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CLICK HERE TO SIGN UP or visit us online to sign up at eBookNews.SimonandSchuster.com For my big brother Samuel Stoltzfus (1965–2013), who was always there when we needed him most CONTENTS Introduction: Public Enemy PART I: BEATING MY PATH 1: Becoming Us 2: Hard Lessons 3: Learning English 4: Free at Last 5: Open Road 6: Courting Trouble 7: So Ordered PART II: MAKING OUR STAND 8: Fairy Tale 9: Shun This! 10: Way Too Close 11: BUI 12: Coke Brothers 13: The Barber of Bergholz 14: Don’t Clape Me, Bro! 15: Stitchin’ with a B 16: Valentine’s Day in Court 17: Schooled in Forgiveness 18: Girls Gone 19: Bad Breeding 20: That’s Rich 21: Sunshine State of Mind 22: Exes PART III: BRINGING IT ALL BACK HOME 23: Catching Up 24: Kelly’s Girl 25: Last Laugh Acknowledgments About the Authors INTRODUCTION: PUBLIC ENEMY W hat did I ever do to the governor? I had never even met the man. But the governor and his people had clearly been keeping a close eye on me. And now he had something important to reveal: Of all the thugs, criminals, miscreants and lowlifes in the state of Pennsylvania, I was Public Enemy Number One. Me, a community-spirited businessman from a large Amish family! Me, a laid-back thirty-five-year-old who happened to appear in a popular television show! Apparently, the whole state—excuse me, the whole country—needed to be protected from me. Okay, so maybe I’m not the perfect role model. I know some scruffy people. I do like to run around. When I was younger, I picked up a couple of DUIs, which I’m not proud of, okay? But other than those, the worst offense on my rap sheet is a measly dis-con, disorderly conduct, for mouthing off to a cop at the three- day Country Concert at Hickory Hill Lakes in Ohio. I wouldn’t tell him where my tent was. I didn’t want him watching me and my friends for the rest of our vacation. He found a nice holding cell for me instead. That might make me a bit of a hothead. It doesn’t mean I’m a twenty-first-century Al Capone. But there was Pennsylvania governor Tom Corbett in August of 2014, coming out of his hole in Harrisburg. His approval ratings were lower than poison ivy’s. He was about as popular with the voters as deer ticks. And now he was aiming a fat load of phony outrage straight at me. What can I tell you? Politicians at election time will grasp at anything. Someone must have told the governor about Amish Mafia, the Discovery Channel series that follows my unlikely adventures as an unsanctioned guardian of the Amish. He must have taken me for the black- hatted John Gotti of south-central Pennsylvania. And now he was ready to pounce. “Bigoted,” Governor Corbett thundered. “Negative, inaccurate and potentially damaging,” he fumed. “An affront to all people of faith,” he roared. The blustering governor signed a petition saying all of that and more. And he was demanding action, too. He wanted the TV show canceled. He wanted the sponsors to all pull out. He wanted the entire production, then entering its fourth successful season, packed up, shut down and bum-rushed out of the state. Can you believe this guy? How did he get elected in the first place? Was he the governor of Pennsylvania or a frustrated TV critic? Didn’t he have any real issues to worry about? If we were half as bad as he said we were, why had it taken him three years to speak up? In the governor’s hysterical view, our show was a stone-cold insult to the people of Lancaster County. “It changes the image of the county from one of pastoral beauty, where people are devoted to faith, family and friends,” he contended, “to one of banal ugliness.” Banal ugliness. I wasn’t even certain what that meant. But I was pretty sure it wasn’t a compliment. M y name is Levi Stoltzfus, though most people know me as Lebanon Levi. Born and raised in a devout Amish family, I got tired of seeing Amish people pushed around by forces inside and outside the Amish community. I decided to do something that people from my background rarely do. I started speaking out and standing up. And I did it in public. I think everyone was surprised, me included, when our little TV show shot to the top of the Nielsen ratings, becoming the most watched show on the entire Discovery Channel. Suddenly, I was standing in the middle of this media tornado, semifamous, hugely controversial, wondering what exactly I had done to send the governor of Pennsylvania and his little lackeys around the bend. I’ll tell you what I did. I dared to start telling the truth about the Amish. The whole truth. The good and the bad. And that put a lot of people very much on edge. I went into the outside world, and I didn’t slavishly repeat the usual Amish propaganda from the Lancaster County Chamber of Commerce and Pennsylvania Dutch Convention & Visitors Bureau. You know the stuff I mean: the saintly country bumpkins driving their buggies, milking their cows and hiding their faces from photographs. That version is fine as far it goes. Some of it is even true. But it’s only a fraction of a much larger story, a small fraction. The rest of the story has been carefully hidden from most outsiders, and really it’s the most interesting part. I had the nerve to go on television and start telling the rest. The Amish are wonderful people. Don’t get me wrong. I love the Amish. My family has been Amish for centuries. The Amish have made me what I am today. But the Amish aren’t perfect. Nobody is. Not even me. The Amish are living, breathing human beings, not some tourist-brochure cartoons. The Amish have good and bad inside them and plenty in between. I’m sorry, Governor Corbett, but it’s disrespectful and dishonest and just plain dumb to run around pretending otherwise. I’m not sure what the penalty is for truth-telling in Pennsylvania. But I don’t believe it’s mandatory silence. So I’m not planning on piping down any time soon. A s you might imagine, I wasn’t brought up knowing much about Nielsen ratings, political protests or reality TV. We were the plain and simple people.