Delinquent: Shakorie went to prison twice. Now he runs one of the largest construction companies in Cuyahoga – ‘You can overcome’ (2024)

CLEVELAND, Ohio – Two days after turning 18, Shakorie Davis was flirting with girls outside Cleveland’s South High School, when he spotted a kid with a gold chain around his neck. Just as he passed, Shakorie snatched it and took off.

He didn’t know the kid, never even spoke to him in the exchange. And while the chain was valued around $300, Shakorie says he didn’t do it for the money. He had more than that in his pocket from selling drugs.

“It was just me being a straight A-hole,” he says now, nearly 30 years in retrospect. “I never thought anything about it. I was just being a kid; I didn’t realize how serious they would take it.”

The victim reported the theft to a nearby police officer, who arrested Shakorie and took him to adult jail. The Cuyahoga County Prosecutor’s Office, then run by Stephanie Tubbs Jones, charged him with robbery, which would come with mandatory prison time, if he were to be convicted.

To avoid that fate, Shakorie accepted a plea deal to a lesser attempted robbery charge that would grant him probation but still label him a felon. He remembers the judge, Nancy Margaret Russo, advising against the plea because of how it might affect his future, but his public defender didn’t show, and the attorney who filled in thought it was OK. Probation, the young Shakorie agreed, “seemed like a much better deal” than potentially spending years in prison. He didn’t realize then that a better attorney might have advocated for the charge to be further reduced or dismissed altogether.

Shakorie took the deal and was sentenced to 18 months of probation. He also was ordered to pay the victim for the chain and finish his high school education, which he did. That was in 1996.

Had the incident occurred a few days earlier, when Shakorie was still considered a juvenile under the law, he might have avoided arrest altogether. He never threatened the victim and didn’t use a weapon. And while his juvenile record wasn’t clean, reflecting at least two drug arrests and some traffic infractions, he had no history of violence.

It’s likely his lifestyle would have led to adult court eventually, he admits. He’d been selling drugs since he was 15 and had no intention of stopping. But Judge Russo was right, Shakorie thinks now. That first felony started a chain of events that led him to cycle through probation violations and twice go to prison in his early 20s – until circ*mstances intervened to set him down a better path.

Today, he owns Next Generation Construction, a multimillion-dollar company that counts among its clients Sherwin Williams, Cleveland Clinic, University Hospital and Cuyahoga County itself.

For decades, Shakorie has avoided speaking publicly about his criminal past in an effort to protect his business. He still worries how clients might view him, if they learn of his felony record. But he agreed to share his journey with The Plain Dealer/cleveland.com for the first time as part of the series Delinquent: Our system, our kids, in hopes it will show youth now coming up through the criminal justice system that they, too, can change their lives and be successful – even if they have a felony record and spent time in prison.

“It’s possible,” Shakorie says. He’s proof.

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Youth

Like many youths who touch the juvenile justice system today, Shakorie grew up poor. Both parents worked for the city – his dad for the water department, his mom for the airport – but they lived in housing projects in Cleveland’s Central neighborhood, one of the poorest communities in northeast Ohio. Still, he says, he and his two siblings had food, clothes and security. Life seemed good.

Then his parents became addicted to crack cocaine, and some of the care fell away. “It was almost like overnight it was horrible,” he recalls. When he was 11, the family moved in with his grandmother on Lee Road for about a year but then got a house in the Union-Miles neighborhood, where Shakorie says his life was confined to a city block. No one had a car, so everyone in the neighborhood hung out together.

Shakorie tried to make the best of it. When his friends started selling drugs, he kept his head down and devoted himself to sports. His freshman year, he started getting bussed to James Ford Rhodes High School, where he was expected to be varsity quarterback. The summer before the season began, he recalls playing in one game where he threw two touchdowns and ran in a third, proving his potential. Everyone was celebrating him back on the block.

His dad was proud too, but unwittingly the dad said something meant as a compliment that Shakorie heard as a death sentence. “When you graduate, I’m going to get you a city job with me,” Shakorie remembers him saying. Shakorie had just had his best game and was a decent student. He thought he had a shot at college and dreamed of being a lawyer, despite not knowing anyone from his community who had done it. The words landed like a reality check, he says, placing him in a box from which he felt he’d never escape.

The very next day, Shakorie recalls quitting the football team and joining his friends on the street corner selling drugs. Soon after, he transferred to East Tech High School, though he skipped most days and had to redo his senior year. His life lacked purpose, he says, so he spent his days getting high and selling drugs – he could make $1,000 a day.

“I was going to graduate to do what? Get a city job? We were still poor,” Shakorie says. “Why rush to live like I’m living right now with my parents?”

It was around that time that he started getting into trouble with the law. First for drug possession, which prompted his first trip to probation, and then drug trafficking a year later, when he was 16. He was given a suspended sentence to juvenile prison and returned to probation.

When he was 17, he added two traffic violations for driving without a license and crashing a borrowed car. That was in May of 1996. Three months later, he turned 18, snatched the chain, and was in the adult system.

Cycling

With six months left on probation, he tested positive for marijuana and was ordered to complete out-patient drug treatment and attend several substance abuse support meetings per week, records show. His probation was also extended another year, but he was caught using again before the end.

In that period, though, Shakorie says his mother, who was drug-free by then, told him about an opening in the construction union, and he started a job as a sheet metal worker. He stopped selling drugs and was doing well, he says. But that April, he was arrested in a federal sweep of men who had sold drugs to an informant. Shakorie says the exchange had occurred nearly a year prior, before he’d stopped selling cocaine; he was just being charged late.

When Shakorie’s name appeared in the paper as part of the bust, he lost his job. He went back to selling drugs until his case concluded, and, at age 23, he was sentenced to federal prison for a year. After release, he worked miscellaneous jobs, but he had three toddlers by then and gravitated back to selling drugs to make more money.

“Nothing had changed. I was back in the same environment, with the same friends,” Shakorie says. “When you don’t have any purpose, what else do you do?”

A year later, he sold a gram of cocaine to a police informant and was charged with drug trafficking. In court, he pleaded down to possession to shorten his prison sentence to 8 months. His judge, Shirley Strickland Saffold, however, added another 11 months.

He remembers her pointing to some charge he wasn’t convicted of as justification, but he never knew what it was. It could have been part of his juvenile record or, he later learned, it could have been a car theft in which police listed him a suspect in 1997, though they never questioned him, and he was never charged. (Shakorie says he only learned of the alleged offense in 2022, when he requested his full criminal history, a copy of which he provided to The Plain Dealer/cleveland.com.)

Just before he was incarcerated, he learned he had a fourth child on the way.

While in prison, Shakorie says he “grew tired” and decided to make changes. He got married. He started taking typing courses and reading books. He won an essay contest on Black History Month, which gave him confidence in his abilities. And he found a strong faith, which gave him hope of something better.

He returned home in 2004, at age 25. It might have been easy, then, to slip back into old habits, but he says his environment had changed. One of Shakorie’s closest friends was killed in a shooting prior to his return, and nearly everyone else he knew was serving time. He only had his wife and kids, who had moved out of his old neighborhood and were living in Shaker Heights.

“It was the first time I was removed from the block,” he says.

He leaned into his faith and tried a new approach.

“Sometimes we expect people to just do the right thing, but we didn’t come from that world. You do what you know,” Shakorie says. But this time, “I finally had something to anchor on.”

Rebuilding

Life felt harder as a convicted felon, he remembers. But he didn’t give up.

He first connected with an area businessman who gave him a job as a roofer and later introduced him to a cabinet maker. Shakorie spent three months learning to build cabinets on the side, without pay. “I believe in the power of knowledge over a dollar,” he says.

Then he did a carpenter apprenticeship with a Bedford company. His first job was helping renovate a Cleveland Clinic facility. On the side, he started buying and flipping houses to build wealth. In 2009, he started his own company, Next Generation Construction.

It flopped in three years. He knew how to do the work but not how to run a company, he says. Then he started losing his properties, including the house his family was living in, when the housing market crashed. He was able to sell his last building and use the money to buy his family a new house for $15,000. He went back to work with the Bedford company, earning $10 an hour, but this time he spent his days in the office, learning estimating and how to run a business.

In the meantime, he renovated his house, which he eventually sold for over $100,000 before moving back to the Shaker Heights area. The sale provided the seed money he needed to relaunch his business.

“I never looked back after that,” Shakorie says.

Business exploded. Shakorie is still helping shape the East Side of Cleveland and the lakefront. He’s also responsible for renovating the Fanatics Sportsbook at Progressive Field, Cleveland Clinic’s InterContinental Suites Hotel and Loudville at RocketMortgage FieldHouse.

Life is still challenging, he says. He avoids requesting key badges for most of the sites where his company works because it would require a background check, and in 2022, he was denied a small business loan with a major bank because he couldn’t prove he’d repaid the restitution for snatching the $300 gold chain. (He says his payment was required to close out probation, but there wasn’t a receipt, and he couldn’t track down the victim to repay him.)

A smaller bank gave him a $1.5 million line of credit anyway, but he’s not sure he’ll ever be able to expand that to $5 or $10 million, without which it will be hard to grow his business.

“It will always be a fight,” Shakorie says of the collateral sanctions that come with a felony record. But that’s the reality, he adds; there will always be things you can’t do. “The quicker you accept that, the quicker you can build your foundation on what you can do.”

‘Find your superpower’

Today, Shakorie says it’s almost comical to talk about who he was in his youth. “I was a totally different character from who I am now.”

He’s been out of prison for 20 years. He’s married with four children, all of whom have graduated from college. He’s running one of the county’s largest minority-owned businesses, which was named the 2024 Northern Ohio Small Business of the year.

He still gives back, where he can. He has served as past president of the Contractors Assistance Association and sat on boards for the Union Miles Community Development Corporation, Greater Cleveland Partnership and Cleveland Builds, among others. He and his wife also donated to University Hospitals and have a N.I.C.U Room named after them.

Now, Shakorie has been turning his focus toward helping area youth build brighter futures and avoid some of the obstacles he faced. He partners with the Youth Opportunities Unlimited construction academy and ACE Mentor Program of Cleveland and recently taught the Construction Accelerators Program for the Urban League of Greater Cleveland and Sherwin Williams, helping introduce youth to the industry. (His mother now works with area youth as a corrections officer in the county’s Juvenile Detention Center.)

Shakorie fears the county is losing youth to social media, absentee parenting and poverty. But by infusing communities with structure, job opportunities and recreation activities, he thinks it’s possible to change the trajectory. It will take consistency, parenting and love, he says. But if you give youth a purpose and opportunities to achieve it, they can thrive.

As for kids already in the juvenile system or those serving time in adult prison, there’s still hope, he says.

“Find your superpower,” Shakorie advises. “I have a felon label on me, but I provide a service that people want, and I’m good at it. If you find a superpower, people will overlook your shortcomings, and you can succeed. You can overcome.”

(Coming tomorrow: 16-year-old Devonté Johnson was a star safety on the football team who seemed destined to make it to the professional level. Instead, he got wrapped up in street violence and was killed. His coach had been trying to direct him back to the right path for months, he says, but ran out of time to reach him. The juvenile system is designed to rehabilitate kids when they offend to prevent further harm, but the community also has a role to play before that point, the coach argues. It will take everyone coming together to prevent youth crime and save lives – “If we don’t, then we’re part of the problem.”)

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