Ex-Inmate’s Venture Aims To Help North End Drug Dealers Use Business Skills For Good, Not Ill
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HARTFORD — Bashaun Brown has an eye for business.
Spend more than five minutes with the 36-year-old and he’ll steer the conversation to sustainable funding, the importance of networking, and how best to engineer partnerships.
And when he lets slip that he’s developing T.R.A.P. House, a business incubator that targets high-crime, high-poverty areas, with $30,000 in seed money, he gives the impression that he’s an MBA student with years of experience. But he’s not, and Brown has become an unintentional advocate for dismantling that kind of knee-jerk judgment.
It’s not that Brown isn’t educated — he’s got 16 credits from Wesleyan University under his belt. Only he didn’t accrue them at the school’s Middletown campus. Brown took his classes through the school’s center for prison education as he sat behind the walls of the Cheshire Correctional Institution during a six-year tour for bank robbery.
To hear him tell it, that’s only the latest stop in his academic career. It began in earnest in a much different setting: the streets of Plainfield, N.J., a city 30 minutes south of Newark where, as Brown describes it, preteens act as lookouts and drug mules in exchange for soda-and-chip money.
Bashaun Brown, an ex-con who served six years for bank robbery, works to establish a venue for his upcoming event in the co-working space reSET in the Parkville neighborhood of Hartford May 4. reSET serves entrepreneurs and aims to inspire innovation and community collaboration. They have been mentoring Bashaun in his business venture. (Lauren Schneiderman)
“It’s not a matter of ‘how did I get involved with drug dealing.’ I was born into it,” Brown said. “If one of my friends got a job, he was the outlier.”
Enter T.R.A.P. House, its name a play on the street slang for a place to buy and sell drugs. Now it stands for “transforming, reinventing and prospering.”
The acronym doubles as the organization’s mission statement. Brown wants to set up shop in the North End and recruit drug dealers, providing them an outlet to “pivot their skills to the legal economy” through college-level entrepreneurship classes.
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He has already started to make his rounds, visiting halfway houses and touring neighborhoods, spreading word of what he’s doing.
“There are no headhunters looking at these people, no one’s looking to hire them,” Brown said. “But I believe you have the same type of people in these neighborhoods that have the same business acumen that you might find at Harvard or Yale. They’re just using it for the wrong reasons.”
Brown knows that all too well.
As he grew out of his initial corner-boy upbringing, he tried to distance himself from that life. He got accepted to Morehouse College, and spent a year in Atlanta studying computer science.
To hear him tell it, his dreams collapsed under the weight of debt. By summer 1998, Brown’s first year of college had left him $12,000 in the red, even after a Pell Grant, student loans, and his grandmother’s maxing out her credit card at $5,000.
But when he went back to New Jersey, he saw kids his own age driving Cadillacs. Money wasn’t a worry for them. It was a way of life.
Brown told himself he would pick up his old habits for a few months, sling some crack and heroin to pad his income, and get ready for another year at Morehouse. He never made it back.
“It was like a step in the rabbit hole,” Brown said. “The first bad decision in a series of bad decisions that ended up being made after that.”
That series led him to People’s Bank in Waterbury on May 15, 2009.
Brown had followed relatives to Connecticut, where they had relocated. Disguising himself with a dreadlock wig, a desperate Brown stole $4,000 from a teller with nothing more than a flashlight and a nylon duffel bag, according to an arrest warrant filed in the incident.
Police arrested him hours later as he was counting the money in the living room of a nearby home. During his interview with detectives, he confessed to robbing a nearby Barnes & Noble using the same method two weeks before.
Alone with his thoughts in prison, Brown vowed to change.
“I looked back on my life and I realized I had wasted my natural abilities doing the wrong things,” he said. “I wanted to do some good, to give another option to kids growing through that life.”
After his release in July, Brown stayed in touch with Wesleyan professors who had taught him in prison. Nearly a year later, he and three undergrads submitted the incubator concept in a grant competition sponsored by the university’s Patricelli Center for Social Entrepreneurship.
A panel of faculty, staff and alumni from the school judged entries in a “‘Shark Tank’ for people who want to do social good,” according to Makaela Kingsley, the director of the center.
“Social entrepreneurship is riddled with failures and setbacks, and we want someone who’s laser-focused on the goal of having a positive impact on the world,” Kingsley said. “When the judges met the team and saw how strong they are with Bashaun at the helm, it instilled confidence in them.”
Enough confidence to give Brown and his team $5,000 in seed money. An additional $25,000 came from the center’s namesake, Bob Patricelli.
“I have to believe that Bashaun understands the psychology of young drug dealers and what will appeal to them,” Patricelli, the founder and chief executive of Women’s Health USA, said. “This is not some academic expert writing papers about something. This is a young man who’s lived it.”
The health care entrepreneur saw himself in Brown’s charismatic approach to business. He was immediately attracted to his story of overcoming his past missteps and working to better the world around him.
So Patricelli became an angel investor for the team, something he’s done only once before for a group out of Wesleyan. But his money, which covers program costs and Brown’s salary, came with a single string attached.
T.R.A.P. House had to open in the North End of Hartford, an area Patricelli is interested in bolstering. The group sat down with Mayor Luke Bronin in April, receiving his blessing and a few bits of advice on how to hit the ground running.
“I think Bashaun’s correct that, by definition, street hustlers are entrepreneurs,” Patricelli said. “It’s not enough to create jobs that are in the nature of neighborhood beautification. If you’re going to fire the imagination of young people, they’re more likely to be excited by something they’re familiar with and interested in.”
Street hustlers are salesman at heart, Brown argues. And to be successful, they rely on the same skills as their counterparts in legitimate businesses.
“They have a wonderful knowledge about supply and demand, they keep an eye on profits, they’re risk-averse,” Brown said. “The people overseeing drug deals are excellent leaders, team builders. All the things successful entrepreneurs have, dealers also have.”
It’s a business model partly grounded in idealism, but Brown’s not naive. He knows that his system won’t work for everyone.
“T.R.A.P. House is not in the business of trying to convince someone to stop selling drugs. That’s not what we’re trying to do,” Brown said. “We’re trying to position ourselves to be a place where, if you want to stop selling drugs, you can come here. That’s not going to happen until someone is tired of selling drugs, of looking over their shoulder or going to prison.”
