President Trump on Wednesday commuted the federal sentences of Larry Hoover, 74, who was serving three life terms for running a notorious Chicago drug gang out of a supermax prison cell, according to the White House.
The commutation is not expected to put Mr. Hoover back on the streets of Chicago — he has over 100 years left to serve on state murder charges in Illinois that presidential clemency does not erase. But it may lead to his transfer out of the supermax prison in Colorado where he is held.
Mr. Hoover had already been locked away in Illinois since the mid-70s for the murder of a rival drug dealer when federal prosecutors dragged him back to court in 1997. They accused him of running a vast and highly organized gang, the Gangster Disciples, that had nearly 30,000 members in Chicago alone and raked in $100 million a year trafficking drugs across the country.
Mr. Hoover, prosecutors said, was known as “King Larry” or “the Chairman” by thousands of youth who pledged undying allegiance to him.
He was convicted of federal drug conspiracy charges and moved to a federal prison in Florence, Colo., the highest-security prison in the United States.
According to The Chicago Sun-Times, Mr. Hoover had previously requested early release under the First Step Act, a criminal justice reform passed during Mr. Trump’s first term that aimed to expand early release programs for those who committed nonviolent crimes and drug offenses.
Mr. Hoover wrote to a federal judge in 2022 that he was “no longer the Larry Hoover people sometimes talk about, or he who is written about in the papers, or the crime figure described by the government.” The judge denied the early release request.
Mr. Hoover’s case has been a cause célèbre for years. In 2018, when the rapper Ye — then known as Kanye West — visited the Oval Office, he brought one of Mr. Hoover’s lawyers and told the president “it’s very important for me to get Hoover out.”
Because a president can commute only federal sentences, Mr. Hoover will likely have to serve the remainder of his 150- to 200-year sentence for his state murder conviction in Illinois.
The Gangster Disciples are still active in Chicago. The gang’s members continue to be prosecuted by the federal government, accused of racketeering, drug trafficking and murder.
Aishvarya Kavi works in the Washington bureau of The Times, helping to cover a variety of political and national news.
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