President Donald Trump appears to have first heard of gang kingpin Larry Hoover during a 2018 press event with the rapper Kanye West— also known as Ye—that has been called the craziest Oval Office performance of all time.
The topic was prison reform and criminal justice. West, who was wearing a red MAGA hat, cited the case of Larry Hoover.
“He has six life sentences, and they have him next to the Unabomber doing 23 and 1,” West said, meaning only one hour out of his cell a day.
“What did he do?” Trump asked. “Tell me. Tell us.”
One of Hoover’s attorneys, Justin Moore, was present.
“Allegedly, it’s for conspiracy from prison — from state prison,” Moore said. “You know, it’s alleged. But we do believe even if he did commit those crimes, the sentence was overly broad and too strict.”
“What was the sentence?” Trump asked
“Six consecutive life sentences in the most secure prison in the world, also known as ‘a clean version of hell,’ for basically an economic crime.,” Moore said.
“What prison is that?” West asked, knowing the answer. “Name the prison.”
“ADX Supermax, in Florence, Colorado,” Moore said. “They house the Unabomber, al Qaeda operatives, mass killers, Oklahoma City bomber, things of that nature.”
Trump asked Hoover’s age and Moore said he was 68. (He is now 74.)
“And really, the reason why they imprisoned him is because he started doing positive for the community,” West said. “He started showing that he actually had power.”
The event took a step toward nutty as West continued, “So there’s theories that there’s infinite amounts of universe and there’s alternate universe. So it’s very important for me to get Hoover out, because in an alternate universe, I am him.
“And I have to go and get him free because he was doing positive inside of Chicago, just like how I’m moving back to Chicago and it’s not just about, you know, getting on stage and being an entertainer.”
West said that Hoover is “an example of a man that was turning his life around, and as soon as he tried to turn his life around, they hit him with six life sentences.”
“You say don’t tear down the statues?” West asked in apparent reference to Trump’s oft-stated opposition to scrapping Confederate monuments. “Larry Hoover is a living statue.”
At another moment, West announced that had a gift for Trump and showed him a cell phone picture. It was of what he called ”iPhone 1.” a hydrogen powered plane that he said could replace Air Force 1.
“Well, we’re going to have Apple, an American company, work on this plane,” West said.
Things further devolved to where it would have been easy to forget the talk about Larry Hoover.
His attorneys unsuccessfully sought in 2020 and again in 2024 to have his federal sentence reduced. Federal prosecutors offered their own views of what Moore had called basically an economic crime.
In court papers, prosecutors said, “Hoover claims he engaged in political activism as a teenager, but the record shows that he was actively engaged in gang violence—starting a pattern that lasted for decades. By his own admission, Hoover was expelled from Francis Parker High School after shooting a gang member in front of the principal’s office.”
By 1973, the papers say, Hoover had become a gang leader self-coronated as “King Hoover.”
“At a meeting of his gang, Hoover ordered the execution of William Young and other street level workers suspected of stealing from Hoover’s narcotics stash houses,” court papers say.
”On the night of February 26, 1973, Andrew Howard—a gang member under Hoover’s command—shot Young in the head six times and dumped his body in an alley. Approximately 90 minutes after the murder, Hoover called another meeting of his gang and reported that ‘he had gotten one of the guys that they was [sic] after and he wanted the other two…killed also before the week was out.’”
One of the two, Tony Tucker, vanished and has not been seen since. The third, Joshua Shaw wasShaw was was shot six times in the head and upper torso, but survived.
“During an interview with police officers, Mr. Joshua Shaw said that he was shot on the orders of inmate Mr. Larry Hoover,” court papers say. “Just before the murder trials of Mr. Larry Hoover and Mr. Andrew Howard, Mr. Josh Shaw was found dead in an alley with two gunshot wounds to the back of his head.”
Hoover and Howard were nonetheless convicted. Hoover was sentenced to 200 years for double murder.
“Astonishingly he continued to rule the Gangster Disciples from prison,” court papers report. “Under Hoover’s leadership the gang rose to prominence, controlling a large part of the street-level drug trafficking in the Chicago area. At its height in the early 1990s, the gang’s drug sales brought in about $100 million per year.”
In the 1980s, Hoover decided to go from monarchical to corporate. The King became the Chairman, with two boards of directors,
“An incarcerated Board for the leaders in prison and an unincarcerated Board for the leaders on the outside,” the court papers note.
Under the directors were the governors, who ran drug sales in neighborhoods of Chicago and its suburbs. Each governor had some 1,000 gang members under him. The “foot soldiers” were overseen by disciplined coordinators who were themselves overseen by regents.
“If there was more demand in an area than the Gangster Disciples had foot soldiers to supply, the gang permitted dealers unaffiliated with a gang, called ‘Neutrons,’ to sell their wares so long as they paid a tax to the Gangster Disciples,” the court papers say. “But the Gangster Disciples violently suppressed any rival gang’s attempt to sell in Gangster Disciple territory.”
The papers add, “In order to funnel proceeds from the enormous number of small sales to the gang’s leaders, Hoover decided to charge each gang member certain dues, called the ‘count’ or the ‘weekly.’ This was in effect a tax or franchise fee for doing business as a Gangster Disciple, similar to the tax levied on Neutrons. The Governors were responsible for getting the weekly in to the Directors, and Governors who owed back taxes were likely to find themselves the unwilling recipients of a beating.”
The papers further report that Hoover and his lieutenants retained “the power to order violations… violent beatings which sometimes rendered their victims hospitalized or killed.”
“In order to conceal the illegal activities of the gang, members were forbidden from discussing the same with law enforcement authorities under penalty of death,” the papers add.
In 1993, Hoover moved to further fill his pockets as chairman by instituting what was called “One Day a Week” or “Nation Dope.”
“One day each week, everyone selling within the gang’s territory had to sell drugs for Hoover himself,” the papers say. “Hoover estimated that this would net him $200,000 to $300,000 each week. He thought there might be some resistance to Nation Dope, so he instructed the Directors to put the word out that anyone refusing to sell Nation Dope would be shot.”
The papers add, “Hoover’s analysis was simple: ‘One day a week ain’t much to ask for your life.’”
Because prison phone calls are recorded, Hoover had his directors meet him in person at whatever state facility he was in at the time. State authorities sought to make that more difficult by transferring him to a prison in a far corner of Illinois. The directors still made the sixh-our drive from Chicago.
Federal prosecutors secured a warrant to place a transmitter in the visitor’s badge given to one of the gang leaders who met with Hoover.
“The government was thus able to monitor the conversations of the gang’s inner leadership for six weeks until the transmitter was discovered,” the papers report.
With the recordings and witnesses, the feds were able to indict Hoover and the gang’s top leadership for running a continuing criminal enterprise. He was convicted in 1997 and sentenced to six life terms.
“Because of Hoover’s iron grip on the GDs—which lasted for decades—many communities in Chicago were ravaged with drugs and gang violence,” federal prosecutors said in court papers in 2020.
“Hoover destroyed neighborhoods and lives, including minors who were conscripted into his gang. He ordered murders to maintain discipline within the gang and control the territory where his gang sold drugs. He negotiated with the gang’s narcotics suppliers and implemented a system to ensure that the profits from drug trafficking flowed up the ranks to his pockets. And Hoover did all this from a state prison.”
That ended when Hoover was consigned to the U.S. supermax prison, ADMAX Florence in Colorado. He was in perpetual solitary confinement and cut off from any direct communication with the gang. The “GDs” splintered into a myriad of factions without him.
Hoover declared himself reformed, saying that “GD” now stood for “growth and development.” Prosecutors dismissed it as a scam. Two judges held that the federal sentence should stand as imposed and Hoover remained inmate 8063-024 in ADMAX Florence.
“To the extent any one person can deter another to commit crimes, Hoover’s life imprisonment symbolically demonstrates that the rule of law reaches even those in power who seem untouchable,” U.S. District Court Judge Harry Leinenweber said in his 2020 ruling.
But as measured by myth, Hoover remained as big as ever.
“Larry Hoover is still a symbolic figure nationally within the world of street gangs,” federal prosecutors said in court papers. “Nearly every gang member in Chicago even if they were not born during Larry Hoover’s reign knows his name. He’s the famous chairman of the Gangster Disciples.”
The GD’s emblem is a six point star and West was almost certainly making reference to both the gang and Hoover in the 2021 song “Pure Soul. ”
“Always had mob ties/ Stood on my six points, how could I not rise?… / And for all the guys that went to the White House and said, ‘Free the old man.’”
Kanye enlisted Drake to join him performing at a “Free Larry Hoover” benefit concert at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum that December.
Some 70,000 people attended and the event went global when Amazon streamed it on Prime Video, the Amazon Music app, and the Amazon Music Twitch channel. The benefit for the man in ADMAX also became the first content streamed to IMAX theaters.
Trump returned to the White House this year in part by stoking fears of what he describes as an invading horde of violent migrants, among them gang members he described as “the worst of the worst.”
But on Wednesday, Trump’s recent binge of pardons and commutations extended from various MAGA white collar criminals to a man who ran an all-American gang as large and vicious as MS-13 or Tren de Aragua. The gang leader whose name had come up during the zany Oval Office meeting with Kanye seven years ago received a commutation.
Hoover still faces more than a century behind bars on a state murder conviction over which Trump has no power.
But the commutation of his federal sentence imparts a message that prosecutors warned Hoover’s bid for a sentence reduction five years ago would have sent if successful.
“The lesson to gang members today will be that there is no need to fear federal prosecution or the prospect of a life sentence and that federal punishment for the kinds of crimes that Hoover committed is not definite or not certain, because not even the likes of Larry Hoover, the worst of the worst, ultimately had to serve his federal life sentence,” the government’s memo in opposition said.
