From the Streets to the Stove, from Cocaine to Foie Gras, Chef Jeff’s Recipe for Redemption

What does it take to transform your life after hitting rock bottom? Chef Jeff Henderson knows firsthand. His journey from South Central LA drug dealer to award-winning chef, bestselling author, and youth mentor is a masterclass in personal reinvention and the power of redirected hustle.

Growing up in a single-parent home, Jeff absorbed entrepreneurial traits from family members who modeled hard work without formal business education. As a curious child riding the school bus through wealthy neighborhoods, he pressed his face against the window, dreaming of one day owning a beautiful home with a white picket fence. This early exposure to economic disparity planted seeds of ambition that would drive him throughout his life—though initially down a destructive path.

When crack cocaine flooded his community in the early 1980s, Jeff saw an opportunity to achieve his American Dream through illegal means. By 19, he had become a millionaire drug dealer with custom cars and a three-story house. But the law eventually caught up with him, resulting in nearly ten years in federal prison. Rather than becoming bitter, Jeff used this time to transform himself through education, reading voraciously and learning from the white-collar criminals around him. Most crucially, he discovered cooking in the prison kitchen, which became his pathway to legitimate success.

After his release, Jeff strategically worked his way up from dishwasher to executive chef in elite restaurants, eventually becoming the first Black executive chef at Caesar's Palace. His remarkable story caught media attention, leading to appearances on Oprah, a book deal, a movie deal with Will Smith, and multiple Food Network shows. Today, through The Chef Jeff Project, he mentors at-risk youth using culinary arts to teach leadership and life skills—passing forward the second chance he received.

Jeff's concept of "hustlepreneurship" perfectly encapsulates his philosophy: you don't need to change your hustle, just change your product. His story resonates because it proves that with grit, strategic thinking, and willingness to learn, anyone can transform their life regardless of their past. Ready to be inspired by the raw truth of one man's remarkable journey? Listen now.

Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction to Chef Jeff Henderson
• 8:45 Growing Up in South Central LA
• 18:22 Entrepreneurial Spirit and Early Hustles
• 30:37 The Dark Path: Drugs and Fast Money
• 45:13 Prison Life and Transformation
• 58:51 Finding Purpose Through Cooking
• 1:03:51 From Prison Chef to Beverly Hills
• 1:11:40 Las Vegas and The Chef Jeff Project

Transcript

SPEAKER_02: 0:00

Welcome to Vegas Circle Podcast with your hosts, Pocky and Chris. We are people who are passionate about business, success, and culture. And this is our platform to showcase the people in our city who are making it happen. On today's podcast, we are sitting down with somebody that's living proof that no setbacks are final. His journey from rock bottom to the national spotlight has had him featured on Oprah, Good Morning America, the Steve Harvey show, just to name a few. Got lots to talk with this brother about, man. So let's welcome to the circle. Award-winning chef, best-selling author and entrepreneur, Chef Jeff Henderson. Welcome to the circle, my man. Appreciate you. So we've been watching, you've been on our radar for a while, man. Okay. I think we know a lot of the same people, man, like Rich Robletto. Oh, yeah, that's my man, Rich. Richie Rich. Rich has been on the show, Frederick Hudson. Yeah, he has a tech company downtown. We had Frederick on a couple years back and he's a good one. Yep. We had him on the podcast about three years ago. So you you come highly recommended, my man. Highly recommended. So let's jump right in, man. So growing up South Central, LA, what was it like for you, man? What was life like for you before you went to prison from understanding which we're going to get into?

SPEAKER_01: 0:58

Yeah, well, interesting. You know, life back in those days was in the 70s when I was young. You know, I'm 60 years old. Actually, I'll be 61 this Sunday. You got some good genes. Yeah, well, you know, you know, the the prison, I always tell people a lot of people don't realize prison preserves you. And we'll get into that. So it took a lot of years off my life. And so growing up in LA was was interesting. Came from a single-parent home. Grandparents were very instrumental in my upbringing, along with my sister as well. So I came in a f I grew up in a family of entrepreneurs. You know, my grandfather, my great-grandfather was a photographer, my father was a photographer, and so my mother also an entrepreneur as well. And so growing up back in those days, it was like it was a struggle at times. You know, I saw the American dream as a youngster. You know, I was one of those guys who rushed to get on a school bus every day because during integration in LA, you know, a lot of the homeboys was bust out of the hood into the burbs to go to school. And so I used to wear these glasses when I was young, and the right lens was thick as the bottom of a Coke bottle. So y'all are pretty young, so y'all probably don't remember the thick Coke bottles back in the days. It's jokes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, once you once you finish the soda, you can take it back to the store and you get 20 cents. Yeah, I don't know that y'all don't know about that one. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so, you know, getting on the bus, I always, you know, fought to get that seat behind the school bus driver because it had the largest window. And so, and it didn't have the seam in the middle. And so every day during that 35-minute, 40-minute bus ride to school, we passed through multimillion dollar neighborhoods. And so I was a kid that was always curious, always asked questions, I always wanted to know why. And so I began to question, you know, our circumstances. How come they get to live there and we have to live over here? What's the difference in the projects and apartments, low-income housing versus living in a beautiful home? Yep. And so when I saw these homes, I was like, I want one of them. I want one of those for my mother. I want the house on the hill with the white picket fans. So that started my childhood dream of the American dream was a house. Like growing up in a house, you know, with a double-door refrigerator, you know, having, you know, a garage, you know, uh a dog running around the yard, a basketball hoop over the garage door. Yep. You know, those things were kind of important for me. You know, my parents originated from New Orleans, Louisiana. There was a big exit during the late 50s and the early 1960s, where a lot of people from New Orleans left and went to Chicago for the textile industry. They went to Detroit for the automobile. We're both from there.

SPEAKER_02: 3:38

I'm from Chicago. You're from Detroit.

SPEAKER_01: 3:40

Okay. Yeah. And then a lot of folks went to Oakland, Longshoremans, and then Los Angeles, where my family chose to go to because they were able to get jobs as domestic workers in Beverly Hills and work for the uh LA County LA Unified School District.

SPEAKER_00: 3:56

After you had these things, you know, what next steps did you take, you know, after you kind of had this burning desire, right, to move into entrepreneurship if you seem with your family? Like what was like the natural progression of that kind of inherent ambition? Well, interesting.

SPEAKER_01: 4:06

I think I think example, you know, my grandfather, my father, my mother uh modeled the behavior of an entrepreneur. You know, everyone in my house got up early. You know, so as a young kid, we were up at five o'clock on weekends in the summers. You know, my grandmother would always make coffee. My grandfather had a janitorial service in LA. And so he cleaned all the wealthy Jewish delicate testants and bakeries up on in Wilshire District. But he also had a contract with Baskin Robbins, which used to be called 31 Flavors. And then another, he had a bunch of contracts. And so all the boys had to go work with granddaddy. And so my grandfather used to be work as a longshoreman in New Orleans, and he was a very hardened man. You know, he was serious about life. He never was silly, he never clowned around. And when he came to LA, father had told me that he didn't want to work under the bootstrap of people who oppressed a lot of black folks down in the South. So he says, I'm going entrepreneur. And my grandfather started out with an old Chevy, and he had a ladder in the trunk, a squeezy, and a mop bucket. And so his expertise was cleaning windows and changing the ballots in fluorescent lights in businesses. And also buffing and waxing floors. And so as a kid, my grandfather had me cleaning toilets, cleaning floors, cleaning windows. So we saw what ambition looked like. We saw grit hard work and hard work. Yeah. And and grit. And I think I think when you look at the word, when you look at grit that a lot of people use and really don't understand that, is I think one of the foundations of grit is when your parent or guardian never lets you give up. You know, and my grandfather was that type if you're sick, if you're not feeling well, you're hurting, you still going to work. And that that stayed instilled in me all the way up until today. So my grandfather was ambition, my father was ambition, my grandfather, my great grandfather had an old school Polaroid, and he hustled nightclubs down in Mobile, Alabama. Yeah, yeah. You know, and even though he didn't have a good relationship with my grandfather, it was the visual. So when you think about young people who grow up under adverse childhood experiences, things that you see, hear, and experiences, the long-term impact. And so my grandfather never came to me or my father or my great-grandfather to my grandfather and said, Look, I'm gonna show you how to hustle. I'm gonna teach you the principles of hard work, and here's the payoff. They didn't have the the intellect, the capacity to put that. What they did was they allowed us to witness it. And so we learn a lot of times when you're uneducated, which all my family never finished school. My grandfather made my dad stopped working in seventh or eighth grade because he had to deliver groceries in the in the pharmacy in uptown New Orleans. So he started early, you know, working as like a worker preneur, but he always had a vision to have a growing business. You know, and so my grandfather, you know, I I kind of coined the term hustlepreneur. Right. And so that's the next book I got coming out called Hustlepreneur's ship, right? That's for sure. And so hustlepreneur is a spin on entrepreneur. And so a hustlepreneur has certain lived experiences and entrepreneurial traits that he learned from experience versus in a book or in school. Right?

SPEAKER_02: 7:48

So or philosophy, just teaching a philosophy. Absolutely, absolutely.

SPEAKER_01: 7:52

And so when you know, when there's no food growing up, you know how to create a meal with government rations. You know how to turn 15 cents into a dollar. And if mama don't bring food home, you gotta hustle. So in my era versus the era today where these young folks are very entitled, if we didn't hustle, we didn't eat. Because my mama worked two jobs. So for me, I think that that experience with my grandfather, and he was tough. And so if wax built up on the floor and I didn't get it right, he had these big hands, he would thump me in my head. And so our bald heads back then were called covitus. I don't know if you know that term. So that's an old term, like military, like dungerines where your jeans. So the bald head was called a covitus, and he would thump me in the head along with my first cousins. You say, Boy, didn't I tell you to make sure you got that wax? So that's where that mental toughness came in and respect of authority that allowed me to eventually flourish. But what my parents as entrepreneurs didn't have, they didn't have vision. You see, so they worked that entrepreneurial job as if it was a job. So basically, they created a job for themselves. So my grandfather never had the vision because he had a van, it said Charles Henderson Janitorial Services. He didn't have the vision to say, What if I buy 25 vans and hire 25 janitors to go out and then let me go out and negotiate the deals? So they didn't have that type of vision because they didn't have the training for that. And so I think that's where I draw and inherited that entrepreneurial spirit from my grandfather.

SPEAKER_02: 9:42

Especially because I'm looking at it right, like writing books, motivational speaker, you know, chef. You got so many things probably from watching all these, you know, people that you've seen set your foundation that hard work, you probably have five different businesses, right, that you that you've actually developed.

SPEAKER_01: 9:57

Yes, but you know what's interesting about it is that so my my philosophy is that you know you you focus on your strengths and you manage around your weaknesses. Manage around your weaknesses. Okay. So meaning you guys run Vegas Circle Podcasts as talent here, but then he does the cameras. That's not your lane. Correct. Right? And so when you focus on your gift, the one thing that you do extremely well at a very high level is the gift. See, a lot of times we invest and go to college because what we're passionate about. I love the golf, but I suck at golf. That's not my own.

SPEAKER_02: 10:36

You know what I'm saying?

SPEAKER_01: 10:37

And so so your gift is various things. Sometimes a gift is not a skill set. Your gift that can create revenue streams could be your charisma, it could be your beauty, it could be a physique.

SPEAKER_02: 10:54

Especially now with social media.

SPEAKER_01: 10:55

Jeez, people gotta seriously. You know, your talk game, right? Your gift to gab, your communication skills. That's true. And so when I was young, I had several little businesses. So my grandfather my father had a lawnmower. Once we eventually moved out of South Trent, LA, we moved to Long Beach. I got kicked out of LA Unified School District. And so I wound up going to school in Long Beach, North Long Beach. So my father had a lawnmower. And so I used to take his lawnmower when he left to work, and I cut grass before I went to school. So I used to charge like$25 for the back,$15 for the front. So I always kept a little change. And I know you were getting it too much. Yeah, every morning before I went to school, I had to have paper.

SPEAKER_02: 11:33

Because everybody hated cut grass basically.

SPEAKER_01: 11:36

No, I I just I just was taught that early, right? And then these guys used to come in our neighborhood in these white vans, these white dudes, right? And so we used to go sell gourmet chocolate candy up in San Pedro and Rancho and Palisades. And so I used to sell out all my gourmet chocolate every night, and we would win cash prizes and trips to like Knotts Bray Farm in Disneyland. Oh, wow. And then eventually I wound up when I wound up going to San Diego, we lived there twice. I had a newspaper route. I had the number one newspaper route in Linda Vista.

SPEAKER_03: 12:09

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 12:09

So I would, I, I, I, money was, you know, money was I I had to have money because why do they why all the successful entrepreneurs had newspaper routes, man?

SPEAKER_02: 12:20

You ever noticed that like back in the day? All the successful entrepreneurs, you would you do the history? Yes. A lot of them had newspaper routes.

SPEAKER_01: 12:27

Yeah, and that was like way before social media. I mean, you you got all your information from learned the how to hustle, talk, communicate, sell the door-to-door. So, and it's interesting you mentioned that because for me, I had a lot of people on my route who didn't look like me. Of course. That's what I'm saying. You gotta be a chameleon. You gotta get, yeah. But then what that done for me, it helped me not be, what's the word I want to use? Not not to be inferior.

SPEAKER_02: 12:53

I love that. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 12:54

Right? It it taught me not to fear people of wealth, people who didn't look like me, because I got practice in communicating with folks, customer service. And so I had a unique technique, what I used to do. So a lot of the paper boys used to be on our bicycles, and we had Schwen's beach cruisers. So we had the the strap, you know, he had the big bag in front of you, the big bag in the back. And then we had the saddle in the back, right? So they would just go and toss their papers, right? So what I did is I took every newspaper, I put it in a plastic bag. So the guy, the newspaper company would give you these plastic bags for a rainy day. So when it rains, you're supposed to put that paper in the plastic. So messed up, yeah. So it don't mess it up. So I put mines in it all the time. And I used to get off my bike, I used to go up, and I had one of my homeboys with me. We would put the newspaper because it had a hole in it, like a doorknob advertiser and put it on their screen. So they didn't have to come out of their house into the yard or the driveway to get that newspaper. And so that was part of my tip hustling. So when I came down for collection at the end of every month, they would always put a nice tip. The service. And so that stuck with me too. Kids are helping later on.

SPEAKER_02: 14:09

My sons are gonna have to listen to this, man. Just the service of doing that, man. I wish my sons would listen. Yeah, listen the simple simple things.

SPEAKER_00: 14:15

You have a child, like you go from like this, you know, setting the foundation, right, of your upbringing, and then kind of you then you have sure you go through a phase like hustlepreneurship, you want to call it, right? Where you're really trying to establish what it means to be an entrepreneur. How do I set that foundation? How can I, you know, put the contracts in place? How can I set these agreements, these business licenses? But during that, do you feel like you were going through like a sense of rebellion where you're trying to get quick, you know, money, trying to take, you know, audit and stuff to try to take that next step faster? Or do you feel like you had the patience to kind of navigate it in a more like productive way?

SPEAKER_01: 14:45

No, I don't I don't think it was navigating faster. I think that, you know, and so when you look at the social issues that really impacted young boys and girls of color during that era, is that we look at the high crime in black and brown males and what drives criminal tendencies, what gives birth to the criminal. And so most of us young black males lived in single-parent homes where there's no father. So a lot of young men had experiences of their mothers happen to prostitute themselves to put food on the table. What I mean for that, not walking on a on a whole track or anything, but I mean having a sugar daddy. And so when a young black boy or any boy of any color, I would assume, sees that. Sees that or come home and see his mother in multiple relationships, and when the old man leaves, mama got a little money. Food is on the table.

SPEAKER_02: 15:37

You see what I'm saying?

SPEAKER_01: 15:39

Because the the relationship of a mother and her son, that umbilical cord is never severe. It's a special relationship. And it's your first love. It's your first love. Exactly. Absolutely. And so when you look at what drives criminal in young black males, is the fact that we started hustling to help mama to put food on the table, to make sure mama had a little change in her pocket. If you ask any drug dealer, especially of color from my generation, uh why they started, and it was the first thing they do is they buy their mama's house just like an athlete does in the NBA or the NFL. We got to get mama a house, we gotta make sure she got money so she don't have to be sleeping with an old married man from the burbs. Yep. And so that was a good thing. That messes subconscious up, man. Yeah, it messes you, it messes you up. No doubt. I'm not doing this, and that's the level of trauma.

SPEAKER_02: 16:24

Yep.

SPEAKER_01: 16:25

You know, and then it impacts black males, and I and I don't when I say black males, I speak from my own lived experience. I'm a black man. I get it. And so I don't I don't I don't have other type, I don't have the Hispanic experience with a white experience, anything like that. I speak from my own experiences. And and so during that era, again, our parents were uneducated, they lacked certain skills, and so you know, welfare, you know, food stamps, government ratchings back then in the 70s, we got commodity food. So there were government centers we went to, and we got peanut butter, peaches, jelly, bologna, cheese, and all those different things. And again, every day I still had to get on that bus. And I saw the American Dream.

SPEAKER_02: 17:05

And you literally take you away. It's almost like a low exposure.

SPEAKER_03: 17:08

Yeah, and that's a low vacation in the morning, man.

SPEAKER_01: 17:10

And that's why exposure is so important for our young children so they can see options.

SPEAKER_02: 17:16

Before I don't I don't want to go down a rabbit hole, but one of the it's funny because my wife and I, we talk about this all the time. I will never forget this. I think I was 20 years old, I'm 45 now. And I remember this man told me, and and it echoed what my father used to always talk about was he was saying, do not give your kids, because I didn't have kids at the time, do not give your kids material things, take them on experiences, take them on travel, get them a passport as soon as they and diapers. My wife and I did that, and you see the development of them just seeing stuff. You know what I mean? So that's powerful what you're saying.

SPEAKER_01: 17:45

And that's important. And so, and I think the reason why my grandfather and great grandfather and father had those blinders of poverty and they didn't have vision is because they never was exposed. Yep. You understand? So when you lack exposure, you lack growth and development. And so when you think about middle class values, values of people who come from wealth, they're they're children under the theater. You know, they they they go to Niagara Falls, they've been on an airplane, they've been to an island, they've been to Europe. And so it's important that children get to see things and remove those blinders and see the possibilities of life.

SPEAKER_02: 18:20

1000%. I love that. How did you end up in prison? Is it like what where was the turning point that was like, damn, and it got you caught up where you were selling drugs? Like you were talking about earlier. What got you caught up?

SPEAKER_01: 18:31

So again, that that that dream, that desire, yeah, that passion for wealth and to one day get that house on the hill, eventually led to when I got in high school, started selling weed. Yep.

unknown: 18:45

Right.

SPEAKER_02: 18:45

So we were in still South Central too.

SPEAKER_01: 18:47

When I was in San Diego. Oh, you were in San Diego. So how I got to San Diego at the age of 16, I got stabbed in a mall called Cerritos Mall by some gang members. Damn, yeah. So my mother's area, yeah. My mother was living in San Diego. And so after I got out of hospital, Bellflower Hospital, my mother came and got me and brought me to San Diego. Damn. And so being in LA around hustlers and entrepreneurs and progressive folks, San Diego was a quiet town next to the bay. And so they were 15, 20 years behind time in terms of street hustling. And so went out there and got put on the weed game because you know borders right there, and you have Fallbrook, or the Fallbrooks Mexican cest, the Thai bud, the weed that everybody smoked back then. So I sold weed in school. I used to sell dollar pinhead joints, and I used to sell diamond nickel bags that I'd put in ziplocks. And back then I didn't wear boxers, I wore tidy whiteys, right? And so every time I went to school, I would line the front of my underwear with nickel bags of weed. And so that was my little hustle. Yeah. Right. And then so in the early 1980s, during the so-called war on drugs, crack cocaine has showed up.

unknown: 19:58

Yep.

SPEAKER_01: 19:59

In early 1981.

SPEAKER_03: 20:01

Yep.

SPEAKER_01: 20:01

So, you know, Los Angeles was on the forefront in Oakland of the distribution and manufacturing of back then it was called rock before crack. So in the East Coast, they called it crack because it used to be in a vial, little cracks they would put in a pipe. But on the West Coast, we cooked rock. So they had like, you know, a$50 rock, a$100 rock,$25 rock. And so when I saw the guy start making that kind of money versus weed, I'm like, I'm just gonna. Change the whole game for you. Yeah, I need to get in on that. And so I made a$150 investment and I bought a sixteenth of an ounce, and I just started flipping. I was curb serving that was running up the cars. Hey man, I got them rocks, man. I got them rocks. But after a while, I was saying, like, this is dangerous. You know, somebody's gonna kill it. Because I've never been a gang member.

SPEAKER_02: 20:49

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 20:49

Right? Because I never saw profit in gangbanging. Like, I can't dislike someone because they live on another side of town or they're white or Hispanic. You know, I judge everyone on individual character, you know what I'm saying?

SPEAKER_02: 21:01

Going back to that newspaper route.

SPEAKER_01: 21:03

Yes, exactly. I'm paying attention, I'm following you. And this is how I became even a successful drug dealer, part of my life I'm not proud of, but I was one of those guys that can go in any neighborhood. Crip neighborhood, blood neighborhood, everybody, yeah. Hispanic neighborhood. And so I was a visionary. I saw the big vision. And then when you know Scarface came out and, you know, all the drug cart movies back in those days, like I wanted to go to Columbia. Like, I was serious about this business all the way down to how I cooked it and how I packaged it and how I marketed that product as well, too. And by the time I was 19, I was a millionaire. And so I got the house. At 19 years old. At 19.

SPEAKER_02: 21:46

Wow.

SPEAKER_01: 21:46

Up in Dictionary Hills, I built a custom three-story house in Dictionary Hills, overlooking Sweetwater Lake, hooked moms up, family up, because during that era, you know, there was there was a huge profit margins in selling rock cocaine. Because you take, and I don't want to get too deep into that. I said to myself when I came here, I didn't want to put a lot of emphasis on that, but the science behind that, like, like we didn't have the intellectual capacity as chemists to come up with a formula to turn powder into a more higher potent drug. Somebody did that. Did that. And during the Iran Contra, the drugs got here from the weapons to Iran to South America, like that shit just showed up, homeboy. We didn't have no passports, we ain't never been across the border, we didn't have no airplanes, that shit was just coming in. Guys were becoming multi, multi-millionaires overnight. It was crazy. It's hard to walk away from something like that. It's very difficult. And what happens, even a lot of our parents turn another cheek. They in church on Sunday, Pentecostal, Holy Ghost, all that. But when that money same here, right? That's just true. So I remember I remember when my sister told my mother that I was selling drugs. And mom's told me, You have to go. I'm not, you can't sell drugs and be in my house. So I bounced. My mother was single, had my sister and I, but my father been married other times and had other kids. But my mother just had my sister and I. And back then they was living in East San Diego in a one-bedroom apartment. And so my sister and I shared a corner group. I don't know if you remember corner group. I'm going back to the day. No, you're not. So corner group is in the living room and is that a West Coast thing? It could be. Okay. There's a little table in the corner, and then the couch you sit on are beds and you pull them out so two people can sleep there. Oh, gotcha. So we slept in the living room. Gotcha. And then after you wake up, you make you take your blankets away, you push that back in.

SPEAKER_02: 23:52

You know what's a matter of fact? I remember staying at a hotel in Long Beach way back in the day, and I think it had it like that.

SPEAKER_01: 23:56

Okay. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02: 23:57

It's called a corner group, right?

SPEAKER_01: 23:59

Okay. And I came by to see my mom, my sister, and I told my sister, I said, Look, get this to mom. It was$10,000.

unknown: 24:07

Damn.

SPEAKER_01: 24:08

$10,000,$100 bills is about that thick right there. And gave it to moms. And moms paid me. I came over there and she she just thought it was nickel and diamond it. But at this time I started moving in some weight. And then I came with the money and I gave my moms$10,000 and she turned her other cheek. Like so many mothers did. None of us saw the damage, the long-term damage that rock cocaine was going to have in our community. So this is why we're having the issues we have today from the, you know, the violence, the anger, and our young people. It stems from that era. And so during that time, you know, I started eight cars, I had customer Sadies, and I understood certain value systems because even back then, I used to travel like to Jamaica and Hawaii. And we used to go like this. It was this Easter's travel agency in San Diego. I would go in there and buy like 12 first-class round tickets. And all the homeboys would go to Jamaica for, you know, seven, eight days over there, party, live it up, have a good time and stuff. Yeah. And then what what but the tough part of it was is that the little homies that was riding bicycles, remember the visual learning? They were watching us with the cars, the jewelry, the women, all of that came. And then when you look at the the the crack cocaine era of the 1980s, you look at the multi-billion dollar industries that was born out of that. See, we were the first, and I'll show you pictures. I have receipts for everything. So I can back up everything I say with receipts, with photos, documentation. You know, we had the big Turkish rope chains with the big Mercedes medallions, right? And then the athletes wanted to be like drug dealers. And so that as you see all the drug dealers. 1000%. Yeah, they get the big chains, the diamonds, earrings, and stuff. And so we created the we we we evolved the diamond and gold industry back in those days. When you think about the pedicure, manicure shops, everybody's getting petty manny's, right? Yeah. There was a in LA there was a nail salon called Man Trap. Man trap. Inglewood. Okay. So when you think about the name Man Trap, so women come there, get the nails done, their feet. That's where they started because before then it was press-on-nails. Okay. You know, you go to like pick and save or whatever, and you the girls press the nails on. So that's when that became very popularized, pedicure manicures back then, right? And then you look at the fashion industry, fila, elise, starter jackets, air Jordans. Like Jordan should have a nonprofit that just puts money back in prisons because of the guys who killed to get those shoes.

SPEAKER_02: 26:51

Back in the day, we couldn't wear Jordans. Yeah, they'd get robbed. Oh yeah, no, they'll shoot. Exactly, exactly. In the 80s, it was serious with the footlocker on the map.

SPEAKER_01: 27:01

You know, so then we bought cars, you know, Mercedes, Rolls-Royce's. They didn't really do Bentley's back then, but a lot of homeboys had like Rolls-Royces and BMWs, Candy Paints, Music, and then the cell phone industry. Like I had the big NEC brick phone, and you know, that industry was born out of there. You know, we bought real estate, uh, we traveled. So when you think about criminal money that's incorporated in the economy in this country, is why I always say crime will never go away. There has to be crime. Yeah. There has to be loopholes. I mean, drugs dealing created the DEA. It created narcotics task force. It created the ATF from the drive-by's and the AK-47s and all of that. Too many late eras.

SPEAKER_00: 27:46

You gotta go spend it, right? You can't invest it. It's hard to invest uh money that's coming in with that.

SPEAKER_01: 27:50

So then how the feds work in those days, too, like they'll let you build up, they'll watch you for a long period of time. Build up, get real estate, get assets, come indict you, then take all your stuff. Take all your stuff, yeah. You feel me?

SPEAKER_02: 28:03

So it's usually your paperwork, paperwork ain't set up that way, so it's going back to the exactly.

SPEAKER_01: 28:07

You know, because like we all bought houses, but we use the same real estate man that was selling the houses to all the drug dealers. So we just wasn't thinking like that. And then you gotta think about the music industry, gangster rap, another multi-billion dollar industry. That's when RB kind of went to the wayside back then because they wanted to promote the violence in the drug dealing and rap music would begin to take the get the young kids thinking violently and and and valuing materialistic things. Yeah. And then on top of that, the$190 billion mass incarceration business. So, you know,$90 billion industry in the United States prison system from juvenile. I don't even know it was$190,000 state and federal.$190. Because inside of these prisons, there's factories. All your airplane seats are made in prison. When you go to Costco and you go to the to to Walgreens, you get two pair of prescription glasses for$99. That's all that shit's made in prison.

SPEAKER_02: 29:07

Is it true? Like I was reading about that, right? Like they were saying that the prison system in the future knows how much to build and construct everything by single-family homes and the home nine.

SPEAKER_01: 29:22

So that's called correctional forecasting, right? That's true. Yes. So they also study the failure rate of kids in schools. Like here in Clark County School, that's the third largest school district in the country, 350. Yes. And so so they have what you call behavior schools here, alternative schools. And so we work in an alternative school called Peterson. And so most of the young kids there, they got ankle bracelets, they have some type of criminal behavior activity in a regular school. Yep.

SPEAKER_02: 29:51

And so that's through your Jeff uh the Chef Jeff project. Chef Jeff Project. I want to ask you about that too.

SPEAKER_01: 29:56

And then so, so, so when they when when you look at the failure rate. The kids not going to school, the addiction of vaping and drugs, there's a greater chance of them getting incarcerated one day. And so that's how they forecast the building of prisons based on that. And broken families where young boys are growing up in a house with just the mother, the father's either in prison or not in that child's life. So those kids kind of grow up uncivilized a little bit because, you know, kids aren't disciplined and they lack structure that we had. Yeah, because there was a Mr. Johnson on the corner can thump you upside the head back in the days and bring you home to your to your mama. And we got paddled in school. So I was getting paddled every week. My ass stay rest. You know, the principal had to paddle with the hose in there, and you get lashes. Yeah, that's crazy. But that's structure, that's discipline, that's respecting authoritative figures. And so now with that gone, and then home economics, wood shop, metal shop, all those basic programmings are there. Because everybody's not college material. So you remove all of that, what are these young people gonna do? Yeah. Play video games.

SPEAKER_02: 31:11

Yeah, and that's a wood process. So, like how you said prison saved your life. Yes. Correct. How how so?

SPEAKER_01: 31:17

So in 1988, I got indicted by the feds. Okay. So in the mid-80s up into the 90s, massive indictments all across this country. So they flood the community with the drugs and the weapons. So guys build massive fortunes, right? Then all that gets confiscated, and then they start building up the prison system. Because in the prison system, every prison has factories. When I was in Terminal Island, we made metal furniture that went to U.S. government and foreign governments. Wow. You have prisons that rebuild alternators for military T1 tanks and electrical harness for military jets. You have prisons that uh that do printing. So I I do a lot, I was this in North Carolina prison system in Ohio. They have printing factories, they make logos, patches, everything in these prisons that sell for cheap for the government. So these are the contracts that you get. The contracts you get in the prison. I followed it. And so the more time you have, you're in these prison factories working for 12 cents, 20 cents an hour, and and stuff in these prisons, so it becomes big business. And so I wound up serving almost 10 years in a federal system. Wow. And so I was 23 years old when I went in. And so I was in in prison when it was called Club Feds. I don't know if you ever heard that term. I think I did from a movie, but what does that mean? So club fed means, okay, so the federal prison system is totally different from state correctional institutions. In state prisons, you have more hardcore, you got guys in there that shot four people to 200 bucks. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. So any crime that's federal, like bank robbery, any crime that happens on a federal highway is or or or or just like people, a lot of money crimes. Anything crossed state lines and stuff like that. So it's federal. And so when I went in the federal system, I was in there with during the time that Ivan Bolski, Michael Milken, I was in there with the former president CEO of Paramount Studios, bankers. Oh, so you was picking these brothers. Yeah, yeah, no, they these guys was like high level. Everyone in there was all the big cartel bosses. I I used to my cell was across from Rosario Gambino. I used to read a newspaper to him almost every day because his English wasn't that good. He was serving 45 years for the, he was, they were running heroin, the Gambino family through the pizza shops in New York City. And so even though he was an East Coast mafia dude, he was placed in Terminal Island. Really nice guy. He was the only prisoners that wore a Rolex watch and a gold chain with a rosary. And even the warden at that time was a full retired full birth colonel named Fred C. Stock. And he everyone called him Mr. Gambino. It was a short guy. And so I heard about the mafia as a kid on television.

SPEAKER_03: 34:12

I said, I can slap this dude to the ground anywhere.

SPEAKER_01: 34:15

Yeah, right. You already know you like calling home the moms and be like, hey, your whole family did it home for like 10 days, right? Your whole family did it for real. But he was a super world, when I say world-class gentlemen, like those guys were criminals, but they had they had structure. They weren't dirty criminals like you get a lot in the States. Extremely sophisticated. Yeah, they're not like, yeah, they were intelligent. You know, these mafia guys were like, you know, the kids, they grow up straight. You know, one kid goes to be an accountant, one kid goes and be a criminal defense attorney, one kid may be a real estate broker. So that's how they clean, they're not buying like all their whole setup. And so being in prison with these high-level convicts, you know, federal judge in there, and what was his name? Alan Hastings. He was a black federal judge out of Miami for corruption. He was there. And so these guys were very elitist. They were like the one percenters. And so they taught a lot of business classes, marketing, public. Why you were in prison? Yes. Oh, yeah. Because they didn't want to work in a factory, so they created educational courses for a lot of the other inmates. And so this was the first time in American history that the federal system was flooded with black prisoners and Hispanic prisoners who came from poverty because of the level of drugs that was being moved and the assets that we had moved us up to that federal level. I follow you. And so when Nancy Reagan came out with just say no, the war on drugs, that's when they cleaned up. Was it part of a big conspiracy master plan to break up families of color? They say that's a conspiracy, right? They say it's a conspiracy that the federal government allowed the weapons and the cocaine to come into our communities. Because again, drug treatment is a multi-billion dollar industry. Everybody get paid. Especially you said$190 billion.$190 billion, Google it. That's unreal. I might be off by five billion. I was in it, I read the paperwork, I see it. I'm at correctional conferences, the American Correctional Associates, American probation and parole. So I teach at these associations around the country, so I get access to those numbers. And so crazy in prison, bitter, blaming everyone, my father for not being in my mother, my sister. This any I blamed everyone. And it didn't come to a time where I started to hold myself accountable. It didn't happen overnight. You know, so in prison, you have different cards, right? And so you got the Chicago car, you got the East Coast, you got the Mexican Mafia, you got the Area Nation, you got the Crip card, the blood card, and you got all these different sets. And so when you go into the system, everybody is lobbying to recruit you to get in that card, right? And so me coming out of San Diego, I rolled with the 619, which was a San Diego car. We stuck together in case something jumped off. We had each other's back. Even though I wasn't gang affiliated, but originally from LA, I had a lot of crip partners from LA that I went to school with in Long Beach and in LA. So I was got guy caught in the middle. That's tough. So I had to really ever it was stressful for me because I had to navigate the prison politics trying not to take a side. But then again, you have to choose a side because if I had an issue with somebody on the yard, I need that protection, right? And so then you have the Christians, you have you have the Muslims, you have the Nation of Islam, then you have Orthodox Muslims, then you had the Jewish car, then you had the Catholic, then you had atheism in prison, you had Native Americans, we had a TP on the yard. Because the one thing the federal government does, they respect everybody's religion. And so you had Imams coming in, you had pastors coming, you had gospel people. And so I was lost. So I knew nothing about history. I lacked self-love because my parents never, like one day I asked my dad, said Dad, was you ever in the Black Panther? Was you down with the movement in the 60s? He didn't know anything about that. No, my grandfather didn't either, because as I became conscious in prison, so everybody was lobbying to get me, right? And so there was a guy named Mze. Mze had long locks, like down to his butt, and they were mad at it. You could tell guys who got fresh locked, they get him put in there, but his was like mad at it. And so he was part of the BLA, the Black Liberation Army. If you're not familiar with them, looked him up. And so it was a revolutionary group uh in the South that smuggled weapons from Mexico that didn't have serial numbers on there, and then they recruited prostitutes who gave birth to kids, and they had house, they had midwives. So they were birthing revolutionaries into the world that didn't have Social Security numbers or fingerprinting. So that way they can go on missions of killing record. So that's even like during, like if that's why the cartel, when they get robbed by black gang members here, they bring in guys across the border, their fingerprints ain't registered nowhere. They come over, do a hit, boom, they gone. You know, or guys go crawl out of state and they do hits like that. And so MZ, he was an older guy. He gave me a book called Black Men Obsolete, Single Dangerous. And I'm like, man, I don't want to read this shit. I'm not into that. You know, and he would always pull me to the side. They was always huddling in their little corner on the yard, talking about black history, the struggle. And then you had the nation of Islam, who, and their, and their Bible back then was called Message to the Black Man. And then you have the Christians who had the Bible, the Muslims had the Quran, and then you had the Jewish people, so they were all pulling. And then the the nation guys, you know, they had their shirts buttoned up. You're out of Chicago, so you're very familiar with the city. Farrakhan lived across the street from my godmother in Hot Parks. I know I know the nation very well. Yeah, so but but one thing any warden would tell you, they respected the nation in prison because they were highly disciplined. And they never had problems. No, and they re and they they were gang member flippers. So I met a guy, I used to be the person. Yeah, so so they took the gang members and and shifted their mentality instead of saying, why are you killing your brother? Love your brother. And so when when I went to watch the video and listen to him, and then they started teaching history, like, you know, 400 years ago before we came here, kings and queens and all the the things that that that we done in this country from architects to things we invented. I'm like, damn, why didn't my school teacher ever tell me that? You know, why my dad? And then I was calling my dad, said dad, why you ever, mom, why you ever tell me this shit? And you're learning this in prison. In prison. Yeah. Right? And so I graduated from high school, but not with a G D. I graduated with a certificate of completion. The schools back in those days were funded. They they they pass kids through grades without even qualifying because they keep you in the school, and the kids get and the schools are funded. So I should have never graduated. Yeah, buddy. And then I wind up going to school. So I got the books, I start reading, and I just start thinking different. I start analyzing things. Okay, now I now I see, now I know why we was always poor. Now I know how those people who lived in the burbs got those houses. And so I started valuing education, information, and being exposed. And so every race in prison had their own TV room. The white dudes had their TV room, the blacks had theirs, Hispanics, Asian, Island Pacificers have theirs, and the Wall Street boys had theirs. And so in their TV room, they always watch 60 Minutes, 2020 Primetime Live, Financial News. They had Wall Street Journal, USA Today, National Geographics. And so I used to go by their TV room and just look through the window. And I could see the TV, but I really couldn't hear. Then one day the Wall Street dude said, Come on in. And so before I went in, I kind of looked to make sure none of the homeboys said, What are you doing going up in the white boys TV? And so I went in and took a seat in the back and started watching 60 Minutes. And what 60 Minutes was attractive to me was because Ed Bradley, uh Schaefer, you remember all those characters on and they would always do reportings from around the world. So you're getting a whole global Yeah, and so Africa, China, and then they had National Geographics. And so I like that book because there was always pictures of, you know, Amazon. I had never seen that shit before. And became very interesting to me. And then so having conversations with them, they had a Toastmasters in Terminal Island.

SPEAKER_02: 43:16

Yeah, that's multi- that's multi-mark. The Toastmasters that's like public speaking, yeah, public masters. Yeah, public speaking, yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 43:21

And so me, they're sh they're steel sharpening steel while they're doing time. And they watching their financials from prison. So their accountants is coming in the visiting room. They make it so that's residual money. They're making money while they doing time. We didn't we didn't set our money up like that. We had the cars, the jewelry, and all that. And then went to Toastmasters. Is that how do you learn to speak? I always knew how to speak.

SPEAKER_02: 43:45

Okay, as far as like public speaking person.

SPEAKER_01: 43:47

Yes, public speaking was my first, and I and I'm gonna show you before I leave. I got a picture of me. It's weird, man. Like, I don't know why I took certain pictures, even in public speaking in prison, and I got pictures of me in my prison chef uniform without even dreaming of it, it was a hustle or speaking. And I got all these things, and that's how I wind up getting on Oprah. Because she didn't believe a lot of it. And then I came with receipts, and she was like, Oh, okay. So every part of my story, I I got the pictures, right? And so the guy said, Listen, I want you to talk about how you became a millionaire at 19, 20 years old. And so I talked about all my marketing strategies. I was a chameleon, how I dressed different to go in different hoods. Yeah. And then when I went to LA, I bought like three Nissan Centras brand new 1985 Nissan Centras in Mission Bay. And then I always had like I had a female would drive the car, kids in the car. I had I had packages from shopping that would go in the car. It's a whole hustle. Yeah, and then before they had the golf shirts, we had La Tigra. I don't know if you guys remember La Tigra. You remember La Tigra? Remember, remember Britta can British little flag. So it was a shirt just like this. Okay, okay, okay. With a with an alligator. Had the stripes on? Oh, yeah. That was back in the day. Yeah, that was back in the day. Yeah, yeah. And I would have that on. Okay. And then I didn't look gangster in the street because I had tattoos. But that was the whole purpose. Yeah, and I never got tattoos because I always had homeboys that got busted based on their tattoos. No, yeah, they know. I never got tattoos. And so I went up there, gave my spill. I think I had 12 minutes, 15 minutes, and came off. And then the dude came up to me, he said, Jeff, you say, You smart. I said, What do you mean? He said, When you was on the street, you understood marketing, branding, public relations, distribution, you understood profit and loss. You know how to manage diverse workforce. I never heard those words before. I didn't know what marketing and any of that shit was, right? So there's a very thin line between entrepreneurship and hustlepreneurship. Very thin line, right? So he said to me, he said, Jeff, he said, man, he says, all you gotta do is change the product. I said, man, you can be successful in anything. And so through reading Black History, I started to love myself and love my people and community. And so in 1990, vividly I remembered I still have the ebony magazine, it came out because it took 10 years for the medical research folks and the government to study the impact of crack on the human body. It's just like when the pandemic no one knew how to address that. They needed time. Same with HIV. Back in the days, guys was dying like this with AIDS. Now you live a whole life. You needed time just to study that. Magic Johnson is still rolling, right? And so it came out, the magazine, and on the front it had two little black babies with a bunch of vials of crack in it. And that's where the term crack babies came from. And so back in that era, when people were getting hooked on crack, they started with primos. So after you know, they smoked the weed, the weed got weaker. The Mexican cest got weaker, and then they started sprinkling a little bit of rock in there. So it's called primos. You get a little bit of weed and a little bit of that crack in there, too, is highly addictive. And so you had suburban mother, you had wives, professional, lawyers, doctors, wealthy white kids from the burbs coming in the hood getting crack. And so when they when they ran out of money and got broke, then they prostituted themselves to get high. Whether it was, you know, chronographic, but they traded that to get high. And through that process, you had a generation of children who were born addicted to crack, but also not knowing who their father was.

SPEAKER_02: 47:40

That's wild.

SPEAKER_01: 47:41

So now you have the drug dealer baby, you have the crack baby, you have the sugar daddy's baby, then you have the military, because San Diego is a military town, so every time the ships came in, you know, all the girls were rushed to the Navy clubs, and then they get knocked up, and then these kids got young guys are going back home. So you had a generation of young people. So now when you think about the anger, the violence, you think about these mothers bringing children in the world, like, damn, who's a father? I just had a train run on me last night, 15 guys. That's how I got high for a whole week. Who's the daddy? And so that's the generation of the 80s where there was no family structure, there was no middle class values, and the mothers didn't really want the kids, then that became a welfare hustle. More kids you got, the more welfare money you got. And so that addiction has gone on and on and on, and it's just destroyed a generation of black people and brown families, right? And so when I saw that magazine, tears is woman. Because I was a part of that.

SPEAKER_02: 48:42

I was just about to say that because you you did that. I was I did that.

SPEAKER_01: 48:45

I was there, I was in the rock houses. I I cooked cocaine, I packaged it, I sold it, I coached, I taught a sales team, you know, I I motivated, I taught guys, I said, man, leave the colors alone, stop banging. Let's get this paper, right? Because money is money. No matter who's buying your product, you know, I don't care if who you're selling it to, because that's like anything. Like you can't be a racist car salesman. Not at all. The color's green. It's green. It's gonna impact your your bottom line, right? Yeah. And so I always understood that, but didn't know the terminology of that. And so on and on anyway. So, anyway, I I get became very close with the Wall Street guys, and you know, they was putting me up on game, and I lost my job once and got fired and put me in the kitchen on pot and pan detail after I got out of solitary confinement and got in the kitchen, and I started uh washing dishes and stuff and then helping the cooks out. It got really good. There was a guy by the name of Mr. Womack, and he was the head inmate cook, and he took me under his wing. He taught me how to cook. And so while I was working in the kitchen with him, I started an underground catering business because I wanted favor from the Wall Street dude. So I said, How do I get closer to them? So, what is the number one commodity in prison? Food. So I started stealing all the red onions, hard-boiled eggs, extra chicken out of the kitchen when I became the head made cook, cookies, baked goods. Then I traded them. So the Wall Street guys were very elitist. They didn't want to wait in line like all the rest of the combat. So I served, I cooked for them. We had microwaves, I made cheesecakes, I made top ramen noodle dishes, all kind of shit. And so the the Wall Street guys, they want their top ramen noodles, so they wanted, you know, chicken to go in there, and I had onions and, you know, I seasoned, I was still seasoning my socks low. I used to stuff my underwear. I walked out the kitchen, I looked like I was pregnant. I stole everything that wasn't locked up in the in the in the refrigerator. And then, you know, so we ate good. The Fed system, we ate good. When I first got indicted, we had T-bone steaks every week. In the Fed system, yeah, with the bone. No, not now. That's all changed. After after the 60-minute uh story broke in 1991. Showing what's really happening. Yeah. So so the federal system was built for wealthy white men who got their hand caught in the cookie jar.

SPEAKER_03: 51:01

Got it.

SPEAKER_01: 51:01

And government officials, judges, congresspeople, because they they passed the budgets. Got it. So they made sure the federal prison system had a huge budget. Swimming pools, bocce ball courts, law library that would mirror USC law school. Like we had a wood shop, leather shop, metal shop, tennis courts, handball courts.

SPEAKER_02: 51:22

That's wild.

SPEAKER_01: 51:23

We had a gym that would make 24-hour fitness look like it's nothing. Baseball diamonds. We had basketball. That's crazy as hell. But that but that's how it was designed then. And then so when 60 Minutes did a special on Club Fed, they exposed it. And so they filled the swimming pools, they took away a lot of those. We had a movie theater. We saw movies like six, maybe three to six months after they showed at AMC Theater. We had we had a real before you even got it on Tater stuff. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, we we we had that in there. You know what I'm saying? So for me, prison refined me. I went in prison with a high level of how the world works. I understood business from a street level. How it really works. Yes. Yeah. And in prison, the the Wall Street guys became so fast. I became so fascinated with them of how they built wealth, how they stuck together, how they didn't waste time. They didn't play sports. You know, all the homeboys playing basketball, lifting weights, getting all buffed. They was on this. I got a little yoked up when I was in there, but once I started getting that knowledge, for what? I'm I want this. I quit lifting weights. That's why you don't see me all swole up, tatted up. So I understood, you know, how to get access, how to build those relationships and stuff.

SPEAKER_00: 52:47

And how did that like translate into like the Chef Jeff project? Right. I think obviously that's the you know main point. They want to make sure before we run out of time, we can get a chance to really poke. No, no, no. I like listening all day.

SPEAKER_02: 52:57

I like listening to it for sure.

SPEAKER_00: 52:58

I think for sure. But I think really we want to leave out on you know, really the positivity, right? The Chef Jeff Project and what you're bringing to the table, what that mission's about, and like what you're looking to accomplish from that. Gotcha.

SPEAKER_01: 53:07

And you know, it was all born out of, you know, successful. You know, there's a certain, there's a process that everyone has to go through to get here. My process was pretty process with Vegas Circle. One day you all gonna have this arena before you go straight. You're going through that process right now, right? And so I came out in 1996, and a famous chef in Beverly Hills named Robert Gatsby, who worked for Thomas Keller, Joe Robishon, Alan DeCossi. You know, Thomas Keller is the one chef in the world. And so he was opening up a place. I read about him in the USA Today in prison, and he was opened up at 672 Wilshire LeBray in Beverly Hills. And I started writing him letters from prison. Hey, I'm getting out October the 2nd. Uh I love opportunity. I'm a great dishwasher. I know how to cook, but mostly institutional cuisine. And I made my way to Beverly Hills, and uh he didn't hire me right away. He was a British guy, super polished, clean shaven, had the wireframe glasses, starch white coat, smoked cigars. He had mostly this high-end folks coming there, and he eventually hired me, taught me classical French cooking, took me under his wing. I went on to work at Gatsby's to the Rich Carlton, the Marriott Hotel Bel Air, Lair Matas, all the high-end stars. All five star, five diamond. Like, so I strategically selected the places that I worked is because I'm this type of guy. When I was on the street, I studied the most successful drug dealers. And so whoever was the rich, wealthiest drug dealers, I watched them, I study the cars they drove, the clothes they wore, how they communicated, how they build relationships, how they went in different communities in different states and set up business. So coming out of prison, I want to know who the top chef was. What do they know? I don't know. So I went and got jobs tratically at restaurants and hotels where the top chefs were asked. And so I didn't have the culinary pedigree, the background, so I always went in as a dishwasher. And then I never took a break, I never took vacation, I never called in sick. So you had a gift to gab, so you know how to work your way.

SPEAKER_02: 55:09

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 55:09

Yeah. And so what I did is so on my lunch break, I went over to the fine dining restaurants and I posted up and I just studied the guys' watch them, I asked questions. They threw menus and recipes in the trash. I would take them out. I had a dictaphone because I didn't understand French terminology lexon flaws. And so I would record them. And then I had what you call a food lover's guy, food companion, that has a dictionary with all French culinary terminology. And that's how I taught myself and I bought cookbooks. And so I had clean shaved my face, took makeup, covered my earring home, started getting my hands manicured and polished, get invested in getting my grill tight. So nothing about me was threatening. Nothing about me said prison. And so I worked my way off through LA, went to San Diego, I ran a restaurant called Escal, breakfast, lunch, and dinner. It used to be, it used to be the La Meridi in a French four-star hotel. The Marriott took it over. I chefed that for a year, came back to LA, worked at Rich Carlton in a fine dining room with a three Michelin Star Chef, Gerard Ferry. It was interesting because I never ate S-cargo, uh caviar. So I learned about Triple Zero, Beluga Caviar, Taruga Caviar. So I had to taste all these different foods. I was like, damn, you know, it just I had no palate for that shit. But I had to, I had to become I had to cook it and taste it, right? Yeah. And then so I set my sights on Vegas in 2001. I came here, stayed at the jockey club. You guys know the jockey club? Yeah, right next to Belagia. Before it was surrounded, it was the cheapest place to stay on the strip because it was owned by private owners. And so I started at Mandalay Bay. I worked my way all the way down Paris. They put Paris hotels pretty much hired me, introduced me to the kitchen I was going to be working in, the staff, and then when a record came up, they said, we're gonna call and get back what you never did. So Caesars was the only place I didn't want to apply because I didn't tell you about that before, but I used to be a high roller at Caesars. Caesars used to cater to all the black drug dealers, mafia, Arabs from all across the world. So they already knew who. They were the only game in town. So I used to come, we used to come in there with Louis Pan, Louis Vuitton, duffel bags, two, three, four hundred thousand cash, all the sugar leonard, Marvus Hagler, Mike Tyson, Larry Holmes fights. He had Caesars. Back in the days, the fights were outside before they had showroom, big showrooms like that. So the fights were always outside under a big tent. And so I saw Marvus Hagler's last fight when he fought Sugar Ray Leonard. If you watch the HBO film, you'll see me and my boys coming down. We're like maybe five seats from the ring. I had a big old Mercedes medallion. We had all the jewels on, couldn't tell it's nothing, right? And so I had every filling. And so I used to be, I had a gambling addiction back in the day. So I used to, man, I probably lost 300,000 here in Vegas at Caesars back in the days. Even today, I don't go in casinos unless I have I'm speaking, I have business, because when I see when I see the tables, I've never touched anything since four almost 40 years ago. When I see the tables, my stomach knots up. When I see dice, they knot up. So I don't have a good feeling in casino. So I'm glad when I was working there in the kitchen, I was in the back of the house. So I never saw that. And so I I put my resume in, and Jim Perello, he was an Italian chef from New York, called me into office and interviewed me. Not my first, but I got multiple interviews, but he didn't care about the record. He said, He said, Jeff, you ever kill anybody? I said, No, sir. He said, Can you cook? I said, Yes, sir. He said, That's all he wanted to know. That's all he wanted to know. So he used to be the executive chef of the Beverly Hills Hotel, the Big Big Way. Oh, so you interviewed. I was at the Bel Air on Stone Canyon. Got it. Both were five stars. I mean, Michael Jackson, Oprah. We owned a 99-room boutique hotel. And then he said, Come in and cook. And so he wanted six courses. So there were other chefs competing for the job. Chef Tornat and La Scal, the Italian restaurant, not La Scal, um Tarassa. And so he said, Okay, six courses I want. And he and they had a round banquet table, and the vice president, everybody was there. So I did seven courses instead of six. So I up one on other chefs. Because everything I had to do always had to be better, had to be extraordinary. It couldn't be ordinary, never ordinary for me. Everything above average for me. And so, you know, banquet china, you know how you go to banquets? Yeah, yeah. You got that old ugly bone-white china with the salmon been in the warming box. So I came in the night before the prep and I went to every restaurant in Caesars and I took China from every restaurant. I was the only chef who had different china for each one of my courses. Stood out. Stood out. Remember Standout. So this guy named Marcus Buckingham, you got to get his book called Standout. And so again, that's part of the whole process. Your podcast. How do you stand out above all the other, you know, it's being innovative and creative. And I was the same way, even as Adrian. Dylan. Like, how do I I didn't gang bang, so I didn't have the violence around me because I know violence brings police. Yep. So I stayed low-key. I never went to parties hardly, ever went to a concert. Why? Because that's where all the fights and neighborhoods jump off. So I was never there. So I I moved very strategically. And so when I came here and I got to, so he hired me at Caesars. I was I was a chef tornado at Tarasa. Within three months, he promoted me to the first black exec chef and he put me in the Palatian buffet. Even though I came from a fine dining background, traditionally black chefs in Vegas don't get further than the coffee shop or buffet or catering. Like we rarely got steakhouses or fine dining rooms. It's just the culture here back then, right? And so I got promoted to the Palacian buffet, turned that place around, and then I finally got an interview at Bellagio because I came here to go to Bellagio. Okay. The big B, the Bentley of them all back then. That's the best, yeah. And I came into Bellagio, I had to wait three chefs get fired to finally get a guy, a guy by the name of Wolfgang Wolfgang von Weezer, hired me as an assistant chef of Cafe Lago. And then got a Cafe Lago as assistant chef. The other chef went out on stress. They promoted me to exec chef. And then that's how, and then I was running that restaurant and it was their premier highest grossing restaurant on the Las Vegas strip at the time. I ran it for about 18 months. Then one day the phone rang, hello, chef Jeff, may I help you? He said, Hey, this is Mike Saltons from New York. I'm a literary agent. Um, I love your story. Would you be interested in writing a book? And I said, Well, I never thought about writing a book. I said, How do you know about my story? He says, uh, Karen Page, Andrew Dunningberg, they wrote a book called Becoming a Chef, heard me speak in New Orleans about my story. How I used to cook cocaine and was a prison, a cocaine chef, prison chef turned gourmet chef. And then he says, I love your story. I think I can get you a book deal. He said, If I come out, we write a proposal, I get you a book deal. Are we in business? I said, Yeah. So we came out, I wrote a proposal called Cook from the Streets of the Stove, from Cocaine to Farguai, went back to New York. Every major publishing house went into a bidding war to publish my memoir. And we went with uh William Morrow because they had cookbook background. So wrote the book. Once we turned in the manuscript, he said, Jeff, he says, I said, Yeah, what's up, Mike? He says, You going on Oprah? I'm like, Oprah. I'm like, damn, this was like, this overnight, right? Then Oprah, right? So then the book came out, went on Oprah, told my story to the world. And then two hours after Oprah was over, I was in New York, the phone rang again. Hello, Chef Jeff, might I help you? Say, hey man, what's up, Jeff? I said, Hey, who's this? He said, Man, this is Will Smith. I said, Come on, who's playing on my phone? So my agent was on a three-way call with Will. He was filming I Am Legend in Brooklyn. And he sent his homeboy to pick me up, and his homeboy was Heavy D. He was in a white Lincoln Navigator. He was small. Big fan of Heavy D. Yeah, because he had a heart situation. So Heavy D picks me up. We head up to Brooklyn. I spent two days on the set of I Am Legend with Steve Tiss, Jason Blumenthal, Todd Black. They do all of Denzel's Will Smith movies. So all the big boys. His mother was there. He had a pimped out trailer like city block long. I just couldn't, I just, this was just crazy. I just couldn't fancy. That was fantastic. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I never chased. When is your movie coming out? I just don't have a next movie out. Five o'clock the next day, I had a multi-million dollar movie deal. They wrote me a check for$750,000. That's how I bought the house for my family that I live in.

SPEAKER_02: 1:03:55

So you did come up with a movie deal.

SPEAKER_01: 1:03:56

Yeah, I got the movie deal. Oh, sure. And then and then so it's a lot more money on the back end. So he bought the rights. So I spent some time with him, and then they bought the rights. And then a week later, phone rang again. Hello, Chef Jeff, my help. Said it's Bob Tushman, senior VP of Food Network. Said, We love your story. We saw her in Oprah. We want to do a TV show with you. I'm like, this dude, I'm telling you, it was scary. It's like I was worried someone was going, just like, why me? Too positive. Yeah, so this is how we're leading up to the Chef Jeff project. Why me? Drug dealer, prison, stole. I was a car thief, broken houses as a kid. I did all kinds of things. Why me, right? And so when you talk about the journey, the process, and being highly favored, that's a Christian term. You know, highly how does Jay-Z become a multi-billionaire rapper? Why didn't other ones come? He was highly favored. Right place, the anointed, right place, right time, right relationships, and the process. So, so got the Food Network show. So they said Bobby Flay was big, he was a big dog, Rachel Ray and him back then. So me and Guy Fetty started at the same time. Guy Fiat started at the same time. And so I said, you know, here's an opportunity for me to do some good with this TV show. And I said, Let's do the Chef Chat project and let me take at-risk kids into a kitchen and use the power of food to impact these kids. Because in cooking, in the process of cooking, the formula, there's leadership, there's delegation, there's execution, there's attention to detail, there's leadership, all these different principles that are tied in to running a brigade in a kitchen. And so we did one, it was a it was a prime time docufollow series, and we got one season of it. And then after that, I got the book cookbook deal, and then I was on the road and my wife called me. She said, honey, she says, U.S. Airlines want you to speak at their leadership conference in Scottsdale, Arizona. And I said, Okay. I said, Well, they're probably gonna pay me$1,000,$1,500. We were living on South Loss Vegas Boulevard in a two-bedroom apartment with our kids. And then so I got, and then she called back a few hours later, screaming in the phone, I said, You're not gonna believe this. I said, What happened to the kids? No, what how much are they gonna pay you? I said, How much? She said, 30,000. Now I'm sitting in a coffee shop in Seattle. I got my gateway computer. I'm in gateway's big old thick one with bounce in the middle. I'm on a I'm online, and then I said, Let me go, I Googled up public speaking. I said, shit, I'm in the wrong damn business. I wrote my resume and resigned from the Bellaggio at that moment.

SPEAKER_02: 1:06:34

From that first gig.

SPEAKER_01: 1:06:35

Yes. 30 grand. 30 grand. My first professional speak engagement was 30,000. And then agents start calling me. I was with CAA, I was with UTA, I was with Warren Morris and Endeavour. And I wound up having four TV shows. Flipped my food, found me sal with Chef Jeff, and I was on the game show network with a show called Beat the Chefs. And then so that went on and on. So I wind up quitting. And then I was still speaking in prison and stuff. Pandemic hits 2020. Nobody's traveling. Everything's shut down. So I had some I had some change put away. And I was at North Las Vegas. Never go over there. So one, I'm a creature, habit. Every time I go to the airport, every time I go to a store, I take the same road, the same left turn. I don't never see it. Yep. So I got lost out there and I was coming down Las Vegas Boulevard and I saw these little kitchens, ghost kitchens. And I pulled up in there, 4D commissary, and I saw these little kitchens. I saw the owner and I said, What's happening with these? Educate me. He said, We charge$3,000 a month, has one stove, two tables, refrigerator, and a freezer. I said, I want this. So I wired him the money, got the place, and I launched the Chef Jet Project relaunch. And I went on Facebook and I started saying, if you're a single mother and have a son who's having challenges in school or at home, bring him to the Chef Jet Project. And so I started bringing him in. I thought we were making beignets, we're cooking food and mentoring him. So I was bringing other former lifers and former drug dealers to turn a life around. And so that gave birth to the Chef Chet Project relaunch as it is today. And so we've been around for five years now. That's awesome. And uh so my family and I have invested close to$400,000 of our own money.

SPEAKER_03: 1:08:18

Congratulations.

SPEAKER_01: 1:08:19

So we're now in partnership with the city of Las Vegas, Clark County, and the EDA. We won a$2 million grant a few years ago. So now we have a mobile culinary school. So we go into Summerview Detention Center, we go into behavior schools and also Spring Mountain Youth Camp. So we're very active in the prevention and intervention space in Clark County School District, working with disconnected kids in workforce development. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02: 1:08:44

That's fantastic. That's a great man. I can listen to you talk for a minute. Let's do straight, straight motivational speaking, man. All right, so we're gonna wrap this up, man. But I do gotta go. I gotta go one thing real quick.

SPEAKER_01: 1:08:55

So when I was a kid, so this is this is a trip, and I just thought about this. Like everything that I've done, it was the sea was already planted because I used to talk a lot as a kid, and I was always told to shut up. Sound like that. It's like all three of us, probably. And my mother used to slap me in the mouth for talking too much everywhere I go. The boy don't never the boy don't never stop talking. And now I make a living traveling the world talking. So he goes to tell you when a parent is unconscious and lacks certain values, they can do harm to a child and crush their potential and their dream. That's right. I got two kids that talk out is let them talk. I may plug my ears or something out is let them talk.

SPEAKER_02: 1:09:44

Yeah, let her hear that. My wife, I'll just put that. So I gotta ask you, be the chef. I can't leave out on this because I asked I'm a big foodie. What's your favorite restaurant in Basic? I know you were gonna go there. Yeah, I think I heard you ask somebody else.

SPEAKER_01: 1:09:54

Yeah, that's my I ask everybody that.

SPEAKER_02: 1:09:55

So what's your favorite restaurant in Vegas?

SPEAKER_01: 1:09:57

Most of the restaurant, most of my eating out is not here. Because I'm weird? Not here in Vegas. Because I travel so much. Okay. So when you're here, when you're when I'm here, so when the steakhouse. Okay. It's Prime Steakhouse at Bellaggio, Kraft, Tom Colequio's place at MGM. Also, the new used to be Nero Steakhouse at Caesar's. I'll go there from time to time, right?

SPEAKER_02: 1:10:19

Kraft Steak we got. Oh, that's why I engaged. Lucas is good. So I gotta I gotta engage at Kraft Steak.

SPEAKER_01: 1:10:25

Okay, Kraft, yeah. I love Kraft because it's it's my style. It's good. It's good food. It's good and it's casual. Yeah, it's great. I don't like to have to put a suit on. And so those are my favorite places. Okay. But I'm really into street food, comfort food. I'm a food truck guy, hit food trucks up. I like holes in the walls. Every city I go to, if you look at, I'm a coffee officiano, so I hunt down like coffee shops, pastry shops, no matter where I go, in the country, outside the country. That's what's up, man. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02: 1:10:53

So stakes your things, what I got out of it. And also, you a hard ass worker, man. Yeah, that's what it is. What else is next for you, man? What's what's next on the plan for 2026 coming up?

SPEAKER_01: 1:11:04

Uh we'll continue to build uh the Chef Chet Project. We just partnered with a couple national organizations. I'm going to Texas, Houston this weekend with the blacks in criminal justice. Okay. And so there's a renowned research professor, Dr. Yusuf, from Bethune Cookman Historical Black College. Dr. Yusuf's sister.

SPEAKER_02: 1:11:24

Oh, okay. I'm sorry. No, no, I'm okay. I think I saw the uh flyer for the colour. Kadim. Yeah. Yes. Oh, so you see me the flyer on LinkedIn. Yep.

SPEAKER_01: 1:11:29

And so they're going to study the Chef Chet Project and create a curriculum over six months that will be, I'll be able to use the create pilot programs all across the country. So other people train a trainer. So other folks will be able to take my curriculum training model of the Chef Chet Project and work with system impacted and disconnected youth across the country. So that's one thing. I'm working on a new book called Perception. Uh because one of the perception, how people perceive you and how you perceive other people, which is a big issue in disconnected youth, underserved youth, inner city youth, because of how they carry themselves and conduct themselves and why they have challenges, landing employment opportunities. You know what I'm saying? So how do you look? How do you walk? How do you sit in a chair? How do you eat? How do you hold a fork? How do you build relationships? How do you socialize? And so that's going to be my next piece. And uh hopefully you don't know. And hustle entrepreneur, right?

SPEAKER_02: 1:12:25

We're gonna do together is what you were saying.

SPEAKER_01: 1:12:28

So also, so the the project I'm doing with the study is called the Hustlepreneur Project. Okay. And so I like hustlepreneur because it's not your traditional entrepreneur. And so these are unique skill sets that you only can learn through lived experience. You can't teach hustle, you can't teach grit. You know, like you, you so it's it's the it's developed and built on based on those experiences. And so people always ask me, say, when I came to Vegas, man, it's gonna be a tough kitchen, Jeff. I said, Man, I mean, I man, I manage lifers and killers in a penitentiary, right? And so prison, you develop grit, mental toughness, adaptability, because one day you could be in one cell, another, one prison next. So all these traits you hear everybody talking about grit and adaptability, mental toughness, prison prepares you for this on the outside if you have a shift in the way that you think. And so that's that's my focus with that. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02: 1:13:25

Chef Jeff Henderson, man. You you you a beast, man.

SPEAKER_01: 1:13:29

I appreciate you sitting down with us, man. And uh, what's the social handles people can reach out to you? On Instagram, all social handles are at Chef Jeff Live. Okay. And then and then at the Chef Jeff Project, and then of course, you just Google me, everything comes up right there as well, too.

SPEAKER_02: 1:13:42

So Matt, to listen to more of your speeches, man. So I appreciate you sitting down with us, man, and check us out at the biggest super.com, man. Thank you for your time, man.

SPEAKER_01: 1:13:50

Appreciate you, man.