BALTIMORE — Baltimore Rapper YGG Tay, who already is in federal prison, and a prominent “hit man” were part of an alleged subset of the Black Guerilla Family gang that is accused of carrying out six homicides and about a dozen other shootings, a recently unsealed federal indictment shows.
Federal prosecutors say YGG Tay, whose name is Davante Harrison, paid other members of the gang to kill people on multiple occasions. A U.S. district judge sentenced Harrison to 15 years in federal prison in July after a jury found him guilty of drug and gun charges.
In a recently unsealed indictment, prosecutors said Harrison rapped about hiring a hit man, David Warren, who is charged in the same indictment, and said he was open to paying others to kill.
“Breaking news I just signed the top shooter in the city to a deal. All them years he signed to me, a lot of (people) get killed,” Harrison rhymed, according to the indictment. “If he get caught, don’t stress about it, his lawyer going on my bill. If somehow he lose at trial, got one word, appeal.”
Four other men were indicted alongside Harrison and Warren: Barak Olds, Wayne Prince, Joshua Duffy and Tyrell Jeffries. Although the indictment was unsealed Monday, it’s unclear if any of the men are being represented yet by attorneys on their latest charges.
Duffy and Jeffries were arrested Monday, while the other four were already in custody, the U.S. attorney’s office for Maryland said in a news release.
In a statement included in the release, Maryland U.S. Attorney Erek Barron touted the indictment as a reflection of his office’s efforts to target gangs.
“Gangs will not be allowed to hold communities hostage through violence and intimidation,” Barron said.
The crimes alleged in the indictment — including drug distribution, armed robberies, assaults and fatal and nonfatal shootings — occurred over a seven-year stretch from 2014 to 2021, according to the indictment, which charges the men with participating in a racketeering conspiracy.
The U.S. Department of Justice says the Black Guerilla Family gang began in a prison in California in the 1960s. First identified in Maryland prisons in the ’90s, its presence continues in state correctional facilities today.
Black Guerilla Family members were in 2013 accused of turning the Baltimore City Detention Center into a stronghold, and authorities for years have sought to take down the gang’s regimes, attributing dozens of murders to the group and its leaders.
The indictment outlines in detail the role each man is alleged to have played, while acknowledging they conspired with other gang members yet to be identified by authorities.
Before the indictment, Baltimore authorities had charged Warren with attempted murder 10 times. Then-Police Commissioner Kevin Davis in 2017 described Warren as a “trigger puller” who belonged in custody and not on city streets. But all of the cases were either dropped or resulted in acquittals at trial.
The recent indictment attributes two murders and at least 10 attempted murders to Warren.
Warren is again accused of a quintuple shooting on Memorial Day of 2016, according to the indictment. Federal prosecutors say Harrison in 2018 hired Warren for his “services as a hit man,” adding Warren attempted to kill three people from February through August of that year in exchange for payments from Harrison.
When Harrison boasted about hiring the city’s “top shooter” in a rap video posted to Instagram in February 2018, he was referring to Warren, according to the indictment. About a month later, Warren allegedly sent Harrison a picture of himself carrying an assault rifle and proclaiming in a text message that Warren had “a lot of power.”
Federal prosecutors say Warren expressed his willingness to kill if Harrison accepted him in his inner circle.
When Harrison developed beef with members of a rival crew, Warren did Harrison’s bidding, authorities said. The indictment alleges Warren went to a home he believed that one of the rivals lived in on April 4, 2018, only to find the rival’s mother and sister. He and an unidentified accomplice shot and killed the mother and her daughter, according to the indictment.
“There’s a heinous individual out there who committed it,” the Baltimore Police spokesman at the time, Chief T.J. Smith, said of the double homicide.
About three months later, Warren struck again, according to the indictment. Warren, Prince and an accomplice not identified by prosecutors tried to kill another one of Harrison’s rivals, showing up to a house the accomplice owned and was renovating and opening fire. Prince allegedly fatally shot a construction worker and gravely wounded the other by shooting them in the head.
Federal prosecutors say Olds shot and killed a drug trafficker on July 3, 2019, while the woman was pushing her infant daughter in a stroller.
Olds is also accused of shooting a person in the head on July 15, 2015, an incident where an unindicted accomplice shot and killed another person.
In between those fatal shootings, Duffy and Jeffries attempted to kill someone at the direction of a ranking BGF member who had stolen from the person they went on to shoot, according to the indictment.
The indicted alleged gang members were also accused of running a stash house for the crew’s guns and drugs, a place they were known to hide out after shootings.
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