Like other entrepreneurs, Ray Beasley begins his day with an 8 a.m. coffee stop at Starbucks. Sipping a Cafe Americano, he flips open his Sony Vaio laptop, fires off e-mails and works his cellphone.
But unlike them, Mr. Beasley's résumé doesn't include an MBA or experience in corporate America. He's an ex-con who developed his business idea while serving time in Texas prisons, and his "brain trust" is made up of fellow inmates convicted for the crime he's now trying to prevent – identity theft.
"My first thought was: You've got to be kidding me," says Donald Hicks, a University of Texas at Dallas economics professor, when Mr. Beasley showed up two years ago, unannounced, at his campus office. "This guy is built like a linebacker, and he's just out of prison?"
But Dr. Hicks listened as Mr. Beasley reeled off his tale of hours spent in prison rec yards and day rooms interviewing cons, learning their scams and silently drawing up plans for a computer program he believes could thwart identity theft using countertop machines in stores and restaurants.
"The spirit and the drive he displayed ... on a human level, I admire that tremendously," says Dr. Hicks. "I couldn't just blow him off."
The 45-year-old Mr. Beasley grew up on Ramsey Street in Cedar Hill, a southern Dallas County town where parents turned children loose on bicycles and neighbors knew and looked out for each other. The Beasleys – Mom, Dad and four children – were devout Jehovah's Witnesses who quoted scripture with ease.
Dad Raymond Beasley Sr. had founded his own construction business while in his early 30s. The younger Mr. Beasley often joined his father at jobs in Highland Park, where Beasley Foundation Contractors poured concrete for Bernard Fulton, founder of the prestigious Greenhill School, and real estate doyenne Allie Beth Allman. The boy saw –and liked – how the other half lived.
In fall 1981, Mr. Beasley started classes at the University of Houston. But when his father's construction business fell on hard times a year later, he dropped out and went looking for a way to make money, quickly.
It took one phone call to set up a meeting for him to buy 7 kilograms of cocaine – the first time the 19-year-old had ever seen the drug.
"It was quicker and easier to get kilos of cocaine than a loan from a bank," Mr. Beasley says now.
This was a heady time for the young man who'd been spit on proselytizing door-to-door as a Jehovah's Witness. He bought expensive suits, drove flashy cars and dated even flashier women.
Then, in February 1990, Mr. Beasley and a business associate from East Texas went to meet "Angela" and her California connection at the Bennigan's on Northwest Highway to buy cocaine. "California," he recalls, turned out to be an undercover officer, and the two were arrested.
While out on bail on the drug charges, Mr. Beasley briefly joined a gang with a specialty in stealing identities and check kiting. "It was like robbing a bank with an ink pen," he says.
In September 1991, Mr. Beasley saw the harder side of crime. He began his 99-year term at the red-brick, razor-wired Coffield unit in Tennessee Colony, about 70 miles southeast of Dallas.
Beneath the 40-foot-tall stained-glass window in the prison's cavernous chapel, he and other inmates would pretend to listen to tapes of religious music. Instead, an inmate known as "Dorsett" would school Mr. Beasley in Identity Theft 101.
All you need are obituaries in the newspaper, Dorsett told him. They'd give you a birth date and place of birth as well as the mother's maiden name – most of the ingredients needed to pose as someone else.
Identities in hand, "Reginald" explained that personal checks could then be made from scratch with stock paper from an office supply store and some software.
In 1994, Mr. Beasley picked up his abandoned college studies, enrolling in data processing classes, where he learned how to draw schematic diagrams.
Fellow inmates tutored him in subjects such as COBOL programming and MS-DOS. He got a transfer to the Ramsey One unit near Houston in 2001 to continue his studies.
If the prisoners at Coffield gave the inmate his undergraduate education in identity theft, Ramsey One was graduate school. Ramsey housed professionals: engineers, bankers and computer programmers.
"We didn't talk scams; we talked systems capabilities," Mr. Beasley says.
This is where he met Michael Miller, a fellow inmate who had been a computer programmer. They were an odd pair – the fiftysomething bespectacled Mr. Miller and Mr. Beasley, who weighed nearly 300 pounds by then. Mr. Miller offered technical advice, and Mr. Beasley could resurrect his drug dealer's countenance when necessary, shielding Mr. Miller from prison violence.
"I was very skeptical," says Mr. Miller, now released and living in the Dallas area. "In that environment, you always assume everybody but yourself is a scam artist."
For three years, Mr. Beasley retraced the steps to Mr. Miller's dorm, six rooms down. Pointing to a particular formula in Mr. Beasley's hand-drawn schematic, Mr. Miller would ask: How would this stop someone from opening up an account in my name?
Over the 15 years he was in prison, Mr. Beasley talked with about 900 inmates, he believes. This think tank of cons shared their methods with him and poked holes in solutions he would propose within his computer program.
In March 2006, Mr. Beasley was paroled after 15 years in prison. By then, both his parents were dead and he was estranged from his brothers and sisters. He moved in with an aunt in Wichita Falls and got a job washing dishes at a local El Chico.
But in Dallas, Carolyn Jones, an old high school teacher, became his agent, trying to drum up support for his fledgling company, B System.
"He had a lot more potential than he ever really lived up to," she says.
And then, that July, he paid his surprise visit to Don Hicks at UTD.
It was Dr. Hicks who put him in touch with Tom Hill, an Electronic Data Systems Inc. fellow and a rainmaker in the tech world. Like Dr. Hicks, Mr. Hill found himself attracted to the ex-con's passion.
Mr. Hill paid the tuition for an entrepreneurship class at Southern Methodist University, telling Mr. Beasley that having an idea wasn't enough.Mr. Hill also introduced him to Doug Harris, who runs UTD's cybersecurity institute. Dr. Harris said UTD would build a beta machine to test Mr. Beasley's theories if he could raise the money: $600,000.
"If I can get that machine built, I can get everything I want," Mr. Beasley says now.
Since that meeting last June with Dr. Harris, Mr. Beasley has rounded up investors in B System: a family of churchgoers in Sunnyvale, a group of Dallas firefighters, old friends who want this story to have a happy ending.
One morning, Gigi White, now a Lancaster City Council member, walked into Starbucks and reintroduced herself to a speechless Mr. Beasley. He hadn't seen her since they were in their 20s on the Dallas club scene.
But she'd heard about his time in prison, his release and his quest to make B System real. As she left, the councilwoman pressed a $300 check into Mr. Beasley's hand.
"You've always been a smart man," she told him. "Now you're doing it smarter."
In the last year, Mr. Beasley has raised about $85,000, most of which he has spent on food, rent, Internet service and an attorney to help him patent his idea.
His investors say they believe in Mr. Beasley's dream.
"I gave Enron a chance," says Ray Allen, a retiree who, along with his wife, Martha, invested $5,000 in B System. "Why not him?"
Still, the big money has eluded Mr. Beasley, and the clock is ticking.
"If this doesn't happen in a hurry, someone else will do it," Dr. Harris says.
Mr. Beasley refuses to take time away and get a regular job.
Working 9-to-5 wouldn't get him the money fast enough, he says. "My story hasn't been typical so far, so why should I act typically?"
Mr. Beasley finds it frustrating to know that if he returned – even briefly – to his old life, getting the money would be easy.
Instead, he hopes for a savior. "God gave Joseph the power to interpret dreams, and the pharaoh listened," he said, quoting from a Bible story in Genesis. "I just haven't found the right pharaoh."
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