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Larry Hoover's Pardon Puts Spotlight on Atlanta's Own Gangster Disciples History
The news of Larry Hoover's pardon by President Donald Trump on Wednesday cast a shadow over Atlanta's own history with the Gangster Disciples.
For the past few years, Atlanta's top elected officials and law enforcement officers have engaged in concerted efforts to combat gang violence and recruitment throughout the city. Their fight may have taken on a new layer with Trump commuting the federal sentence of the notorious Chicago gang leader. Hoover's Gangster Disciples are one of the largest gangs in America, with factions throughout the country, including in metro Atlanta.
'My number one focus is targeting gangs. They are committing, conservatively, 75 to 80% of all of the violent crime that we are seeing within our community,' Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis said to reporters in 2022 following her office's indictment of Atlanta-rappers Young Thug, Gunna, and 26 others for their alleged participation in YSL, an alleged criminal street gang.
Hoover was convicted on federal RICO charges in 1998 for directing the Gangster Disciples — the gang he founded — from his Illinois prison cell, where he had been incarcerated on murder charges since 1973. After his conviction, he was transferred to ADX Florence in Colorado, the highest security federal prison in the country.
Just last year, three Georgians affiliated with Hoover's gang — a man from Atlanta, a man from Stone Mountain, and a woman from Athens — were sentenced to federal prison for their roles in a gang-retribution killing that left three men dead.
According to prosecutors in the Justice Department, the men were high ranking members of the Gangster Disciples and the woman was a leader of the gang's female arm, Sisters of the Struggle.
When federal prosecutors went after the Gangster Disciples back in 2016, they indicted 38 high-ranking members on racketeering charges. While some of the co-defendants were from across the country, 22 were Georgia residents and 15 lived in metro Atlanta. One was a former DeKalb County police officer who was caught on recorded phone calls relaying sensitive law enforcement information to the gang's 'chief enforcer.'
Another Atlanta co-defendant testified at his trial that Georgia-based rapper Rick Ross allegedly paid $3 million to the Gangster Disciples for using Hoover's name in his 2010 single 'B.M.F (Blowin' Money Fast).'
Though hip-hop was invented just a month before Hoover's incarceration began in 1973, he has remained a popular figure to name check in lyrics over the years. The day Hoover's pardon was announced, Ross and Atlanta rapper Offset both posted pictures of Hoover on their Instagram stories.
NBC attributes Hoover's sentence commutation by Trump to Atlanta-born, Chicago-raised rapper Kanye West, who thanked Trump on X for commuting the federal sentence when the news broke.
Despite Trump's pardon, Hoover, 74, will remain behind bars on state charges for a murder conviction for which he was sentenced to serve 200 years in 1973. He is eligible for parole since he was convicted five years before Illinois abolished discretionary parole.
The Illinois Department of Corrections lists Hoover's projected parole date as Oct. 25, 2062, which would be one month before his 112th birthday.
The post Larry Hoover's Pardon Puts Spotlight on Atlanta's Own Gangster Disciples History appeared first on Capital B News - Atlanta.
