Chicago street gang leader Larry Hoover's clemency bid now in Gov. JB Pritzker's hands

SPRINGFIELD, Ill. - It's now up to Gov. JB Pritzker to determine whether Gangster Disciples founder Larry Hoover should be freed from more than 50 years of incarceration after making his pitch for clemency to the Illinois Prisoner Review Board.

"On April 7, the Prisoner Review Board held clemency hearings, including Mr. Hoover's," Liz Mitchell, a spokeswoman for the review board, said in a prepared statement. "After the hearings are held, the Board typically sends its confidential recommendations to the Governor within 60 days. All recommendations on public hearings from the April docket have been sent to the Governor, including Mr. Hoover's."

The notorious street gang leader's bid to be freed from state custody comes after Republican President Donald Trump last year commuted Hoover's federal life sentence in a supermax prison under the First Step Act, a bipartisan law passed by Congress during Trump's first term meant to reform certain federal sentencing guidelines.

For Pritzker, a Democrat who has expressed support for leniency in the criminal justice system but has taken a more careful approach the longer he's been in office, a decision over Hoover's fate could be politically risky as he runs for a third term and is mulling a run for president in 2028. He also has no deadline for deciding on whether to grant clemency to Hoover.

Hoover was convicted in state court in 1973 of the murder of William Young, one of Hoover's gang underlings who was shot to death that same year after he and others had stolen from gang stash houses. As a result, he was sentenced to up to 200 years in state prison.

But in 1997, Hoover, despite already being incarcerated, was taken down in a federal drug-trafficking, extortion and criminal enterprise case along with other gang leaders. This conviction led to Hoover receiving a mandatory life sentence in federal prison before it was commuted by Trump.

For the remaining state case, the Prisoner Review Board previously considered whether to grant Hoover parole before rejecting that bid in 2024.

Meanwhile, Hoover's clemency petition says the former gang kingpin "has demonstrated profound personal transformation and exceptional rehabilitation" over his decades in prison, and that he has suffered multiple heart attacks while performing prison labor in a Colorado state prison where he resided as of last year.

Federal prosecutors, however, have vehemently opposed any breaks for Hoover, arguing he did untold damage to communities across Chicago during his reign on the streets.

The Gangster Disciples' origins go back to the 1960s and the gang became a major criminal force under Hoover's leadership in the 1970s. Hoover built an operation that was as sophisticated as a legitimate corporation, and authorities say he ran the gang even while in state prison for murder. The leadership even established a strict code of conduct for members.

By the mid-1990s, Hoover transformed the Gangster Disciples into a multistate drug distribution network, federal authorities have said. The gang, under his direction, shifted from traditional street market competition to a franchise system on drug sales. The 1997 federal conviction moved Hoover from Illinois' state prison system to a federal prison.

After the leaders of the Gangster Disciples were taken down by federal authorities, a steady splintering of the gang took place in the ensuing years, experts said, changing the dynamic of much of Chicago's street violence. Instead of big gangs like the Gangster Disciples fighting their rivals, a lot of violence erupted between little factions, or cliques, that authorities in Chicago considered to be offshoots of the GDs.

In a 2012 interview with The Chicago Tribune, Andrew Papachristos, now a Northwestern University sociologist who has researched street gangs, said without the strong hierarchy gang members were more likely "to come into conflict with people who are next to you."

"So if you're around four other (gang) sects and you're no longer partying with them on a daily basis," he said, "those conflicts will be more likely to erupt because you don't have that grand poobah telling you what to do anymore."

Pritzker's dealings with the Prisoner Review Board are an area where he has had to reconcile his progressive policy positions with pressures from the political center and the right.

Since becoming governor in 2019, the makeup for the board has changed noticeably, from being labeled by legislative Republicans as too liberal to later being criticized by some prisoners' rights and criminal justice reform advocates for taking too hard of a line, specifically by preventing older inmates convicted of heinous crimes from getting the paroles they sought.

The review board came into focus again two years ago when a parolee was charged - and later convicted - of fatally stabbing an 11-year-old boy and seriously injuring his mother, with whom the parolee used to be in a relationship.

The parolee, Crosetti Brand, had been released by the review board from state custody on a separate issue involving the parolee and the woman months earlier. After the stabbings, the board's chairman and another member resigned.

In a decision backed by Pritzker, the state eventually codified more changes with the review board as part of the fallout.

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This story was originally published May 15, 2026 at 10:53 PM.