Shoes are still being dropped in Tekashi 6ix9ine racketeering case.
Nine Trey Bloods gang members are still falling one by one as Tekashi 6ix9ine serves out his remaining months in prison. Tekashi infamously snitched on his whole crew and helped the feds to implicate multiple gang members like his ex-manager Shotti who got a prison sentence of 15 years handed down to him by Judge Engelmayer. Another Nine Trey Blood, who is called Drama and whose legal name is Denard Butler, appeared in court on Thursday afternoon and received a 5-year sentence. His attorney Kenneth A. Paul argued that his client never committed any serious crimes and only got tied up with the gang because of their association with Tekashi 6ix9ine. “Quite frankly, my client was a hanger-on,” said the attorney. “He was interested in the music industry,” he added. Butler pleaded guilty to one count of “participating in a racketeering enterprise” in mid-2019.
When it came time for sentencing on Thursday in the Thurgood Marshall Courthouse in downtown Manhattan, the judge considered Butler’s age when evaluating the charges against him. “He’s 35 at the time he makes a decision to associate with a violent gang on a sustained basis,” Engelmayer said. “That’s bad decision making.”
Butler started hanging with the gang in early 2018 when his friend Roland Martin better known as Ro Murda, was released from jail. His affiliation with the Nine Trey Bloods was made out to seem negligible even though he was involved in some violent crimes with the gang, including the April 2019 robbery that Tekashi exposed in the courtroom during his tell-all trial last year.
Based on Denard Butler’s plea bargain, his recommended sentence was 77-96 months, but judge Paul Engelmayer felt particularly lenient in his ruling. He handed down a sentence of 60 months telling Butler, “in recognition of your secondary role with the gang,” Engelmayer said. He also told the defendant that he sees something in him after being moved by the letters the court received from his family and friends. “I see a lot of good in you,” the judge said before the proceedings were adjourned. “If you hold yourself up to the aspirations [your friends and family] have for you, you’ll be in a good place.”
When prosecutors teamed up with Tekashi 6ix9ine and made him into a federal informant, they had a plan to take down the Nine Trey Blood gang, and it looks like that agenda is still being executed.
