Rapper 6ix9ine Was Part of a Violent Street Gang, Prosecutors Say
Daniel Hernandez, the rapper known as 6ix9ine, was sentenced last month to four years’ probation in a case involving explicit videos with an underage girl.
The Brooklyn-based rapper and Instagram star known as 6ix9ine, whose talent as a performer is often overshadowed by a magnetic attraction to trouble, was part of a violent gang that sold drugs, robbed rivals and shot at people who crossed them, according to a federal indictment unsealed on Monday.
The rapper, whose given name is Daniel Hernandez, 22, was charged along with five other men, some of whom were once part of his management team, including Kifano Jordan, known as Shottie.
Mr. Hernandez and Mr. Jordan were part of a gang known as the Nine Trey Gangsta Bloods, and committed a series of violent crimes and drug-trafficking offenses, including attempted murder and armed robbery, the indictment said. In one instance, the indictment said, a plan to shoot someone who had been disrespectful to the group led to a July 16 shooting of an innocent bystander in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. On April 21, one of the men shot at a rival inside the Barclays Center, but no one was hit.
Gang members also robbed a man at gunpoint in Times Square in April, in an attack that prosecutors said was directed, and filmed, by Mr. Hernandez himself.
“This gang, which included platinum-selling rap artist Tekashi 6ix9ine, wreaked havoc on New York City, engaging in brazen acts of violence,” Geoffrey S. Berman, the United States attorney in Manhattan, said in a statement, referring to Mr. Hernandez by another stage name he has used.
Investigators from the New York Police Department and two federal agencies — Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives and Homeland Security Investigations — were involved in the case.
Mr. Hernandez and four of the five other men appeared in Federal District Court in Manhattan on Monday and were ordered jailed without bail by Magistrate Judge Henry Pittman.
They did not enter pleas, though Mr. Hernandez’s lawyer, Lance Lazzaro, portrayed his client as a target, not a ringleader, of the gang, saying that the Federal Bureau of Investigation had warned him last Saturday that his safety was in danger.
Monday’s charges are the most serious in a series of legal problems for Mr. Hernandez, who has spent the last two years creating a divisive brand for himself. One of the charges he faces carries a minimum prison sentence of 25 years, if he is convicted.
Just last week Mr. Hernandez pleaded guilty to disorderly conduct chargesstemming from an incident with a police officer in Brooklyn earlier this year. Last month, he was sentenced to four years’ probation — including requirements that he stop affiliating with known gang members — after he pleaded guilty to using a child in a sexual performance.
Mr. Hernandez had participated in a video that featured a 13-year-old girl performing a sex act, which he then posted online, prosecutors said. Mr. Hernandez, then 18, said at the time that he did not know the girl’s age and told the police that his “persona is just for shock value.”
In deciding to deny him bail on Monday, Judge Pittman noted that when the F.B.I. raided an apartment Mr. Hernandez had been renting in September, agents found an AR-15 firearm and a backpack containing credit cards and identification of the man robbed in Times Square.
The judge called the discovery of the stolen goods “compelling evidence corroborating his involvement” and the firearm “very troubling.”
Mr. Hernandez’s career had seemed destined for success. He had
built a following on SoundCloud and Instagram, where he has 15 million followers. His debut single, “Gummo,” went platinum and reached No. 12 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart.
Three subsequent songs cracked the Top 50, including “Fefe,” with Nicki Minaj, which also went platinum and peaked at No. 3. His debut album, “DAY69,” came out in February and reached No. 4 on the Billboard album chart.
Over the weekend, Mr. Hernandez announced that his follow-up album, “Dummy Boy,” would be released Friday and feature two songs with Kanye West.
But his buzz in the industry came with, and was intensified by, a dark cloud of internet beef that often metastasized into violence.
Last month, just hours after he was sentenced to probation in the video case, he went to a restaurant on Manhattan’s Upper East Side to meet the head of his record label. A melee broke out, and a bodyguard for Mr. Hernandez fired a gun. Mr. Jordan was charged with assault in connection with the melee.
The man injured in the shooting, Faheem Walter, known as Crippy, was also charged in the gang indictment unsealed on Monday.
Earlier this month, just two weeks after the restaurant shooting, there was a shooting at a home in Beverly Hills, Calif., where Mr. Hernandez was filming a music video set to feature Mr. West and Ms. Minaj. In August, shots were firedduring the filming of a music video in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, starring Mr. Hernandez and the rapper 50 Cent.
In July, Mr. Hernandez was kidnapped and robbed in Brooklyn. Though he said he would decline to cooperate with the police in that investigation, a former member of his management team was arrested and charged with the robbery this month.
Mr. Hernandez said last week in a radio interview with The Breakfast Club that he was cleaning house after the incidents and adhering to the judge’s orders in the video case by distancing himself from Mr. Jordan. “Everybody is gone — get out of my life,” he said. (The YouTube version of the interview has been viewed more than four million times.)
The rapper added that his only legitimate business partner was Elliot Grainge, the founder of 10k Projects, Mr. Hernandez’s record label.
Representatives for 10k Projects did not immediately comment on the latest arrest and how it might affect the release of the new 6ix9ine album.
According to Mr. Hernandez’s lawyer, Mr. Lazzaro, after Mr. Hernandez announced in the interview that he was getting rid of his management team,
the F.B.I. brought him in to warn him that agents had heard on wiretaps that some or all of the men, whom Mr. Lazzaro called “bad apples,” intended to “super violate” Mr. Hernandez in retaliation. He was offered round-the-clock surveillance but refused it, Mr. Lazzaro said.
A prosecutor, Michael Longyear, said that Mr. Hernandez was arrested on Sunday after law enforcement officials learned that he planned to travel to Foxwoods Casino in Connecticut, where they feared he might be a catalyst for violence.
“The defendant is a violent man,” Mr. Longyear said.
Mr. Hernandez seemed to foretell his fate in the interview last week, though he may not have known just how many agencies were tracking his movements.
“Only two things I’m scared of in life,” he said. “God first, and the F.B.I.”
