Larry Miller — a soft-spoken, self-assured man in his 70s — doesn’t seem like someone who could have written the book on redemption.
He is decades into a storied career in corporate America that has included running the Portland Trail Blazers and many years as a Nike executive overseeing the most successful sneaker brand in the history of the world, Air Jordans.
But that wasn’t what brought him to Boston last week. He was here to spend three days with troubled young men who have been where he has been: behind bars or facing a future of incarceration.
Here to spread a message of hope.
Miller, who’s based in Portland, Ore., was in town at the behest of Roca, the Chelsea-based antiviolence organization fixture that has been working with young people involved in crime and violence for more than three decades. The people there thought his story might inspire some of the young men they work with.
Because if someone who committed murder as a teenager, as he did, can rewrite his story the way Miller has, that’s a message struggling young men need to hear.
“To meet someone who’s made so many changes, it says something about what’s possible,” said Molly Baldwin, Roca’s founder and chief executive. “I think that’s very powerful.”
So Miller met with an inmate in Western Massachusetts, shared his story with young men at Roca’s Boston office, and participated in a “fireside chat” with Lieutenant Governor Kim Driscoll Friday at Roca’s annual breakfast.
Miller’s story is indeed remarkable.
Miller was a 16-year-old gang member in Philadelphia in 1965 when he murdered another teenager, 18-year-old Edward David White, a few blocks from his home. Miller was drunk, he says, and angry because a member of his crew had recently been killed by a rival gang. But White wasn’t part of any gang and wasn’t anyone Miller knew.
Miller’s lawyer cut a deal to have him charged with second-degree murder, and he did 4½ years for the killing.
That wouldn’t be his last stint in prison, but he says it was the one that turned his life around.
Behind bars, he started reading. “The Autobiography of Malcolm X” made a particularly deep impression.
“It turned on a consciousness in me that I was never able to turn off,” Miller said. “One of the quotes I like to use is, ‘In this world talent is distributed evenly, but opportunity is not.’ ”
Besides becoming a reader, Miller became a college student. He left his last prison in 1982 with a degree in accounting from Temple University. (Such prison-education programs like the one he was in all but disappeared during the ‘80s and early ‘90s.)
When Miller left prison, degree in hand, he had a decision to make: whether to trust potential employers to overlook his past. After one discouraging job interview, he decided he couldn’t. He didn’t lie about his past, Miller says, he just didn’t volunteer any information. He got one job, and then another job, and began a steady march up the corporate ladder.
All the time living in mortal fear that his past would eventually overtake him.
“I was scared every day,” he told me.
He finally came clean in a 2021 memoir, a book his daughter spent years urging him to write. And while he is still deeply involved with Nike’s Jordan operation, he now spends a lot of his time preaching to the incarcerated and formerly incarcerated, telling them that they can have a better future.
“I’ve met and shared with so many organizations, like Roca, that are out doing this work,” Miller said. “I didn’t know anything about that before this. That’s why I’m doing everything I can to support as many of these organizations as possible.”
Telling his truth, Miller says, has freed him from his past. He met with the survivors of his victim after his book’s publication, and he says they forgave him.
Miller said telling his story has changed him.
“To see that people see the value in me telling my story has been incredible.”
Roca hopes that story can be just as powerful for the next Larry Miller.
Adrian Walker is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at adrian.walker@globe.com. Follow him @Adrian_Walker.