Award-winning chef leads youth by example

Jet, Oct 28, 2002

Change is good, especially if it means leaving behind a life of crime and becoming an inspiration for others. After serving his time in prison, Jeffrey Henderson has gone from being a crack cocaine dealer to an award-winning chef trying to make a difference.

In his heyday Henderson, a Los Angeles native, cooked his own cocaine powder and sold the finished product with earnings that would periodically total up to $35,000 a week. By the young age of 19 he was running his own cocaine enterprise. "I never drank, never smoked or did cocaine. I was strictly a money-man. Strictly money," he says.

In December 1988 Henderson, 24 at the time, was charged with conspiracy and intent to sell cocaine after one of his couriers, who police said was under the influence while driving, was stopped at a border checkpoint and asked to pull the vehicle over.

When authorities searched the car they found cocaine and $40,000 in cash. The items were easily traced back to Henderson, whom police had been watching for a couple of years, because of a utility bill with his name and address on it that had been left in the car's glove compartment. Henderson would later be sentenced to serve 10 years and seven months in prison.

Ironically Henderson's love for the culinary arts began while he served out his prison time. After he was fired from doing cigarette detail, which consisted of sweeping up cigarette butts on the prison yard for approximately 20 minutes a day, Henderson was put on pot-and-pan duty in the kitchen. This would be the beginning of his food service experience.

"One thing about working in the kitchen, you got to eat better than everybody else," Henderson says of his past life.

He admits that once he realized that cooking came very natural to him, he wanted to succeed at his newfound passion. "I caught on very quickly," he says. "I'm the type of person that whatever I do I have to be the best at it no matter what."

Like many prisoners Henderson spent a lot of time reading while incarcerated. One day he ran across an article in a national newspaper that featured the top African-American chefs. Six months away from release, Henderson was inspired to write to Robert Gadsby, a high-end cuisine chef featured in the article, to ask for a job in the cooking field. Henderson never did receive a response.

"I knew that in this business, [high-end cuisine] was the only way to make money and that was the only direction I wanted to go in."

Eight years and six months had passed when Henderson, who was released early for good behavior, walked out of prison a free man. On his release one of the first things that he did was to make his way to Gadsby's restaurant to try to find work. After several visits to the establishment, his persistence paid off, landing him a job as a dishwasher. Henderson's "first in, last out" mentality earned him the title of pastry cook and later line cook.

Henderson felt the need to broaden his skills, so he decided to try his hand at working in some of L.A.'s top restaurants and hotels to gain more cooking experience.

"I couldn't afford to go to culinary school, so my schooling was in the experience," admits Henderson, who also learned some tricks of the trade from menus, books and the Internet.

After working his way through Los Angeles Henderson bought a one-way ticket to Las Vegas and hit every resort on the strip. "Quite a few people were interested in me until my record came up," he says. "That's when I was told, `We'll call you back.'"

The last resort that the husband and father of five tried was the Caesars Palace. He managed to wow the head honchos with a five-course tasting that landed him a job. "I told them about my record and they said, `You didn't kill anybody, so don't worry about it. It was a long time ago,'" he says. "It was almost divine."

Within a year and a half Henderson moved his family to Vegas and began to receive quite a bit of praise for his cooking, including a promotion to Chef de Cuisine (French for head chef) of the world-famous resort. However, the honor that he is most proud of is being named the 2001 Las Vegas Chef of the Year by the American Food and Wine Tasting Federation.

Henderson believes that with success comes responsibility. Now at age 39 he is giving back to the community with his non-profit organization The Westside Group.

The former bad boy speaks frankly to young people at schools and juvenile centers two to three times a month about choices, consequences and reality so that they don't make the same mistakes that he made.

"Prison pretty much saved my life. It rescued me from the streets," reveals Henderson. "I have an obligation to give back because I feel like it was my generation that destroyed another generation of young Black males," he says.

As Henderson dishes out his words of wisdom to at-risk youth, he continues to have hopes of building another enterprise in the future that is much different from the first.

"I know what it's like being on top, and there's a way to get that back legitimately."