Donald Trump has commuted the sentence of Larry Hoover, a former Chicago gang leader, who had been serving multiple life sentences for more than five decades.
Hoover, 74, is the co-founder of Gangster Disciples, a gang described in court documents as “large and vicious” that sold “great quantities of cocaine, heroin, and other drugs in Chicago”.
He was convicted in 1973 for ordering the killing of a 19-year-old neighborhood drug dealer and given a sentence of 150 to 200 years.
In 1997, he was given six life sentences after being found guilty of federal drug conspiracy, extortion, money laundering and continuing to engage in a criminal enterprise.
He has been serving out his sentence at ADX Florence prison facility in Fremont county, Colorado.
The commutation, first reported by Notus, was confirmed by a White House official.
Hoover renounced his criminal past and has made repeated requests to shorten his sentence, including under the First Step Act, a criminal justice reform bill passed during Trump’s first term.
“I’m a completely different person than the man who went to prison in 1997,” Hoover told a court in 2024.
At a court hearing last year, Hoover’s lawyers said he had “virtually no contact with the outside world” for more than two decades and “spends 23 hours a day in a concrete cell no larger than a parking space”.
Hoover was the subject of a 2021 “Free Larry Hoover Benefit Concert” organized by rappers Kanye West and Drake.
