Charles ‘Chuck’ Colson died on April 21 aged 80, from complications resulting from a brain haemorrhage.
President Richard Nixon’s hatchet man-in-chief during the Watergate years, he was known to his colleagues as the ‘evil genius’; he spent several months in prison in 1974 after pleading guilty to obstruction of justice, but turned to Christ and, after his release, forged a new career as an evangelist.
Prison Fellowship
In 1976, Colson, who once described himself as a ‘flag-waving, kick’em-in-the-nuts, anti-press, anti-Liberal, Nixon fanatic’, founded the Prison Fellowship Ministries, a $50-million charitable organisation established to bring Christ to the inmates of the world’s penitentiaries.