A $100,000 bounty was placed on the head of rapper FBG Duck before he was shot and killed outside a high-end store in the Gold Coast over two years ago, according to police records reviewed by the Chicago Sun-Times.
FBG Duck, whose real name was Carlton Weekly, was shot as many as 21 times in the daytime attack on Aug. 4, 2020, that also left his girlfriend and someone else waiting in line with him at the Dolce & Gabbana store, 68 E. Oak St., wounded.
Two weeks later, an informant in Chicago police custody told detectives and FBI agents that someone affiliated with the Black Disciples street gang had offered up $50,000 “to anyone that killed Weekly” and later raised the bounty to $100,000, according to the police records.
Another tipster told investigators, “Duck had a price on his head,” the records show.
The name of the person said to have placed the bounty was redacted. But the informant offered some crucial identifying information: The person had bought custom-made necklaces for members of the Black Disciples’ O Block faction.
An FBI affidavit — filed in March 2021 seeking permission to examine data from cellphones belonging to three suspects in the shooting — noted that slain rapper King Von, real name Dayvon Bennett, had appeared in a YouTube video posted days after Weekly’s killing that shows him “acquiring valuable O-Block pendants for his associates.”
Bennett is perhaps the most notable figure associated with O Block, a set linked to the Parkway Gardens low-income housing development near 64th Street and South Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Drive.
In a federal racketeering and murder indictment in September 2021, months after Bennett was gunned down in Atlanta, prosecutors accused five O Block “members and associates” of killing Weekly: Charles “C Murda” Liggins, Kenneth “Kenny” or “Kenny Mac” Roberson, Tacarlos “Los” Offerd, Christopher “C Thang” Thomas and Marcus “Muwop” Smart. All are awaiting trial. A sixth suspect killed himself just over a month earlier, police records show.
The FBI affidavit says Bennett talked in the YouTube video about different jewelry designs for particular members of his crew, including “Muwop” and “C Murda.”
The informant told investigators Roberson didn’t want the jewelry and that this was because he was a member of the Gangster Disciples’ Dip Set faction, records show, though another court filing says he considered Parkway Gardens his “second home.”
Weekly was identified a member of the STL/EBT, or Tookaville, faction of the Gangster Disciples, which the police say has allied itself with the gang’s Jaro City faction and had an ongoing feud with O Block.
According to the police records, a friend said Weekly had been “leery of letting people know his whereabouts because he had received deaths threats from opposing gang members in the drill rap scene.”
He had reason to be worried. Police reviewed surveillance footage from another Oak Street store and heard someone on a cellphone saying he saw “Duck” less than half an hour before the shooting. The person on the phone walked in to the Moncler store with someone else, saying someone with a gun was giving chase.
The search warrant affidavit says O Block members tore out of Parkway Gardens about 20 minutes before the shooting, leaving in a Ford Fusion and a Chrysler 300.
Investigators later used automated license-plate readers and various cameras to track the cars’ paths to the crime scene.
At 4:26 p.m. on the day of the shooting, the cars pulled in front of Weekly’s girlfriend’s sedan on Oak Street, according to the affidavit, and two men jumped out of the Ford and targeted Weekly, and two others got out of the Chrysler and fired at the rapper and his girlfriend.
The gunmen then drove off in the two cars, which were registered to Offerd and Roberson.
The police records show investigators had “high confidence” linking ballistic evidence recovered at the scene to five other shootings, in which one person was killed and five wounded. No one has been arrested in those shootings, according to court records.
Roberson was the first person arrested in Weekly’s killing. He was taken into custody in February 2021, weeks after being charged with first-degree murder in a shooting in Dolton in which a man was killed and two women were wounded. Roberson, who’s in federal custody, also has been indicted on dozens of felony charges in that case.
The conflict between Tookaville and O Block has been memorialized often in disrespectful rap songs and videos, including a video Weekly released in July 2020. In it, he rapped, “Said I wasn’t going to diss the dead, and OK I did it.”
In the affidavit, an FBI agent said Weekly then “mentions, in a degrading manner, nine names, aliases, and / or monikers of deceased individuals,” all believed to be Black Disciples.
Among them was O Block’s namesake Odee Perry, who was shot and killed in 2011 at 20, according to the affidavit.
Perry’s killing had sparked a series of retaliatory shootings — including the 2014 killing of Gakirah Barnes, who police say was a female gang assassin for a Gangster Disciples faction.
Police records show that case was closed later that year, after Cook County prosecutors rejected charges against the prime suspect: Bennett, who later rose to fame as King Von.
By then, Bennett was facing felony charges in connection with another killing. He was found not guilty on all 24 counts in that case.
A day after Weekly was killed, Bennett responded to his diss track, according to the FBI affidavit, with his own song, in which he appears to take aim at Shondale “Tooka” Gregory, who was shot to death in 2011 at 15.
In an interview with a rap-centric media outlet, Weekly described Gregory as a close friend and said his set began using the name Tookaville after his death, according to the affidavit.
“Tooka in my lungs, I say that every time, cause he got smoked,” Bennett rapped in a music video while wearing an O Block chain.
Bennett also took what the FBI agent viewed as a shot at Weekly: “O Block, OTF, 300, b----, just check the stats, n---- said that he be thrown’ shots, I bet he catch them back.”
Investigators took the verse as a “reference to negative repercussions coming to Weekly as a result of Weekly’s disrespect.”
In October 2021, when he announced the charges in Weekly’s killing, U.S. Attorney John Lausch said the online sparring common in the drill rap scene “shows you what’s happening in this city.”
“People are threatening to commit acts of violence and then either bragging about acts of violence or talking about how they’re going to retaliate for other violence,” Lausch said. “It’s happening on a regular basis.”
Bennett ended up dying in a mass shooting outside a hookah lounge in Atlanta on Nov. 6, 2020, a week after his debut album was released.
Authorities have said he was shot by a friend of Quando Rondo, another buzzing rapper.
Contributing: Jon Seidel, Frank Main
