Ex-Inmate Enjoys Success on Outside, Returns to Train Others for Jobs

Abdul Singleton got his job the hard way--in jail.

Singleton, an 18-year-old with a gentle smile, was serving an eight-month term at Rikers Island for selling drugs and for “traffic directing”--pointing customers toward the pushers. It was his third arrest: “I never wanted to be out there selling drugs, but I couldn’t get a job.”

That’s when he encountered Fernando Mateo and his Mateo Institute of Training, a very different kind of MIT that has been established behind coils of razor wire at the jail in the East River.

There, Mateo and seven other contractors train prisoners for jobs--at no cost to the government. The idea is to provide training and a job once a prisoner gets out; Singleton was one of the first four graduates, and a second class, which ended in July, graduated 14.

“In the beginning, I thought he was selling dreams, and that it wouldn’t happen. It did,” he said. “Fernando was the only one who gave us something.”

Why does Mateo give? “When I was 15 and experimenting with drugs, I dropped out of school and got a job. Two years later, I opened my own carpet shop and prayed, ‘God, if you give me health and success, I’ll come back and help others someday,’ ” he says.

Mateo is now 34 years old. His little carpet shop is not so little; it does $3 million in business each year, he drives a Mercedes-Benz and lives in affluent Westchester County. Now, it is pay-back time, and he brings his own passion for success to men who have known little but failure.

“Fernando is like a secret weapon,” said Sandy Smith, director of the special events division at Rikers that oversees MIT. In 15 years with the Corrections Department, “I’ve never seen anything like this.”

“We’re going to teach you self-esteem, for your children,” Mateo tells the inmates. “We need you guys. It’s time that we as minorities get our act together. . . . I used to live in a Lower East Side home where I saw guys shootin’ up in the hallways. But I said, ‘This isn’t the way to live.’ ”

As he listened, Anthony Choily made the sign of the cross.

Once a plumber’s apprentice, he was sentenced to a year for car theft. Now, Choily has been given a second chance to learn plumbing.

“I’m giving back to myself what I took away,” said the 28-year-old recovering alcoholic and drug addict. “I’m ready for society.”

Once or twice a week for 12 weeks, Mateo and the others bring their own materials to Rikers to teach carpeting, asbestos removal, clothes manufacturing, carpentry, plumbing and fencing, as well as sheet-metal and electrical work.

The trainees are all sentenced prisoners, serving time for assault, drugs, weapons possession--everything except the most violent, murder and rape.

Life inside Rikers, as in any prison, can be violent.

“One guy had his face ripped open right in front of me,” said Fernando Figueroa, 19, who is serving one year for heroin dealing.

Figueroa, a sheet-metal trainee who was once a toy salesman, said that before he was arrested for the third time, “I was doin’ real bad. I was killing people, with drugs, and I was real hooked.”

His unemployed mother “is real happy with me now, she was never so happy. I’m glad I’m at Rikers, there are a lot of opportunities for me.”

“I used to help my girlfriend with her boutique. I’m very much into fashion,” said Benjamin Brooks, 23, who is learning clothes manufacturing. “But I used to get mad. Now, I’m gonna try to improve my attitude, hold my composure, so I can be patient with customers when they don’t buy something.”

This is precisely what Mateo tells them. “At first, you might be unloading trucks. Be humble, be nice. If you have a good attitude, you make money,” he said. “You can’t afford to be macho, or just a tough guy.”

Does it work? Of last year’s four graduates, all trained in laying carpets, only one has returned to jail--for possession of an unlicensed gun. That’s too little time and too small a sample from which to draw any conclusions, but the general recidivism rate for Rikers’ inmates is 65%.

Abdul Singleton is determined to be a success. Each day, he gets up at 6 a.m. at his parents’ South Bronx home and rides the subway for 1 1/2 hours to his job at a Brooklyn warehouse run by Consolidated Carpet, the biggest unionized installer on the East Coast.

All day long, the lanky ex-con is on the concrete floor, cutting carpeting, loading it on trucks--and earning $7 an hour.

“There are not many people who want to get down on their hands and knees these days and sweat. Here, you have a guy who wants to work,” said David Meberg, president of Consolidated and a friend of Mateo’s.

At night, Singleton walks home through the slums where he sold drugs for two years; he passes his old dealer buddies on the street corner.

This month, he is expected to become an apprentice and will start installing carpets in homes and offices at double his present wage.

He used his first paycheck to buy a microwave oven for his mother and father, a laid-off city Parks Department worker, and five of seven brothers and sisters who still live at home.

“My mom is very happy,” he said.

So is Mateo. He has been asked to introduce his program in other cities. He has received one of President Bush’s “Thousand Points of Light” awards. He constantly gets mail from people who hear about the program and want to help. A third Rikers class is starting with 22 inmates.

“If I can save the city the $58,000 a year it costs to keep an inmate behind bars, get him off welfare and make him a taxpaying citizen, that’s more than $100,000 a year,” he said.

Then his face softens.

“We’re saving souls, and we’re giving them the tools to live forever.”