How the Kingsmen keep Minnesota’s formerly incarcerated out of federal prison and thriving

It took Erick Washington more than a dozen failed cocaine addiction treatments and a two-year prison sentence for armed burglary, but when his “light-bulb” moment finally arrived, it proved enduring.

“Oh, this is it,” Washington recalled thinking as he sat handcuffed in the back of a squad car the night of his arrest in 2009. He knew then that he wasn’t going back.

Washington, now 62, doesn’t hesitate to share one of his lowest nights with men and women coming home from their own federal prison sentences. Leaning on his lived experience, he is now a pillar of a Minnesota federal court strategy to interrupt the patterns that can send people back to prison.

More than 300 federal inmates have been released to Minnesota on average each year during the past decade. During that time, Minnesota’s federal “re-entry court” program has partnered with the nonprofit Kingsmen Project that Washington started with his wife, Tammi, to steer the same people away from committing new crimes.

“He’s understanding of where our participants are coming from, but he’s also able to hold them accountable in a way that I think is meaningful for them,” said U.S. Magistrate Judge Elizabeth Cowan Wright, who with U.S. District Judge Katherine Menendez preside over Minnesota’s federal re-entry court program.

Since linking up with Minnesota’s federal re-entry court — still one of the only programs of its kind to match offenders with mentors from the community — the Kingsmen approach is catching on. Thanks to the advocacy of an ex-Detroit motorcycle gang leader-turned-mentor, the Kingsmen Project is considering expanding into Michigan.

The Washingtons manage their nonprofit out of their Spring Lake Park home while holding down full-time day jobs. Their mentees include people whose criminal records can include robbery, drug trafficking or murder convictions, and are in need of help finding work and staying on the right side of court-imposed release requirements. The couple often invites those they work with into their home to lend a hand, walking some through their first-ever job applications. At other times, mentoring might look like standing guard outside the hospital room of a young man shot in the stomach.

“I’m just trying to do the next right thing,” Washington said.

Howard Young could hardly believe it: Barely six months after leaving prison, he was picking at a plate of grilled chicken drumsticks at a north metro park with the same federal judge who sentenced him six years earlier. The Kingsmen Project’s annual summer picnic brought them together again.

Young, 39, is now in re-entry court and on supervised release after serving time for heroin distribution. He caught that charge soon after getting out of state prison for a murder conviction for the shooting death of another teen when Young was 16. He denied those allegations but took a plea deal on the eve of trial. Young was given 20 years, of which he served 13.

Young now says his first prison stint hardly matured him. He went in a boy, he said, but exited a man solely in the physical sense. His subsequent federal drug sentence, however, forced him to reflect on how easily he could spend the rest of his life incarcerated. He met men he believed could’ve done so much good on the outside but were instead “trapped.”

“I didn’t want that to be me,” Young said.

Young never knew stability: He cycled through foster and group homes as a child in Chicago before he “turned to the street” at 8. Before his murder arrest, Young came to Minnesota while trying to evade juvenile charges in Illinois. Yet, when Young left prison in January, what first compelled him most about re-entry court was the prospect of shaving time off his post-release supervision.

“When I came home this year, I was still on the fence,” Young said, acknowledging the temptation to return to his familiar circles: “I had people coming at me that could really change my life in many ways — for good or bad, depending on how it went.”

Washington wanted to guide Young to the good. After hearing that Young couldn’t find work despite applying for any opening he could find, Washington invited Young into his home office to carefully construct an application that soon landed him a warehouse job in St. Paul.

Washington also urged Young to join the Kingsmen Project’s weekly Sunday morning Zoom meetings. Such calls can eclipse 2 ½ hours as Washington insists on having each of the two dozen or so participants — mostly from Minnesota but also from states including Michigan and Kentucky — be heard.

One morning in early August, the group contemplated the difficulty of accepting the feeling of struggle, particularly when money is tight.

“You get your mind going back to what it always knew,” Young said.

The Kingsmen Zoom calls also filled a void for Washington when, in 2021, COVID-19 forced his original men’s support group meetings to shift from in-person to online. He started the gatherings after his own release from state prison in 2011. But the first virtual call yielded no participants, he said, despite the men having been close friends for decades. When he called on mentees from the re-entry court, Washington said his computer screen filled with fresh faces.

Manny Atwal, an assistant federal defender who has worked with Minnesota’s re-entry court since its inception, said that mentors such as the Washingtons can better help participants through life questions they may not want to ask the typical faces they see in court: dating advice, how to use a smartphone, managing finances. She’s convinced that the lack of having a role model was why her younger clients kept coming back to court in previous years.

Atwal remembers one young client who wasn’t taking re-entry court seriously. Washington once told the man he was going to walk away from him because he knew he was “still in the game.”

“Sure enough, the kid picks up another case and goes back to prison,” Atwal said.

Atwal warned the man when he finished that latest sentence that she was convinced she’d attend his funeral. She wasn’t surprised when she got a call that he’d been shot late one evening, but she was relieved he survived. Washington and fellow Kingsmen mentor Patrick Ester promptly sat outside the young man’s hospital room and later helped him cope with his recovery. At the late July picnic this year, the man surprised Manny by showing up alongside his mother, girlfriend and young child. He still attends Kingsmen group calls.

“Had it not been for Erick and the other Kingsmen like Pat Ester, I have no doubt I would be talking about this kid as if it was in the past tense,” Atwal said. “And yet he’s doing this.”

Ester is the first person to transition from re-entry court graduate to being a mentor for the Kingsmen Project. Sentenced in 2003 for 17 ½ years for a cocaine distribution conviction, Ester approached his own re-entry court experience with skepticism. He first struggled getting over sitting down with the same people who sentenced him. And no one at the table “looked like us,” he said — until he met the Washingtons.

Today, the Kingsmen Project has worked with roughly 100 formerly incarcerated people and maintain caseloads of up to eight people per mentor. Ester is still amazed while reflecting on how he and Washington joined a large panel discussion on reentry with judges and other public officials at the Eighth Circuit Judicial Conference last year in Minnesota. Chief U.S. District Judge Patrick Schiltz recently tapped Washington to join a committee to fill a federal magistrate judge vacancy. And Washington and Ester were invited to attend the investiture ceremony for a newly appointed judge.

“Just imagine me, a gangbanger from Chicago, sitting with judges,” Ester said.

“And they wanted to hear from us,” Washington added, proudly puffing his chest.

Aref Nagi traveled from Detroit to attend the Kingsmen’s late July picnic, less than three years after being released from the Sandstone, Minn., federal prison for a racketeering conviction out of Michigan.

Once revered in Detroit as “Scarface,” Nagi was vice president of the Highwaymen Motorcycle Club and the lead defendant in a federal racketeering case there. He was sentenced to 37 years in prison in 2011, a term that was later cut to time served in 2021 amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

Nagi learned of the Kingsmen while in the Minnesota federal prison. His release date was on a Thursday, and Nagi logged onto his first Kingsmen Zoom call that Sunday.

He now mentors through his own nonprofit in Michigan and shows up on each weekly Kingsmen call, occasionally in between helping run his family’s Mexican restaurant. Nagi wants to see Michigan’s federal court start a re-entry court similar to Minnesota’s model, and U.S. District Judge Donovan Frank, who originally presided over re-entry court along with U.S. District Judge Susan Richard Nelson, has offered to speak with judges there.

Shortly after this year’s picnic, Nagi helped Washington coin the theme for an early August Kingsmen Zoom call: “Where have you been? Where are you now?”

“I don’t care what kind of plans you had in prison. When you hit the gates all bets are off,” Washington told the group. “You’ve got probation, you got life, you got family. Got to get a job. Here’s the whole world coming at you.”

Nelson, the judge, remembers Washington telling her one day that “it’s hard to go to prison. But the only thing that can be harder is coming out.”

Minnesota’s reputation as being a good state for transitioning from prison to society inspired Fellicia Smith’s family in Ohio to recommend she complete her federal bank robbery sentence in the state. After being laid off from her job as a sports reporter in Ohio, and the subsequent deaths of her parents, Smith carried out four bank robberies between 2016 to 2017 to feed a gambling addiction.

Now with a contract job nearing its end, Smith said said she has had job offers rescinded because of her criminal record. The Ohio judge in her case will not allow her to participate in Minnesota’s re-entry court, but Smith is now a board member for the Kingsmen and encourages women leaving federal prison in Minnesota to open up to her and Tammi.

“Would it be easy to go out and do something bad? Yeah, it would be so easy to fall back into trouble,” she said. “But I also know that when I’m struggling, I can talk about it with any of these people.”

Smith’s family knows she’s busy each Sunday morning because she is logged onto every Kingsmen call.

One morning this summer, Washington listened intently as a newcomer, a young Minnesota man on release for terrorism support charges, talked about balancing the monotony of getting back on his feet with gratitude over being out of prison.

Washington replied: “We love you. You are not what you did.”

“I really have a lot of trust issues myself, especially with everything I have went through,” the young man said. “But the moment I met you, man, I really allowed myself to let my guards down.”

Late one afternoon this month, St. Paul’s largest federal courtroom was packed with friends, partners, parents and small children there to watch this year’s class of seven graduate re-entry court. Clad in blue caps and gowns, members from the latest class thanked the Washingtons and Ester alongside the judges, prosecutors, defense attorneys and probation officers who make up the program.

“When you have guys that have been through what you’ve been through and they have been successful — that’s where I want to be,” the first graduate said.

Participants typically complete the program within about 18 months. On this day, the judges took turns handing each graduate a certificate and posed with them for photos. Menendez closed by recalling how often they’d pull out their phones during court sessions to recite the latest text of inspiration sent by Washington early that morning before he went to work.

She said it was an honor, not a burden, to give her time to the program.

“It makes me feel better every time,” Menendez said.

Young vows to be among next year’s graduates. Washington and Ester already say they see mentor potential in him when he’s done.

Young remembers the evening he rode home with his wife after Washington helped him fine-tune his job application earlier this year. As they approached a stoplight, Young gripped his Tracfone — a prepaid cellphone often called a “burner phone.”

The device held Young’s past connections, people he could turn to for the type of work and money not available at the legitimate jobs he was toiling to find.

One call or text and he’d be back in the game.

“I feel like throwing this phone out,” Young told his wife.

“Baby, do what you feel,” she replied.

Young thought once more of how easily he could reconnect with his past. He also considered what Washington did for him that night.

The light turned green. Young tossed the phone onto the street, and the couple drove forward.