Politician Mr. Jeff Smith: From Basketball Courts to the Halls of Justice

From Basketball Courts to Congressional Dreams

When I talked with Jeff Smith, I knew I was in for something different. This guy didn’t come from money, but he earned a PhD in political science from Washington University, co-founded charter schools that now serve over 4,000 students, ran for Congress at 29, and only lost by 1,700 votes to political royalty. Then the FBI came knocking at 6 AM.

Jeff’s story starts on the basketball courts of St. Louis, where his obsessed father would drop him off at boys clubs in rough neighborhoods when he was just nine years old. “Starting when I was, you know, nine, 10 years old and he would drop me off at like this boys club matthew dickie or this other gym called the wool center,” Jeff told me. “And then uh sometimes he would day other times he would leave and go play golf and pick me up in three or four hours.”

His dad was five-foot-six, his mom five-foot-two, and when they took three-year-old Jeff to the doctor, they learned he was in the third percentile for both height and weight. The doctor had to explain there was no first or second percentile because “we don’t want to make people feel bad so we started at at three.”

But those early years getting beaten up on basketball courts taught Jeff something that would carry him through everything that came next. “I was always the littlest kid usually the youngest kid almost always the only white kid on the court and you know you get better when you play with people who are bigger stronger faster older,” he said.

The Congressional Run That Almost Was

Jeff wasn’t one of those kids who told his teachers he’d be president someday. He went into education, taught at Dartmouth and Wash U, co-founded charter schools because he was frustrated with the dysfunction at St. Louis Public Schools. But when Dick Gephardt’s congressional seat opened up in 2004, Jeff saw his shot.

The problem was he looked about 12 years old and was running against Russ Carnahan, whose family was Missouri political royalty. “His dad was governor his mom was a us senator. His grandpa was a congressman his sister with secretary of state a very well-known family and of course I was a total nobody,” Jeff explained.

By the end of the campaign, Jeff weighed 102 pounds because he’d knocked on over 25,000 doors and would sprint between houses. “So I would run several miles each day, uh in a suit,” he said. The suits were falling off him, and people just didn’t take him seriously.

But Jeff had learned something from all those years being the smallest guy on the basketball court. “When you go out on the basketball court for that many years and you’re always you know a foot shorter than the guy you’re guarding and an 80 pounds lighter and you got to figure out a way to do it, it just doesn’t seem that daunting to run against a guy who happens to have more name ideas than you.”

He lost by 1%, 1,700 votes. That loss would come back to haunt him in ways he never imagined.

The Wire That Changed Everything

Five years after that congressional race, Jeff was living his life as a Missouri State Senator when his best friend came to him with a problem. The feds had knocked on his door asking about a postcard from the 2004 campaign. What Jeff didn’t know was that his friend was already wearing a wire.

The whole thing traced back to a guy who had approached Jeff’s campaign aides three weeks before the election, offering to put out a mailer about Carnahan missing votes. Jeff knew something was fishy about coordinating with a third party, so he told his aides, “look just don’t tell me any details.” When they asked what that meant, he said, “are you stupid? I don’t want to know what you do.”

That 30-second conversation broke federal election law. Instead of telling the guy to get the information himself from public websites, Jeff’s aides handed him their compiled voting records. Then Jeff signed a false affidavit saying he knew nothing about the postcard.

The guy who approached the campaign turned out to be a psycho who had car-bombed his ex-wife’s divorce lawyer and was wanted for cocaine distribution, bank fraud, and other crimes. When the feds searched his place, they found tapes of him talking to Jeff’s friend. The friend got compromised and chose to wear a wire rather than go to prison himself.

Jeff found out the hard way. He was in excruciating pain from broken ribs after a basketball collision, had taken some Percocet, and was awakened at 6 AM by pounding on his door. “And it was the fed,” Jeff said. “Oh wow. And they were not interested in you. We’re just interested in this guy skip Olson and we think you may know something about him.”

The Reality of Federal Prison

Jeff’s lawyer told him fighting the charges would cost four or five million dollars, money he didn’t have. So he pled guilty and got sentenced to a year and a day at FCI Manchester in eastern Kentucky, 500 miles from home.

The intake process set the tone immediately. When the woman at reception asked his education level and he said PhD, then asked his last profession and he said state senator, “she looked at me and she said, uh, all right. You want to play games? You can play games all you want. We got ones here to think they’re Jesus Christ.”

Jeff thought he’d teach classes, given his decade of teaching experience. The prison wasn’t interested. They put him on the loading dock in the food warehouse, “catching and throwing, you know, 80 pound boxes and 100 pound bags of rice beans flour sugar just in a line with six other dudes.”

At first he thought it would be miserable. Then he realized those six guys were all 240 to 350 pounds, some of the biggest on the yard. “So they became like my crew,” he said. Plus he got access to decent food before it got picked over.

When guys asked how long he was in for and he said a year and a day, one lifer put it in perspective: “damn, I done more time in this joint on the toilet than you got time.” The guy had done 25 years.

Time as Your Enemy

The hardest adjustment wasn’t the food or the people. It was time itself. “Your entire life, at least for somebody like me. I was in a hurry. Yeah, I was on the move,” Jeff explained. He’d come back from the state capitol on Thursday and hit seven or eight neighborhood meetings that same night, running from event to event.

“Then I got to prison and the one thing that I had tried to you know to extend when I was on the street, I wanted more hours than every day once you get to prison everything works in reverse. People are moving slowly because they’re trying to extend every activity in their day to fill up the day.”

Jeff served his time, wrote a book called “Mr. Smith Goes to Prison,” and gave a TED talk about lessons in business from prison. Today he’s back in St. Louis, still involved in education, still married to the woman who stuck with him through it all. The charter schools he co-founded are thriving with over 4,000 students.

Sometimes your worst nightmare becomes the thing that teaches you what really matters. For Jeff, it was learning that time isn’t something to fill or kill. Time is something to use well, whether you’re the smallest guy on the basketball court or the white-collar guy on the loading dock.