Five months after President Donald Trump commuted his federal life sentence, Gangster Disciples founder Larry Hoover has made his pitch for clemency on a state murder case to the Illinois Prisoner Review Board that could ultimately set him free after more than 50 years behind bars.
Trump in May commuted the federal life sentence of Chicago-born Hoover, a controversial move that abruptly ended a yearslong quest by the notorious street gang leader to win early release under the First Step Act passed during Trump’s first term.
Trump commutes federal life sentence of founding Gangster Disciples kingpin Larry Hoover
But Trump’s decision to commute didn’t mean Hoover was going free, as he’s still serving a 200-year sentence for his state court conviction for murder.
Hoover’s 121-page petition for clemency was received this week by the Illinois Prisoner Review Board, a board spokesperson said. Should the board deem the petition complete and meeting the requirements to be heard, the next step in Hoover’s push for freedom would be placed on the Prisoner Review Board’s clemency docket in January.
A spokesperson for Gov. JB Pritzker declined to comment on Wednesday, directing questions to the Prisoner Review Board.
Pritzker has previously said that any clemency requests from Hoover would be treated the same as any other prisoner.
“We have a process in the state of Illinois,” Pritzker told reporters soon after Trump’s commutation of Hoover’s federal sentence. “If you want to seek commutation or pardon, you go through a process. First you apply through the Prisoner Review Board, and then the Prisoner Review Board makes a recommendation to the governor.”
Hoover’s other avenue to freedom would be the granting of parole, a decision also made by the Prisoner Review Board. His most recent bid for parole fell short last year, though he’s allowed to renew his request next year, records show.
Hoover’s clemency petition, dated Tuesday, says the former gang kingpin “has demonstrated profound personal transformation and exceptional rehabilitation” over his decades in prison, and that he has suffered multiple heart attacks while performing prison labor in the Colorado state prison where he’s resided for the past several months.
In a letter included in the submission, Hoover echoed remarks he made in federal court last year when seeking relief through the First Step Act about how he is a changed man.
“I am no longer the Larry Hoover people talk about in the papers, or the crime figure described by the government,” Hoover wrote. “That man has over these many years transformed into the man I am today. I just want to come home and be with my family. I am tired.”
His lawyer, Justin Moore, wrote that Hoover’s continued incarceration “serves no rehabilitative purpose, no public-safety goal, and no justifiable penological interest.”
“He has long since fulfilled every punitive objective the law intended,” Moore said in the petition, adding that in “twilight of his life,” Hoover is hoping to contribute positively to his community and serve “as a living testament to the possibility of redemption.”
Federal prosecutors have vehemently opposed any breaks for Hoover, arguing he did untold damage to communities across Chicago during his reign on the streets. They argued he has continued to hold sway over the gang’s hierarchy while imprisoned, even promoting an underling he’d secretly communicated with through coded messages hidden in a dictionary.
But skeptics of Hoover’s supposed rehabilitation were not limited to prosecutors. In May, the boss of the Chicago FBI, Douglas DePodesta, told the Tribune he thought Hoover “caused a lot of damage in this city” and deserves to be in prison.
At a hearing last year on Hoover’s motion for early release, U.S. District Judge John Robert Blakey asked Hoover’s attorneys point-blank: “How many other murders is he responsible for … So many we can’t count?”
One of the nation’s largest street gangs, the Gangster Disciples became a major criminal force under Hoover’s leadership, with operations that spread to dozens of U.S. cities and were as sophisticated as many legitimate corporations, including a strict code of conduct for members and a franchise-style system for drug sales.
But they were also notoriously brutal, using violence and murder as a way to keep rivals at bay and even punish members who went astray.
Hoover was convicted in state court in 1973 of the murder of William Young, one of Hoover’s gang underlings who was shot to death that same year after he and others had stolen from gang stash houses.
In the early 1990s, before Hoover was charged in federal court, former Chicago Mayor Eugene Sawyer lobbied the Illinois Department of Corrections parole board on his behalf, arguing that Hoover could help stem Chicago’s street violence if he were allowed to return home, the Tribune reported at the time.
Hoover was indicted in federal court in 1995 on charges he continued to oversee the murderous drug gang’s reign of terror from prison. He was convicted on 40 criminal counts in 1997, and then-U.S. District Judge Harry Leinenweber sentenced him to the mandatory term of life.
For years, Hoover had been housed in solitary confinement at a supermax prison in Florence, Colorado, which counts a number of high-profile and notorious detainees, including Sinaloa cartel boss Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, Sept. 11 terrorist attack plotter Zacarias Moussaoui and Jeff Fort, the Chicago gang leader who founded the El Rukns.
Days after Trump commuted his federal sentence, Hoover was transferred out of the supermax prison in Florence and is currently being housed in a Colorado state Department of Corrections prison in Canon City, about 110 miles south of Denver, according to his clemency petition.
