The new federal indictment runs only 25 pages, but it evokes more than a half-century of terror in Chicago and across the country. Indictments filed last week in southern Illinois against seven leaders of the Gangster Disciples allege severe crimes of racketeering conspiracy, drug trafficking, witness intimidation and multiple murders.
Just as important, the indictment attests that the U.S. Department of Justice’s most ambitious assault on any major gang in this nation’s history hasn’t yet stopped the mayhem. The Gangster Disciples, who in the 1990s had 50,000 members in 35 states, have since subdivided into smaller but still efficient and ruthless gangs. Today the GDs continue to provoke bloodshed in Chicago and other cities.
Federal courts will determine the guilt or innocence of the seven defendants named in the court filing. This case should, though, resonate across Chicago and Illinois. It is one more reminder of why GD founder Larry Hoover — the gang nation’s self-styled “King” and “Chairman” — should spend the rest of his days as federal inmate 86063-024.
Hoover is among the worst of the worst incarcerated at the supermax prison in Florence, Colorado. Yet the feds allege in their indictment that he has continued to hold sway over the GDs — just as he did, astonishingly, for the more than 20 years he spent in an Illinois prison.
Six life sentences followed by …
Hoover was serving a 200-year state sentence for murder when, in 1995, federal prosecutors accused him and 37 other GDs of masterminding the murderous drug gang’s reign of terror, much of it in poor neighborhoods. In 1997, jurors convicted Hoover on 40 criminal counts. At sentencing, lead prosecutor Ronald Safer dwelt on the many young lives Hoover had destroyed: “The tears of the mothers who have lost their children to the gang are real.”
U.S. District Judge Harry D. Leinenweber sentenced Hoover to six life sentences, seven 20-year sentences and three four-year sentences, all to run concurrently. Plus a five-year sentence that would come after the others.
Now, though, Hoover’s attorneys are back before Leinenweber, arguing that a federal law passed in 2018 means the judge should recalculate the sentence and give him an early release. That could mean moving Hoover from the federal supermax back to a more hospitable Illinois prison to continue serving his earlier state sentence for murder. Similar legal arguments already have led to reduced sentences for some of Hoover’s GD co-defendants.
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Yet the new indictment has Hoover still running gang business from Colorado. In one passage the feds allege that in September 2014, two of the new defendants discussed how Hoover recently had appointed them as “board members” reporting to Hoover and overseeing the GDs’ operations. Another passage says, “The Gangster Disciples hold gatherings and celebrations on certain dates of importance to the organization, such as the birthday of founder Larry Hoover.”
The indictment doesn’t say whether, as in past GD prosecutions, the government has recordings of alleged discussions of gang business. Hoover’s attorney argues that prosecutors included Hoover’s name in the indictment “gratuitously and without basis” in an attempt to thwart his chance of a reduced sentence.” The attorney, Justin Moore, wrote in a statement, “This is a 70-year-old man in the twilight of his years, who has serious medical complications, and is seeking release to finally be with his wife, children and grandchildren after nearly 50 years of separation. To have his name continuously thrown into the affairs of others and to be used as a scapegoat for criminal activity he has no connection to needs to cease.”
Is Hoover just an ailing, harmless grampa? Recall that before the feds charged him in 1995, Hoover had been nearing parole in Illinois. Some Chicago civic leaders said he was a changed man, and a few aldermen hoped to enlist his followers in their political campaigns.
But weeks of surreptitious government recordings of his conversations with GD visitors to his Illinois prison betrayed his alleged rehabilitation as a dangerous fantasy. In one discussion, Hoover had advised his deputy, Gregory “Shorty G” Shell, to occasionally give young gang members drugs to sell for pocket money: “You bring them along. They know they wouldn’t have anything without you.”
A gifted, and dangerous, leader
The new indictment doesn’t include Hoover as a defendant in this case. But if the new evidence persuasively suggests that he’s still an influence on the Gangster Disciples, that alone should resolve his request for a reduced federal sentence. Colorado, the Centennial State, is an appropriate place for him to spend the 21st century.
We’ve written before that it took an uncommonly gifted leader to run an interstate organized crime ring from prison. So we don’t underestimate Hoover’s ability to settle old scores or cause fresh havoc. A Chicago desperate to cope with a rising tide of homicides and other shootings doesn’t need Larry Hoover back in Illinois, chatting up his old cronies.
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