Court documents unsealed tonight have revealed the details of a recent plea deal reached between rapper Tekashi 6ix9ine and federal officials, with the musician pleading guilty to nine different felony charges, including racketeering, conspiracy, firearms offenses, and narcotics trafficking. That’s in addition to other crimes he admitted to in court, including paying someone to try to shoot rapper and producer Chief Keef, participating in armed robberies, and forcing us to repeatedly have to remember how to type out “6ix9ine.”
As part of the same plea deal, Tekashi (real name Daniel Hernandez, which is how we’re going to let ourselves off the hook and refer to him by from now on) admitted to what prosecutors have been accusing him of for months, i.e., being a member of the Nine Treys Bloods gang, which he reportedly joined right around the time his first major single, “Gummo,” was climbing the music charts. Now he’s agreed to provide authorities with information on some of his associates’ activities, presumably with an eye toward lightening his sentencing in January 2020. He initially pleaded not guilty to all the charges arrayed against him, and was facing a maximum sentence of life in prison.
People whose capacity for remembering awful shit done by celebrities—which is turning out to be an unlikely but depressingly useful skill in our modern era—will recall that this isn’t Hernandez’s first brush with the courts, either. He was previously put on probation—way back in the halcyon days of October 2018—for participating in a video shoot that included sexually explicit material shot with a 13-year-old girl in 2015. Per NPR, a brawl broke out in the courthouse just moments after that particular day in court came to a close, which didn’t do a lot for Hernandez’s claims that he was simply a musician adopting signifiers of gang culture, rather than an active gang participant himself.