mine. I don’t know where I’d be without him. There was a time I couldn’t tell you the difference between Jesus and Joseph. But I learned. You pour the Gospel on kids who need it, and it saves them. God’s word is not a bunch of fables, as some say. I’ve seen too many examples of people being saved.
“I know. I’m one of them.”
“Let’s Go for a Ride” can be purchased at www.amazon.com, and at Target and Barnes & Noble.
Columnist Phil Gianficaro can be reached at 215-345-3078, pgianficaro@theintell.com, and @philgianficaro1 on Twitter.
This article originally appeared on The Intelligencer: Hooked on drugs by dad, Bucks County native found sobriety in Jesus
