The Story of former Rahway, New Jersey Warden Bob Hatrak is an extraordinary one. In 1973, he became the youngest warden to ever take over a maximum security prison. Hatrak had a keen eye for reform, and approached the idea of reform with empathy, creativity, and industriousness. A huge part of Hatrak’s efforts centered around boxing. What Hatrak accomplished was no simple boxing prison program, but something that went deeper, that redirected the energies of the inmates, turned their focus to something positive, and taught them a number of skills.
The jewel of the program was light heavyweight James Scott, an inmate serving a lengthy sentence that not only headed up Hatrak’s coxing program, but also competed in the ring. Remarkably, Hatrak got HBO to televise a fight inside the prison with Scott facing off against #1 contender Eddie Gregory. Scott won that fight, and then rose all the way to the #2 contender in the world. The publicity and growth of Hatrak’s boxing program proved to be a mixed blessing. Power above him, came in and crushed the program just as Scott was on the verge of a title fight.
Still, the program changed the lives of the inmates who participated, and Hatrak’s life as well. All of this history and more is detailed in Hatrak’s excellent book, “Not On My Watch.” In our conversation, Hatrak and I discuss his successes, his disappointments, and his legacy, which looms large.
Fights Around The World: Rahway and the prison riot of 1971 was obviously one of the more extraordinary occurrences in the history of prison riots. Can you talk about how that riot led to you becoming the warden?
Bob Hatrak: I was the director of education at the Trenton State Prison and my boss, the warden Howard Yeager, was responsible for all the prisons in New Jersey. About three days after the riot, he asked me if I would ride with him to Rahway because he needed to do an inspection. I was curious why he wanted to take me. I’m not a security guy, I’m the Director of Education. Why isn’t he taking a security guy? It turned out that it was because the director was going to be there and they were going to have a meeting that they wanted me to attend. I didn’t know any of that until well afterwards. We went there and walked around, saw all the damage, and talked to both inmates and staff. The center rotunda is a great big round area that is controlled by a sally port that leads you from civilian life into prison life. In the rotunda were the remnants of the riot, bloody towels, bloody sheets, broken beds, just god awful. When I looked down at that, it really fazed me, it got to me. I thought to myself “Should I ever get a chance to run a place like this, something like this is never going to happen on my watch”—thus the name of the book. It wasn’t long after that that my boss Howard Yeager retired and Bill Fauver was hired as the warden. The first day he was there, he named me as his assistant superintendent and gave me free reign to do whatever I wanted to do. In fact, I asked him what he wanted me to do and he said why don’t you write your own job description? So that was nice. It gave me an opportunity to free wheel and do the kinds of things that I wanted to do that I had been working on. A lot of what I did at Rahway, I kind of pilot tested at Trenton and it all worked for me there. I thought if it works there, it’s got to work at Rahway and sure enough, it did.
When I got to Rahway, I found that there were a number of what I call violent threat groups, inmate groups that just roamed around stealing from one another, hurting people, and doing bad stuff. I needed to put them out of business as quickly as possible, but I had to replace that with something. What I tried at Trenton were self rehabilitation groups. I replaced the threat groups with the rehabilitation groups. It was all brand new, so nobody knew what it was going to be like. It took a bit of time, but little by little, my groups kind of took hold and the threat groups went away and that added to a lot of stability. In the time that I spent at Rahway, violence decreased by some 63%, and it’s largely due to giving inmates an opportunity to self rehabilitate, putting the ball in their court and asking them to figure out how they’re going to get themselves ready to go home. I had some ideas as far as the groups were concerned, but by and large, the guys did that on their own. James Scott is a good example. I read something in a Dallas newspaper not too awfully long ago. I didn’t know this because it was 40 years ago, but he was interviewed by a reporter, and the reporter was kind of puzzled and asked how can boxing be rehabilitation? And Scotty had the answer. He said “Boxing is an opportunity for an inmate to do what he wants to do. That’s the secret to this man’s rehabilitation. We get an opportunity to self actualize, to become whatever it is that we want to become.” I was really surprised and very happy that he remembered all of that.
FightsATW: Boxing is often thought of as a purely violent sport, but there’s a lot more to boxing than just that. There’s all kinds of things about boxing that teach you something about yourself. I would assume it also gave the inmates a place to put their energy.
BH: Back in the seventies, the climate and environment around the nation was that rehabilitation has to go away and we’ve gotta lock ’em up and throw away the keys. I was kind of swimming against that tide. Boxing today is being written about, and being called the criminology of boxing. They’re talking about boxing in prisons and the kinds of things that come out of that. I looked at an article this morning, that was just written not too long ago, that talked about how it’s even a good idea to get youngsters started in boxing because of the kinds of things that they learn in the gym. The other thing about our program is that we didn’t want it to be just boxing. I looked at boxing and all the trades that surrounded boxing, like being referees, being corner men. We called our program and what we worked on the “boxing trades”. One of the things that makes me really proud is that Jersey Joe Walcott licensed one of our guys, Eddie Johnson, to become the first inmate in the country to be a professional referee. That was quite something. So it was working. We had a number of inmates that became licensed as boxers. At the end of the program, when it finally went away, we had four guys inducted into the New Jersey boxing Hall of Fame. Dwight Muhammad Qawi went on to become the light heavyweight champion and the cruiserweight champion of the world. He was one of the guys in the program. So not only did we have boxing on that side, but we had the other trades with Eddie Johnson being a referee, and a couple of other men being handlers. One of their jobs as handlers was that they escorted Scotty to the ring every night that he had a fight. One of them was a quarterman who worked as a student of Dr. Ferdie Pacheco. Ferdie was Scotty’s quarterman. So our guy got some really good training working in the corner with Pacheco. We had a lot of good things come out of there other than just boxing. The key word they’re writing about today is desistance.
That’s the process of working with men to get them to learn what has to be done to get them away from criminal behavior to non criminal behavior, which is a little different than rehabilitation. When I first started in the business, we thought teaching them how to read and how to write was rehabilitation and that was going to keep them out of prison. That had absolutely nothing to do with desistance. Boxing was one of the ways that we thought we would apply desistance and hooks. We needed to have some hooks that we could work with to get people to work on making the change. And we had three hooks: self-actualization, self-resocialization, and self-repair. Those were the main hooks that we focused on to get people to move from one set of behaviors to another set of behaviors. Self-actualization in our boxing program was when an inmate had to decide what his career goals were. Is he going to want to be an electrician? Is he going to want to be a boxer? Right up front, they had to make that decision about what do I have to do when I get out of here to be able to be employable? The other thing was self-resocialization. That was working on what we have to do to get inmates to replace one set of skills and values with another more positive set of values and skills. That’s a whole lot different than teaching them how to read and write. And then self-repair, they had to decide how they were going to add to what they were learning in the gym and what were they going to do about academic education, vocational education, how they were going to take psychological health, psychiatric health, all kinds of things that were, again, going to help them move from one step to another. That was kind of a revolutionizing area. It’s probably still revolutionary today, and what pleases me is that I’m reading about it in today’s literature. I thought to myself wow, here we were 40 years ago, maybe different words, but that’s where we were.
FightsATW: Were you into boxing just as a fan, before you instituted the program? Or was this something that just seemed to make sense to you as you learned more about the sport?
BH: I always wanted, when I was a detracted person as the director of education, to put gloves and weights in the big yard and the chief of security wouldn’t let me do it. The reason was that he thought the inmates would verticalize violence. They would go from learning how to punch each other to punching the warden. He didn’t want to get into that verticalization. I looked at it as horizontalization. I thought guys working together in a gym are not going to want to start beating on other people. They take it out in the gym. That was where I started to think about boxing. I remember when I was about eight years old (I could barely speak English at the time), and I would sit with my dad in front of an old Zenith Radio in the city of Trenton, and we would listen to fights. I remember listening to Jersey Joe Walcott and Willie Pep. I really got into boxing at a very early age. I was going to try to build a boxing school in Rahway. I didn’t know how I was going to do it, but wanted to do it. Some real pressing need demanded that I do it now. That need was that we had in New Jersey two factions of the Muslim population, the New World of Islam and the Nation of Islam. And at the Trenton State Prison, they were killing each other. And there were a lot of holy wars going on. They had a really bad incident about five years after I left, where one inmate got killed, and the people decided to separate them. They put one side in one institution and another side in another institution. They kept them segregated from everybody else but each other. They were there for about two years. My captain, Richie Kern, came to see me one day. He said boss, I think we’ve got trouble. Some federal judge is going to release all of those guys and we’re going to get a busload. So here I am, I’ve got a pretty stable place going right now, but I’ve got a real opportunity to get it turned around sideways. I kept thinking about that.
I remember I had known James Scott from the Trenton Prison. He came to Rahway to be released from Rahway when I was there as warden. When I said goodbye to him, he told me he was going to Florida to fight with the Dundee brothers. He had a good career there in Florida, so I remembered Scotty. I remember at Trenton Prison when he was a kid. He got put there as a juvenile with hardcore guys. I remember him having to carry a steel pipe around with him to try to keep people from preying on him. I remember Scotty was on the New World of Islam side. I knew when he came back from Florida, he got put in segregation because he was one of them. And so I asked Richie Kern to go down to the building where they were segregated and tell Scotty that Hatrak wants you to come to Rahway, but only on one condition, that you have something positive to do to keep from being in trouble. I said don’t tell him, but I want him to start my boxing school for me. I want him to start a boxing school. So he went down, and Scotty said oh yeah, anything to get out of here. And so we moved him to Rahway. A couple of nights later, I saw him on an interview line. I interviewed inmates every Thursday night at seven o’clock. I saw Scotty when he first arrived that Thursday night, and he said I couldn’t expect this from anybody but you, Hatrak. He said what the hell is a boxing school in a prison? I said Scotty, we’re going to figure that out together. I don’t know what it is. You’re going to have to figure out how to get people to come in here as volunteers to train guys to be anything that they want to be. And the long and the short is, he took the bull by the horns and built a real heck of a program, got a lot of volunteers, got a lot of equipment. Ferdie Pacheco was a real mainstay in our program. Scotty built one heck of a school. He really did. It’s too bad that he never got a shot at the title, and I blame myself for that. I was ready to have a fight for the title, and my boss was not for it. My boss wasn’t about publicity. He thought that I was getting too much publicity on my own for Scared Straight.
And here a world title fight for an inmate was going to get more publicity than Scared Straight could have ever imagined. He got really nervous about that. Scotty fought Richie Kates on March 10th, and my plan was to furlough Scotty a week or two after the Kates fight. Now, how was I going to do that? When I first got there, I had a group of singers called the Escorts. They were a vocal group and they made albums, and their first album sold over 300,000 copies in the prison. They were all maximum security inmates. I put them out in the Newark Symphony Hall on what I called an escorted furlough. Seven of them with five officers and 2,000 people in Newark. They brought the house down. I remember they called me up on the stage to get an award of some kind and I got up there and looked down at 2,000 black faces. I was the only white face in the crowd, but it was quite a night. I did it once, and I had an opportunity now to do it for Scotty. I was going to put him out on an escorted furlough, and (?19:49) was ready to promote the fight. In fact, he said he talked to the governor and he asked the governor to arrange for that because it would not only do Scott a lot of good, but would do a lot of good for other inmates around the country. Wouldn’t you know, after the Kates fight on the 10th, I was two weeks away from activating a furlough and I guess somehow word got to my boss. The 17th, seven days later, I got transferred out of Rahway Prison to the central office. Not long after I got transferred, Scott got transferred. There went the boxing school, and then everything just fell apart.
FightsATW: One thing that I don’t want to lose track of here is that at the time that you were made warden at Rahway, you were the youngest warden of a maximum security prison ever. How did you get selected? How did someone say let’s pick the young guy?
BH: When I worked at Trenton Prison, my boss Howard Yeager retired, and Bill Fauver came in as the warden and appointed me his assistant warden. As I told you, he said write your own job description, which gave me an opportunity to experiment with a lot of stuff, and we did a lot of things to Trenton, a lot of which made him look really good. He ended up getting a promotion out of it to director of the division, and when he got up there, he gave me my promotion. He sent me to Rahway. That’s how I got there. I just did a good job for him and he got rewarded, and so he was going to reward me. He didn’t care how old I was. He saw what I did at the Trenton Prison with regard to violence. Violence went down by a whole heck of a lot. I recall that shortly before I got transferred, and not long after Fauver got transferred, the inmate committee had a banquet in the auditorium that they paid for on their own. Everybody was invited. All the inmates were invited. And they gave each of us a plaque for reducing violence in the Trenton Prison. I felt good. I thought I knew how to do that. If I ever got the shot, I was going to try to do what I did here. When Fauver went uptown, he called me right on the phone and said you need to go to Rahway. So it wasn’t any magic. It was being in the right place at the right time and doing a good job for the guy who appointed me.
FightsATW: I want to bounce back to boxing, because you actually got a match with James Scott on HBO. How did you reach a deal with HBO to show a prison fight?
BH: Scotty became the president of what I call the Boxing Association. That was the inmate group. The Boxing Association was responsible in part for scheduling boxing matches or fighters that come into the prison and fight our guys in the school. We had a couple of those. I forgot who Scott fought, but we had an undercard with some of the other students fighting. One of the guys came, I wish I could remember his name, and he said I know a guy who wants to be a promoter. He used to work for Ali, and that rang a bell immediately because that was the other side. Ali was in the Nation of Islam, Scotty was the New World of Islam. If I could get both sides working together and each of them have something to lose, I might be able to avoid violence, and it worked. If Murad was with Ali, I’d like to talk to him, and I did. He was one of Ali’s security men. In fact, watching television, I remember him as the man who carried Ali’s pick. So he would pick Ali’s hair in the corner. But Ali gave him some money and said I want you to go out and get a job now, a real job as a promoter. So he funded him with some front money and Murad went out and was trying to become a promoter. And this young inmate knew that and asked me to talk to Murad. Murad had not done a fight of any kind ever, so I hired Murad to come in and be the promoter for our school, and he pulled a rabbit out of a hat. One day he came to me and said “Boss, I’ve got something that’s going to knock your socks off. HBO wants to come in and televise a fight.” He said “I’ve done some leg work on that and Eddie Gregory is willing to come in and fight Scotty. The reason he wants to do that is Gregory has a championship fight contract scheduled and he wants to use the Scott fight as a tune up. So, I’m going to see if I can get HBO to come in to do it.” They’re brand new, they were a young company. And he went in, and he’s the guy who pulled it off. He brought HBO in to do the fight. The one thing that he did say to me was that he didn’t have any money, and there was no way that he was going to make money by having a fight in a prison.
There’s no crowd, there’s no concession stand. He said I’ve got to make something. He said how about if you let me charge admission to the Eddie Gregory fight? I said you’re asking me to let people in off the street to come into a maximum security prison to watch a fight. That’s really high risk. I thought about it and I eventually did it. And we had 500 paying customers at the Gregory fight and not a bit of trouble, not a single one. I had 1,300 inmates in one part of the prison watching the fight on two big screen TVs and 500 paying customers down around the ring. At the end of the fight, everybody went home, the inmates to their cells, and the civilians to their homes, and there wasn’t a single bit of trouble. I remember my boss talking to me and telling me that he was concerned about what I was doing. He said to me Bob, you’re going to lose your prison. I said how am I gonna do that? He said Bob, you’re taking a lot of risk, and it’s high risk stuff that you do. And I said Bill, you don’t understand. I know my population. I’ve got a good rapport with them. I walk and talk this place every day, all day. I know the staff and we can make it happen. We’re going to do it. Well, he came to the fight and we’ve got a picture of him sitting next to me on the stage watching the fight, and I’m having a good time and he was looking around saying oh my God, when’s this thing going to blow up? After the fight, he took it on the hop. He left. I just watched everybody leave. The inmates went to their houses. Not a problem. Civilians went home. We locked the prison up. Let out all of the reporters and whatnot, the TV people with all of their cameras and ladders and ropes and everything else, did a lot of frisking. But it worked like a charm. So I was ready to do it some more times.
FightsATW: And not only that, but James won the fight. Which, I don’t think was part of Gregory’s plan.
BH: No, no, no. Gregory was thinking this was a tune up. He was just going to get a workout for his title fight, and Scotty actually destroyed him. I sat right at ringside and later on in the late rounds, when Scott would hit him in the midsection, you can actually see welts raised on Gregory’s body. He was hitting him so hard. Gregory was one tired, beat up man at the end of that fight.
FightsATW: Scott obviously was an incredible talent and I’m guessing it might have been a blessing and a curse. A blessing from the standpoint that you have somebody with this skill set, this ability to teach, this ability to fight in a very professional manner, but also so good that maybe he drew almost too much attention to what you were trying to do, which created the problems that you had at a higher level within your business, but also even with the WBA getting cold feet and stripping his ranking. He was ranked number two in the world at one point.
BH: He sure was. I remember when the WBA stripped him of his ranking. Bob Lee was Sergeant Joe Walcott’s deputy commissioner for Corrections in New Jersey. Bob Lee was also on the board with the WBA, and he made an impassioned speech when they were taking his ranking away, how wrong it was, and just tried really hard to get them not to do it, but they did it anyway. We had some support. We had Jersey Joe. We had Bob Lee. We were in good shape, I thought. But not good enough to have the WBA not strip him of his ranking.
FightsATW: All these years later, does that still hurt?
BH: It does. It really does. My wife will tell me that I have just got to get over it. She says you’ve got to get out of the seventies, and I’m just back in the seventies, thinking about it all the time. I think the one regret that I have is that I didn’t get the title fight set, because I think what would have happened is that Scott would have become the light heavyweight champ of the world, the governor would have had him paroled, he’d have gotten out early and done some great things, because when he finally got paroled years later, what did he do? He went to the city of Trenton to a gym and worked with kids. That was all about this re-socialization and whatnot. He internalized it, and that’s what he did. So he would have done something like that if he had gotten released earlier. I really believed, had he won the title, he was going to be a paroled man.
FightsATW: The HBO boxing match was in ‘78. He also had a fight with then Dwight Braxton (later Dwight Muhammad Qawi), who is in the Boxing Hall of Fame. So, he has his own pretty amazing story there. But James didn’t get released until 2005. Before he got dementia and passed in 2018, he only had those 13 years, which is not nothing, but I imagine it’s hard not to think of how much more he could have done.
BH: It’s unfortunate. As I said, when I left Rahway, it wasn’t long after then that he left for Trenton and it was because he was set up by a corrections captain. Andrew Mambo told me that. Andrew Mambo was the producer of the Fighter Inside on ESPN. He told me that Scott was set up. The chief of custody said that Scott had threatened to kill him and that Scott was dealing drugs. That was the vehicle that they needed to get Scotty out of Rahway to Trenton Prison. Once Scott left, that was the end of everything. He was the school, he was the association, he kept it running. They knew that if they got rid of me first and Scott second, boxing would be history, and it was. I remember it wasn’t long after we started the boxing school, the Angola prison in Louisiana copied us, and they’re still going today. They were a copy of us. And here we were, gone. I saw a YouTube video a couple of months ago that in Thailand, they have a boxing school that mirrors our boxing school and they fight for parole. It’s the way they advertise the program, fighting for parole.
FightsATW: I always think of the word trailblazer in very literal terms, which is that the reason it has to be blazed is because it doesn’t exist. But when you have to set fire to create a trail, you’re probably going to get a little burned too. Do you ever look back on it and think, I’m very proud that we were one of the first to do something like this, and it led to something more, but damn, it’s too bad that we had to get burnt along the way, because we were really making progress.
BH: I think about that. I don’t necessarily think about myself being transferred. I think about the 75 young kids who were busting their gut every day in that gym and not long after I left, everything went away for them. I remember a week or two after I left, these kids had been working really hard, there was going to be a boxing tournament at one of the other prisons. When I left, the new warden wouldn’t send them because he didn’t have enough money for officer escorts. That wasn’t true. Had I been there, I’d have had 50 guys ready to go free to escort these guys. Here were a bunch of kids who for a year had been just really busting their gut and now couldn’t even go to a tournament. And like I say, not long after that, it was all over.
FightsATW: Going through your life and career and then writing it down and putting it on paper, I think serves two purposes. One is that it’s a guide on how to do something that’s very difficult, but it’s also a cautionary tale about what resistance you may run up against when you do try to do something different. Do you see the value in having created something that can be referred to for those who might want to try something difficult in the future, whether it’s this or something else?
BH: Sure, that was one of a number of reasons why we wrote the book. I’m still hoping, after the book comes out, that some courageous maximum security prison warden somewhere is going to read it and say I’m going to try that. It hasn’t happened in 40 years, but it’s something that I really dream about. And I’ve thought a lot about that. I could just kind of present a roadmap about how I did what I did and why I did it and why it worked. That might be an opportunity for somebody else to try it and make it work. Anybody courageous enough to try that had to know what the pitfalls were, where the landmines were, and I thought we dealt with some of that. Here are the kinds of things that happened to me and it could be high risk, it depends on who you are, where you are, and who your boss is. It was very intuitive. It was both of those.
FightsATW: Do you still watch boxing today?
BH: I do. I watched a lot of fights afterwards. In fact, I watched a fight sitting in a bar in Portland, Oregon, with a friend of mine, David Riley, the day that Scotty fought Qawi at Rahway. I just wish that I had been there. Scott fought like a defeated man. He just didn’t have the heart and didn’t have the spirit that he had because they had been jerking him around. He wasn’t the same Scott that I knew. And Qawi beat him. But, Qawi was in the program too, and they sparred a lot together. They had really good fights in sparring, but Scott held his own. I don’t know that he ever lost a fight or won a fight. I think that he was a better fighter than Qawi, and I think he should have beaten Qawi if he was the same James Scott that I knew when I left there.
FightsATW: Qawi’s fights with Evander Holyfield at the cruiserweight level were extraordinary battles of wills as much as anything. I think what you’re getting at there is that James maybe lost a little bit of his will because he didn’t see a path forward anymore.
BH: He lost a lot of his will. He really did. I could see it in his face watching the fight. He just wasn’t James Scott. He knew Qawi. He fought with him every day in the gym. There was no way that he couldn’t beat Qawi and Holyfield and anybody. He was that good. When you rip the heart out of a guy, strange things happen. He was a defeated man before that fight ever started.
FightsATW: You can never get back the years that you would have wanted for him, or the opportunities that passed him by, but he’s a legend in New Jersey now, he’s in the Boxing Hall of Fame in New Jersey. I hope that you feel some vindication in that, even with the failures that came later and the roadblocks that got in both his and your way. He did get out of prison, he did reform himself, and he did give over a decade of his life to making other people’s lives better.
BH: Absolutely. He worked with kids, he traveled with kids to their boxing matches. He just loved what he was doing. He would have done that had he gone out and won the championship. It would have been the same James Scott. He was ready and he did reform himself. He re-socialized himself. He actually moved from criminal behavior through the boxing ring into non-criminal behavior and all the things that come through that process of moving away from your past and re-engineering that past and creating a new future. Scotty did that. He could have gone home a lot sooner than what he did. The thing that makes me the most proud about the whole boxing school was that he went out and he did what he said he was going to do. He was going to re-socialize and he was going to make it. And he did.
FightsATW: It seems to me, Bob, that you did what you said you were going to do too, which was give folks a chance. Even with the issues you ran into, the lessons that were learned during that time at Rahway extended far beyond the ending of the Boxing Association. So, pretty damn remarkable.
BH: I appreciate that. By the way, I’ve been inducted into the Hall of Fame too.
FightsATW: Well, you damn well should have been.
BH: Yeah, Mr. Hascup called me one night and wanted to know if I would accept induction into the Hall of Fame. I guess he wanted to be sure before he was going to do it. I wanted to know why, and he said well, you did a whole lot of good things for boxing. I don’t know what I did, but he thought that I did. So yeah, in November of last year, I was inducted. So we’ve got four of my fighters and me. And Eddie Johnson is a licensed referee and we were only in our first year.
BH: Can I share one more thing with you that really comes up high on my pride barometer?
FightsATW: Of course.
BH: We had thirteen groups at Rahway like the boxing group. Thirteen. When I got to Rahway, one of the chapters in the book dealt with my having to pick up the riot demands from a riot a couple of years earlier that hadn’t been dealt with. The first demand was medical. They said aspirin was the major medication that you got if you were sick. So, I wanted to take the medical situation first and try to do something that was going to make an impact. Meeting with the inmate council, we talked a lot about some of the stuff that we could do and there were a group of guys that wanted to be EMTs. So I figured why not? Maybe that’s another group, an EMT group. So I arranged for twelve of them to go over to Rahway General Hospital and get trained as EMTs. Then when they came back, I figured now what are we going to do with them? Somehow, we came up with the great idea that we need to have an ambulance service inside the prison, but it’s got to be an on foot ambulance service because we can’t have a vehicle out there. Well, wouldn’t you know that every shift, every day, one of those EMTs was in the hospital and if a call came in, they were off with their backpack and a doctor and a stretcher to help people.
The first guy they helped was having a stroke. He probably would have died. They saved his life. And so, that made me really proud to have a group that did something like that. The Escorts was another inmate group there. The Escorts are still somehow singing today, because I saw something on the internet where the Escorts did a concert in Harlem a couple of years ago. So here they are, still cranking it out. But we had 13 of those kinds of groups and more to come. The place was really excited. Everybody was wanting to try something that they always wanted to do. And, we probably would have had 30 or 40 of them had I stayed there, because things were on a roll. It took hold. I think the thing that inmates liked was the fact that here was an opportunity for them to do something that they wanted to do. Not me telling them I’ve got an electrician’s program, you’ve got to be an electrician. I was going to help them do what they wanted to do, and in the process, we’re going to try to help them go home a better person than they were when they came in. And that’s what happened.
FightsATW: It’s one hell of an industrious legacy. When does the book officially get released?
BH: The book is going to be out between the 16th and the 20th of this month on Amazon. The Kindle version is on Amazon now.
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