I grew up on a kibbutz. My parents joined it, but then left me there. I loved it. I didn’t want to leave. I used to milk the cows and chase girls. I became a musician, and my dream was to compose and play music for TV shows and films. I still play music, but not as a business.

I didn’t want to leave the kibbutz, but I wanted to go to America. I had a dream of seeing New York; I wanted to have the freedom I had heard you could find here. I came more than 20 years ago, when I was 17. I came by myself with $50. I thought I could live on that for weeks—we’re talking about a time when a box of cigarettes was 75 cents. But when I got to customs and they asked if I was bringing any fruit or vegetables, I said, “No.” I didn’t know that my mother had put a lemon in my bag. She said the fragrance would be healing in case I didn’t feel good. The customs inspector opened my bag, found the lemon. That was a $50 penalty, so my adventure became bigger.

For three nights I slept at JFK airport, where I would walk from one food stand to another. If I saw someone eating, I’d pretend I was cleaning the table. Some people said, “That’s OK, I’ll clean up after myself,” and I would say, “Please, let me clean.” Then I would eat any food they left behind. It’s called surviving.

Some of them want to become a film editor in two weeks. Some don’t want to do anything but save their lives.

After that I became a Hasidic. I studied in a yeshiva for eight years. I was a diamond dealer, and I had a small company that made jewelry. But I always played the piano, and I always had this dream to pursue my art. I didn’t dream of having a concert, just playing music for myself.

Then 12 years ago I started working for a company that made television shows. Three months after I started, the owner called me into his office and said, “I have to fire everyone now because the company is bankrupt.” I told him I thought the company could do well under the right management, so he challenged me. He said, “You’re getting so much money, why don’t you take over the company?” That is just what I did. I bought the company for a couple of hundred thousand dollars. Four years later I sold it to a Spanish telecom company.

A few years later, I moved to City Lights Media [a film and television production facility], where I became a partner with the three brothers who founded it: Danny, Jack and Joe Fisher. One day I went to visit a friend who was a teacher at the Friends of Island Academy, the Manhattan high school for juvenile offenders imprisoned at Rikers Island. He introduced me to the director, and I asked, “What’s the success rate here? What percentage of the students get out of jail and stay out?” He told me it was 30 percent. “That’s impossible,” I replied.

“Because if you put me in jail, I would do everything to not go back.”
I asked him what he offered his students. When he told me that the Friends of Island offered a diploma, I asked him what his students would do with a diploma. He said, “Well, they can work for McDonald’s.” I replied, “That’s why they’re failing, because to succeed you need motivation, and what motivates is the imagination. The kids can see for themselves that the maximum they’re going to get from this is standing in front of a fryer at McDonald’s.”

No Idle Hands
I came up with the idea to pay the kids $300 a week to work at my company and other places in the industry. Danny Fisher helped me put it together. For two years now I have been working with five boys from the program. We had a sixth one who moved to New Orleans to live with his father. One of the boys is now working for a small video production company, helping at whatever they ask him to do; they are pleased with him so far. Another is working at a company where they barter trades for low-budget movies.

Danny keeps the others busy doing whatever we need them to do: lighting, helping the editor, logging, arranging the library, showing up on time. They read scripts, too, and give me their opinions. One of the boys recommended the script for a horror movie called The Plague, which we are producing with Clive Barker. It’s about comatose children who wake up when they get to adulthood, and start terrorizing their parents.

I make horror movies to maintain my cash flow. I dream of making a historical film about a story from 300 years ago of a Jewish man who beheld a new messiah and converted to Islam. I’m trying to teach the kids to have dreams about what they can do, too. You have to understand: We are getting boys who are worse than babies. They have bad habits. They grow up in a place where if you’ve never been in jail you’re a “faggot,” you’re nobody. I can hardly understand what they’re saying. But they’re very sweet, even innocent in the sense that they come from a ghetto that has different rules than the outside. They start selling marijuana when they’re 10, and they don’t really comprehend that it is going to get them in trouble; it’s just what everyone around them does.

They make fun of me for not understanding ghetto language. One of the boys, Marc, came to me and asked me to talk to the manager of a mall in Queens where Marc wanted to rent a booth selling custom jewelry. I asked him, “Why do you want me to talk to the manager?” Marc replied, “’Cause he don’t understand me.” I answered, “Two years ago you were making fun of me because I don’t speak like you.” So he asked me to send him to speech therapy.

Some of these boys are intelligent. Some of them want to become a film editor in two weeks. Some don’t want to do anything except save their lives—which is fine, because when you save your life, you save other people’s lives. If you aren’t a rotten apple, you won’t make the entire box rotten.

I’ve tried to talk to city officials about funding a program like this.
I tell them, “If you don’t you will have to pay $200 a day to keep each of these kids in prison.” So far all of the money for the project has come from my own pocket, and I hate to think what will happen to the boys when I run out of cash. I do this because I believe that when you leave the earth you don’t take anything with you—you take only what you gave. I can give these boys a chance to give something.