On the afternoon of August 4th, 2020, in the middle of Chicago’s Gold Coast, a shopping district known for Rolls-Royce’s double parked outside boutiques and tourists who’ve never heard a gunshot fired in anger. A 26-year-old man named Carlton Weekly walked out of a Dolce and Gabbana store with his girlfriend and a friend.
He was shopping for his son’s birthday. He had four kids. He had a Sony deal. He had a song that Pitchfork had called one of the defining tracks of Chicago Drill. He had every reason to believe that afternoon would end the way it started. It didn’t. Two vehicles, a Ford Fusion and a Chrysler 300, had traveled approximately 30 minutes from the southside to reach him.
Four men in masks stepped out. The shooting lasted 15 seconds. Police later recovered 38 shell casings from the scene. Carlton Weekly, known on every street corner and every streaming platform as FBG Duck, was struck 16 times. His gun jammed when he tried to return fire. He fell to the sidewalk in front of the store and stayed there for over 20 minutes while scared bystanders circled him with their phones pointed down.
The kind of footage that ends up archived forever but never fully explains itself. When local news reported his death that evening, someone on the street clapped. His mother, Luca Weekley, found out about it from a television broadcast before she’d had a chance to see her son’s body.
That is where the story ends. But the story didn’t begin there. Not even close. It didn’t begin with the disc song he dropped 3 weeks before the shooting. It didn’t begin with King Vaughn. It didn’t begin with the feud the internet calls the greatest beef in drill history. It began before any of these men had ever held a microphone on a series of blocks in Chicago Southside, where the rules about who lives and who dies had been written long before drill music gave those rules a soundtrack.
Carlton Weekly grew up in Wood Lawn on Chicago Southside, raised on the geography of 63rd Street and the identity of the gangster disciples. Specifically, the STL EBT said that the streets would later rename Tukville in honor of a 15-year-old boy who was shot dead at a bus stop in January 2011.
That block 63rd to 64th Street between roads and Champlain is what Chicago gang history maps as STL Tukavville territory. The adjacent stretch Eberhart to roads runs as EBT. Together they form the GD pocket that Oblock, a black disciple stronghold 2 minutes north at Parkway Gardens on 64th and King Drive, has been at war with for over a decade.
Both sides trace their overarching gang identities back to a split in Chicago’s Black Street gangs that goes all the way to the 1960s. The Black Disciples on one side, the Gangster Disciples on the other, identifying as BDK and GDK, respectively. BD Killers and GD Killers, a formal declaration of hostility that predates every drill song ever recorded.
FBG Duck was the most prominent rapper to emerge from the GD side of that specific geography. And when he died, the men who killed him drove back to Oblak and started celebrating on Instagram before the ambulance had cleared the scene. Over the next 14 months, those same men would go on Instagram live dozens of times, release songs about the murder, wear custom jewelry bought as celebration, and talk themselves directly into federal indictments.
Six of them are now serving mandatory life sentences. What follows is the story of how that happened and why it was never really about one song. FBG stands for Fly Boy Gang, a rap collective Duck formed with his neighborhood friends as a teenager. The group, sometimes also called Clout Boys, included FBG Young, FBG Duchy, Billionaire Black, FBG Cash, and FBG Wooi.
They came up in the early days of Chicago’s drill explosion, recording in basement and uploading to YouTube, rapping about 63rd Street the same way Chief Keef was rapping about Oblock as a declaration, as a warning, as a flag planted in concrete. Duck’s government name was Carlton Weekly. His rap name was FBG Duck.
On the street, they called him Big Clout. And that nickname was not accidental. He wore it like a target. He wore it because he earned it. By 2018, he had released Slide, a track that Pitchfork selected as one of the 11 songs that defined Chicago Drill. The song was reportedly recorded in approximately 40 minutes and became an instant classic in the genre.
It generated enough heat to pull in a remix from 21 Savage and Land Duck, a distribution deal with Sony Music’s records division. He was moving, not just in the streets, but towards something that looked like a way out. But the war he’d grown up inside never stopped moving with him. and the men from O Block, who had been keeping score of every dead friend since 20s and 11, had a ledger that still was in balance.
To understand why FBG Duck died where he did, you have to understand where both sides started. You have to understand a child named Shawn Del Gregory, a housing project renamed for a murdered man, a teenage girl who became an assassin, and a decade of funerals where each one made the next one more likely. In January 2011, 15-year-old Shawn Del Tuka Gregory was shot multiple times while waiting at a bus stop on the 600 block of East 63rd Street.
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He was a GD member from the STL EBT set, and his death is widely believed to have been connected to the friction already brewing between BD and GD factions in Woodlon. He was 15 years old. FBG Duck knew him personally and ran to the scene after hearing the news. getting there while Tuka’s body was still on the ground.
He had said me and him clicked like that was one of my real close friends. Like every day like spend the night at his house he spent that man and my cousin came in there running to me crying and telling me, “Hey friend, just got killed. You feel me?” Then I ran all the way from 62nd and Wallbass all the way to 6:30 to St. Lawrence.
Shake them right there on the floor. In Tuka’s memory, the STL EBT set renamed their block Tukavville and committed to revenge. Members like FBG Brick, Duck’s older brother, Germaine Robinson, began repping that memory publicly. The grief became identity. The identity became fuel. 8 months later, in August 2011, a respected Oblak member named OD Perry was shot and killed near Parkway Gardens at the 400 block of East 64th Street.
He suffered multiple gunshot wounds and was pronounced dead at Stroger Hospital. The BD faction renamed Parkway Gardens Oblock in his memory just as the GDs had renamed their block for Tuka 8 months before. Perry’s killer was never officially charged, but internet speculation later partially supported by a Freedom of Information request pointed to Gakira Ki Barnes, a teenage female GD member from the Yro City set affiliated with Tukville.
Chicago police records named Ki and her cousin Boss Trail as subjects in the report after an unnamed informant identified them as the shooters in 2016, years after both of them were already dead. This is how the war worked on both sides. A life for a life, a block renamed for everybody, a social media post for every getback, and the police closing roughly 60% of Chicago’s murders unsolved.
The black communities on the southside were particularly underserved when it came to justice, which meant the men on both sides of this war operated in a world where settling scores personally was the only accountability that reliably arrived. They understood that system because they had been born into it.
Ki Kakira Barnes became the most notorious figure on the GD side of this war in its early years. The streets credited her with 17 bodies before she turned 18. Whether that number is verifiable is a separate question. What is documented is that she was feared, active, and tied to coordinated counterviolence against Oblak.
She and FBG Butter, another STL EBT member, were known as the twins on their side of the map, operating with a confidence that made sense only inside a war where dying young was already the assumed outcome for everyone involved. Meanwhile, on the BD side, a young man from Oblak named King Vaughn, real name Devon Bennett, was building the same kind of reputation in the streets while going back and forth on Twitter with Duck and his GD associates as early as 2012. Van’s closest friend on the block was Troy James Johnson, and the two of them moved as a unit. Van was also already deeply suspected in multiple shootings by this point. In October 2012, a 17-year-old named Model McCamry was shot on the 6,300 block of South Roads Avenue, and the internet widely credited Van with the killing based on tweets he made in the hours and days around the incident. The following month, a feared GD shooter named Rodney Boss Trail Stewart believed
responsible for killing Shoid Ligins, an early Oblak member, was found shot in the back of the head in an alley far from his own neighborhood, left for dead, and died days later. This detail matters beyond the body count. Sherroy Ligins was the brother of Charles Ligins, who the streets knew as Sea Murder.
Se Murder would later be one of the six men convicted in January 2024 for FBG Duck’s murder. The motive that brought him to Oak Street on August 4th, 2020, had been building since 2012. These were not strangers settling an abstract beef. They were men with dead brothers, dead cousins, dead best friends, and an entire decade of funerals that had given each of them a personal reason to pull a trigger.
By September 2013, Joney, Jerome Wood, another Oblak member closely linked to King Vaughn’s circle, was dead, lured to a location, and shot in the head. The internet credited Ki and an associate called Lil B. over on 63rd. By early 2014, Boss Trail had already been dead for over a year. The GD side was losing members, too, just not as publicly as what was coming.
Ki herself was gunned down in April 2014 in Woodlon. Chicago police documents released after King Vaughn’s death appeared to confirm that Vaughn was the shooter with multiple witnesses identifying him. Though police said they didn’t have sufficient evidence to formally charge him at the time, Vaughan was never indicted for that killing.
About six weeks later, he was arrested for the murder of Malcolm Stucky at a birthday party in Englewood. A case that would land him in county jail for three and a half years as the war continued to churn through his neighborhood without him. This is the architecture underneath everything that followed.
Not a feud that started with a beef on Twitter. Not a rivalry that started with a disc song. A war that started in schoolyard fights, escalated through funerals, and produced in each of its surviving participants a grievance inventory that no music career was ever going to dissolve.
During the years Van sat in county jail, his block kept bleeding. Chief Keef had already put Oblock on the national map and moved away. The remaining members were operating in the streets without the structure that a charismatic older head provides. And across the map, FBG Duck was rapping harder, dissing louder, and cementing his position as the most prominent active GD voice in Chicago’s drill scene.
A position that, in the logic of this war, meant his head carried the highest bounty on the GD side. He knew it. In a 2017 Vlad TV interview, Doug said plainly that he thought about being killed every single day. He said he was a disrespectful person, that his ops wanted to take his life and that if you dissed him, he would kill you.
Not as a rap line, as a statement of fact about how he navigated the world. He said, “I know guys want to hurt me and guys want to take my life. Of course, I know and guys want to kill me. I’m a very disrespectful person, but they’re going to die. You diss me, I’m going to kill you.
” He lived with that clarity and stayed in Chicago. Anyway, the single event that changed the temperature of this war permanently came on Valentine’s Day 2017. Troy, King Van’s best friend and Oblock’s most feared active hitter, traveled to a sports casual activewear store on the north side.
Whether he was shopping or opting is debated, but the story goes that someone from the opposing side spotted him first. Surveillance captured the moment he was caught off guard. He was shot in the chest and died at Northwestern Memorial Hospital at 23 years old. Boss Top, one of Oblak’s senior figures, described Troy in the plainest terms possible.
He said, “Troy just as different. You know what I’m saying? He was a real enforcer. That’s what he was, right? He’s like he was out here for real.” Troy’s alleged killer was Terry Barry, known as TB from the Taiwan World Set, a GD aligned faction that shared alliances with Ducks Tukville crew.
TB posted a tweet reading, “Happy Valentine’s Day.” In the hours after the murder, King Vaughn, still in jail, found out about Troy’s death the same day through an Instagram live, claiming, “Hey, what happened? I met they just killed Doy, who he what my best friend, boy.
Somebody just killed my best friend mom in jail. I’m in that going to go crazy.” The death of Troy is the moment where the informal retaliation structure on the Oblak side became something more deliberate. The men on the block began calling themselves Get Back Gang. The mission was specific. Revenge for T Roy and then revenge for whoever came next.
Through 2017, the killings intensified on both sides. On June 16th, 2017, a man named Sherid Ree, called Poppy, was executed outside a candy warehouse on the southside where he was working a shift that afternoon loading items for a customer. A gunman in his ski mask shot him once in the head, then fired two more shots as he fell.
The broad daylight brutality of it was captured on amateur video that circulated on social media immediately. The kind of footage that the drill community processed with a combination of mourning and clout chasing that had become its default setting for death. Oblak hitter Hakee Murray known as HK was widely suspected of being responsible.
The nickname Headshot King appearing in his online presence shortly after. One month and one day later on July 17th, FBG Duck’s brother came home. FBG Brick and Germaine Robinson was standing on his block at 6300’s South St. Lawrence when men jumped out of a car and opened fire. His friend Kobe Stanley Jacobe Mack was shot dead on site. Brick ran into a gang way.
They followed him and killed him there. The immediate aftermath was caught on camera and circulated within the hour. Duck and his mother arrived at the scene while Brick’s body was still there. What Lacha weakly said to her son at that scene is one of the most consequential moments in this entire story.
Not because it changed the war, but because it almost changed Duck. He said, “I was sitting on the ground and him and my auntie was hugging me.” And I was in my son and I was like, “Duck, I need you. I don’t need you doing nothing stupid.” I say, “Duck, I need you and me.” Telling that to my son, he went to that studio and went crazy. That pain music.
He did go to the studio. He recorded through the grief. His mother’s intervention redirected energy that could have gone into the streets into songs instead. And for a while, it worked, producing some of Duck’s most emotional and commercially significant music. But the war didn’t pause because Duck was grieving.
In September 2017, TB, the man believed to have killed Troy, was shot on a porch near the same store where Troy had died and was pronounced dead at Northwestern. Two months later, HK himself, the headshot king, who had been one of the most active figures in the Get Back campaign, was shot multiple times outside Oblak and died too.
The cycle compressed itself into a single season. Troy’s killer, then Troy’s Avenger, both dead by the end of 2017. Two more families destroyed on the BD side. Each funeral another entry in a ledger that kept growing. By the time King Vaughn was released from jail in December 2017, having beat his murder case because his codefendant implicated himself while Van said nothing, he came home to a block that had buried multiple members while he was locked up.
He came home to a crew that had been fighting without him, losing people and waiting. Whatever ambitions he had for a music career existed alongside something that hadn’t diminished at all during 3 and 1/2 years of county jail. A capacity and apparent appetite for violence that the time inside had not touched.
Van’s music career launched officially in May 2018 with Beat That Body. By December 2018, Crazy Story made him nationally known, a storytelling song so viscerally detailed about Chicago street life that it almost defied the line between confession and fiction. But the distinction between King Van the rapper and King Von the Oblak hitter was never real.
And Vaughn made no effort to pretend otherwise. He gave his people cash when he came back to Parkway. He went live on Instagram the same day as murders to mock the dead. He moved in both directions simultaneously. Music money circulating back into the block, the block’s reputation circulating into his lyrics.
And neither side of that equation was quiet. A May 2020 vlog showed Vaughan back in Parkway Gardens handing out wads of cash to members on the block. That image would later be referenced in federal proceedings as possible evidence of the bounty structure prosecutors alleged existed. Because during all of this, according to multiple sources presented at trial, King Vaughn had placed an open bounty on FBG Duck, reportedly starting at $50,000 and later raised to $100,000.
The FBI affidavit noted this allegation. Whether it is documented fact or street law amplified by court filings is a question that Van’s death in November 2020 left permanently unanswered. He was never charged, never tried, never gave his version. What is documented is what came next.
In January 2018, FBG Duck released the music video for Slide and everything changed for him commercially. Pitchfork selected the track as one of the 11 songs that defined Chicago Drill. 21 Savage, who had been moving in the same Atlanta circles as Lil Durk, and who was apparently unaware of the full history behind Duck’s beef with the BD side, jumped on the remix.
Duck signed to Sony Music’s records division off the back of the song’s momentum, reportedly for a deal in the millions. For a rapper who had been grinding since 2011 and who had watched his brother get murdered in the street, this was the kind of break that was supposed to rewrite the trajectory.
And Duck did change, at least partially and for a while. In December 2019, he released Chicago Legends, a track that paid tribute to fallen rappers from across Chicago’s gang divide, including names from the BD side of the war. Lil Durk’s late cousin Nusky and close friend of Rondo, Ninstar among them.
Duck’s friends told the Tribe that he was actively trying to stop putting guns in his music videos and had become involved in a violence prevention program. Bo Deal described him as a good person who always told jokes and made people feel comfortable. Chicago King Dave said Duck talked about wanting to move his mother out of the neighborhood and give his kids something different.
The song reads now as a near miss at peace. a man using his platform to signal, however obliquely, that he was willing to start treating the dead on the other side as human beings rather than props. Whether the Oblock side ever received that signal the same way it was sent is another question entirely.
By early 2020, King Vaughn’s rap career was operating at full intensity, and so was the beef between him and Duck. In February, Vaughan released Took Her to the O, a storytelling track in his trademark style. This time built around a fictional scenario that ended with him killing FBG Duck on screen.
The music video staged it with an actor. The song now has over 300 million views on YouTube. Duck’s response came a month later. I’m from 63rd. directly addressing Van’s catchphrase and little boying him on wax, suggesting that Lil Durk, Van’s F mentor and the man who had put him on was the one actually calling the shots and that Vaughn was just a proxy.
On Instagram lives through the spring and early summer of 2020, Doug kept proddding. He told viewers that Van used to get his ass beat on the bus after school. He said his ops couldn’t rap. He said Van was only famous because of Lil Durk. The social media back and forth had been running for nearly a decade at that point.
But what was shifting in 2020 was the scale. Both men had real audiences now. Every post reached millions of eyes. And Vaughan, who had come home from jail into a block, still processing multiple deaths, was watching Duck’s online behavior with a level of attention that no longer read as a rap beef.
At this point, Doc thought that he was in a rap beef rather than a street beef with King Vaughn. But clearly Vaughan was not thinking the same. In July 2020, around the 10th, Duck uploaded Dead [ __ ] commercially released as Dead B on August 1st, 2020, 3 days before he was killed. The song named at least nine deceased black disciples, OD Perry, the man Oblock is named after, Troy, King Von’s best friend, Sheroid, C Murder’s brother, Chino, BJ’s brother, J Money, Lil Buu.
The song didn’t just diss them in passing. It cataloged the dead methodically, then mocked how each of them died. Duck said he wasn’t originally going to diss the dead, then did it anyway in detail for 2 minutes straight. The FBI affidavit later stated explicitly that the track contained derogatory statements about nine deceased black disciples and that investigators believed it may have helped motivate the subsequent attack.
People around Duck reportedly warned him not to release it. Some said it was too much. The video went viral within days with drill fans and commentators watching to see how Oblock would respond. Van’s response on social media was not a song. He started appearing in the comment sections of Duck’s Instagram lives, typing the names of deceased GDs, people he and his crew were rumored to have killed, directly at Duck while Duck was still live on camera.
In a May 2020 vlog, Vaughn had already returned to Parkway Gardens distributing cash to members on the block. The gap between the rap beef and the street planning behind it had closed to nothing. Duck told multiple interviewers over the years that he refused to leave Chicago. He told Vlad TV that he had thought about being murdered every single day of his life, but that he wasn’t running from anyone.
He told his Instagram live audience that he was hood to the core and had no plans to relocate regardless of how many streaming numbers he put up. He said, “Last time I checked, the goal in the hood is to make it out that SAT stupid ass people, not to always stay in there, but I’m a hooding guy, and I ain’t running for no [ __ ] so I don’t got to go nowhere. I ain’t got nothing.
Nobody in this world scared me.” On the morning of August 4th, 2020, he woke up in a bad mood and posted to Facebook about Brick, saying he hoped he bumped into whoever was responsible for his brother’s death. It reads now like something written for a movie. a line that lands differently once you know what happened eight hours later.
He had no idea how precisely that wish was about to be answered or that two vehicles were already being prepped on Oblock for a 30-minute drive north to the Gold Coast. Surveillance footage later reviewed by the FBI showed two vehicles, a Ford Fusion and a Chrysler 300, leaving the Parkway Gardens area in the early afternoon of August 4th, 2020.
Prosecutors would later establish that Tak Carlos Offered Loss had purchased the Ford Fusion a week before the murder and returned it shortly after. Internet investigators had connected the second vehicle, the Chrysler 300, to Kenny Mack, through his social media activity before the FBI even made its arrests.
The cars traveled north approximately 30 minutes to Chicago’s Gold Coast, a luxury shopping corridor where the Dolce and Gabbana on Oak Street sits next to other boutiques selling to a clientele that has no geographic connection to the southside gang war they were about to intersect with.
According to the FBI affidavit, Ralph Turpin, known as Tez, spotted FBG Duck in the Gold Coast shopping area and made calls to alert other Oblak members to his location. Duck was outside the Dolce and Gabbana store on Oak Street with his girlfriend and a friend shopping for his son’s birthday. He had no idea the call had been made.
He had no idea the two cars were already moving toward him. At approximately 4:37 p.m., the vehicles pulled up. Four masked men stepped out and opened fire. The shooting lasted 15 seconds. Duck pulled his own weapon and tried to return fire. It jammed. Police recovered 38 shell casings from the scene.
Duck was struck 16 times. His girlfriend and the man with them were both wounded but survived. The shooters got back in the cars and left at speed. Duck lay on the sidewalk for over 20 minutes while members of the public circled him, some filming, unsure what to do. A 12-minute video of the aftermath was uploaded in its entirety.
Duck’s mother later claimed that the police blocked the ambulances from getting through, preventing her son from receiving timely medical attention. He was pronounced dead at a hospital shortly after, claiming they even blocked the ambulance off from getting to him. See, that’s what they don’t want the world to know, but I’m going to tell it, and I’m going to get justice for my son.
National news coverage compared the execution style brazeness of the attack to Chicago gang warfare of the 1930s. Two attack cars, four shooters, a hell of bullets, and a luxury shopping district in broad daylight. The reporters were not wrong about the comparison. What separated this from 1930s mob violence was Instagram.
Within hours of Duck’s death, the men who had killed him were already broadcasting. C Murder posted a photo of himself doing the GD killer hand sign captioned, “Anyway, GDK.” A direct King Von Lyric reference, “The same day of the murder.” Memo 600 went live smoking a blunt and confirmed for his viewers who kept asking in the comments that yes, it was duck he was smoking, then showed off a custom duck themed Calipac as visual confirmation.
Lil Durk appeared on Instagram live stepping off a private jet in Atlanta saying nothing about the murder, a calculated display of alibi that he had set up hours earlier with a public tweet placing himself out of Chicago before the hit took place. 10 days after the murder, King Vaughn was photographed at Icebox Jewelers in Atlanta picking up custom diamond enencrusted Oblock chains for members of his crew with a list of names posted alongside the video on Icebox’s YouTube channel.
Van’s personal extra-large chain was engraved on the back with the names of nine fallen Oblak associates, a crosshair, the number 64, the old name for the block, Wick City, and the tagline Oblock for Life. Smaller chains were distributed to members including Sea Murder and Muop. Vaughn had been planning the chains for months and had been photographed consulting about them with the crew as early as May 2020 before Duck’s death.
But the distribution in the public video release came 10 days after the murder. And the symbolism of what the chains represented in context was not subtle. He said, “Just put this 1992 to 2012.” Okay, who’s that one for? I want to know the name. And then you just How do you spell this? D H E R O I D.
The specific chains were tied to specific getbacks. Sheroid’s chain, Chino’s chain, the chain for the murder of FBG Duck, worn by the men who had done it. On August 31st, a vlogger sat down with Boss Top from Oblak for a filmed interview on the block. Boss Top told the camera he’d answer anything.
When the vlogger asked about FBG Duck, Boss Top immediately blurted out Troy’s name, then pivoted to redirect the camera toward one of the men standing behind him, who responded with a nose-wipe gesture. Boss Top then called his old block chain a trophy. He said, “This like it’s like a trophy, so this is our brother.
You know, we shouldn’t ward in the chain because she’s way more than the train that Shy likes that.” That section of the interview was edited out before the arrest. But the clip had already been captured and continues to circulate. The original comments on the video, many posted long before the federal indictment, point out that Boss Top had aimed the camera directly at one of Duck’s shooters.
In the days and weeks that followed, Sethang went live and nearly said all the killers names on camera before catching himself and saying members. Kenny Mack posted a photo with Sea Murder captioned killers. Big money argued with FBG Measel on Instagram and bragged that Measel couldn’t diss Oblock because Oblak had killed his ops.
Muop and Setang got on a FaceTime call with a drill rapper from Jacksonville named Kiso and let him confirm on a live broadcast that he was smoking duck too. He said, “Who you smoking on from the rack man? What did you say? They can’t hear you folk. You say you smoking that Doug, my boy Queso smoking that duck, baby.
” Van himself went on a phone interview with DJ Academics in October 2020. tried to claim he and Duck had squashed their beef, then pointed the camera away from his face mid-in while audibly laughing with BJ in the back seat. In December 2020, Sethang and Zel released a track called Jump Out that mapped directly onto the mechanics of Duck’s murder, hopping out of cars, no ambulance arriving in time, Ops mothers crying. It was wall to-wall.
The fans in the comments were calling it a self snitching anthem before the year was out. King Vaughn, who had been making music and living between Atlanta and Chicago since the murder, was killed on November 6th, 2020 in an Atlante parking lot altercation completely unrelated to the Tokavville War 3 months after Duck.
His death left the Oblock structure without its figure head and primary financial engine. But it didn’t stop the bragging. On October 13th, 2021, one year and over two months after FBG Duck was killed, the FBI descended on Parkway Gardens in a coordinated sweep, arresting five men. The men taken into custody were Charles Ligins, C murder, Kenneth Robertson, Kenny Mack, to Carlos Offford, Loss, Christopher Thomas, Seth Ang, and Marcus Smart Mu.
A sixth man, Ralph Turpin Tez, whom prosecutors said had spotted Duck in the Gold Coast and made the calls that triggered the attack, was already in custody on separate charges. All six were indicted under RICO. The racketeer influenced and corrupt organizations act, the same legal architecture originally designed to take down the mob, facing charges of raketeering conspiracy and murder in aid of racketeering, which carry a mandatory life sentence on conviction.
A seventh man connected to the case never saw that indictment. Zelmuna, an Oblak member whose car had been identified in connection with the shooting by internet investigators months before any federal action, took his own life on August 24th, 2021, weeks before the FBI moved. whether he knew the arrests were coming, whether the accumulated trauma of losing Troy, HK, and others he was related to had simply become unbearable, or whether something else drove the decision is a question that has no answer. His suicide was mourned on Oblock. The unanswered questions about what he knew or told anyone remained open. The federal investigation had reconstructed the entire operation. Surveillance cameras documented the defendants leaving Parkway Gardens, traveling to the Gold Coast, committing the murder outside the Dolce and Gabana and driving back south. A 357 caliber cartridge recovered from a Chrysler
connected to the suspects matched casings from the scene. Phone records placed the defendants together around the time of the shooting. And then there was everything else. every Instagram live, every music video, every caption post, every vlog, every interview, every song.
The FBI press conference said it plainly. You can go online right now and watch Oblak members bragging about their crimes. The government had been watching and what the defendants had handed them was an evidence trail that practically prosecuted itself. The indictment labeled Oblak a criminal racketeering enterprise and stated that the murder of FBG Duck was committed to further that enterprise.
that members use social media and music to publicly claim responsibility for violence and taunt rival gang members to increase the organization’s notoriety. The framing mattered. Treating a southside street gang as a RICO enterprise the way the feds had once treated the Chicago outfit gave prosecutors tools that local charges never would have.
The ability to bring in pattern of violence evidence, social media content as exhibits, and the full weight of federal sentencing minimums that left the defendants no daylight. Laina Weekly found out about the arrest in real time and reacted on Instagram live. She said, “They got him. They got these summer ningas.
They got him. They was talking. The fed just called me and told me they arrested Mawa. They are messed with C thing. They arrested um two more of us five people that they have in custody.” She had been waiting for that call for over a year. While she waited, she watched the men who killed her son go live on Instagram, drop music, accept custom jewelry, take flights to Atlanta and back.
She had gone live herself repeatedly through that year, dismantling misinformation about Duck’s death, responding to people who sent her pictures of her son’s body to torment her, and addressing the stream of death threats that came with being the public-f facing grieving mother of the most famous casualty of Oblak’s war.
She arranged a roundt meeting in November 2020 with the mothers of other slain Chicago drill figures, including Tuka’s mother, to try to build something constructive in the space where grief usually just produces more grief. When Lil Durk released Should have Duck in early 2021, a diss track aimed at the deceased FBG Duck that became a gold-certified commercial success with half of mainstream America singing along to lyrics about getting high as Duck.
Lina Weekly went online and addressed it directly. She pointed out that Durk had never mentioned Duck’s name while Duck was alive. She accused Durk of using her son’s death to sell music. She told him that what he was doing was the same thing that had gotten Bobby Schmura locked up.
And she warned him that a Rico case was coming, claiming now he want to get Asen gay, he about to get half like Duck Jerk. He never did it while he was alive. The trial began in November 2023. Prosecutors framed the murder as a gang operation executed to maintain Oblak standing in the criminal enterprise with the dead [ __ ] track serving as the inciting provocation that set the final plan in motion.
Defense attorneys argued that drill lyrics are performance and exaggeration, not confession, and that the government’s cooperating witnesses had their own reasons to lie. The jury deliberated for 16 hours over 3 days. On January 17th, 2024, the jury convicted all six defendants of murder and aid of racketeering and conspiracy to commit murder.
Mandatory life sentences across the board. Duck’s mother wept in the overflow courtroom, saying, “When I go home and tell my grandkids that their father’s justice has been served, that’s going to be a big burden lifted off my shoulders.” The convictions did not close every question the case raised. Court filings alleged that Kenneth Robertson told a cooperating witness he participated in the murder because King Vaughn had placed a bounty on Duck’s head, reported to have started at $50,000 and risen to $100,000.
The old block chains Van purchased over $100,000 spent on 16 custom pieces distributed to members including the convicted killers were entered into evidence as symbols of the gang’s reward structure. Vaughn was never indicted. He was already dead. In 2024, FBG Duck’s mother, the mother of his child, and two survivors of the Gold Coast shooting filed a civil wrongful death lawsuit against Lil Durk, King Van’s estate, and multiple record labels, including Sony and UMG.
The lawsuit alleges that F, Lil Durk’s only the family label, functioned as a media outpost for the Oblak criminal organization, that Durk and Vaughn taunted Duck before and after his death to expand their brand, and that the conspiracy to kill Duck was partly designed to promote their commercial interests in music.
These are serious allegations. Whether they survived the legal process is a separate matter. What they represent is a mother who refused to let the story end with six convictions when she believed others were still walking free. Carlton FBG Duck Weekly was 26 years old. He had four children. He had a Sony deal.
He had a mother who pointed him toward a microphone when she could have pointed him toward a gun who held him at his brother’s murder scene and asked him not to retaliate. He had a song that hundreds of millions of people have streamed and that earned him a place in the history of Chicago drill. He had a disc record that named nine dead men and he knew when he released it what that kind of provocation meant in the city he refused to leave.
None of those things are simple. None of them cancel each other out. The disc song was real. The talent was real. The war that made the disc song possible was real. And it had been running for nearly 10 years before Duck ever pressed record on dead [ __ ] What the case ultimately shows is not that a rapper was killed because of a song.
It shows a system, a recursive decadel long loop of murders renamed blocks, Instagram lives and retaliation plans where clout and survival had become so interwoven that bragging about a murder on camera was treated as rational. Where the men most capable of violence were also the most eager to document it, and where the federal government ultimately walked into court and played that documentation back to a jury for 6 weeks straight.
Six men will spend the rest of their lives in prison for what happened on Oak Street on August 4th, 2020. Carlton Weekley’s kids are growing up without their father. And somewhere on the south side of Chicago, there is still a block named after a 15year-old boy who was shot at a bus stop in January 2011.
And that name still means something to the people who live there, which tells you everything about how long these things last and how little any of it actually ends.
