Jason Safford: Green Energy Pioneer Goes to Prison
“The true secret ingredient to being a human being is our resilience. We can overcome anything as long as we put our mind to overcoming it.”
Jason Safford had only been out of federal prison for three months when we talked. He’s one of the most recent guests I’ve had on the show, and what struck me was how raw everything still was—the processing, the halfway house, trying to explain to his young kids why daddy had to leave every Sunday night.
His story starts with one of the most dramatic near-misses I’ve ever heard: he was supposed to be in the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001.
Overslept and Lived
Jason grew up in Park Slope, Brooklyn—back when they called it “Park Slum.” His father worked for the federal government and then the MTA. The family was tight-knit, taking trips together, building a beach bungalow on a foundation his grandfather had started.
Jason was a three-sport athlete and a tuba player good enough to get into Oberlin’s Music Conservatory. He transferred to NYU’s film school, stayed on the basketball team, and eventually landed at MTV in Network Operations in the late 90s.
That’s where the idea hit him: artists should be able to put their portfolios online and sell themselves directly. This was before Facebook, before MySpace. He left MTV to build it.
The intellectual property angle attracted Cantor Fitzgerald, the law firm in the World Trade Center. They loved the idea. They were ready to invest. Jason’s meeting to consummate the deal was scheduled for the morning of September 11, 2001.
“I was a young guy, thought I could stay up all night preparing,” Jason told me. “When I went to get dressed and wait for the train, I fell asleep at my desk.”
He missed the train. A plane flew through the window where his meeting would have been.
From 9/11 to Green Energy
That brush with death changed everything. An older Jamaican man named Lynn—a retired mechanical engineer from Pfizer—sat Jason down and asked what he was going to do now.
“There are all these displaced people in downtown Manhattan,” Jason told him. “I could buy some shells of buildings in Brooklyn, fix them up, put solar rooftops on them, give people a better quality of life.”
Lynn said that was the best business idea he’d ever heard. A month later, on October 11, 2001, they were at the Queens courthouse incorporating Saflin Corporation—a combination of their names.
For the next sixteen years, they built green energy projects in New York, Long Island, California, Hawaii, Texas, and Florida. They won city contracts to train over 200 people in green jobs—OSHA certification, cool roofs, solar electric and heating, building technology.
The 330-Acre Dream
In 2007, right before the financial crisis, Jason and his partner made their big move. They bought a 330-acre property in Upstate New York with an incredible history: a castle where Theodore Roosevelt had visited as a child, a mansion built by a famous Russian cellist. They were going to build a model green community—carbon-neutral houses with solar, wind turbines, the whole vision.
Then the financial crisis hit.
They survived by hosting concerts and festivals, anything to bring money onto the property. They made it through. But in 2016, a leadership change at the state level killed the deals they were counting on. Everything they thought was going to happen got delayed.
“My business partner was thirty-three years older than me,” Jason said. “We were at the end of our rope. I had just had my first son in 2015. And my business partner came to me and said we have a responsibility to our investors—friends and family—to try to make this work.”
Crossing the Line
They needed to refinance the property but couldn’t qualify for a regular loan. What Jason describes next is the part that haunts him.
“I went to my business partner and said, ‘There’s a way we can get the money, but there’s also a chance we could go to prison because it’s not 100 percent kosher,’” Jason told me. “And he said, ‘Do whatever it takes.’”
They manufactured documents. Changed appraisal numbers to get the loan approved. It’s something Jason says is rampant in real estate, though that didn’t make it legal.
The loan went through. Then his business partner turned on him and sued, claiming he’d been clueless about what Jason was doing. The feds arrested Jason in December 2019.
“I went to the feds, I basically said, ‘Listen, I did this,’” Jason said. “‘It’s done in the real estate world all the time.’ And my lawyer said, ‘Really?’”
Remanded from the Courtroom
On October 28, 2021, Jason stood before the judge for sentencing. He’d written a letter explaining that the real victims were his two young sons. The judge had given him extra time to try to complete a solar deal that would pay everyone back. The prosecutor blocked it.
The judge gave him four years—the mandatory two plus twelve months on each of two additional charges. Then something happened that Jason never expected: he was remanded immediately. No going home to say goodbye. No reporting later.
“They put you in the jail cell at the courthouse,” Jason said. “They’re like, ‘Don’t hang yourself, you’ll get through this.’ I’m like, ‘I’m not thinking of killing myself. I’m just devastated for my family.’”
He spent eight and a half weeks in Oneida County detention eating cold bologna and rancid applesauce before transferring to Otisville and then Lewisburg for RDAP.
Parenting from Prison
Jason’s wife had supported him through everything. But explaining it to a five-year-old and an eight-year-old was something else entirely.
“I never looked back when I walked out,” he said about leaving prison. “It was a superstition with the guys inside. You just don’t want to think about what you went through.”
From the detention center, Jason started writing stories for his kids—Aesop’s Fables-style tales with morals, animals, lessons. It became his way of parenting from behind bars.
He established a routine: wake up at 3 AM when the guards’ keys jangled by, exercise, write. At Lewisburg, he taught over 100 men how to pass the CDL permit exam. He ran creative writing groups. He helped guys with their GEDs.
“Time is your real enemy,” Jason said, crediting fellow justice-impacted entrepreneur Mike Morawski with that insight. “If you can kill time every day by being productive, you’re going to get through it.”
Three Months Out
When we talked, Jason was working as a coach at UFC Gym in New Hyde Park, New York. He’d started the job through the Fortune Society, a reentry organization he’d found by writing letters from prison.
He’s writing a new book called “Win Your Day” about the ten habits he developed from arrest to release. And he still has that 330-acre property—now he’s planning to develop it with tiny homes instead.
“I’ve got a wife and kids that I need to get home to,” Jason said about navigating the halfway house. “So I’m even more hesitant to invest in anything that could put any negative in my life. I’m literally standing on the trains watching people, doing my best not to interact because I’m afraid of anything wrong happening.”
That fear of being sent back is real. The rules are stringent. One wrong move and you’re gone.
When I asked Jason for his biggest takeaway from everything he’d been through, his answer was immediate: “Resilience. You can’t learn it any better than when you go to prison. We can overcome anything as long as we put our mind to overcoming it.”
You can reach Jason at jasonsafford.com or exceptionalresultsnow.com.