We explore what led him down that path and what it takes to reinvent yourself.

I was probably like 16, 17 when I got out of jail between 15 and 16.

And that's when I really like started hitting the streets pretty hard.

You know, I I just thought I was like a smarter drug dealer and and And I was for a sense, like I stopped dealing with like customers on the corner.

I started doing this whole delivery service.

We basically had seven cell phones because each phone only held 1500 contact numbers.

So we always needed a new phone because the memory was gone.

That's nickbrax.com slash MYM

We're just being nerds about it.

[Instrumental music] At a very early age, 13, so I started selling weed, and then eventually started selling coke, and started my own delivery service, with generating about $5 million in revenue, $2 million, you know, I was making a profit.

I grew up three blocks away from here.

Uh, my mom still lives [laughs] in the same apartment I grew up in.

You know, it was tenement housing.

In the '80s and '90s, down here was a very drug-infested neighborhood.

You know, like, every 10 steps you took was a, you saw a heroin needle.

And so how did Coss go from feeling overwhelmed on the subway to running his business and finding his own employees? How do you find them?

You, you, you, you recognized the mistakes that you made that led to you getting caught but didn't necessarily change the underlying behavior.

Yeah, I, I think one primary factor was that I had a son, um, before I got, went in.

Uh, my son was, uh, almost two years old, you know, and I, I got married in Rikers Island, actually, 'cause I thought I was doing a lot of prison time.

Um, and, you know, I, I was with my wife, and she would bring me my son, you know, to visit me every month.

And that's, like, the hardest thing to answer your kid, right? Like, "Why, why can't you come home?" You know.

And them crying right there, and me talking over the f- payphone and, and trying to teach him his ABCs or, you know, doing his first kindergarten homework, right? Like, that's, that's not, you know, the life I wanna give my kid, you know?

Yeah, does it drive you crazy when you see somebody down the street who's not playing by the rules? What do you do about that?

Uh, absolutely, you know.

Yeah.

Whatever it is, you know? Uh, and, and it's, a- a- and I s- I think that's, like, the real just, right? Like, you know, outside the building, you know, as Hannah was, like, driving or walking by there, you know, we have Martin Luther King's, like, quote, right? Like, the, the most difficult thing that we're gonna face as society is to embrace the willingness to know that criminal justice reform and rehabilitation is gonna be the largest problem that we tackle as a society.

How do we do that, right-

Mm-hmm

... we should be communicating towards, like, people that have been justice impacted, right? Like, I, I, I wanna, like, change that narrative as well.

You know, talk about, like, not only returning citizens, but returning humans, right? We have a lot of immigrants that are being unjustly impacted, too.

You know, so, like, that's the narrative and the, the way we wanna interpret and talk, but the way we catch people is con, right?

And then what happened?

Then they, I'm like in the house.

In the stash house.

In the stash house.

I'm dealing with all the phones.

And so I ran up to the stash house because I needed to do the deliveries myself.

I got all these people waiting for me.

For what?