Late last year, Daniel Hernandez, better known as 6ix9ine, violated the terms of his release from federal prison, where he had served time on racketeering-related charges.
Mr. Hernandez, a slight, platinum-selling rapper with facial tattoos, had flown to Las Vegas without permission and used meth. Back to prison he went for a few weeks. Within months, he was once again in the soup, this time for having cocaine and MDMA. A hearing on whether he would return to prison again was scheduled this month.
Then Mr. Hernandez was accused of violating his release terms for a third time.
On Thursday, he pleaded guilty to that, admitting that he and a comrade had beaten up a man inside a mall in Florida.
“Me and another individual hit a person, and I was wrong,” Mr. Hernandez told Judge Paul A. Engelmayer of Federal District Court in Manhattan.
A prosecutor, Jonathan Rebold, supplied context. Mr. Hernandez had been visiting the mall, in Palm Beach County, on Aug. 8 when a “verbal altercation” took place with a man who taunted Mr. Hernandez over his role as a government witness against gang members he had once been allied with.
Mr. Hernandez and a second man knocked the victim to the ground and kicked and punched him, Mr. Rebold said, then fled when they realized their target had a gun.
“This is now the third time before this court in the last year,” Mr. Rebold said, adding that he had concerns about Mr. Hernandez’s impulse control.
Mr. Hernandez’s lawyer, Lance Lazzaro, replied that his client had not been looking for trouble, adding: “He’s confronted by his history.”
Judge Engelmayer ordered that Mr. Hernandez be placed into home detention in Florida, where he will be fitted with an electronic ankle bracelet. The judge told the defendant that he was sorry to hear “that there are still people in this world who will taunt you,” but urged him to turn the other cheek.
Few public figures have a more persistently troubled relationship with the law than Mr. Hernandez, a brash performer who came to prominence in 2017 when he released a video for a song called “Gummo” that showed him delivering scatological rhymes and prancing with pistol-wielding gangsters on a Brooklyn street. It has been viewed hundreds of millions of times.
Mr. Hernandez, who once described himself as having a “scumbag persona,” has long projected what oa New York Times critic called “LOL-shrug nihilism,” spouting insults, cultivating feuds and relishing transgression.
His admitted criminal conduct began in 2015, before he attained musical renown, when he induced a 13-year-old girl to have sex with an adult man. Prosecutors said he posted videos of that encounter on social media.
Mr. Hernandez was sentenced to probation. But the Manhattan district attorney’s office later said that Mr. Hernandez had violated its terms, driving with a suspended license in Brooklyn and grabbing a 16-year-old fan by the neck in Houston. He had also joined a gang and used his following as a rapper to provoke gun violence, prosecutors added.
Although Mr. Hernandez had been given “every chance to succeed,” he had “failed to mature” into a law-abiding adult, prosecutors wrote in 2018, asking that he be sentenced to prison. A State Supreme Court justice sentenced him to community service and four years of probation.
About a year later Mr. Hernandez was charged in a racketeering conspiracy case, along with five other people connected to the Nine Trey Gangsta Bloods, whose members have been accused of murder, robbery and drug trafficking.
Mr. Hernandez made a second plea agreement, this time with the U.S. attorney’s office. He admitted to violent crime in aid of racketeering, firearms offenses and conspiracy, then testified against two Nine Trey members. On the stand, Mr. Hernandez gave a vivid description of the gang’s operations, including the way its members had bolstered his street credibility, then threatened his life.
The two Nine Trey members were convicted, and prosecutors called Mr. Hernandez’s cooperation “extremely useful.” He was sentenced to two years in prison, then released four months early, in 2020, because asthma made him vulnerable to Covid.
For some time, Mr. Hernandez seemed to avoid serious trouble. Then, last fall, he was arrested when he missed a court appearance in Manhattan.
Judge Engelmayer said then that he was concerned by reports that Mr. Hernandez had “absconded” from the Dominican Republic in 2023 while charges were pending against him stemming from a fight, and had een ticketed in Florida for driving 198 miles an hour.
The judge sentenced him in November to 45 days. The next round of violations occurred when Mr. Hernandez’s home in Florida was searched in March. Mr. Hernandez pleaded guilty in July to possessing contraband there.
On Thursday, Judge Engelmayer said he was troubled by Mr. Hernandez’s “serial pattern of violating supervised release” and would take it into account.
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