Armed With Knives, Inmates Learn to Dish It Out : Cuisine: Ex-chef to Truman and Eisenhower teaches cooking class at D.C. prison in Virginia. His captive audience sees it as a marketable trade, and a taste of success.

Giving a prison inmate a knife is usually not a good idea, but William E. (Dad) Smith does it all the time.

He hands them eggbeaters, frying pans, measuring cups, eggs, butter and flour, too.

Smith, the White House chef to former Presidents Harry S. Truman and Dwight D. Eisenhower, has transformed a cafeteria-style food preparation course at the District of Columbia’s prison in suburban Virginia into a classroom for haute cuisine.

The program, founded in 1984, gives inmates a marketable trade, a taste of success and the incentive not to return. One-third to one-half of the inmates who pull time at Lorton are likely to return. But only one of Smith’s alumni is back behind bars; the rest work in restaurants, universities and country clubs.

Smith’s classroom is a busy, hands-on laboratory dedicated to gastronomic delights, where his pupils readily seek his advice on such dishes as fish, Chicken Marco Polo, rice and strawberry shortcake.

“Hey, Dad, you want us to filet the fish?” asks David Covington, aspiring chef and convicted armed robber.

“Not yet, it’s too early,” Smith replies.

Smith is an ex-Navy cooking instructor who will be obeyed. Take food from the kitchen back to a cell, and you’re out of his course. He once made an inmate bake a cake six times because he knew the student didn’t follow procedures precisely.

“I don’t give them any breaks at all. If a guy cannot conform to my standards, I don’t need him,” he said.

But those who heed and learn from Smith have an ally who will vouch for them after they are freed into an often unforgiving job market.

Ex-cons looking for work already have one huge strike against them, Lorton prison spokesman Bill Meeks said. “The majority of the time,” Meeks said, “he is given only one opportunity to prove himself.”

Seifuddin Abdul-Malik is one of Smith’s graduates. Before he became a chef making $30,000 a year at the Georgetown Preparatory School in Rockville, Md., he did a 10-year stretch for armed robbery.

“I had no prior work record at all,” said Abdul-Malik, 38. “All I knew was crime.”

Now, says the school’s assistant food and beverage manager, Genevieve Difilippo, Abdul-Malik can do outstanding work. “His specialty is Chinese food or Asian cuisine,” she said.

Convicted murderer Edward Frizzell Williams was one of Smith’s first students.

“We stayed with Dad because of what he teaches us--not only the culinary [classes], but he also teaches us about life, how to be responsible men,” said Williams, up for parole in 1997.

“He used to come down here on weekends for no pay to teach us,” Williams said. He said Smith also has paid for food and books out of his own pocket.

Smith didn’t seek the job, and he earned twice as much as a country club chef. But now he prefers it to chatting with Harry Truman in the White House kitchen, he said.

“It’s more rewarding,” Smith said, “because you can see the fruits of your labor.”

He also said he’s not afraid at Lorton: The word is out that any inmate who hurts him will be sorry.

“If I’m here by myself, somebody will come by every 15 minutes or so to check, see if I’m all right,” he said.

Smith has about 25 students in each of two classes, a one-year and a three-year course, and there is a two-page list of inmates wanting in. (No wonder: In addition to catering a few special events, the cooks get to eat the food they make.)

By the end of the three-year program, inmates have spent 218 hours baking, 300 hours on cake decorating, 708 hours on meat-cutting and 318 hours on accounting, and have learned French terms for food.

They also have learned how to hand a knife to someone: handle first, with the flat part of the blade against the hand. Smith requires inmates to sign out for the knives, and they are under lock and key when not in use.

The program wouldn’t work without donations. Smith’s highest annual budget has been $3,000, compared to the $6,000 it takes for one student to go through a comparable program on the outside. Smith secured the inmates’ white chefs’ uniforms from Walter Reed Army Hospital, and much of the equipment is donated.

Smith is grooming inmate Daoud Mujahid to take his place. Mujahid, who watches carefully over the inmates preparing Chicken Marco Polo, couldn’t boil an egg when a murder conviction sent him to Lorton in 1977.

Smith wants to retire this year and take a long fishing trip with his grandchildren and great-grandchildren, but he has a list of projects to finish.

He also wants to start a separate cooking program for the district’s female inmates, and a chef’s school on the outside--for unwed mothers, senior citizens and people looking for a new career.