When Uchendi Nwani's beeper went off during a midterm exam his senior year at Tennessee State University, it did more than break his concentration, it derailed what seemed to be a bright future.
The honor-roll student, licensed barber and son of a minister was destined to become a successful businessman ó until he gambled with the law and lost. Nwani wound up facing 30 years to life in prison after police intercepted a million-dollar cocaine shipment he was expecting.
''Chin'' Nwani had built a drug empire complete with a fleet of cars outfitted to smuggle cocaine from Miami to Nashville. He'd been living a double life, even carrying a pistol to church.
''All my friends were selling drugs and getting caught, but I figured I was smarter than them. I figured I could deal the drugs without touching them,'' says Nwani, now 33.
With police looking for him, Nwani fled to Atlanta, where he wandered from place to place for two weeks. He thought about suicide. Instead, at the urging of his mother, he turned himself in.
By God's grace, he says, he got a sympathetic judge. He was sentenced to 6‡ months in a federal boot camp populated mainly by Martha Stewart-type criminals ó wealthy men doing time for hacking or insider trading.
After enduring 17-hour days of hard labor and soaking up every bit of advice he could pry from his fellow inmates, Nwani was released into a halfway house. He returned to school and got a job at the on-campus beauty salon. He cut so many heads he developed his own time-saving clipping technique.
The hardest part was suffering ridicule from the students who remembered his arrest.
''You've really got to go above and beyond if you're an ex-convict,'' he says. ''Ninety percent of people treat you like dirt.''
A year later, he left the halfway house with a business degree from TSU and $40,000 in his pocket. He used the money to start a pager and cell phone business, which he later sold to open his barber school in 1998.
Nwani's Barber and Style Academy is a place where single mothers can get a haircut for less than $10 and former criminals can learn not only a trade, but also the fundamentals of managing their own business.
The school has five instructors and keeps about 100 students on its roll. Nwani estimates he's graduated more than 300.
He bought three properties to open Opportunity House, which shelters 30 former convicts, recovering drug addicts and others who are down on their luck.
''God got me out of that. It wasn't nobody but him,'' he says. ''A lot of people helped me. I wanted to give back to people.''
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