After a couple of weeks, Seth Sundberg’s striped colleagues stopped asking the question that any 7-footer is all too accustomed to hearing: How tall are you?
“Then after that, the population doesn’t change,” said Sundberg, a former University of Hawaii basketball center. “Everybody knows.”
When Sundberg was released from federal prison in May 2014, having served nearly five years for defrauding the IRS of $5 million, he was startled — and thrilled — to receive the question again.
But there was no easy return to all he’d left behind. When the former hoops pro-turned-mortgage executive went away in 2009, he was a month from getting married. He had a 2-year-old daughter. He was worth seven figures even before the IRS’s temporary contribution to his bank account.
By the time of his release, Sundberg’s former fiancee had moved on, and he was still getting to know his daughter, Ava. He was flat broke. Worse, even, as the IRS still claims he owes nearly half of the money he took. (Sundberg disagrees.)
“My net worth right now is fairly negative, on paper,” Sundberg, 40 and living in San Francisco, said this week.
Sundberg has something going for him, though: Prison Bars.
The 7-1 Sundberg was the starting center for two years at UH (1995-96 and ’96-97), including the first of the “Dynamic Duo” NIT teams of Anthony Carter and Alika Smith. He led the team in blocks both years and averaged 7.9 rebounds as a senior.
Injuries came to define his career, though. A lacerated spleen from a vicious elbow knocked him out the final nine games his senior season, something his coach, Riley Wallace, still laments.
A couple of brief stints with the Los Angeles Lakers followed, but he played the majority of his six-year pro career in Europe and Russia.
“He was a good player. He was tough,” Wallace said. “I was surprised that he went to prison. He was too smart for that.”
With his wits — he graduated from high school at 16 — came a propensity for mischief, like the time he created the alias Franco Metcalf. Sundberg bought property with his basketball money and discovered he had a knack for real estate; he rose quickly to branch manager of Access Mortgage and Financial in San Mateo, Calif. But he also resented aspects of the system.
On his 2008 tax return, he falsely claimed he’d paid a large sum in an obscure form of taxable interest and required reimbursement. When it actually worked and the $5 million check came in the mail, he shrugged and deposited it.
“It was a combination of greed, arrogance and anger that kind of led me to do what I did,” Sundberg said.
A few months later he was arrested. He pled guilty to mail fraud, filing a false tax return and false claims and was sentenced to 71 months in prison.
Resentment stayed with him for a while, including a year of county jail in Santa Clara, Calif., he called “pure hell” before he was shipped off to Texas for most of his term.
There he started to look inward and realize that his actions — no one else’s — had landed him where he was. He began reading what eventually totaled about 500 books, which he said shifted his perspective. He enrolled in classes with the goal of finishing his college degree.
“Being comfortable is nice. I think we all strive for comfortable,” he said. “But the reality is, we don’t get to make profound life changes in positions of comfortability. You only get to make them when our backs are up against the wall, and we have really, really tough challenges. That’s when we get to see what we’re made of.”
He worked in the kitchen. One day he went in the back to grab a box of chicken to serve. It was labeled “Not for human consumption.”
Sundberg, disgusted, vowed to find an alternative. He used his meager wages ($5.25 a month) to buy ingredients from the commissary and began experimenting with making granola bars.
“I actually had no food experience other than eating a lot and liking to eat,” he said.
Eventually he crafted a viable product out of honey, oats and peanut butter. The “Prison Bars” soared in popularity as a mildly contraband product he could trade for currency like stamps and tuna. Sundberg brought a few other inmates into business with him and over his last seven months inside, he had assembly line-style production and organized distribution and made about $1,300.
Sundberg walked out of prison with a box of Prison Bars. It turned out people on the outside liked them, too.
He authored his company (tagline: “criminally delicious”) in May 2015. Beyond turning a profit, the new CEO wanted to raise awareness of recidivism in the United States — Sundberg cited a National Institute of Justice statistic that roughly three out of four people with criminal histories end back up in prison within five years — and resolved to employ as many such people as possible to give them a chance at something sustainable.
“Getting out, I wasn’t sure if this was something that people would respond to or not,” he said. “I had a lot of shame and embarrassment I was dealing with, a lot of guilt for the people I had hurt. … A lot of this company initially was my therapy, kind of forcing me to tell this story.”
With his entrepreneurial spirit, he excelled in a training course put on by Defy Ventures, a nonprofit for ex-cons boasting just a 3.2 percent recidivism rate among graduates. While still living in a halfway house, Sundberg earned startup money through Defy’s “Shark Tank”-style business pitches.
Rebecca Choi, Defy’s chief of staff in San Francisco, thinks Prison Bars can make it big and called his hook about second chances “extremely compelling.”
“He has the ability to connect with people, and I think that’s one of the things that has made him successful,” Choi said. “He’s super humble. He takes feedback very well. And he’s learned and grown and iterated through the various challenges that he’s faced as an entrepreneur.”
Prison bars is on the verge of its first commercial shipment with a product replicated as close as possible to what Sundberg made on the inside, but now non-GMO, organic and gluten-free. To this point, all the bars have been made by hand with more than 10,000 moved, mostly to small businesses.
Sundberg heads up a staff of six people — four of whom were in prison. Prison Bars has received interest from Google, Whole Foods and even Alcatraz’s tourist shop.
“I’ve actually eaten a lot of granola bars since I’ve been out,” said Prison Bars part-timer Scott Matsuda, 39, who served 10 years on a drug conspiracy charge. “The ones that we make are just as good. … I see a lot of potential with this. He’s just not folding or buckling. He’s steadfast on doing what he set out to do.”
Seth Sundberg now sees his daughter a few times a month. He is close to wrapping up his bachelor’s degree in economics from UH via online classes and hopes to walk across the stage at the Stan Sheriff Center — his old stomping ground — in December.
“(He’s) learned his lesson and people can follow his success,” Wallace said.
Asked this week if his journey seems surreal, or all too real, Sundberg paused.
“That’s a great question,” he replied, before settling on “real.”
“Honestly, it’s sad,” he said, “to go through that and just visualize it. It’s painful. But … I wouldn’t change anything. Now that I’ve gone through it, I wouldn’t change anything about it.”
