Last summer, when I met Daniel Dart for the fourth or fifth time, he told me he had just finished earning his master’s degree at the London School of Economics and Political Science and was at the Sloan School of Management at MIT pursuing his MBA. He was also starting a venture capital fund backed by some prominent investors and receiving informal advice from financial giants like Josh Friedman, John Arnold, Jack Selby, and Gary Cohn.
Tough Childhood
Growing up in the East Bay area of California was tough. He doesn’t want to discuss the details publicly, as he has a good relationship with his parents, who have been married for 52 years. Here’s the sanitized version: “It was a very tumultuous home,” Dart says. He was the youngest of three children, with a mother who worked in a beauty salon and a father who ran a supply store for building materials, with one of the sections known as “the rock garden.”
Turning to Gangs
He recalls feeling unwanted. He had suicidal thoughts at a young age. He tried to escape. As a teenager, Dart rarely attended classes. In one semester, his GPA dropped to 0.0. At 13, his parents sent him to military school, which he describes as “just a display for the eye” where “everyone got into trouble.” However, his GPA rose to 4.1. He returned home after two years and his GPA dropped again to 0. Then his parents sent him to Provo Canyon School, later revealed to be a torture center for decades. “They would strip me for three days, for misconduct,” Dart remembers. “At that point, I didn’t belong anywhere. I was like a feather in the wind.”
Jail and Transformation
After finishing at Provo, Dart began using drugs – heroin, cocaine, crack, marijuana, and a lot of drinking – and mingled with like-minded rebels, including some people he met at military school, where everyone belonged to one gang or another. He didn’t talk to his parents and could not return home. He knew some people in San Diego and applied to San Diego State University (SDSU), which accepted him.
Jail and Return
After getting out of jail in 2000, he had nowhere to go, and the opportunity for college had vanished. “It was very tumultuous,” Dart says, laughing about his predicament. “I was wandering the beach. I was seeking echoes. I was sleeping on the beach. I knew where I could get a pasta dinner on Wednesdays. I had a rough routine.”
Return to Los Angeles
At this time, a childhood friend heard from another friend that he had met Dart in San Diego. “She told me he looked like he was going to die,” the childhood friend recounts in a phone interview. “He was skinny, and his eyes were swollen. Maybe that was when he was heavily using drugs.”
Back to Jail
In 2011, the band Time Again stopped touring, and Dart started reconnecting with his old friends in Los Angeles, amidst a gang economy. He was dating someone in a “catastrophic” relationship, and they were on the verge of breaking up. One night, they were drinking, arguing, and talking badly to each other. The woman threatened to call the police about any gang activity he was involved in. He dismissed it. Dart had a recording studio and wanted to go there. She had a car. He drove, and she came to drive back. But the argument continued, and at one point, she demanded that he stop and let her out. They were on the freeway, so he exited at the next exit, and she got out. Then he drove to the studio.
Jail
The Return
Several days later, on September 2, 2011, he was in the studio, and when he stepped outside, a swarm of police officers apprehended him on charges of kidnapping and robbery. “When they pulled their guns for the first time, I thought I was going to get shot by a gang,” Dart says. Then the police began asking him what he knew about the gangs. He pieced it together. The woman he had been dating must have completed her threat and informed the police of his gang affiliation. The police were trying to use the charges of kidnapping and robbery as a means to extract information about gangs. But Dart didn’t have much to offer. “There could be 2,000 gang members, but there are only three you need to worry about,” Dart says. “I wasn’t one of them.”
The Return and Transformation
Dart and his lawyer thought he would overcome the charges, but it didn’t go that way, and the court sentenced him to six years in prison. However, he appealed the ruling and won the appeal, based on a finding that there were mistakes in the plea agreement and the subsequent ruling. By the time he finally got out, he had served another three years in prison and estimated he had read 400,000 pages.
The Return and Transformation
Daniel Dart left prison for the second time on September 5, 2014. He reconnected with his friends in Los Angeles and went out for drinks on his first night out of prison. Some people were arrested on the next corner from where he was, and he knew he could have been him, heading back to prison. He went to Alcoholics Anonymous and finally got clean. I asked him how hard that was. “It really wasn’t hard to stop drinking,” he says. “You either follow this program, or you go back to prison.”
The Return and Transformation
Once he got clean, Dart landed a job changing linens at Airbnb homes. Then he helped a friend rent his own apartment on the site and made some money. Toward the end of 2014, Dart was having coffee in a café in Hollywood one day when a friend who managed bands, including Weezer’s musician Brian Bell, walked in. He offered Dart a job helping to manage Bell and a separate band called The Relationship. Dart jumped at the opportunity. It turned out he was good at managing bands and even signed contracts with some bands himself.
The Return and Transformation
Then Daniel Dart started his own management company, called DEC Artists, which later became DEC Projects as it expanded into other areas beyond music. His ongoing connections helped him land the band Crash Kings, which had some successful songs. He represented the musician Seal in a book and film deal. Then he got involved in social justice issues including gun violence, homelessness, and immigration. Through DEC, Dart ran public awareness campaigns for clients like actor Mark Duplass, the Wounded Warrior Project, Tom Colicchio from Top Chef, and the Bezos Family Foundation run by the parents of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.
The Return and Transformation
The work in social justice grew, and DEC began to enjoy a kind of increasing influence as one project led to another. It became routine for him to disclose his prison history from the beginning. When the Bezos Foundation approached him about a project, he asked them if they knew he had been in prison and was still under house arrest. The answer was no. They asked him if it was likely he would go back to prison. He said no. They asked him if he could do the work. He said yes. The project was implemented.
The Return and Transformation
As his reputation in social justice work grew, Dart worked on campaigns for the White House under the Obama administration and the AFL-CIO and other organizations. He hired people to help implement the projects. The United Nations and other international organizations hired him to work on development and refugee issues in Algeria, Ghana, Uganda, Gaza, the West Bank, and other parts of the Middle East. “The refugee issue resonated with me because I felt as a child that I was a refugee, like someone who had no home and was always moving around,” Dart says.
The Return
The Transformation
He also began to realize that mobilizing capital is essential for improving people’s lives. At an event in Washington D.C., Dart met Gunther Schondleitner, who was the CEO of the World Bank at the time. They connected, and Schondleitner, who graduated from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), eventually suggested that Dart apply to the graduate program there. Dart had a high school equivalency certificate and no college education, but he taught himself how to write research papers which he presented at academic conferences. He decided to give it a try while working on a project for the Saudi government in Riyadh. Schondleitner wrote a letter of recommendation for him.
The Return and Transformation
LSE rejected him. Dart became obsessed with the idea of attending LSE to the extent that he wrote letters to ten department heads and other officials asking them to reconsider the decision, arguing that a traditional educational background is not the only path to success anymore. Not exactly sure what happened, but he succeeded. LSE reversed its decision and accepted him into its master’s program, making Dart the first student known to enroll in the prestigious school without a bachelor’s degree.
The Return and Transformation
In 2020, the COVID pandemic hit, causing Dart to pause in Saudi Arabia. LSE transitioned to remote learning and he completed the first semester without stepping foot on campus. But he was
Source: https://www.aol.com/one-man-wild-journey-prison-140013541.html
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