Eddie Gibbs Went From Prison to Politics. Now He Helps Others Get a Second Act.

While he was locked away in New York’s most dangerous prisons, Eddie Gibbs never imagined that he would share a stage with the governor. Now, as he walked to the dais, his hands were shaking and his mouth was dry.

He wore a gray suit, a striped tie and a pink handkerchief with custom pink-and-white Nike Air Force 1 sneakers. Scrawled on the soles in pink marker was the inmate number he had recited to correction officers every day for nearly three years.

He was on the stage with Gov. Kathy Hochul, who was set to sign into law his bill requiring prison officials to tell people who are being released from custody that they have the right to vote.

“As the first formerly incarcerated male to serve in public office in New York State,” Mr. Gibbs, 55, said as tears formed in his eyes, “this law is near and dear to my heart.”

A Democratic assemblyman in East Harlem since 2022, Mr. Gibbs has made it his mission to help people who are or were incarcerated. His advocacy and the symbolism of his journey come during a political tug of war over criminal justice reform.

In June, while giving a speech on the Assembly floor, Mr. Gibbs said he sometimes “felt like a prop” when it came to the issue.

“But I’m proud to be a prop,” he said. “Use me.”

That’s what had him sitting in a restaurant outside a prison 70 miles north of New York City one fall day. Trevell Coleman, a rapper known as G. Dep, had become famous in the late 1990s as part of Bad Boy Entertainment, the same label as the Notorious B.I.G. But now Mr. Coleman was inside that prison, and Mr. Gibbs wanted to prove that he deserved to be let out on parole.

Mr. Coleman had killed someone. But so had Mr. Gibbs, in self-defense, he says.

‘I didn’t want him to come back.’

Mr. Gibbs grew up in East Harlem with his mother, a single parent, and four siblings. What he remembers most about his father, who died while he was in prison, is that he often fought with his mother.

“We had dingy sneakers and socks, and I’m wearing my older brother’s clothes,” Mr. Gibbs said. “We started hustling with everybody else.”

He got a job packing bags at the local supermarket. Then the owner offered him a lucrative side gig delivering marijuana along with groceries, Mr. Gibbs said. The owner saw potential in Mr. Gibbs’s jovial personality: He knew all the customers’ names.

Soon, he struck out on his own, and the joints became plastic vials filled with crack cocaine. The demand was insatiable. Mr. Gibbs said he was making enough money to buy designer clothes and a car. Then a 19-year-old man named Otis Frazier was released from prison after serving almost three years for robbery. It was 1987.

Drug dealers in the neighborhood were wary of Mr. Frazier. Mr. Gibbs said he had seen him try to rob a fellow dealer and had wondered if he might be next. Instead, they began hanging out.

Mr. Gibbs, who was 18 at the time, bought Mr. Frazier clothes and gave him money. The old-timers warned him that Mr. Frazier was not his friend and that he was being extorted, or “in street terms, punked,” he said. They advised him to make Mr. Frazier sell drugs with his crew.

Mr. Gibbs said Mr. Frazier had cursed and told him, “You’re going to give me what I want.” Then before long, in Mr. Gibbs’s telling, this is what happened:

One afternoon, he saw Mr. Frazier lurking as he parked his car at home, so he tried to dash up the stairs to the apartment he shared with his mother. Mr. Frazier caught him in the elevator and stabbed him in the knee with a butcher knife, forcing him into his mother’s apartment, where the men knew there was a safe.

There was no money in it, but a loaded revolver was stashed inside under a stack of papers. Mr. Gibbs grabbed for the weapon, and Mr. Frazier began swinging the knife. Mr. Gibbs fired one shot as Mr. Frazier ran out the front door and headed for the stairwell. It was, Mr. Gibbs said, the first time he had fired a gun.

“I didn’t want him to come back,” Mr. Gibbs recalled thinking as he gave chase, his voice shaking at the memory. He remembers firing his weapon at least twice more.

Mr. Frazier was taken to the hospital but died later. After hiding out, Mr. Gibbs turned himself in to the police in the days after the shooting. Mr. Frazier’s death was counted among the 1,672 murders in New York City that year as the violence associated with the sale of crack engulfed economically deprived neighborhoods like East Harlem.

“I shot a man,” Mr. Gibbs said. “I sold drugs. I put myself in that predicament. I became a target.” Asked if he was remorseful for having killed Mr. Frazier, Mr. Gibbs said that he was but that he had acted in self-defense.

Mr. Frazier’s family sees things differently. They believe the men had a dispute over money Mr. Frazier believed he was owed. They say Mr. Gibbs has never apologized and is not remorseful.

“You want to serve the community?” said Janice Murrell, 61, Mr. Frazier’s older sister. “First thing you do is make amends. That’s starting off the right way.”

Ms. Murrell said her brother was a loving person who fell in with the wrong crowd as a teenager. She remembers him imploring her to look out for their mother, Ola Williams, while he was incarcerated. He received his G.E.D. in prison and wanted to build a life for himself after he was released, she said.

His death devastated their mother and Ms. Murrell’s oldest son, who adored his uncle, Ms. Murrell said as she teared up. Ms. Williams died last year, but Ms. Murrell said she would be willing to sit down with Mr. Gibbs.

“The only thing I can say now: Otis, take care of Mom,” Ms. Murrell said. “You’re with her now.”

Mr. Gibbs said he had expressed remorse to Ms. Williams shortly after he got out of prison, but he maintained that he acted in self-defense, saying: “Was he wrong? Certainly. Should I have just let him leave and maybe come back and kill me?” Mr. Gibbs paused. “It wasn’t something I was willing to gamble with.”

After he spent a year on Rikers Island awaiting trial on a murder charge, prosecutors offered a plea deal for manslaughter. Mr. Gibbs said his public defender had advised him to take the deal, and he had.

Now, Mr. Gibbs sometimes has to quiet thoughts that his colleagues in the Legislature see him as a thug who will eventually fall back into a life of crime. He has three children and began taking care of his two grandsons after his daughter’s sudden death in 2016.

State Senator Jamaal Bailey, a Democrat who has become a close friend of Mr. Gibbs, said, “When you see somebody that not only lived, but is a product of what can be done when reform is actually achieved, it gives people hope.”

‘Guys like Eddie never really had a shot’

Walk into Mr. Gibbs’s East Harlem office on any Monday and there will be fresh piles of letters on his desk from people incarcerated in New York’s sprawling prison system.

There is a 37-page handwritten declaration of innocence in a manila envelope and reports of broken computers at one prison and abuse at another near the Canadian border. Some people want to know how to get a certificate of “good conduct,” which could help them get jobs when they are released.

“This is a lot of pressure,” Mr. Gibbs said as his staff discussed whether they could help the writer of each letter. “A lot of these incarcerated individuals are relying on this office.”

One of the letters was a copy of one Mr. Gibbs had written himself, on behalf of Mr. Coleman, the rapper known as G. Dep. Mr. Coleman had signed a $350,000 record deal with Bad Boy in the ’90s, but as his career began to fade, he became bogged down by drug addiction.

In 2010, Mr. Coleman walked into a police station and confessed that he had shot a man during an attempted robbery 17 years earlier. The case had gone cold and might never have been solved. John Henkel, the man Mr. Coleman killed, was just 32 years old.

Mr. Gibbs knew Mr. Coleman from East Harlem and remembers when Mr. Coleman was at the height of his fame. There were new cars and fans, but “he was carrying that demon around,” Mr. Gibbs said, referring to the guilt from the killing. “It was eating at him every day.”

Mr. Coleman was convicted of second-degree murder in 2012 and sentenced to 15 years to life in prison. The two men kept in touch, and in August 2021, Mr. Gibbs wrote a heartfelt letter to the governor requesting clemency.

“Trevell’s story is remarkable and one that I can personally relate to,” he wrote, explaining how he and Mr. Coleman had grown up in the same public housing complex and were among “the many who went down that wrong path.”

Mr. Gibbs was not optimistic that his request would be approved because of the violent nature of Mr. Coleman’s crime, but he promised to keep at it.

Mr. Gibbs’s work with the formerly and currently incarcerated has left some in his East Harlem district feeling neglected. In a primary on June 25 in the 68th District, he faces challenges from Xavier A. Santiago, the chairman of the area community board, and two district leaders, Tamika Mapp and William P. Smith.

Mr. Santiago said he was running because Mr. Gibbs “has left almost all of the constituents as orphans.”

Mr. Gibbs said he’s proud of the work he’s done, and that both his district and the incarcerated get his full attention. Since Mr. Gibbs took office, he has visited all of the state’s prisons, except for the three where he was held, because he says he’s not ready. His district had the ninth highest rate of incarcerated residents among all Assembly districts in 2020, according to research from the Prison Policy Initiative, and he is sponsoring legislation to increase to $2,500 from $40 the amount of money given to people getting out of prison.

After he was released from prison, he did odd jobs and tried comedy before becoming a driver for Murray Richman, a lawyer known in the tabloids as Don’t Worry Murray, who represented mobsters as well as rappers like DMX, Shyne and Jay-Z.

“You got to give a guy a shot,” said Mr. Richman, who pushed Mr. Gibbs to run for office. “The funny thing about it, I’ve always maintained that guys like Eddie never really had a shot.”

Mr. Gibbs had earned his G.E.D. and an associate degree while he was in prison. By 2021, he was an East Harlem district leader when, in a surprise, he won the Democratic Party nomination for an Assembly seat. JustLeadershipUSA, a nonprofit organization that trains people who have been in jail or prison for leadership roles, is aware of at least five people who were incarcerated, including Mr. Gibbs, who have been elected to state office since 2021.

“It’s important for other formerly incarcerated people to see themselves in that position,” said DeAnna Hoskins, the president and chief executive of JustLeadershipUSA.

Carl Heastie, the speaker of the Assembly, said “Eddie’s election and subsequent re-election confirms what his constituents think — that for young people who may have made a mistake, your life is not over.”

‘The beginning of something fresh’

Mr. Gibbs was sitting with his head in his hands at a restaurant near Fishkill Correctional Facility in Beacon, N.Y. It was October 2022, and Mr. Coleman had received his associate degree that day, graduating cum laude from Alliance University at Fishkill. Mr. Gibbs had been the commencement speaker, but he still didn’t know if his request for clemency for Mr. Coleman had been effective.

“This is the beginning of something fresh in your lives,” Mr. Gibbs told the graduates, who let out a loud cheer when he described being the first incarcerated person to serve in New York’s Legislature. “Who knows where your dedication to your second chance will lead you.”

As Mr. Coleman stepped up to get his degree, Mr. Gibbs threw both arms around his shoulders and gave him a long hug.

“I never thought I was going in this direction,” Mr. Coleman said after the ceremony. “But I see that it’s a new beginning.”

Steven Zeidman, Mr. Coleman’s lawyer and a co-director of the Second Look Project at the City University of New York School of Law, said that even though both the judge and the prosecutor in Mr. Coleman’s murder case had called for him to be granted clemency, the letter from Mr. Gibbs still mattered.

“It wasn’t just a standard letter,” Mr. Zeidman said. “What made this letter different was the commonality that he had with Trevell.”

Just over a year after the graduation, Ms. Hochul announced that Mr. Coleman was one of 16 people who would be granted clemency. It made him eligible to seek parole, which he did at a hearing on March 20. He was released on April 4.

Mr. Coleman has spent the past few weeks transitioning to life outside of prison. He plans to work with young people and may even get back into music, but with the goal of helping people avoid the mistakes he made. Seeing how Mr. Gibbs changed his life after prison has been motivation.

“It definitely gives hope, especially to somebody that’s been incarcerated,” Mr. Coleman said in an interview after his release. “It lets you know that things can turn around.”

Susan C. Beachy contributed research.