WORCESTER—Principe “Prince” Virtuez owns and operates a successful barber shop, gives motivational speeches at barber expos across the country, provides free haircuts for the homeless on special occasions and collects Christmas toys for families in need.
He also has developed a huge following on Instagram at @prince-the-fit-barber while detailing his saga of being able make a difference in his community after overcoming homelessness beginning at age 12 and being imprisoned multiple times for possessing and selling drugs.
He sounds exactly like the role model he could have used when he was young.
“There probably was one,” he said, “but it was just in one ear and out the other.”
Plenty of people listen to him now because he has overcome so much adversity.
“You can believe it if you see it,” he said. “You can believe it if I was worse than you and now I’m living normally. You can’t deny that. So that’s what I post and that’s why I tell the story and that’s why I keep it on people’s minds every day.”
Virtuez owns Palace Elite Barber Spa at 120 Stafford St. and he offers counseling to those who want it whether he cuts their hair or not.
Joshua Martinez, 27, of Worcester has had Virtuez cut his hair for the past two years.
“He’s probably the best barber around,” Martinez said. “He takes his craft seriously. He’s a really good barber and good person.”
Martinez also knows he can speak to Virtuez about what’s bothering him and he rates Virtuez as one of the top motivators he knows.
“I think that’s amazing,” Martinez said. “He took what he came from and he turned into a success.”
Virtuez posts about his accomplishments and his journey.
“The bottom line of my page is to motivate people who have lost hope,” he said. “There’s nobody that knew the 12-year-old me that would tell you that I would be doing this stuff right. They’d all assume I would be dead.”
Virtuez admitted he felt the same way. He said when staff at juvenile detention centers tried to motivate him to turn his life around, he would tell them that there was no reason to do so because he didn’t expect to live past 18 years old.
So now he’s doing his best to show young people that there is hope.
He posts content about barbering on Instagram, has the largest barber podcast on YouTube, called the Clipped Podcast, and he has hosted barber expos in New York, New Mexico, Texas, California, Florida and Puerto Rico.
At the barber expos, he gives a motivational speech he calls, “Cutting Through Adversity, From Struggle to Strategy.”
He calls his shop Palace Elite Barber Spa because he thinks “palace” is a fitting place of employment for someone with his nickname.
“I’m Prince,” he said. “This is my home. I’ve finally got a home. This is my palace. And it’s elite.”
He doesn’t cut corners on helping others. For Thanksgiving, in just four days he recruited 10 volunteers on social media to help him collect 18 donated turkeys and 60 people received free turkey dinners at Fantastic Pizza & Cafe at 910 Main St.
Virtuez plans to drive around on Christmas with his portable barber station and offer free haircuts to homeless people on the street. He never received a Christmas present while growing up so he is also accepting donations of Christmas toys at his spa to give to those in need. Toys can be dropped off at his spa at 120 Stafford St. through Dec. 21 and can be picked up on Dec. 22 from 8 a.m. until 8 p.m. by anyone who needs one.
On his birthday, June 4, he offered free haircuts to the homeless in front of City Hall and five people took him up on his offer. In previous years, he cut hair for free at homeless shelters on Thanksgiving and Christmas.
He’s one of the barbers who works with UMass Memorial Medical Center to have personnel check blood pressure and glucose levels in customers who don’t visit doctors.
“People ask me how I have this much energy,” he said. “Well, I was just born a few years ago.”
He means he was “reborn” a few years ago. He was born in New York to drug-addicted parents who couldn’t take care of him so he was in and out of foster care. When he was 2, his paternal grandfather took him out of foster care and his step grandmother took care of him in Georgia until she passed away when he was 8. So his grandfather sent him to a boarding school in Jamaica.
“In Jamaica, a 10-year-old kid is like a 21-year-old here,” he said. “You grow up fast out there.”
He remembers climbing coconut trees to pick coconuts and selling them to street vendors to make money. This was no cushy boarding school for the privileged. He found it unbearable.
“I would prefer being in prison in America than in the boarding school in Jamaica,” he said.
Virtuez said when he was imprisoned in the medium security state prison in Shirley later in life, he’d often have flashbacks of his boarding school because the two institutions were so similar.
He didn’t go to class so he was kicked out of boarding school at age 11. His grandfather sent him to live in Springfield with his parents who had supposedly stopped using drugs. Unfortunately, they hadn’t stopped and they would disappear for weeks at a time. Within six months, his parents left him and his younger brother and sister for good. His siblings were adopted, but he lived on the streets and in drug houses.
Virtuez said he never took drugs himself, but he joined neighborhood children in selling them.
“Instead of coconuts, now it’s drugs,” he said.
The foster care system learned he was homeless and placed him in a foster home in Worcester at age 12. He kept running away, however. So he was in and out of juvenile detention centers and spent most of his other time living on the street.
At 17, he was imprisoned for two years in Hampden County Jail and House of Correction for selling drugs in Springfield. When he was released, he lived with a former neighbor.
“From age 8 until about that time,” he said, “I was always looking for a home. I was always looking for parents. I was looking for love. From 8-18, that’s 10 years. That’s a crucial 10 years. All the negativity that I had been through, going to juvenile, getting in fights, just hanging around. At this point, my mind was not trying to change anymore. I was embedded in being an a-hole.”
So he soon returned to the streets. At 19, he began a five-year sentence at Concord and Shirley for possessing drugs. There, he took every self-help course and read every self-help book he could. For the first time in his life, he took education seriously. He stopped talking and acting like a gangster. He said he even had to fix his walk.
After his five-year sentence, he was set up to live in a sober house on Queen Street for three months. He took a job at Shaw’s and rode a bicycle back and forth to work. At night, he enrolled in a Rob Roy Academy on Pleasant Street to learn barbering. Unfortunately, he couldn’t save enough money to remain in the sober house after the government stopped paying his rent after the first three months. So he returned to living in the streets and selling drugs while attending barber school. About a month later, he was caught selling drugs and sentenced to another eight years in prison.
In prison, he earned his barber license and worked hard on turning his life around. After he was released, he worked for a friend who owned a barbershop in Webster and he slept in the shop’s basement at first before moving into an apartment above the shop. Later, he cut hair in Worcester on Grafton Street and then in Natick.
In 2023, he opened his own shop at 1067 Main St. in Worcester on the site of the former Bicycle Alley bike shop. When he was young and homeless, he often slept under the awning in the back of the building or snuck into the basement to spend the night.
This past September, he moved his business to 120 Stafford St.
Virtuez said he stopped going to school when he was 8 years old and never returned. Most of what he’s learned, he learned in prison.
“Everything I’ve done,” he said, “is to better myself. I wasn’t one of those kids in the streets because I thought it was fun. I was born in that predicament. I’ve always been trying to better myself, make myself smarter, educate myself, get myself out of these predicaments.”
He tries his best to convince others through social media that they can turn their lives around too.
Virtuez is single with no children. He said he doesn’t have a girlfriend and he’s lost touch with his brother and he sees his sister infrequently. He goes to the gym, to work and back to the gym, every day unless he goes to an expo.
“I’m proud of myself, but I don’t have a life still,” he said.
His life consists of cutting hair, posting on social media and helping others.
“I started to believe that maybe this is what I’m supposed to do,” he said, “and it gives me comfort in that. I’m happy that I’m not living that (troubled) life anymore, but I want more. I want to have my own [home] life as well. That will come in its time I guess.”
For more information or to book an appointment, visit palaceelitebarberspa.com.
Bill Doyle has been a professional journalist for 47 years, most of them as a sports writer for the Telegram & Gazette. He covered the Boston Celtics for 25 years and has written extensively about golf, boxing and local high school and college sports. He also worked for the campus newspaper when he attended UMass-Amherst. He can be reached at billdoyle1515@gmail.com
