This is an I-Heart podcast.

This is Lee Habib, and this is our American stories, the show where America is the star and the American people.

And we love to hear your stories. Send them to Our American Stories.com.

They're some of our favorites.

And now we bring you the story of Dr. George Valdez.

He's the author of Coming Clean, the true story of a cocaine drug lord and his unexpected encounter with God.

Here's George to tell his story.

It was really interesting about my life is that a lot of times in life we believe that only bad

things happen to bad kids. No one can ever imagine that only bad things happen to bad kids.

No one can ever imagine that good things can happen to good kids.

You know, my story is very, very different.

My story starts when I was a young boy in Cuba.

My parents were a very wealthy family.

My dad was a man of tremendous integrity.

Didn't talk to him very, very much. My mother was everything in our lives. And my mother was the one that wanted to leave Cuba. She did not want her children.

She was very religious. Did not want her children to grow up in a home that just did not, was not

allowed to worship God because it was a communist country. And my father

in the other hand, he really just thought that communism was not going to affect him. And he was

40 years old and I want to come to the United States. And my mother said, well, if you don't want to

come, that's fine, but I'm not going to raise my children here. My mother applied to leave Cuba

when, I guess in 1962, right after the revolution, which would have made me six years old.

We did not get to leave to October 11, 1966. And I tell that my life, I look at it in three very traumatic or three shifts of my life,

...