Name: 從罪犯到典範 ► 毒販變頂級大廚的華麗轉身 - Chef Jeff Henderson （中英字幕）
Uploaded: 2025-07-15T07:58:49.000Z
Duration: 6 min 49 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Indicted by the federal government in 1988.

Served 10 years in prison. 10 years in prison that I served. 10 years walking on concrete every single day.

Sitting on a stainless steel toilet with toilet paper as hard as a brown paper bag.

So it was in 1984 that I embraced a criminal lifestyle.

My criminal lifestyle was shaped by my mentors.

And I decided that this was the way for me, which was the meal ticket for tens of thousands of young men of color in inner city communities across America.

And it's not something that I'm proud of, but you always have to go back to the beginning of how it began.

I made up to $35,000 a week in my heyday.

But one thing that I wasn't able to see because I had the blinders on.

When you grow up in poverty, the front lobe that many of these intellectuals talk about that goes undeveloped, it doesn't allow you to see the world through the eyes of people who have been exposed, who have had access to the American dream.

So we see one thing, that's how to hustle, how to put food on the table.

And one of the biggest mistakes that many of our mothers in our community put on the burden of young boys is for a mother to say that you are the man of the house.

When a mother tells you that you are the man of the house at seven to eight years old, every boy wants to help his mother.

Every boy doesn't like to see his mother abused, doesn't like to see his mother going through various challenges in life.

So they called me a hustler back in the day.

When I was on the street, I understood marketing.

I knew how to manage a diverse workforce.

I had gang members following me like any CEO, any leader or great manager of a company.

When you're a great leader, you have vision.

And when you have vision, it becomes very addictive.

Like tens of thousands of young people on the street.

The one thing that no one ever saw in me, they didn't know how to flip my gift again.

They didn't know how to flip the ability that I was a number one newspaper boy when I was eight.

I had the number one candy seller route when I was a little boy.

But no one saw that because my mother was blind.

It's not that she was uneducated, she was miseducated.

So no one was able to say, Jeffrey, what do you want to be when you grow up?

So as a drug dealer, I became very successful.

I had the ability to tap in to the talent and the strength of people on the streets.

That's how I was able to move the product.

And I'm not putting praise on the fact that drug dealers are these great individuals.

Even though we victimized by selling drugs, we were also victims of our community and the people around us that shaped our thinking.

Wrong choices are inspired by something that we see, something we hear, whether it's greed, whether it's poverty, whether it's just trying to beat the system or something like that.

I was told for the first time in my life that I was smart in prison.

An older man in prison taught me how to shave with a razor in prison.

The first time that I ever was told Carl's son was in prison.

But not only did that begin to get me to see myself different, I became the same analyst that I was on the streets.

I was in prison with some of the brightest minds on the universe, stockbrokers, presidents and CEOs of corporations, judges, lawyers, former DA agents.

I begin to build the relationships with them.

When I came home from prison in 1996, they told me I couldn't get a job and I wouldn't get a job.

When I first got my job, there were things I had to change about me when I got out of prison.

I had to rebuild my image, clean shave my face, took makeup to cover my earring hole up, no tattoos, quit lifting weights so I wasn't big and bulky.

Because I understood the importance of a smile.

And I knew in order to be the best chef in America, I had to go amongst the best chefs to learn, to study.

And when I came to Las Vegas in the year 2000, it was a challenge for me.

I wanted to work at the world famous Bellagio Hotel.

It took me three and a half years to get a job at the Bellagio.

Well, I believe that everybody was born with a gift.

I believe that everybody was born with the abilities and the strength and the genius to become someone.

The reason why we're successful in here because we discovered that.

There's so much individuals out there who are smart, who are forward thinkers, but they were using that intellect the wrong way.

Geniuses just like us, but they've been untapped.

No one takes the time to develop their, develop that intellect.

So many of these young people have been impacted and influenced by negativity.

Why shouldn't we live the American dream?

It doesn't matter where you come from, what religion you are, what your story is.

I believe that each and every one of them should have that opportunity to live the dream.