How Atlanta Created a Gang Stereotype of Its Hip-Hop Artists

As the YSL trial begins, we’re re-running this 2022 feature on the connections law enforcement have made between Atlanta’s gangs and the local hip-hop community.

Rap has been associated with gang stereotypes for decades. During Snoop Dogg’s 1993 murder trial, prosecutors riffed off Snoop’s “Murder Was the Case” lyrics (“Murder was the crime they committed”) to make their (ultimately unsuccessful) closing arguments. Mac Phipps spent 21 years in jail for a 2000 shooting death, after prosecutors harped on his gangsta-rap persona — “This defendant who did this is the same defendant whose message is, ‘Murder, murder, kill, kill,’” a prosecutor said, quoting a Mac song featuring Mystikal — even though someone else had confessed to the crime. But it’s taken on a new urgency of late, with Atlanta as ground zero for a growing number of gang-related cases involving artists. In 2022, a 56-count indictment was issued against YSL Records, which accused rap stars Young Thug and Gunna of leading a criminal street gang. The case is more than just the latest example of law enforcement focusing its efforts on rappers, it’s the product of a city that has spent years cultivating a growing stereotype between its hip-hop community and gangs.

In 2015, defense attorney Drew Findling was representing Offset when he, along with Migos members Quavo and Takeoff, were arrested on gun and drug charges following a gig at Georgia Southern University in Statesboro, Georgia. While Quavo and Takeoff posted bail, Offset was denied bond over a past felony conviction. The next month, prosecutors cited “social-media reports” alleging that Offset was “the CEO” of Black Migos, a local street gang that his group’s moniker was allegedly in reference to. (In fact, the trio’s name was actually inspired by how Mexican drug cartels had proliferated in their native Gwinnett County.) It was the first time that Findling represented a rap artist accused of being a gang member.

“It really came out of left field,” Findling said. “I’ve known Offset, Quavo, and Takeoff since they were teenagers, and they’ve had nothing to do with gang activity. They’re just three young men who went to Berkmar High School, started performing together and then became an international success.” But Offset’s case, which was eventually dropped after the rapper took an Alford plea deal, was just the beginning. “There’s not a day that goes by where I don’t get a phone call, an email, a direct message, a WhatsApp, or a text message from somewhere in America about a similar case,” says Findling, calling the current gang allegations targeting Black and brown artists “violations of the 13th Amendment.”

Years ago, the city of Atlanta had a much different idea of its local gang presence, and though exact statistics were hard to come by, that hasn’t stopped the police force from making unbacked statements. Even Georgia governor Brian Kemp could only find FBI stats from seven years prior during Georgia’s 2018 gubernatorial race to make his case that gangs were a problem in Georgia, and that he, as governor, could fix them. Police have noted in the past how gangs were likely either Hispanic or Asian, but that assertion wasn’t backed by data. One outgoing U.S. Attorney told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution that local gangs “pick up names like Crips and Bloods, but our experience is that they’re not connected to national gangs. I have always been surprised, frankly, that the city of Atlanta has not developed big, sophisticated gangs.”

Though it’s tough to pinpoint a landmark case when it comes to linking alleged gang activity to Atlanta artists, Manny Arora, a criminal defense lawyer who worked at the Fulton County District Attorney’s office from 1998 to 2000, estimates that in Georgia, gang indictments preying on hip-hop stereotypes began to surface “in the last five-plus years,” shortly after Offset’s case in Statesboro. Adds Findling, “I think the allegations of gangs, incorporating RICO, but really gangs in general, is the newest iteration of systemic racism in the criminal justice system.”

RICO would be the Racketeering Influenced and Corruptions Act, which the Department of Justice created 60 years ago to target sprawling mafia organizations. But it’s since been used to go after the likes of DJ Drama and Don Cannon at the height of the career-making Gangsta Grillz mixtape series. (Prosecutors alleged that the operation — where Drama and Cannon worked with Gnarls Barkley, T.I., Jeezy, and Lil Wayne — was “bootlegging” in an age of growing digital-music piracy.) Though Offset’s 2015 case didn’t include racketeering charges, by alleging local gang involvement, it became yet another classic example of a phenomenon described in Erik Nielsen and Andrea L. Dennis’s book Rap on Trial, which details prosecutors pressing gang charges against rappers to bolster what might otherwise be an ordinary drug case. The YSL indictment cites lyrics, music videos, and social-media captions by Young Thug and his YSL signees as “overt and predicate acts within the RICO count,” said Fani Willis, Fulton County’s district attorney in Atlanta.

Today, as police claim metro Atlanta’s gang problem to be “larger than ever,” news reports present rap music as the soundtrack. A flash of an amateur music video introduces interviews with already-jailed gang members about the worst crimes they committed and the numbers of folks they’d recruited. But the video is presented without context, like whether one of the inmates, holding a handgun in his jean-shorts pocket, is actually its star. A separate music video with fewer than 5,000 views became proof of alleged Blood ties in two indictments totaling 169 counts against 20 people in Cobb County. The mother of one of the suspects was baffled, saying the guns and money the video stars wield are fake. And in 2017, when Atlanta’s Fox affiliate was investigating a spike in carjacking, police pointed once again to gang violence. Atlanta police’s specialized gang unit showed a clip teaming with kids and guns, as proof of gangs’ “brazen” social-media behavior at the time. But the scene is actually from SahBabii’s “Pull Up Wit Ah Stick” video.

The YSL indictment isn’t even the first time a music video was submitted as evidence against Young Thug. That would be in 2015, after Thug’s former tour manager Jimmy “PeeWee” Winfrey was arrested for shooting up Lil Wayne’s tour-bus fleet after an Atlanta-area club performance. Prosecutors alleged that Young Thug’s “Halftime” video — despite being released a month after the shooting — was proof of criminal intent, pointing out how Winfrey is seen holding an assault rifle. Thug was never charged for a crime, but Winfrey would eventually plead guilty and be sentenced to ten years in prison, before the YSL indictment named him as a suspect.

Not even transplants have been spared this treatment: In 2019, Chicago’s Lil Durk turned himself in to Atlanta police on charges related to a shooting. Police alleged that Durk was involved as a gang associate. But Arora, his attorney, argued that police wanted to involve Durk because of his celebrity status, telling Atlanta radio station V-103, “You’re not going to win prosecutor of the year or officer of the year by getting some guy off the street that nobody has heard of. This is a feather in our cap. I was a DA, and you get hyped up when it’s someone famous and you really want to go all out, because you want to look good.” Durk was released on bond less than a month later, specifically because he didn’t dodge the arrest.

Durk says that he moved to Atlanta to turn over a new leaf. “I had a bad background,” he told WSB-TV, “just growing up as a child and my father being incarcerated for 25 years, 26 years. I had a rough past. But me moving to Atlanta, I just thought that changed my whole identity or thinking.” Regardless, Arora says that in light of the incident, Durk is still taking precautions: “In some of his more recent songs, he comes and says this is all a prop, this isn’t whatever. So I guess it’s having an impact.” Durk can’t be blamed. In 2021, before the YSL indictment named YFN Lucci as a suspect and alleged rival gang member, the “Keys to the Street” rapper had landed his own RICO charge that cited a guest video appearance where he throws up gang signs.

The indictments of Gunna, who walked free on December 14, 2022 following a plea deal, and Young Thug reinforce the growing gang label of Atlanta’s hip-hop community. Findling, who is the lead attorney for YFN Lucci in his pending RICO case, also represents Yung Mal, a one-time signee to Gucci Mane’s 1017 Records. In 2021, DeKalb County police issued gang charges against Yung Mal and five others for a fatal shooting at a Chevron gas station. But Findling says Mal’s indictment goes as far as citing the size of a chain he wore, “when the history of necklaces and jewelry in the hip-hop genre goes back to the beginning — decades.”

Before becoming Gunna’s lead attorney in the YSL indictment, Steve Sadow had previously represented Atlanta native T.I. and Miami transplant Rick Ross. He says that metro Atlanta does have a gang presence, though it isn’t what Fulton County’s District Attorney office or Atlanta police have in mind. “There’s no talk in the Atlanta metro area about racially motivated, white-nationalist gangs,” Sadow says. “It’s all Black gangs, and I think they’re playing to some cultural stereotype of young Black males.”

But as Atlanta continues to lean into that stereotype, Arora foresees more of its hip-hop stars getting entangled in gang indictments, with their lyrics and videos being used as evidence: “I would absolutely say yes, or they would have to start changing what they’re singing about.”

As recently as spring 2022, local news repeated police claims that another label imprint by a rapper of equal stature to Young Thug and Gunna boasts gang ties: Lil Baby’s 4 Pockets Full. In the meantime, the Fulton County District Attorney’s office announced a 220-count RICO indictment against several dozen suspected members of the Drug Rich Gang. Once again, investigators cited amateur rap lyrics (“Send me the drop, we’ll kick in the house”) to make their case. Willis defended their tactics, saying, “I have some legal advice: Don’t confess to crimes on rap lyrics if you don’t want them used — or at least get out of my county.”

Findling wonders whether Atlanta rap stars will face more indictments, or their relationship to their own city may soon change. “I’ve talked to some of some pretty respected corporate folks around the country that are starting to get the feeling that Atlanta is a repressive community for the arts, and it may be best to just stay away,” he says. “While we may have African American political figures, there is a sense of Atlanta just being part of the systemic racism that plagues this country and plagues our criminal legal system.”

In an “Alford” plea, a defendant acknowledges that prosecution likely has enough evidence to win a conviction but ultimately maintains their innocence.

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