Eugene “Big U” Henley‘s co-defendants in his federal RICO case want to push back their trial, scheduled to start later this month. Their attempt to do that has brought something startling to light: the sheer volume of evidence in the case.
In a new court filing, the government reveals that it has a mountain of material against the former Nipsey Hussle manager and his six co-defendants. Included in that pile are, prosecutors say, “20,000 intercepted audio calls, as well as numerous surreptitious audio and video recordings.”
In addition, there are law enforcement reports, search warrants and returns, criminal history documents, recordings, and photographs — in total, about 60 GB of material.
On top of having to sort through such a huge amount of evidence, many of the co-defendants’ lawyers are also scheduled to handle trials for a number of other criminal cases, some of which overlap with the planned trial start date of May 20, 2025.
To avoid these conflicts, and to give all defendants enough time to prepare, Big U’s co-defendants and the government all petitioned the court to push the trial back nearly a year — to May 4, 2026.
There is one person who objects to this change: Big U himself. Despite the fact that his own lawyer has an entirely different trial scheduled to start one day before his, he still wants to proceed as originally scheduled.
The judge in the case, A. Joel Richlin, has not responded to the request for a delay as of this writing.
Big U is accused of running a massive criminal network as far back as 2010 and using the Rollin’ 60s Crip gang and other associates to carry out various violent crimes (assault and murder), extortion, and more.
In the indictment that landed Henley in custody, one of the intercepted calls from January 2023 shows the music executive having another conversation with a colleague about what he’s capable of doing.
“I’m retired, nigga? Activist? I’ll pull up on your block right now, nigga, and show up and show out, nigga what happened to the last niggas that thought I was retired,” Henley allegedly said.
Henley turned himself in, but has denied the accusations against him. According to Henley, he’s used his platform to help his community and claimed people are accusing him because they don’t like him.
“I ain’t been nothing but a help to our community,” he said in a video. “This the price of being Black and trying to help somebody, trying to help your community and do what you can. You just guilty because somebody else don’t like you.”
