Accused Crips leader charged in ‘mafia-like' crime ring busted by feds
A rap executive and alleged high-level Crips street gang leader was charged with dozens of federal crimes Thursday for what the Department of Justice (DOJ) called a "mafia-like" criminal enterprise.
Eugene "Big U" Henley, Jr., 58, has been charged with one count of conspiracy to violate the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act involving his alleged Los Angeles-based organized crime syndicate, according to the DOJ.
Other charges against Henley involve nine counts of attempted Hobbs Act extortion, five counts of Hobbs Act extortion, one count related to an interstate prostitution ring, 15 counts of wire fraud, five counts of embezzlement for allegedly stealing from a charity that received federal funding and funding from the city of Los Angeles, one count of bank fraud, one count of tax evasion and two counts of willful failure to file a tax return.
The Hobbs Act prohibits "actual or attempted robbery or extortion affecting interstate or foreign commerce," according to the DOJ.
"As the indictment alleges, Mr. Henley led a criminal enterprise whose conduct ranged from murder to sophisticated fraud that included stealing from taxpayers and a charity," Acting United States Attorney for the Central District of California Joseph McNally said in a release announcing the charges.
"Eradicating gangs and organized crime is the Department of Justice's top priority. Today's charges against the leadership of this criminal outfit will make our neighborhoods in Los Angeles safer."
According to the indictment, Henley operated "Big U Enterprise," what the DOJ calls his "mafia-like" criminal organization from 2010 to March of this year, using his stature within the Rollin' 60s Crips street gang to expand his power through fear and intimidation.
However, the DOJ said Henley's "Big U Enterprise" operated separately from the gang.
"While the Big U Enterprise at times partnered with the Rollin' 60s and other criminal elements for mutual benefit, the Big U Enterprise is a distinct and independent criminal enterprise engaged in criminal activity including murder, extortion, robbery, trafficking and exploiting sex workers, fraud, and illegal gambling," according to the DOJ.
The murder claim is related to Henley's alleged 2021 killing of a rapper signed to his record label Uneek Music. Henley is accused of shooting and killing a victim, identified only as "R.W.," for recording a defamatory song about Henley.
Henley is also accused of using an anti-gang charity he founded and directed, Developing Options, to protect gang members with whom he was associated. He also allegedly embezzled funds from the charity, which was supported by grants from Los Angeles' Gang Reduction Youth Development (GRYD) Foundation. GRYD is also partially funded with federal grant money.
According to Yahoo! Sports, former NBA superstar Shaquille O'Neal donated to GRYD. So did current NBA player Draymond Green. The Developing Options website has a front-page photo of rapper Snoop Dogg posing with youth football players.
The Los Angeles Times reported that Henley helped launch the career of the late rapper Nipsey Hussle, a fellow Rollin' 60s Crip who was shot and killed in Los Angeles in 2021.
Henley was also featured in the FX docuseries "Hip-Hop Uncovered."
"The RICO charges against Mr. Henley and his associates reflect a pattern of crimes that runs the gambit from extortion to tax evasion, all under the umbrella of a well-organized criminal organization led by Mr. Henley," said Special Agent in Charge Tyler Hatcher, IRS Criminal Investigation, Los Angeles Field Office.
"Additionally, Mr. Henley allegedly duped the County of Los Angeles by running a charitable organization that promoted anti-gang solutions while continuing criminal activity that was directly contrary to his charity. IRS-CI is proud to partner with fellow law enforcement organizations to investigate these criminal organizations to protect our communities from further harm."
The FBI was credited with assisting in the investigation.
"Mr. Henley looks forward to a vigorous defense of these charges and maintains his innocence," his attorney John Targowski told Fox News Digital.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Boston Globe
6 minutes ago
- Boston Globe
US imposes sanctions on a Palestinian NGO and other charities, accusing them ties to militant groups
The federal government claims that Addameer 'has long supported and is affiliated' with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a secular, left-wing movement with a political party and an armed wing that has carried out deadly attacks against Israelis. Israel and the United States have labeled the PFLP a terrorist organization. Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up Addameer did not immediately have a comment on the sanctions. Advertisement Israel has alleged that Addameer funds terrorism, a claim that the United Nations previously said it could not support with compelling evidence. In a 2022 The organization also works with Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and is a member of the World Organization Against Torture. Israel's 2022 storming of Addameer's offices, prompted a rebuke from the UN, who said in a statement that Israel had not provided convincing evidence to support the claim. The UN said Addameer was conducting 'critical human rights, humanitarian and development work in the Occupied Palestinian Territory.' Advertisement In February, Zachor Legal Institute, an Israeli-American advocacy group that says it focuses on combatting antisemitism and terrorism, requested Addameer be added to Treasury's sanctions list. Marc Greendorfer, president of Zachor Legal Institute said in an email to the Associated Press that his group is 'very pleased to see Treasury following up on our request.' He said the federal government should act 'to prevent hostile foreign actors from spreading hate and violence in the United States. We applaud Treasury's action and encourage Treasury to expand its focus to the other groups that we identified.' Other entities hit with sanctions Tuesday include: The Gaza-based charity Al Weam Charitable Society and its leader The Turkish charity Filistin Vakfi and its leader El Baraka Association for Charitable and Humanitarian Work and its leader The Netherlands-based Israa Charitable Foundation Netherlands and two employees The Italy-based Associazione Benefica La Cupola d'Oro A Because the majority of crowdfunding activity is legitimate, 'this status can make it more difficult for law enforcement attempting to investigate potential (terrorist financing) cases with a crowdfunding and online fundraising nexus,' the report said. Frankel reported from Jerusalem.
New York Times
15 minutes ago
- New York Times
Live Updates: California Asks Court to Block Use of Troops in ICE Raids
In downtown Los Angeles on Sunday, protesters faced off with law enforcement officers. Disinformation about the events has circulated online. Misleading photographs, videos and text have spread widely on social media as protests against immigrant raids have unfolded in Los Angeles, rehashing old conspiracy theories and expressing support for President Trump's actions. The flood of falsehoods online appeared intended to stoke outrage toward immigrants and political leaders, principally Democrats. They also added to the confusion over what exactly was happening on the streets, which was portrayed in digital and social media through starkly divergent ideological lenses. Many posts created the false impression that the entire city was engulfed in violence, when the clashes were limited to only a small part. There were numerous scenes of protesters throwing rocks or other objects at law enforcement officers and setting cars ablaze, including a number of self-driving Waymo taxis. At the same time, false images spread to revive old conspiracies that the protests were a planned provocation, not a spontaneous response to the immigration raids. The confrontation escalated on Monday as new protests occurred and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced — on X — that he was mobilizing 700 Marines from a base near Los Angeles to guard federal buildings. They are expected to join 2,000 members of the California National Guard whom Mr. Trump ordered deployed without the authorization of the state's governor, Gavin Newsom, who normally has command of the troops. The latest deployments prompted a new wave of misleading images to spread — some purporting to show Marines and the military service's weapons in action. One was a still from 'Blue Thunder,' a 1983 action-thriller about a conspiracy to deprive residents of Los Angeles of their civil rights. It features a climactic dogfight over the city's downtown. Darren L. Linvill, a researcher at Clemson University's Media Forensics Hub, said conservatives online were 'building up the riots in a performative way' to help bolster Mr. Trump's claims that Los Angeles had been taken over by 'violent, insurrectionist mobs.' Dr. Linvill said the posts were also 'a bit self-fulfilling.' 'As they direct attention to it,' he said, 'more protesters will show up.' James Woods, the actor who has become known for spreading conspiracy theories, used his account on X to rail against the state's elected officials, especially Mr. Newsom, a Democrat. He also reposted a fabricated quote, attributed to former President Barack Obama, discussing a secret plot to impose socialism on the country, as well as a video of burning police cars that was from 2020. An innocuous photograph of a pallet of bricks, actually posted on the website of a building materials wholesaler in Malaysia, was cited as proof that the protests were organized by nonprofit organizations supported by George Soros, the financier who, to the feverishly conspiratorial right, has become a mastermind of global disorder. Image These bricks are actually from an image on the website of a building materials wholesaler in Malaysia. Credit... The New York Times 'It's Civil War!!' an account on X wrote on Saturday, claiming that the bricks had been placed near the offices of Immigration and Customs Enforcement for 'Democrat militants.' X posted a Community Note pointing out that the photograph had nothing to do with the protests, but it still was seen more than 800,000 times. It was also widely reposted, including by several seemingly inauthentic accounts in Chinese. The online trope dates at least to the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020. It reappeared in 2022 after a conspiratorial post by Representative Lauren Boebert, a Colorado Republican who suggested that bricks for a paving project near Capitol Hill were intended for violent protests after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. 'These days, it feels like every time there's a protest, the old clickbaity 'pallets of bricks' hoax shows up right on cue,' the Social Media Lab, a research center at the Toronto Metropolitan University, wrote on Bluesky. 'You know the one, photos or videos of bricks supposedly left out to encourage rioting. It's catnip for right-wing agitators and grifters.' It also fits into the narrative that protests against government policies are somehow inauthentic. On his own platform, Truth Social, Mr. Trump also suggested that the protesters were 'Paid Insurrectionists!' Numerous posts echoed unsubstantiated claims that the protests were the work of Mr. Soros as well as local nongovernment organizations or Democratic elected officials, including the mayor of Los Angeles, Karen Bass. Some posts disparaging the protests were shared by accounts with deceptive handles that closely resembled those of official government sources or news organizations. Mike Benz, a conspiracy-minded influencer on X who last year claimed that the Pentagon used the pop star Taylor Swift as part of a psychological operation to undercut Mr. Trump, advanced an outlandish theory that the mayor had links to the Central Intelligence Agency and had helped start riots in the city where she lives. He based that simply on Ms. Bass's role as a board member for the National Endowment for Democracy, the congressionally mandated organization formed during the Reagan administration to promote democratic governance around the world. Not surprisingly, perhaps, the theme was echoed by accounts across social media linked to Russia, which often amplifies content that discredits the United States. The Kremlin and its supporters have long accused Mr. Soros or the United States government of covertly sponsoring 'color revolutions' to overthrow governments — from the Arab Spring countries swept up by mass street protests in 2011 to Ukraine. 'It is nationwide conspiracy of liberals against not only Trump but against American people in general,' Aleksandr Dugin, a prominent nationalist in Russia, wrote on X on Sunday. Disinformation in situations like these spreads so quickly and widely that efforts to verify facts cannot keep up, said Nora Benavidez, senior counsel at Free Press, an advocacy organization that studies the intersection of media, technology and the law. She described it as part of 'a much longer effort to delegitimize peaceful resistance movements.' 'Information warfare is always a symptom of conflict, stoked often by those in power to fuel their own illiberal goals,' she said. 'It confuses audiences, scares people who might otherwise have empathy for the cause and divides us when we need solidarity most.'
Indianapolis Star
16 minutes ago
- Indianapolis Star
Here's what the woman forcibly removed from Indianapolis meeting wanted to say
Standing outside the City-County Building on June 9 after sheriff's deputies forcibly removed her, Lauren Roberts — a former deputy campaign manager for Mayor Joe Hogsett and the first woman to accuse the mayor's top aide of sexual harassment — read the statement she had planned to share with the Indianapolis City-County Council before she was kicked out. "If I could tell my younger self what Joe Hogsett and his then-campaign manager, Thomas Cook, were about to put me through," Roberts said of her time working for Hogsett from November 2014 to June 2015, during his first mayoral run, "I would tell her to run away and don't look back." Law enforcement's aggressive removal of Roberts is the latest eruption in a conflict made public in July 2024, when IndyStar reported Roberts and two other women's allegations that Cook pressured them toward intimacy and unwanted sexual encounters while he served as their boss under Hogsett. To investigate the claims, the city hired the Chicago-based law firm Fisher Phillips to conduct an investigation. The 54-page final report released May 29 found that the Hogsett administration followed the law in handling the women's claims. But investigators highlighted ethical concerns around Hogsett's decision to allow Cook to resign in 2020, more than two months after an internal recommendation to fire him. What further outraged Roberts and another Cook accuser, however, is what did not appear in the report: that the mayor, who was married and more than 30 years older than each woman at the time, sent them late-night and personal texts alluding to poetry. Fisher Phillips investigators have declined to comment on the omissions. Cook in the past apologized for his conduct. Hogsett, meanwhile, has defended his handling of his past investigations into Cook and did not address IndyStar's questions about the text exchanges. In her statement, Roberts called the Fisher Phillips report a "political performance" because the text messages were left out and Cook wasn't subpoenaed to testify — an authority granted to the council's Investigative Committee. "Fisher Phillips' report made glaring omissions in favor of the mayor's version of events, made sloppy errors about basic facts that we backed with overwhelming documentation, and frequently, in the most misogynistic way, characterized survivors' statements as claims while the mayor's were treated as facts," Roberts said in her statement outside the council meeting. At the June 9 meeting, the council voted to postpone the final $300,000 payment to Fisher Phillips until councilors learn more about why the law firm left out certain details. The council said its Administrative and Finance Committee would hear public comment on the report in its next hearing on June 17 at 5:30 p.m. During her official comments to the council, Roberts spoke for about 10 seconds before a councilor interrupted her to ask whether her speech was relevant to the meeting agenda. After Roberts restarted and accused councilors of trying to silence her with "manipulative back-room conversations," Council President Vop Osili interrupted Roberts. 'You're welcome to have me hauled out by sheriffs, but I'm going to take my time," Roberts told Osili. 'You will have two minutes," Osili replied, invoking the standard time limit for public comment, "and when you are done with that two minutes, you will be done." When the two minutes were up, Osili said, "Ms. Roberts, you are now done." After she refused to stop talking and leave the microphone, Osili said, "Sheriff, you will remove anyone who is talking at this point." Multiple sheriff's deputies pushed Roberts out of the room while she resisted and told them to stop touching her. "It is never a pleasure to escort someone from our room," Osili told media after the meeting. "But we have a sense of order here and we have rules that we have followed … for a very long time. And others have had to abide by those. When someone indicates or says that they will talk for as long as they like, it's not something that this council can stand with." Roberts' overarching message to councilors Monday night was that they should call for Hogsett to resign. So far, three councilors — Democrat Andrew Nielsen, Democratic socialist Jesse Brown and Republican Joshua Bain, who announced his demand Tuesday — have called on Hogsett to resign. Councilor Crista Carlino, chair of the investigative committee, said after Monday's meeting that she was "deeply considering" that possibility. In her statement, Roberts chastised all the councilors for failing to act. "Survivors, whistleblowers, city workers and campaign staff who speak out about abuse are not the problem for the Democratic party, for this administration, or for this council," Roberts said. "Abusers are the problem. Your constituents cannot afford for you to spend another moment wringing your hands or claiming that your role is limited to policymaking."
