By David Palmer
‘Chef Jeff’ Henderson is a former crack cocaine dealer who became a millionaire selling drugs on the streets of Los Angeles at age 19 and went to prison on a drug charge at 24 for 11 years.
Today, Henderson, 45, is an award-winning chef, television personality (the Chef Jeff Project on the Food Channel in 2008), motivational speaker, and, with two books in circulation, a best selling author. He tells his fascinating story of redemption in “Cooked. My Journey from the Streets to the Stove.” Henderson, built like a linebacker from his exertions in the prison yard and doing pots and pans in the galley, learned how to cook in prison, and when he got out he worked as a chef with an impressive line-up of restaurants, including Café Bellagio in Las Vegas.
Married and a conscientious father of three, he spends much of his time urging audiences, with evangelistic zeal, to live up to their “potential.” He tells them to take responsibility for their own lives, rejecting bogus solutions offered by gangs, drug abusers and other negative influences.
It’s his mission, and it’s what brought him to Arkansas’s Pulaski Technical College in Little Rock on a wintry day in late January to talk about his own failures and redemption and about opportunity. He spoke at two sessions, one in the afternoon and a second in the evening.
In the audience at the 2 p.m. session were students from the Word of Outreach Christian Academy, an accredited private school with 100 students on Little Rock’s Asher Avenue, a rough inner city neighborhood which is getting better thanks to the community development efforts of conservative Bishop Robert E. Smith. Smith is pastor of Word of Outreach Christian Center church. He founded the school 20 years ago.
Led by Angel Roberson, who is a coordinator for the school’s mentoring program, the students were immaculate—the boys in coat and tie and the girls in dresses—and when Chef Jeff turned up his megawatt smile to high beam, they gave him their full attention.
Also paying close attention were members of Tech’s Network for Student Success under the direction of Kareem Moody. The Network’s mission is “to create and promote access to supportive relationships that help African males overcome barriers to college graduation.” About a dozen of the Network’s members had lunch at the Peabody Hotel with Henderson including Keith Dunbar and Robert Moon, whose stories are included at the end of this article.
On this special day, Henderson was talking a lot more about life, and how to live it than about cooking. And he began by talking about his own.
Addicted to the lifestyle
Remarkably, Henderson never used alcohol or illegal drugs, himself, he said, but by his own account he was addicted to money, women and the “lifestyle,” and that is what eventually brought him down and put him in prison for 11 years.
While he is not a drug addict and never has been, Henderson pled guilty to his own addictions and told the audience at the outset that he was deeply sorry, as a former dealer, for creating and serving the temptations of others. He said he is well aware that his drug dealing contributed to the destruction of lives and families.
About his upbringing, he says, “My mother and father couldn’t teach me how to be a man. I didn’t know what a real man did. I had my first child at 17, but I didn’t understand the value of family. I didn’t know that relationships are our most valuable asset.”
While in prison Henderson joined the kitchen squad at California’s Terminal Island federal prison washing pots and pans as punishment under the direction of “Big Roy,” and over the years he rose from dishwasher to chef and was transferred to a facility at Nellis AFB in Nevada. Henderson is convinced that being assigned to dishwashing detail saved his life. Had he not had that opportunity, he said, he would have continued to aimlessly drift.
In “Cooked,” he writes, “throughout the prison, all of the inmates had created these little communities, in part to try to keep on being the person they were on the outside. Me and my homies were exactly like that: the same fools we were.
“We spent most of our time talking about the money we had had, the cars, the women … some of them were just waiting to get out and would probably be back inside one day again — or dead. I was no different. If I had gotten out then, I probably would have been back to my old ways. But I was starting to see that that maybe there was something more I could do with my life.”
Preoccupied as he was with his love for cooking, Henderson also began to recognize while in prison that he had another mission in life and that was to make amends for the harm he had done selling drugs
“As much as the kitchen was the centerpiece of my prison life,” he says, “I found something else just as rewarding. I was asked to join the inmate Teenage Awareness Program by the prison captain. Along with a few other inmates we were escorted to local high schools in Las Vegas to talk to at risk kids about the decisions they were making.”
Taking responsibility
Henderson virtually insisted to the audience of several hundred in the packed conference room at Pulaski Tech that they take responsibility for their lives no matter the disadvantages they may have had and not give in to defeat.
He was a first class hustler when he was a kid and later as a drug dealer, Henderson says, adding that he is a hustler today, but in a good way.
“A hustler,” he says, “is basically somebody who is smart. I just changed my product. In life you’ve got to learn to be a chameleon. You’ve got to adapt to the culture you’re in. They don’t have to adapt to you.”
Others share his views. The ‘Prison Entrepreneurial Program’ (PEP for short) for qualified inmates at the prison in Cleveland, Texas takes inmates whose skills as drug dealers and gang leaders put them behind bars, and makes successful businessmen and responsible citizens out of them.
The centerpiece of its curriculum is a four-month Harvard-style MBA (Master of Business Administration) program, and it has attracted national attention.
Henderson spoke amusingly of the walk he had developed to fit his bad boy drug dealer persona and to intimidate customers, rivals and others.
“I walked like I had a broken ankle,” Henderson said while demonstrating the before and after version of his stroll. “I had to change my walk three times before I got it right.”
Hustling today for him, he says, is about branding and marketing, which is what successful businesses do. And part of it is emphasizing giving back and making a difference.
Here are some of his other observations:
• “Success is a journey”
• “Build wealth—don’t spend it on trinkets.”
• “In life, you’ve got to focus—check your attitudes at the door. Bring your “A” game.”
Perhaps the most visible manifestation of Henderson’s concern for turning young lives around was the Chef Jeff Project which ran on the Food Network in the fall of 2008. New York Times reviewer Gina Belafonte gave it a big thumbs up.
“You’ve got to be some kind of scrooge, some kind of high middlebrow purist, if you don’t think the makers of the Chef Jeff Project have positioned themselves a little closer to heaven than the people behind, say, “A shot at Love with Tila Tequila.”
Reviewer Belafonte goes on to say, “The Chef Jeff project has Mr. Henderson mentoring six young men and women he puts to work at his catering company, Posh Urban Cuisine, in Los Angeles. They are people like Shante, a 24-year old single mother from Long Beach, California who used to sell drugs and Kathy, a former cocaine and heroin addict from the East Coast who, as she puts it, ‘didn’t think I’d make it to 23.’
“Shante and Kathy say they had never before felt appreciated. Among the others are Alonzo, whose mother was murdered when he was a child and Adam who cries in the first episode, believing that with his work on Chef Jeff he is accomplishing something for the first time in his life.”
His final words left no doubt about Henderson’s spiritual focus and his patriotism. Here are two quotes:
• “I love life. I love America.”
• “I believe the creator is behind me. I consider myself a preacher.”
Editors note: After our conversation following his presentation, Henderson wrote in my copy of his book, Jeff Chef Cooks: “To David. God Bless you and your mission in life.”
An interview with Keith Dunbar
Network for Student Success, Pulaski Tech
Keith Dunbar, 46, who is exploring possibilities as he completes his college education at Little Rock’s Pulaski Tech, wants to start his own business. He should be good at it. He once made $30,000 in one day selling cocaine and a lot more than that over the time he was a dealer.
Dunbar, looking distinguished with his slightly graying hair and Ralph Lauren sleeveless sweater, was one of Pulaski County’s more successful dealers of crack cocaine.
He knew about manufacturing it, or buying it from distributors, and he knew about marketing it—in “red markets,” like Little Rock, which are more competitive and “blue” markets outside the mainstream, where you can charge a higher price.
Crack, from a dealer’s point of view, has many virtues, one of which is that it creates a demand in the consumer’s mind for other drugs.
Dunbar also points to his “people skills’ with those who worked for him and bought from him as a definite plus.
Dunbar has spent 16 years of his life in prison—five years in Cummins for robbery and later 11 years at the Federal Penitentiary at Greenville, Illinois, on drug-related charges. He was released two years ago.
He said he had made the most of federal prison.
“I got clean from the drugs, exercised every day (he was a former athlete at Central High), took classes and tried to learn from the businessmen serving time,” Dunbar said.
When Dunbar got out, he got a job selling cars at Crane Ford and later Pinnacle Ford and discovered he had an aptitude for it not unlike his aptitude for selling drugs.
Today, Dunbar, who was brought up “in the projects,” has a wife and a small child and lives in an upscale neighborhood in Sherwood. He is concentrating on finishing college, he says, and is a member of the chess club.
“My life is beautiful,” he says. “In my drug dealing days I had money, but I wasn’t happy.
“When I saw Chef Jeff, I said, ‘That’s what I should be doing.‘”
An interview with Robert Moon
Network for Student Success, Pulaski Tech
From the time he was 13 until he sobered up 11 years ago, Robert Moon, 45, drank or used drugs every day. He was the “class clown” and also a dealer who began by selling joints for a buck apiece.
Unlike Chef Jeff Henderson, Moon was a dealer who used as well as sold drugs, a “clucker” in street terms, and an especially risky business. Still he never went to prison and in fact landed a job as a guard at Arkansas’s Tucker prison for a brief spell before he was fired.
In his prime as a drug dealer, Moon was knocking down $500 to $1,000 a day, he says, sometimes functioning as a mule between the suppliers in California and the Little Rock market.
On one occasion Moon used the drugs himself the dealer had paid for, and fearing for his life, he slashed his own arm, pummeled himself in the face and went to the emergency room for treatment claiming he had been robbed. The dealer bought it.
Moon resorted to other strategies to cover his drug dealing. He studied to become a preacher, and actually gave some sermons while robbing the collection plate of more than $200 and spending it on drugs.
Moon says that his grandparents raised him right, and that he had departed from their teachings when he hit the streets and began to follow the “You do me, and I’ll do you” way of life.
And in the end it was his grandmother who brought him to his knees. In his last desperate days, he was staying with her. She was housebound, and he was taking the checks she gave him to deposit in her account—about $5,000 worth—and buying drugs with it.
She discovered it, and he agreed to go to treatment for his addictions. He went, and it didn’t take. He continued to use drugs and was about to go to her home and beat her up for the money, but, he said, “on July 9, 2001, I cried out to the Lord, and He stopped me.”
Today, Moon is reconciled with his three estranged daughters and will soon be a grandfather. He is a Certified Nursing Assistant and will get his degree next year. He attends 12-Step meetings regularly and also speaks about drug abuse at schools.
“I have turned my life on the streets into a positive thing, and that is a blessing,” he says.
