New York man serves 22 years for two murders he didn’t commit

Calvin Buari parked the black Volkswagen Jetta outside the maximum-security prison he’d called home for years.

He gazed up at the hulking concrete wall of the Green Haven Correctional Facility and inhaled deeply. Only weeks before, he’d been on the other side of those walls.

But on this June 2017 visit, he wasn’t a prisoner. He was a budding entrepreneur, taking an elderly woman to visit her grandson behind bars.

The previous month Buari had walked out of the prison in Stormville, New York, a free man after years of fighting to vacate a wrongful conviction for a double homicide. He launched Ryderz Van Service — a company he describes as the “Uber for prison visits”— as soon as he got his driver’s license.

On that surreal day, his first trip back to the prison since his release, he mingled with the corrections officers and handed out business cards.

“It was like an out-of-body experience, being on the other side of that wall,” he says now. “I wanted to do something to keep family ties because I know how important that is when you’re inside.”

“That grandmother … she didn’t drive, she was elderly. And this was the only person that … (prisoner) had on the outside.”

The modest VW was a far cry from the black BMW Buari drove as a drug dealer in the Bronx in the 1990s, before he was wrongly convicted of murder. His T-shirt, pants and black fedora were a stark contrast to the flowing mink coat and matching brown hat he wore to sell crack cocaine to his customers.

But he was a free man. And he was busy trying to turn his life around.

That visit to the prison — about 90 minutes’ drive north of New York City — was the first of many as Buari’s business grew. And each day he drove to the prison, he thought of how quickly one’s freedom can vanish.

“Every time I pulled up at that prison that I just left, it was a reminder that I need to be on the righteous path,” he tells CNN. “Because if I did not, what was waiting for me was that very prison.”

A hit podcast details Buari’s fight to clear his name

Buari’s story is featured in the podcast, “The Burden: Empire on Blood,” which followed his years-long fight for justice and eventual release in May 2017 after 22 years behind bars.

The podcast launched in 2018 and has been updated with new episodes and previously unheard recordings of his phone calls from prison.

The latest episode, released this week, focuses on Buari, now 53, navigating life after incarceration. A second bonus episode will be released Wednesday. At the end of the podcast’s initial episodes, Buari had just been released and was sleeping in a van in his ex-girlfriend’s driveway as he tried to launch his rideshare business.

Former journalist Steve Fishman, who hosts the podcast, said he decided to do more episodes because he frequently gets questions about Buari.

“People still ask me, ‘What happened to Cal?’ We left him homeless and sleeping in the van and yet he was so determined (to better his life). And frankly, I was interested in what happened to Cal, too,” he says.

Fishman says he’s been “obsessed” with Buari’s case since he received a frantic phone call from him while he was in prison. A fellow prisoner, who was also wrongfully convicted and later released from prison, had shared Fishman’s number with Buari because of his work shining a light on such cases.

Buari then sent Fishman over 1,300 pages of his court transcripts and documents, and Fishman started recording their conversations with his consent in 2011. And he grew fascinated by this man who was campaigning for his freedom from a prison payphone.

Source: CNN