Homeboy with a heart

“There is an idea that has taken root in the world; it is at the root of all that is wrong with it and the idea would be this — that there just might be lives out there that matter less than other lives,” Boyle said. “So how do we stand against that idea?”

Homeboy Industries was hit hard by the recession. In May, Boyle announced he would lay off 330 employees because of a $5-million budget shortfall. He authored “Tattoos on the Heart” partly to provide a new revenue stream, Boyle said.

But while the financial success of Homeboy Industries is important, even more important are the therapeutic opportunities that Homeboy Industries businesses provide for employees, Boyle said.

“The real world believes in the survival of the fittest, and I believe in the survival of the un-fittest,” he said. “I don’t want to morph ourselves into a place that works with the most likely to succeed, and thereby abandons the least likely to succeed.”

Boyle turns 57 in May, and after a bout with leukemia in 2003, he is in good health. He said he has no plans to retire.

He is encouraged by the drop in gang-related violence, Boyle said, the result of hard work by numerous stakeholders, including business, civic and religious leaders.

“Whatever we are doing as a community is working,” Boyle said. “We are at 1967 homicide levels, and we have cut gang-related homicides in half and half again — that is extraordinary. And I always look to the fact that our first 10 years was marked most notably by death threats, bomb threats and hate mail. And the last 10 years have been nothing of the kind.”