Young Thug plea leads to questions about Fani Willis' use of RICO statute

Young Thug walked out of jail on probation. The 2020 election interference case has stalled. Developments in Fulton County’s marquee racketeering cases have some legal observers questioning District Attorney Fani Willis’ reliance on Georgia’s sprawling RICO statute.

“You don’t use a sledgehammer to kill an ant,” said former DeKalb District Attorney Robert James, referring to Young Thug, the Grammy Award-winning artist at the center of the Young Slime Life gang case. “And RICO was the sledgehammer.”

Willis made a name for herself earlier in her career as the lead prosecutor on the Atlanta Public Schools test cheating case, convicting 11 educators charged with racketeering. In her first term as district attorney, the Democrat brought several RICO cases, including one involving former President Donald Trump and another Young Thug, whose real name is Jeffery Williams.

Willis attracted national attention in both, in large part because she showed no fear of pursuing an ex-president and a popular rapper. She received death threats, prompting her to hire around-the-clock security.

But both cases have been upended by stunning developments that have raised questions about where each is heading. The bulk of the elections case is now frozen as an appeals court decides whether to remove Willis and her office from the prosecution. And three of Williams’ other five co-defendants accepted plea deals this week, making it unclear what will happen with the remaining defendants now that Williams is no longer on trial.

Willis has vehemently denied any wrongdoing in the election case, where her romantic relationship with a former deputy has come under scrutiny. And she and her allies have painted the recent events in the nearly 2-year-old trial involving Young Slime Life, or YSL, as a victory — one that held the alleged leader of a criminal enterprise responsible for the actions of his underlings, exactly what the RICO statute was designed to do.

“The convictions in this case represent accountability for admitted members of YSL, a violent street gang,” said Willis spokesman Jeff DiSantis. “Mr. Williams chose to plead guilty to all of the charges against him and allow the judge to determine his sentence. Every criminal defendant in every case has the right to make that decision at any time.”

Willis’ allies noted that Williams effectively admitted guilt to all the counts he faced. And he was put under a restrictive set of probation conditions by Judge Paige Reese Whitaker that would bar him from talking with former alleged associates and largely banish him from Atlanta for a decade.

“The most important thing is it’s another statement to the community that this kind of behavior and activity won’t be tolerated,” said Charlie Bailey, a former Fulton gang prosecutor and friend of Willis’ whose wife currently works in the DA’s office. “That you can’t terrorize communities and shoot up neighborhoods, kill folks, injure folks, rob people.”

‘Nobody should be on trial like this’

Other legal observers viewed the outcome differently.

“One of the problems with this case is it was falling apart under its own weight,” said former DeKalb County DA J. Tom Morgan.

He said Willis charged too many people, which paved the way for dozens of defense attorneys to get involved. That contributed to the trial becoming the longest in Georgia history, he said.

“Ms. Willis and I have a very different viewpoint on how to use RICO,” he said. “She, like she did in the (Atlanta Public Schools) case, indicts anybody and everybody, hoping that some will plead and testify against others. Our viewpoint (in DeKalb County) was that RICO was to go after the kingpin and maybe one or two of his top lieutenants.”

Georgia’s RICO law was put on the books in 1981. It was modeled after the federal version Congress enacted to put away mafia bosses who had traditionally evaded criminal prosecution by tying them to the actions of their underlings who carried out crimes on their behalf.

Prosecutors must show a pattern of racketeering activity, carried out by two or more people seeking to control or protect an interest in some sort of enterprise. Georgia’s RICO law defines racketeering more broadly than the federal statute. It also allows a DA to introduce evidence that, without racketeering charges, would not stand on its own, as individual crimes.

In the YSL case, prosecutors argued Young Thug led a street gang that terrorized a portion of southwest Atlanta. They planned to call more than 100 witnesses. Atlanta defense attorney Andrew Fleischman noted that prosecutors sometimes struggled to explain to the judge why they needed the testimony of some of those witnesses, and Whitaker appeared to be losing patience.

“Georgia’s RICO statute is incredibly broad, incredibly easy to prove, and yet somehow that incredible laxity ended up somehow working against the state that was not disciplined enough to tell a story of the case that made sense,” said Fleischman, a former public defender.

He has also been critical of prosecutors’ use of RICO in the election case, which he argues could have been quickly decided had the DA focused on a narrower set of charges such as false statements.

Williams’ attorney, Brian Steel, said he believed prosecutors had abused Georgia’s RICO statute, and that it was “wrong” that his client had to plead guilty to get his freedom.

“Jurors? Think about what they’re going through,” Steel said. “Nobody should be on trial like this.”

Williams is a famous musician with millions of dollars, but for defendants without the resources to fight lengthy court battles, Steel said, cases like this rarely end well. RICO prosecutions can often stretch on for years, leaving many lower- and middle-income defendants with few options but to plead or sit in jail.

Decrease in violent crime

Bailey, the former Fulton gang prosecutor, said the YSL case, combined with several other gang prosecutions undertaken by Willis’ office, including against Drug Rxch, the Piru Bloods and YFN, have led to a meaningful decrease in violent crime rates.

“The strategy of using RICO and the gang-statute to go after these organized crime syndicates has resulted in a lot of convictions and a drop over and above national trend in violent crime in this community,” Bailey said.

Since fall 2022, homicides are down nearly 27%, according to Atlanta police statistics, and firearm aggravated assaults have decreased by almost 28%. Willis recently said that outside of the YSL and YFN cases, her office has convicted at least 279 people for gang activity.

Bruce Morris, a veteran Atlanta criminal defense attorney not involved in the YSL case, has a less rosy view of Willis’s work.

“I’ve been consistently disappointed with Fani Willis’s leadership and the exercise of her discretion,” he said. “I question her decision-making.”

Morris also said it was inexcusable for the YSL prosecution team to have been found to have withheld favorable evidence from the defense and allowing witnesses to make highly prejudicial statements about defendants.

Willis shares the blame for that, Morris said. “She is the leader. She is responsible for the people she puts in the courtroom.”

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(Staff writer Shaddi Abusaid contributed to this article.)

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