He Built a $4 Billion Brand While Hiding a Murder Conviction. Today Is the Last Day of Second Chance Month.

Second Chance Month · April 30, 2026

Today is April 30th. The last day of Second Chance Month. Tomorrow, the proclamations come down, the awareness posts stop, and everybody goes back to running background checks the same way they ran them in March.

So before that happens, let’s talk about Larry Miller.

If you follow sneakers, basketball, or business, you know the name. Under Miller’s leadership, Nike’s Jordan Brand grew from $150 million in annual revenue to over $4 billion. He ran the Portland Trail Blazers as president. He became one of the most senior Black executives in the history of American sport. Harvard Business School built a case study around him.

What almost nobody knew — for over forty years — was that Miller had pleaded guilty to second-degree murder at age 16, serving four and a half years in prison. Shortly after his release, he served another five years for armed robberies.

He didn’t hide it by lying. He told Sports Illustrated he never lied on an application, but could usually find loopholes. Most applications only asked if he’d been convicted in the prior five years. He answered the question that was asked and kept his mouth shut about everything else.

That worked until it didn’t.

Early in his career, Miller was being considered for a role at Arthur Andersen — then one of the Big Eight accounting firms. He’d gone through several interviews. At the final one, he decided to tell the hiring manager the truth. He watched the manager’s face fall. The manager told Miller he had an offer letter in his pocket, but couldn’t give it to him. “He said, ‘I can’t take a chance on you.’”

Miller had a degree from Temple, honors in accounting, an MBA from La Salle. None of it mattered once the words came out.

For the rest of his career, he kept it buried. But as he became more successful, he started suffering migraine headaches and nightmares. “There was always this tension and this fear that somehow this is going to come out, and it’s going to ruin everything I’ve built up to this point.”

That’s not a success story. That’s a man carrying forty years of dread through every boardroom, every negotiation, every time somebody ran a background check.

He finally told the truth publicly in 2022, in a memoir called JUMP. He was in his seventies.

Education Was the Hinge. Not the Ending.

Here’s the part that gets glossed over in the inspiration version of Miller’s story.

He didn’t find education after incarceration. He found it during. While inside, he earned his GED — one of the highest scores in the program — and was asked to serve as valedictorian. In his graduation speech, he told the people around him to “let time serve us.” Not survive it. Use it.

Then he enrolled in a college-in-prison program and earned an associate degree. Day-release classes. Transfer to Temple University. Bachelor’s in accounting with honors. MBA at La Salle. That sequence didn’t happen because the system was generous. It happened because the infrastructure existed — Pell grants for incarcerated students, college-in-prison programs — and Miller ran at it.

Fr. Greg Boyle of Homeboy Industries has a line that cuts through everything: nothing stops a bullet like a job. He’s right. And the data builds from there.

The case for education in prison isn’t sentimental. It’s actuarial. Every rung on that ladder represents a shift in how a person understands their own future. The zero percent at the master’s degree level isn’t because a graduate credential magically changes behavior. It’s because everything required to earn that degree — the structure, the identity shift, the experience of being believed in and believing in yourself — is what actually breaks the cycle.

A job starts that process. Education compounds it.

Miller is living proof of both. And he’s now spent the years since JUMP making that argument directly to HR directors and business leaders through his JUMP initiative — the Justice and Upward Mobility Project — because he knows the infrastructure that saved him has largely been stripped out. Pell grants for incarcerated students were eliminated in 1994. They were only partially restored in 2023. The college-in-prison pipeline that gave Miller his associate degree while serving time doesn’t exist at scale anymore. Which means the burden now sits almost entirely on what happens post-release — and that means employment.

What This Actually Means for Hiring

Miller’s story gets told as inspiration. The redemption arc, the unlikely executive, the proof that people can change. That framing isn’t wrong, but it’s incomplete.

Miller succeeded despite the system, not because of it. He got through because the paper trail was analog, because the right questions weren’t being asked, because the loopholes were still open. He points out directly that in the internet age, people can’t hide their pasts the way he did. The digital record is permanent. The workarounds are gone.

So the question isn’t whether people like Larry Miller deserve a chance. The question is: how many Larry Millers never made it past the application screen — because the records were digital, because they didn’t have the degrees, because no one found the workaround?

The answer isn’t a small number.

By 2022, 75 percent of states had adopted Ban the Box laws — prohibiting employers from asking about criminal history on an initial application, so candidates get evaluated on skills first. But more than 95 percent of employers still require background checks before hiring. At that point, a prior conviction often ends the conversation, regardless of what the person has done since.

Miller watched the manager’s face fall in 1982 and made a decision that cost him forty years of dread. The manager made a decision that cost his firm forty years of one of the best business minds in American sport.

Both of them lost something in that room.

Second Chance Month Ends Today. The Work Doesn’t.

At BFI, we don’t hire formerly incarcerated workers because it’s April. We do it because we’ve watched people show up, work hard, and produce — and we’ve watched the opportunity cost of every employer that passed on them first.

The people who work with us aren’t charity cases. They’re people who were locked out of the standard pipeline. The résumé gap, the box on the application, the instant screen-out before anyone reads a single line about capability. The system filters for clean records, not for what actually predicts performance: whether someone shows up and does the work.

Miller built a global brand. He ran a major sports franchise. He did it with a murder conviction on his record, concealed for forty years, while carrying the weight of it every single day.

That weight shouldn’t be the price of admission. That’s what second chance hiring actually means — not a feel-good month, not a social post. It means removing a structural barrier that costs companies real talent and costs workers their shot at a life.

If you’re an employer still treating a background check as a disqualifier rather than a data point, Larry Miller’s story is worth sitting with. Not as inspiration. As a question: who are you filtering out, and what are you actually losing?

Breaking Free Industries is a second-chance employer and custom decorated apparel shop based in Orange County, CA. We screen print, embroider, and produce — and we hire the people most shops won’t.

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