“When I first came home [from prison], I didn’t even know how to do a résumé or a job interview,” Michael told me the other day at the Dos Toros restaurant on West 40th Street near Bryant Park.
Over the past four years, Dos Toros has hired a total of 30 men from the program.
photo by Stephen Yang; (From left) Restaurant manager Michael Van Leuvan, employee Darrel Sharpe, and the restaurant’s owners, brothers Oliver and Leo Kremer
Michael Van Leuvan has a wife and three kids and lives in the Bronx. He’s thrilled to be earning $20 an hour as the manager of a Mexican fast food restaurant in Manhattan, and he’s hoping to get a 10 percent raise in the near future.
He’ll probably get it because the owners of Dos Toros, the restaurant chain he works for, not only appear to like Michael, but they also seem proud of him.
Ordinarily, someone like Michael wouldn’t make it into this column — or any newspaper story.
There are millions of others in the city who, like him, go about their jobs day after day, getting a paycheck with little or no recognition.
What makes Michael different is that he’s an ex-convict. Now 31, he was 15 when he was sent away for drugs. He was 20 and on parole when he robbed someone at knifepoint in the Manhattan projects for $37. For that and other offenses, he spent a total of 10 years in prison.
Now he’s part of a city program called GOSO — short for Getting Out & Staying Out — that’s helping young men like Michael get their act together after they’ve been released from prison.
In Michael’s case, it all started in a gang and multiple trips to prison on various charges after he landed back out on the streets.
“When I first came home [from prison], I didn’t even know how to do a résumé or a job interview,” Michael told me the other day at the Dos Toros restaurant on West 40th Street near Bryant Park.
Staples and McDonald’s turned him down for work. “They wouldn’t take me. I had no work experiences,” says Michael, who seems to understand that logic.
With nothing to do, he ended up doing no good and went back to prison. And convictions — especially multiple ones — aren’t the sort of things that get people hired. So he wasn’t.
Dos Toros is one of around 90 companies that has worked with GOSO, which has been operating for 15 years and now has a dozen men between 16 and 24 years old at companies where it hopes they will eventually get permanent jobs.
The company has eight GOSO workers now. Over the past four years, Dos Toros has hired a total of 30 men from the program. Michael has been the most successful thanks to his promotion to manager.
Congratulations to Dos Toros, for supporting and hiring people who need a second chance!