SAN JOSE — It took two near-death experiences before 36-year-old Joshua Anthony Hernandez was ready to put his life as a gangster in the rearview mirror.

He recovered from a near-fatal drug overdose just in time to get indicted in one of the biggest racketeering cases in California history. Months later, while incarcerated at Dublin’s Santa Rita Jail, he was cornered in a cell by three others, his face sliced open in what he now says was a moment that led to empathy and greater understanding of the similar harm he’d inflicted on others.

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After that, the onetime Norteño gang leader found a new calling: jailhouse muralist, through a volunteer program aimed at giving Alameda County inmates a positive outlet, court records show. That change in direction may have yielded Hern

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