687 From Quarterback to Convict: Damon West at ASCII Edge

[Uncle Marv]
Hello friends, Uncle Marv here with another episode of the IT Business Podcast powered by NetAlly and we are finishing up here at ASCII Edge in Boston doing another live interview here and I have the keynote speaker with us and this should be a very good conversation and very insightful, very motivational. I am talking about our speaker, Damon West. Damon, how are you?

[Damon West]
I'm Marv, I'm great, man. Thanks a lot for having me on this podcast today. I've been able to go all over the country with ASCII Edge and work with them and be their keynote at some of these events and I'm telling you, it's one of the best client relationships I've ever had.

Really? Oh, ASCII Edge is great. I mean, they have been over backwards, not just to make sure that everything that I needed, my needs were met, but that everybody here at this conference, their needs are met too.

They really care and you don't always see it. Sometimes you come to these events and people are just going through the motions. We made it here, we had the event, but the folks at ASCII Edge have been great and I'm telling you, it's in September or October will be the last event I do with them and it's going to be a sad day because I've really enjoyed my monthly events with ASCII Edge.

[Uncle Marv]
Well, let me ask you this, to give obviously the listeners a little bit of background here. So you're not in tech and when ASCII approached you to be the keynote, what was your first thought?

[Damon West]
Well, when they were looking for someone with an inspiring story, I was like, I can do that. The tech part, I was like, well, it's funny because I'm not in tech. You're right.

The only work I've ever done in tech was defeating burglar alarms and having a parabolic mic to make sure that no one was ever home inside the house I was breaking into. That was some good tech back then. That went in the whistle.

The appetites are like, what is this guy going to talk about? And that's part of the story. They're looking for an inspirational speaker and my story is about a guy that had it all and threw it all away.

I was once at one time a stockbroker in Dallas, came from a great family.

[Uncle Marv]
Wait, wait, wait, wait. I think we need to go back a little more than that because when I checked you out real quick, because I played football. Oh yeah.

You were a D1 quarterback. Starting quarterback for division one teams. You're a starting quarterback.

[Damon West]
University of North Texas. Yeah, that's one of the things. I've always been a leader and you're going to find from my story that sometimes I've led on the good teams and sometimes I've led on the bad teams.

All right. Back in the 90s, I was a division one starting quarterback at North Texas. My career was cut short with the injury against Texas A&M.

That's when I got into substance abuse, but I was a functional addict back then. Graduate college, I work in the United States Congress, work on Wall Street. It's in that job as a Wall Street broker in Dallas in 2004 that another broker sees me sleeping one day at work and introduced me to methamphetamine.

So instantly hooked more. I mean, just like that, I'm hooked on this drug and I give everything away for that drug because that's what addicts do. We give things away.

My job, my home, my car, my savings account, my family gone. I'm living on the streets of Dallas and I become a criminal to fund my addiction. And it was petty crimes at first.

It was things like shoplifting, breaking into cars, breaking into storage units. Then I started breaking into people's homes. Then I became the quarterback again, only of a bad team.

Now I was the ringleader of a bunch of other meth addicts, breaking into people's homes all over the uptown neighborhood of Dallas and beyond. And it's unfortunate too, because when I broke into people's homes, Marvin, I didn't just steal their property. I stole my victim's sense of security, something I can't replace.

But after three years of committing property crimes against the people of Dallas, a Dallas SWAT team on July 30th, 2008, put an end to the uptown burglaries the day that they arrested me. Or kind of like what the story goes, the shift in mindset, the shift in mindset that looks for opportunity and adversity in life, because that's really what we're talking about is how do you find the opportunity in your adverse situations? I look back at July 30th, 2008, that's not just the day I was arrested.

That was the day I was rescued. Took a long time to get to that way of thinking. We're not there yet.

So Dallas SWAT takes me in. They booked me in a Dallas County jail. It's a $1.4 million bond that I can't reach. The trial takes place less than a year later and the jury sentences me to life in prison for engaging in organized crime, RICO. And I'm the mastermind. I'm the ringleader.

I'm the boss. I go down with a life sentence.

[Uncle Marv]
Wow. Can I ask you, because that's a lot to digest, and I know this isn't going to be the long format that we normally do, but the mindset that you had going from starting quarterback, stockbroker, I mean, that switch almost seems like it's unparalleled. Most of us can't imagine it, but it had to have been something where there was this gradual thing.

It wasn't like you just woke up one day and decided I'm switching my life around, right?

[Damon West]
Right. No. And it was a gradual descent into hell kind of thing because you're in denial a lot when you're in your addiction.

You don't see the problems that other people see in your life. You still think your life is manageable, which is one of the hallmarks of being an addict. You believe your life is still manageable when it's not manageable.

And you justify just about everything you do in the pursuit of what you're trying to get. I could justify enough in my life as an addict, full-blown addict, that I could steal from other people. I could break into their homes.

I violated the social contract in my addiction. And that's what a lot of addicts do. And I was like, I was no different than any other addict.

And you're right. It doesn't happen overnight. It's a gradual thing.

But that's what addiction is like, Marvin. I mean, you know, addicts, I said a while ago, they give up their goals to meet their behaviors. And you don't give all your goals away at one time, right?

You start giving pieces away. Then eventually you wake up, you have no goals. Right.

You only have the behavior. So yeah, it wasn't an instant thing. It was a gradual thing.

But when the jury sentenced me to life in prison, that's when I knew something had to change and that something was me. But I didn't know how to change. I didn't know what I was going to do.

But it was a conversation I was having with this seasoned convict, this old black man in Dallas County jail named Muhammad. And when Muhammad told me, he said, I want you to imagine prison as a pot of boiling water. You have three choices.

Be like a carrot that becomes soft in the boiling water, an egg that becomes hardened by the boiling water. Or you could choose to be like a coffee bean, which changes the pot of boiling water into a pot of coffee. And that's what he told me.

If you want to come back as someone your family recognizes, a better version of yourself, you've got to be a coffee bean. In fact, the last words he ever said to me, be a coffee bean. Now, the significance of that, those four words, they changed my life because they put the power back inside me, Marvin.

Because the power was inside the coffee bean to change the water around it. And if the power was inside me to change the world around me, I wouldn't just survive prison, I could thrive inside of a prison.

[Uncle Marv]
So this conversation you had while you were in prison.

[Damon West]
This is county jail right before I went to prison.

[Uncle Marv]
Oh, county jail. Yeah. And so how did you get in a situation where you had this conversation with somebody who you're describing as a seasoned, hardened criminal would be wanting to talk with you and give you this advice?

[Damon West]
Well, you got to think about the philosophy of being a coffee bean. The guy was a coffee bean himself. He's looking for other positive people.

I realized, too, Muhammad, I didn't seek Muhammad out in Dallas County Jail. He sought me out. He saw a positive person.

He saw someone struggling and someone that needed some help. And he reached down and helped me in the darkest place possible. And it's really one of those angels in life, you know, because if you think about it like this, the help could come to you from anywhere in life.

Right. Doesn't have to be someone who looks like you, same background as you, same upbringing, even the same faith. Anybody can be someone to help you out.

Right. But you've got to be receptive to all the messengers to get all the messages in life. So that's what I was.

I was very receptive to this guy wanting to come and offer me this message. And I went to prison and I remember thinking to myself that if I can keep the power inside me, I want to survive this, I'll thrive in this environment. Right.

And it took a little while. It took a couple of months. Very, very violent.

Prison was hard at first. And I went to a level five supermax prison where the lifers lived, the hardest part of prison there is in the state of Texas. But eventually, after that initiation, the prison was over, the violence is finally over, the threat to my physical safety is gone.

I started working myself. I started becoming that coffee bean. In fact, the transformation that happened inside my life, inside that prison was so extreme that seven years into my sentence in 2015, the parole board comes to interview me.

And the lady from parole was like, hey, look, you didn't just change yourself. You changed an entire prison while you were here. She said, I have one question for you that will determine where you go for the rest of your life.

She said, your life depends on this, Mr. West. She said, if you could be remembered for being anything in life, anything at all, she said, tell me what that would be, but give it to me in just one word, go. Marvin, I've been living that answer the whole time I've been in prison.

I had my purpose in life, and I gave her answer, and I said, useful. I just want to be useful. And I can be useful inside this prison, as you've already seen, or I could be useful in the free world again, finding more coffee beans.

November 16th, 2015, I walked out of a Texas prison, but I'm not a free man, Marvin. That's part of the story. I'm on parole in Texas to the year 2073.

So I've got a little more time with the supervisor lease.

[Uncle Marv]
Now, let me ask the question first, and then I've got a follow-up to that. What was the change that the parole board would see in you before they even showed up to do that interview?

[Damon West]
So what they received was information coming in from the unit, from wardens, majors, captains, chaplain volunteers, people that wrote support letters for me, that this guy was capable of changing one of the hardest places to change, that the transformation he had going on in his life affected the lives of the other people around. Give you an example of how that looks, right? I'm in prison.

I learned about this thing called servant leadership. Servant leadership is when you help other people reach their goals, right? And so I became a servant leader inside that prison.

You know, I couldn't take any college classes inside the prison because I already had a bachelor's degree, but I could teach other men how to read, how to write. I got them ready for the GED test. I started a tutoring service for free for those guys in there, help them become a better version of themselves, you know?

When I would see trash on the ground anywhere in prison, I'd pick it up. And at first, people made fun of me, man. Hey, why are you picking up the trash?

That's not your trash. That is my trash. It's in my home.

It's in front of my house. My house is a prison cell. I want to make sure it's a clean place, you know?

Then the other thing I think that they saw is that I would always share those four words with those men in prison, those four words that you usually hear from a teacher or a coach growing up. I believe in you. I'd tell them that, man.

If you just tell people around you how much you believe in them, you can watch those people grow because every human being needs to hear those four words from somebody. And the prison changed around me. Wherever I lived, there was positivity going on.

Wherever I lived, you know, there was a different mindset. And that's what I think the parole board heard about more than anything is that this guy can change the mindsets. And the good news is, Marvin, is I've been able to do it out here in the free world, too.

I've been out for almost nine years now, and I've been out there going to find these coffee beans all over the planet. USA Today did a big feature article on me recently, and the guy from USA Today said, man, you're literally the most in-demand speaker in America right now. And they feel that the person that wrote the article for USA Today felt like this is like a modern-day Shawshank Redemption.

You know, Shawshank is a good thing to talk about right here on, because everybody, most people have seen that movie. Yeah. Yeah.

Shawshank's about hope. That's what the whole movie's about, right? Depending on whose eyes you see it through.

If you see it through the eyes of Andy Dufresne, you see hope. Yep. Andy had Zihuatanejo.

He could always envision himself on that beach in Mexico one day. But Red, the main character, the narrator, had no hope. Andy brought hope to Red.

Red made it to the beach in Mexico. And if you watch the movie, go back and listen to the character at the very end named Red. Red's telling you the things he feels in life now.

You know, the last scene of the movie, the dialogue starts off with the words, I hope, at the beginning of every sentence. I hope I can make it across the border. I hope I can see my friend again so I can shake his hand.

I hope the Pacific Ocean is as blue as it was in my dreams. I hope. That's what it's about, man.

Everybody's looking for hope, Marvin. And I bring a lot of hope to a lot of people.

[Uncle Marv]
So I'm tempted to end right there because that's a powerful statement. But I want to go back because I'm sure that people are going to think, how can you be that positive in prison? The stories we hear so much are about people who start out with that hope and get it beaten out of them, get torn down and just, you know, succumb to the system.

What was it in your mind do you think made it to where you didn't succumb to the system, you turned the system on its head?

[Damon West]
A few things. One, before I went to prison and right after my trial was over, my mother and father have one visit with me and my mom makes a promise I won't get into any of the gangs and I won't get any tattoos. In fact, she tells me, you come back as the man that we raised or don't come back at all.

That's a big ultimatum. That's a big promise to keep to mom, right? Because the gangs run everything inside of a prison.

Everything in prison is run by the gangs and if you're living the lifers, gangs are everywhere, man. So I knew, though, that I couldn't become someone else because I wanted to go home again. I wanted to go back to my family.

I didn't know when that would ever be. I mean, they sentenced me to life in prison. They could keep me for life or if I changed enough, they would let me go one day.

But I always had hope and I think the reason why I always had hope is because I could see myself in a better place like Andy saw himself in Guantanamo. I could see myself out there in the world again, living a life. I didn't know what the life would look like, but I didn't see myself dying inside of a prison.

I had hope.

[Uncle Marv]
The name of the guy that told you to be like a coffee bean, what was the name again?

[Damon West]
Muhammad. Did you ever see him again? Very good question.

Everybody's, this is the most frequent question I ever get. Yeah, people want to know where's Muhammad now. And it was really hard to find.

I'd recently found Muhammad, but the truth is, man, it was hard to find him because Muhammad's not his real name. It's his Muslim name. When a person converts to Islam, they get rid of their real name, take on a Muslim name, kind of like Kash is good because Muhammad Ali, you're on tomorrow.

I love it, man. So I go back to Dallas County Jail when I got out of prison. I said, I'm trying to find this guy named Muhammad.

I did time with, they're like, we can't find a guy with his Muslim name.

[Uncle Marv]
There's too many Muhammad's in here.

[Damon West]
Yeah, we need a real name or birthday, right? So I had to hope that one day he would find me. And here's how he finally found me.

A couple of years ago, I got a letter from an inmate in the Texas Department of Criminal Justice. I get a lot of inmate mail, Marvin. Men and women all over the American prison system write me letters all the time because you know who I am to every man and woman in prison?

I'm Hope. I am a Dufresne. And I love my role as Andy, man.

I write all these inmates back. But this letter was different. There was no return address, had one sentence, and it said, find James Lynn Baker and you find Muhammad.

So I go to Dallas, get a private investigator. First thing we found was a criminal record, matched everything he told me in county jail, in and out of prison his entire life. Had him in county jail when I was there in 2009 on a parole violation.

So I know this is my friend. All we got to do now is find his current address. But we never did find his current address because James Lynn Baker II, Muhammad, died in Dallas, Texas on May 9th, 2017 of an opiate overdose.

Drug addict, just like me, Marvin, but never got to a program recovery, never made it to a 12-step program like I did. So now that I know who the guy is, this is the part about the story called integrity, because integrity is who you are when no one else is watching. I've got to find a way to honor this man.

I'm not here today without that message of the coffee. And I'm not the person I am today. So I found his family.

Comes from a real great family. His little sister is a woman named Vonceil Baker. Vonceil Baker was the first Dallas Cowboy Cheerleader ever.

First woman to ever wear, 1972, first woman to ever wear that uniform. His mother was a woman named Bertha Baker. And Bertha Baker played a big role in civil rights in Dallas history.

In 1948, she was the first licensed black daycare owner in Dallas. Opened up the first black daycare in the home he grew up in. In fact, the home he grew up in is a landmark in Dallas, city landmark.

So I call his... He's got three living sisters, Kandis, Vonceil, and Vanessa. I called these ladies up one night, told them the story about the time that I met their brother in county jail, the message he gave me, and what I was able to do that message both in prison and out of prison.

And I told his sister, so I said, hey, I don't know what your feelings are about your brother and the choice you made in life but let me tell you what I know about your brother that you may not even know. Your brother impacted at least one person while he was on that planet, me. And I'm going to impact the entire planet with that message you gave me.

So I asked the sisters, I got a way to honor your brother, but tell me first, what high school did you go to? You know, when James and I were locked up together, Marvin, he told me it was from the most inner city part of Dallas there is, poorest part of Dallas, very rough part of Dallas. And the sisters confirmed all that when they told me Dallas Lincoln High School.

That's south Dallas, Marvin. That's as inner city as you can get Dallas. That's it, man.

So I told the sister, I said, great, let's do this. Every year for the rest of my life, I'll put $10,000 into a trust for a scholarship in your brother's name. We'll call this thing the James Lynn Baker II Be a Coffee Bean Scholarship.

And I would love for your family to pick that winner every year so that every year, a little boy, a little girl that grows up in his old neighborhood, they're getting a better chance at life through an education because these two guys met up in Dallas County Jail back in 2009. So the sisters took me up on it, man. We started picking our winners.

These little kids get to go to college and get a better chance at life through education. So, you know, I found out too, Marvin, he didn't just tell me the story of the coffee bean so that I could redeem my life. Because I think by every metric, Marvin, I'm a redeemed man.

I mean, I'm a success story as a human being, as a businessman, as a family man, a man of faith. And this isn't necessarily in the right order because, I mean, staying sober is the first thing, right? I'm sober today.

I'm a college professor. I went back to school, got a master's degree in criminal justice and University of Houston downtown hired me to teach their Prisons in America class. You know, so it's like by every metric, I'm a redeemed man.

But part of the reason why he gave me the story of the coffee bean was so that one day I could come back and redeem him. And that's what I've been able to do.

[Uncle Marv]
Nice. Nice. So I know we're running short on time because you got to get up and go speak, but I just want to make sure that I get this right.

So you co-wrote a book. And the big book that everybody should read is called The Coffee Bean, A Simple Lesson to Create Positive Change.

[Damon West]
Yeah. And, you know, if you really want to get the whole story, if this is like got you intrigued about it, my autobiography is called The Change Agent. It's actually my favorite of all.

I've got five books, but The Change Agent has all the stories in it, man. It's got everything in it, Marvin. So I mean, that's the book that people always go to.

It'll be a movie one day, but yeah.

[Uncle Marv]
All right. So I'm going to have links to that. And this sounds like an incredible story.

Probably people don't have enough time to ask you all the questions they have like I do here.

[Damon West]
Yeah. You were saying we might go 10 or 15 minutes. I kind of laughed.

I knew we wouldn't do this. Hey, look, if anybody wants to find me, DamonWest.org, D-A-M-O-N-W-S-T-dot-O-R-G. My social media is at DamonWest7.

There's more to the story there. Positive posts go out every day, man.

[Uncle Marv]
All right. I'm going to have the links to that. And people, I'm sure, will follow up.

And you've probably been having a blast. And after you speak, I'm sure you're just inundated with people wanting to come up and say thank you and talk to you more. So it's incredible to see.

[Damon West]
Yeah.

[Uncle Marv]
I thank you for the time you spent with me here. I'm going to have to follow up. Yeah.

[Damon West]
I hope you listen to the presentation.

[Uncle Marv]
Come on in. I am. I am.

But I'm going to follow up because I want to, I mean, you're probably so in demand, but I want to, you know, talk to you more.

[Damon West]
OK. We'll do it. We'll do a follow-up podcast.

[Uncle Marv]
Sounds great. Damon, nice to meet you. Thank you for stopping by.

[Damon West]
Thanks a lot, brother. Appreciate you. Thanks for the opportunity today.

[Uncle Marv]
That's it, folks. We'll be back with more. Check everything out over at ITBusinessPodcast.com.

And we'll see you later. Holla!