Juneboy Hits The Big Time

William ​“Juneboy” Outlaw III was New Haven’s top cocaine dealer before he reached the age of 20. Then he spent decades behind bars, staring at death.

This week Outlaw, who’s now 51, hit the big time again — this time as a star street outreach worker featured on the Today Show and in a biography about to rock the nation with a tale of personal redemption.

The book is called Citizen Outlaw: One Man’s Journey From Gangleader To Peacekeeper. Connecticut author Charles Barber, who spent five years hanging with Juneboy, wrote it. The book describes in dramatic detail how Outlaw brilliantly built up the city’s most lucrative drug-dealing organization, then killed a rival, went to prison, reformed with a passion, and started saving lives back in New Haven by negotiating truces in the wake of shootings.

The weeks since HarperCollins released the book to rave reviews have been a whirlwind of public appearances, preparations to negotiate a movie deal — mixed in with the day to day work of convincing New Haven ex-offenders they can lead productive lives rather than sink back into drugs or revenge violence.

The way Juneboy did.

“It’s overwhelming. I’ll be honest with you, ” Outlaw admitted during one of his radio appearances this week, on WNHH FM’s ​“Dateline New Haven.”

“It’s new territory for me in terms of the spotlight — in a positive way.”

The Jungle

Outlaw knew the spotlight in a more notorious way back when cocaine replaced factory work as the driver of New Haven’s economy, especially in the black community, in the 1980s.

After dropping out of Wilbur Cross, Outlaw built up the most successful cocaine-dealing operation in town based at the old Church Street South housing complex across from Union Station. He named the gang the Jungle Boys — using the same initials as his nickname, Juneboy.

Only he doesn’t refer to that operation as a gang.

“I hate the word ​‘gang,’” he said. It suggests that black people are sloppy, violent for the sake of violence, rather than effective business people. He looks back at the Jungle Boys as an ​“organized crime” operation akin to the mafia: All business.

At their height the Jungle Boys took in $45,000 a day. They didn’t know where to put all the cash; they buried some of it on the grounds of Church Street South. As CEO, Outlaw managed 40 people. Before he was old enough to vote.

“He broke the paradigm” for how drug-dealing crews operated in America, observed author Barber, a writer-in-residence at Wesleyan and lecturer in psychiatry at Yale: The employees lived off site rather than where they sold drugs in the Jungle (as Church Street South became known). They stuck to selling cocaine; no side crimes that could bring them down. And they earned the support of community where they sold by buying people furniture, helping people out financially, organizing fireworks displays.

It all came to an end in 1988 when a member of a New York-based Jamaican drug gang came to Church Street South to take care of Outlaw and take over his turf. Outlaw got to him first — then was caught by the cops and convicted of murder. He went to prison with an 85-year sentence, convinced he’d die behind bars.

Leavenworth

At first Outlaw continued his ways behind bars. He oversaw drug dealing and weapons smuggling, in concert with corrupt corrections staffers. The state concluded it couldn’t handle him, so he was sent off to two of the country’s most notorious federal penitentiaries, Lewisberg and Leavenworth.

Barber’s book offers an eye-opening account of how white supremacist gangs actually run the joint, and how inmates survive there — if they’re lucky.

At first Outlaw survived with the help of the very Aryan Brotherhood that threatened his life, thanks to working with friends he had developed back in a Connecticut prison with a white supremacist inmate named Tiny Piskorski.

Then a phone call from his teen-aged daughter Meredith changed his life. She was considering moving from Sacred Heart Academy to public school. Outlaw was urging her to take her studies seriously.

“Daddy, did you finish high school?” she asked.

The question hit him like rocket fire. ​“I felt so much like a hypocrite,” he recalled. A day later he leaped into his own education. In four months he had a GED. Then he pursued advanced degrees. And dived into self-improvement programs, in which he also inspired others.

He was eventually sent back to Connecticut prison. Thanks to an appeal, his sentence was cut to 20 years.

In 2008, he found himself back in New Haven, and ready to turn around his life. He lived at first in a Project MORE halfway house overseen by the late Warren Kimbro — who had turned his own life around from Black Panther assassin to leading reentry agency director. Kimbro recognized Outlaw’s potential to inspire others. Soon he was bringing Outlaw to speak to others leaving prison to straighten out their lives. And helping Outlaw avoid the prying eyes of FBI agents and others waiting for him to screw up.

Outlaw finally landed with the crew at New Haven’s Street Outreach Program, which dispatches ex-offenders to work with young people most involved with violence. The program has been credited with helping cops and the community bring New Haven’s violence rates to their lowest levels in 50 years. Citizen Outlaw details how Outlaw uses his street cred and persuasive powers to convince otherwise unconvinceable young men not to retaliate. In a sense, he gives them permission.

It’s God’s work, especially in cities. Nationally, the criminal justice system releases 700,000 ex-offenders back into communities a year, estimated Barber; within three to four years, 60 percent return to prison. New Haven has been absorbing around 1,000 former prisoners a year back into the community.

The day HarperCollins released Citizen Outlaw, Juneboy was celebrating, along with his boss Leonard Jahad, the opening of a new Ashmun Street community center as part of the Connecticut Violence Intervention Program (VIP), a new version of the street outreach program they started to resuscitate the effort.

Grand Avenue

Then came ​“Today.”

A producer and camera crew set up one afternoon last week on the second floor of Project MORE’s Grand Avenue headquarters, where Outlaw was holding a session of a support group for male ex-offenders trying to straighten out their lives after decades of crime and punishment.

Outlaw has been running the program for 10 years. Some participants have shown up regularly all that time.

“We never had women in here before,” Outlaw observed as a ​“Today” producer directed her crew. Wait, there was one exception: He once invited a female domestic violence victim to describe to the group her experiences of abuse.

The scene swung from reality to surreality and back again. As cameras hovered overhead, the New York crew moved around the long table where the 14 men sat, acting as if it were a regular session.

Which, despite the distractions, it was.

Outlaw instructed participants to write letters to their fathers, then read them aloud.

“I want you to be totally honest,” Outlaw directed. ​“If he was good, say he was good. If he was a piece of shit, say he was a piece of shit.”

“I really miss you,” Curtis read aloud after he and other participants finished writing. ​“You tried to be a father to me, but the streets called me. When I was in prison, before you died, you gave me some advice that saved my life: ​‘Son, get some mental health help.’”

“Did you get help?” Outlaw asked Curtis.

“Yes,” Curtis responded. ​“That’s why I’m here.”

“My mother abandoned me. My stepmother became my father. My father was an abusive person,” piped up Elliott Guzman from one end of the long table. ​“I don’t blame him. I always say, ​‘Things happen for a reason.’”

Guzman started tearing up.

“Deeply in my heart, I forgive him. I forgive him. Everybody makes mistakes. Now I’ve got my own kids. It’s up to me to be a better father.”

Guzman has made many mistakes of his own. He estimated he has been locked up ​“more than 30 times” on more than 50 felony charges. He said he finds that ​“Mr. William’s” support group is helping him straighten out this time.

Soon close to half the room was wiping back tears.

“There’s nothing wrong with crying here and getting emotional,” Outlaw assured the group. ​“Let the tears out. It’s like a river flowing downstream. That’s when the healing begins.”

Outlaw wrote a letter, too. And took a turn reading it aloud.

“Dear Dad,” he read. ​“Why did you put the scar on my mother’s face?

“I’s so angry at you. I’m out of prison now. I’m trying to be a real man. I hope to see you again in heaven. I have so many questions to ask you.”

After the formal session ended, the ​“Today” crew started packing up. Outlaw brought out a box of books. His new book. Participants lined up for their signed copies.

Elliott Guzman, smiling, took his copy and displayed it, like a trophy.