As the racketeering trial against Atlanta’s YSL crew gears up, another arrest has been made — but not connected with the original 56-count indictment that has Young Thug facing a massive sentence and fans calling Gunna a snitch. Latasha Kendrick, the mother of YSL rapper Yak Gotti, was arrested on Tuesday (January 17) and charged with a criminal attempt to commit a misdemeanor after trying to pass the rapper a bag reportedly filled with tobacco and rolling papers at the Fulton County Courthouse.
WSB-TV reports that the mother of Gotti’s child, Nyesha Cox, alerted the rapper’s attorney to the contraband. Kendrick alleges that Cox was the one who requested the bag and an arrest warrant has been issued for the younger woman as well.
Gotti is one of 14 remaining defendants in the case and faces charges including conspiracy to commit murder, theft by receiving stolen property, and participation in criminal street gang activity. Other defendants include YSL founder Young Thug, who is charged with possession of illegal firearms and drugs, while other YSL members like Gunna and Unfoonk have accepted plea deals that suspended any sentences and allowed them to go free ahead of the trial.
The trial is expected to last up to six months, with the Fulton County District Attorney’s office accusing YSL of being a “hybrid street gang” rather than just a record label.
Some artists covered here are Warner Music artists. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.
Look, nobody really looks forward to jury duty. Even the most civic-minded among us might find it an inconvenience, considering that legal proceedings can be tedious and inscrutable and trials can drag on for months at a time. However, one juror in Young Thug’s upcoming RICO trial is learning just how seriously they should take that responsibility — or at least, that’s the idea behind the judge ordering the woman to write a 30-page essay on the importance of jury service.
According to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Juror No. 64 recently traveled to the Dominican Republic on business after trying to notify the court of her travel plans ahead of time. However, when she didn’t show up to court on Monday, Chief Judge Ural Glanville sent sheriff’s deputies to her grandmother’s home to collect her.
The juror said she travels frequently for work and didn’t get her summons until late December. “I didn’t really know I was in violation until the sheriff showed up,” she said. “I thought I was following directions.” However, that wasn’t enough to save her from being found in contempt of court for failure to appear. However, in lieu of sentencing her to jail (up to 20 days) or fining her (up to $1,000), Judge Glanville came up with a creative consequence.
The essay, which must be written in APA style with 10 primary sources and 10 secondary sources, will be due in three weeks and will be run through a plagiarism check. The juror must also appear again on February 13. If she doesn’t, harsher penalties may be applied. She’s otherwise excused from this round of service — but she’ll probably be a lot more eager to show up the next time she’s summoned. Judge Glanville offered his reasoning, reminding the juror that not very long ago, “people who looked like us couldn’t serve on juries. It was prohibited.”
Young Thug is accused of eight charges including gang activity, racketeering, and illegal weapon and drug possession. He’s one of over two dozen members of the alleged street gang “Young Slime Life” or “YSL” who was charged in a 56-count indictment in July of 2022. Thug maintains that YSL is really a record label standing for Young Stoner Life, and the case has drawn scrutiny for its use of Thug’s lyrics mentioning YSL to connect him to the alleged gang.
Several artists on the label have pled guilty to lesser charges of racketeering in exchange for their freedom; this could negatively influence the outcome of Thug’s defense, drawing criticism of those artists. Meanwhile, the terms of their plea deals mean that YSL Records, in its current form, will essentially be out of business, even if Thug is acquitted.
Young Thug is a Warner Music artist. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.
“N****s acting like they switching to a side But it’s only one side. #YsltheLabel #FreeThug&Yak GUNNA BACC!!!!!” Gunna wrote on Instagram. Over on Twitter, he wrote, “R.I.P. KEED ILY & IMY TWIN.”
Both posts, predictably, generated a lot of chatter. Gunna’s Instagram caption rubbed DJ Akademiks the wrong way, as he tweeted, “YSL having a civil war beef on instagram. Gunna came out and tried testing the water … claiming YSL the label and said Free Thugga … and everybody in ysl lookin at gunna like ‘N***a u the reason he in there’ … they all unfollowed him right after even thug sister.”
Meanwhile, Lil Gotit posted “Don’t call me twin” on his Instagram Story, prompting some fans to connect his post to Gunna’s, even though it appears Gunna was calling Keed “twin,” not Gotit.
However, as captured by No Jumper’s Instagram, Lil Gotit went live on Instagram and downplayed Akademiks’ claim of a “civil war” with YSL and disavowed “fake love” being shown to the late Lil Keed, his brother who passed away in May 2022 from “natural causes prompted by eosinophilia“:
Some are connecting Lil Gotit’s comments about Lil Keed to Gunna’s tweet about Keed, even though Gotit said in the video, “This go for anybody.”
Last May, Gunna, Young Thug and 26 other YSL members were arrested and charged in a 56-count grand jury indictment including “conspiring to violate the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act, murder, armed robbery, participation in criminal street gang activity,” as reported by WSB-TV’s Michael Seiden at the time.
Gunna, as part of what’s called an Alford plea, pled guilty to one charge of conspiracy to violate the RICO Act on December 14:
TAKE A LOOK: Rapper Gunna is officially out of jail. This is video of his first moments walking out of Fulton County Jail after he pleaded guilty to racketeering conspiracy charge in what’s called an Alford Plea @FOX5Atlanta pic.twitter.com/k8RXO8OijA
re testifying, Sadow says, “If called by any party in this case, he will testify truthfully, but he reserves his right to assert his 5th amendment privilege against self-incrimination.” pic.twitter.com/0WMJo9vTaC
As the controversial racketeering trial against Young Thug and his YSL crew proceeds, more observers are sharing their opinions on everything that has happened in the case so far. The latest is Harlem rapper Jim Jones, who shared some of his thoughts during an interview with Atlanta’s DJ Univercity on the latter’s podcast. Specifically, he called out the members of YSL who accepted plea deals in exchange for their freedom ahead of the trial; they include Gunna, YSL co-founder Walter Murphy, and Young Thug’s brother, Unfoonk.
Faced with the possibility of incurring double-digit prison sentences due to their connection with YSL Records, these members accepted so-called “Alford pleas,” in which they maintained their innocence and did not offer up any specific information, but pled guilty to lesser counts (mainly racketeering) and had their sentences commuted to time served, allowing them to leave Fulton County Jail without bond. This means they are obligated to appear in court if called as witnesses but reserve their ability to exercise their Fifth Amendment rights. Unfortunately, this can make it appear that they agree YSL is a gang — which is, of course, the prosecution’s whole strategy in extending these offers.
It can also give the appearance to outside observers — especially those not particularly well-versed in criminal law — the impression that they “snitched” in order to avoid longer sentences. Each member to accept a plea has maintained that their cooperation was limited to pleading guilty and that they won’t testify if subpoenaed. That didn’t stop Jim Jones from criticizing them and comparing their circumstances to his own brushes with the law.
“From where I come from, taking a plea when you have co-defendants is really not the thing you supposed to do,” he said. “If you up against a case by yourself and sh*t like that, that’s something different. But when you’re taking a plea it’s a touchy thing.” He continued, “I can say this: None of my n****s took a plea. They all in jail right now doing the time. They accepted what they did, they accepted who snitched on them, they accepted it all, and they all sat down and did their time… Nobody tried to take a plea, nobody tried to go around. N****s even went to trial — they did everything they could but do that.”
You can watch the full interview above.
Some artists covered here are Warner Music artists. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.
If nothing else proves that the US justice system desperately needs to be reworked, it’s this not-so-fun fact: In the same week that Watts rapper 03 Greedo came home from a nearly five-year prison bid for nonviolent offenses, the trial against his closest stylistic analog, Atlanta rapper Young Thug, began in Fulton County. Thug faces a litany of charges but all of them stem from just one evidentiary example: Thug’s own lyrics, in which he shouts out his label/crew, YSL, which now stands accused of being a street gang by Georgia state authorities. They argue that Thugger’s shout-outs constitute evidence of his membership in that gang — and even his leadership thereof.
Now, I’m not going to argue that either man is innocent. We just don’t know enough to say whether or not they’ve done the things they were accused of. A jury was convinced by apparently compelling evidence that Greedo did; a jury will have to be convinced the same for Thug. But Greedo was given five years for possession of a firearm in a state that otherwise promotes its open-carry laws as an advantage over other states’ more restrictive gun laws. And there is no way that any artist should be brought up on charges of racketeering just for rapping about their life and their business. The Johnny Cash comparison has been belabored to the point of beating a dead horse, but let’s face it; he was never indicted for shooting a man in Reno just to watch him die because everyone seems to get that this event was merely a lyrical device.
This week, Greedo released his first post-prison mixtape, the aptly-titled Free 03, produced by Mike Free. Although the timeline of its recording remains unclear, it appears to have been recorded at least in part during the flurry of activity that saw the Watts style-switcher collaborate extensively with a variety of producers to ensure he’d have enough material to bear out his sentence (almost, but not quite; he pretty much ran out of pre-recorded projects midway through the pandemic with his last album Load It Up Vol. 01 with Ron-Ron dropping in 2020). At least some of it sounds like it was recorded over a prison phone, much like Greedo’s frequent collaborator Drakeo The Ruler did with his own post-incarceration mixtape Thank You For Using GTL.
In fact, Drakeo makes an appearance on Free 03, on the song “No Free Features.” It’s a truly heartwrenching moment as you realize this could well be the last time we hear the Watts-bred duo on a record together, as Drakeo was murdered in late 2021, just months after concluding his own years-long nightmare encounter with the criminal justice system. That Drakeo spent two of the final three years of his life fighting similar charges to those currently faced by Young Thug hammers home this harrowing connection. Drakeo was never even convicted of a crime and was, in fact, acquitted of the original charges against him only to have new charges filed and his bail denied.
In a similar fashion, Young Thug was locked up for the better part of a year before his trial began this week, during which time the state shrewdly used a home raid to connect enough evidence to at least make something stick. Those charges, mainly amounting to firearm possession, are eerily reminiscent of those that got Greedo sentenced to over four years in prison. And while the content of Free 03 necessarily does not address the charges against him or his time inside, it ends on a chilling rumination, “If I Die” — which is especially spooky when you consider that Drakeo did so less than a year after his own release.
While the quality of Free 03 belies its likely rushed production process — for what it’s worth, the latter half is better, finding Greedo employing the slippery vocals that had set him apart from so much of the LA underground before his sentencing — it also highlights just what these aggressive sentences really cost. The one commodity you can’t get back is time; whatever financial setbacks are caused by derailing artists’ careers with extensive prison time and trumped-up charges, the true loss is time: Time that they could be helping their communities, as Thug did when he paid bail for dozens of Fulton County inmates for the holidays two years ago, time that they could be giving opportunities to their friends and admirers to escape the constraints of street life (YSL Records, gang or not, employed dozens of rappers, singers, and producers who might otherwise be out there causing real harm), and time they could be inspiring the next generation of aspiring artists to skip the street life entirely.
The fact is, even violent offenders — which the state has yet to prove most of the artists it’s targeted really are — deserve chances to at least try to make amends. They are more of a net positive to society generating income, engaging in philanthropy, and offering imperfect role models to fans than they are languishing in cells at a cost to the state. Meanwhile, there are thousands of inmates currently incarcerated for nonviolent offenses who aren’t artists of whom the same could be said. We latch onto the artists because their fame makes them obvious examples, but really, their plight is just a microcosm of the one faced by thousands of ordinary citizens every day. 03 free, but the time has come to free us all from the trap our prison industrial complex has boxed us into.
Rapper Gunna is looking to reenter the public fold and its good graces since his incarceration last May. While detained, the musician remained optimistic despite having his request for a bond denied three times. However, that didn’t stop him from writing a letter to his loved ones calling 2022, “one of the best years of my life.”
Although the “Pushin P” rapper has been out of jail for weeks, he’s remained uncharacteristically quiet on social media until yesterday. Taking to Instagram, Gunna shared an image of himself inside of his lush home with the caption, “N****s acting like they switching to a side. But it’s only one side,” adding the hashtags #YslTheLabel #FreeThug&Yak to show his seeming advocacy for his label head, Young Thug who is still incarcerated and awaiting trial. The rapper closed the post with, “Gunna Bacc!”
Gunna’s return to social media didn’t stop there. The rapper also uploaded a message to Twitter, writing, “R.I.P Keed. I love you, and I miss you, twin.” Unfortunately, Lil Keed, a fellow YSL Records artist, passed away shortly after Gunna’s arrest.
People didn’t take too kindly to Gunna’s mention of Young Thug or Lil Keed, including Lil Gotit, Keed’s brother. So Lil Gotit posted a subtle response to Gunna’s post. In the first message, Gotit writes, “N****s got to stop the cap,” implying Gunna’s public show of support for Young Thug is all a facade. Then Gotit follows it up with, “Don’t call me twin,” confirming all ties have been severed.
Notorious rap troll Tekashi 6ix9ine left a comment echoing Lil Gotit’s sentiments, “In court, you said it was a gang. Here on Instagram, you’re saying the label. LOL, you can’t make this sh*t up.”
Next week, the State of Georgia v. Jeffery Lamar Williams (better known professionally as Young Thug) and YSL Enterprises, Inc. (or Young Stoner Life Records) RICO trial will begin. With each day that passes, more details about the case emerge, including Williams’ alleged witness list.
In May 2022, Williams and 29 other associates were indicted on 56 counts of criminal acts under the state’s RICO Act. However, now that several co-defendants have accepted plea deals, including fellow rapper and label signee Gunna, fans wondered what that would mean for Williams. He was not offered a plea deal and was denied bond several times ahead of the trial, in which the state has tabbed “around 300 witnesses.” The defense is expected to call several prominent figures in the music world.
Williams’ charges are as follows:
one count of conspiracy to violate Georgia’s Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act,
possession of a firearm while committing a felony,
possession of a machine gun,
two counts of participating in criminal street activity,
three counts of violating the Georgia Controlled Substances Act,
Eight months after Young Thug’s arrest alongside 27 other members of the alleged street gang/record label YSL, jury selection for the trial has begun, while the trial itself will take place shortly afterward. Since the initial 56-count indictment and arrests, numerous members of the group have been offered and accepted plea deals that will at the very least see the end of YSL as we know it, including Gunna and Thug’s brother Unfoonk.
Young Thug himself, though, remains on the hook for eight charges after a search of his home yielded several new charges in addition to one count of conspiracy to violate Georgia’s Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act. The charges against him are now: possession of a firearm while committing a felony; possession of a machine gun; two counts of participating in criminal street activity; and three counts of violating the Georgia Controlled Substances Act. A charge of street racing was tacked on in December, drawing criticism from Thug’s lawyers.
The high-profile trial is estimated to last between six and nine months, according Fulton County Judge Ural Glanville (per Fox Atlanta), and has attracted the scrutiny of multiple recording industry professionals who feel that the use of Thug’s lyrics to connect him to the initial RICO indictments has racism written all over it. Regardless of the outcome, the terms of the plea deals given to Thug’s artists prevents them from associating with other accused members of the alleged gang and even mentioning it in their lyrics, which means that YSL will essentially be no more.
Young Thug is a Warner Music artist. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.
The State of Georgia v. Jeffery Lamar Williams (better known as Young Thug) and YSL Enterprises, Inc. (or Young Stoner Life Records) RICO trial is nearly underway. While representatives for Fulton County claim to have over 300 witnesses ready to testify to the rapper’s allegation of criminal activities, Young Thug has prepared a list to refute their testimony.
Thanks to Michael Seiden, a WSBTV reporter, Williams’ witness list was shared on Twitter. The list is much shorter than the prosecutor’s list, only including 28 people with a caveat that anyone named by the state of Georgia as a witness will be asked to speak on Williams’ behalf.
JUST IN: Music executives, rappers, entrepreneurs, city councilman and family members among 28 named witnesses who could potentially testify on behalf of Young Thug during trial. We’re still working to get a copy of the State’s witness list. @wsbtvpic.twitter.com/9Vfpy8mDtC
A few notable names appearing on the entertainer’s witness list include music executives Lyor Cohen and Kevin Liles, the co-founders of 300 Entertainment, the record label to which Williams is signed, as well as social activist/fellow rapper Killer Mike. Other industry professionals on the list include Sony Music executive Kelechi Aharanwa, and YSL’s co-founder Walter Murphy is also listed as a potential witness for Williams despite having accepted a plea deal.
Based on this list, as Williams fights the 56-count indictment, his legal strategy will rely on negating his public persona, as his father (Jeffery Williams Sr.) and ex-girlfriend (Jerrika Karlae Hauser) appear on the list as potential character witnesses.
While rapper Gunna’s lawyer insists he will not testify against Williams’ the conditions of his plea deal may have contingencies should the trial not go the way the prospectors expect. The same goes for Antonio “Mount Tounk” Sledge and Williams’ older brother Quantavious “Unfoonk” Grier, who were both Williams’ co-defendants before accepting a plea deal.
Young Thug’s trial for his RICO case is currently set to take place on Monday, January 9, 2023, and could potentially go on for more than six months.
Some of the artists mentioned are Warner Music artists. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.
Since the news broke about members of Young Thug’s imprint label, Young Slime Life, being charged with several crimes, including racketeering, murder, armed robbery, etc., at least seven members have entered a guilty plea in the case.
The latest YSL member to step forward is Antonio “Mount Tounk” Sledge, who pleaded guilty to conspiracy to violate the RICO act and possession of a firearm by a convicted felon. Sledge has been sentenced to 15 years on probation. Other YSL members that have entered a guilty plea include Thugger’s brother, Unfoonk, whose real name is Quintavis Grier, and Gunna. This information comes only two weeks before the RICO trial against the alleged “gang.”
According to the Atlanta Journal-Constitiuon, as part of the guilty plea, Sledge has agreed to testify (if called upon to do so at trial), possess no guns, commit no criminal acts, and will have to submit to random drug screenings. If Sledge tests positive for any drugs in his system, he will be required to enter a drug rehab within 30 days.
The former YSL member will also have a curfew from 10 p.m. to 6 a.m. unless “he is working, going to school, or a medical emergency arises.” He is also required to have absolutely no contact with any of the co-defendants.