After six weeks of testimony about an onslaught of West Side gang violence, jurors poised to get Wicked Town racketeering case

Reputed Wicked Town gang enforcer Torance Benson was all smiles when he livestreamed a video to social media from a West Side street one night in January 2018.

But the message to rival gang members was as serious as it gets.

“I’m tired of killin’ mother(expletives),” Benson said jokingly on the Facebook Live video, which was played for federal jurors on Thursday. “I’m taking a break. … I’m a Christian!”

As he spoke, Benson giggled and smiled as two of his associates came up behind him wearing latex gloves and flashing guns before wiggling four fingers for the camera — a sign prosecutors say means “Four Corner Hustlers Killer.”

“This is a lovely day on Ferdinand. … Where’s everybody at?” Benson said, glancing from side to side. As headlights appeared on the quiet street, Benson yelled a warning to his associates, “On that car, y’all!” before the video goes dark.

The ominous scene from Wicked Town’s stronghold at Leamington Avenue and Ferdinand Street was the last piece of evidence shown to jurors before prosecutors rested their case Thursday in the trial of Benson and the reputed boss of Wicked Town, Donald Lee.

Lee, 41, and Benson, 31, are each charged with racketeering conspiracy and unlawful use of a weapon by a felon. Lee is also charged with two counts of murder in the aid of racketeering, while Benson faces one count of aggravated assault in furtherance of the conspiracy. If convicted, they each could face life in prison.

Attorneys for Lee and Benson have argued the prosecution’s case is built largely on the testimony of other Wicked Town members who are cooperating with authorities in order to get a break in their own cases. Some of them are killers and admitted liars, while others have been paid by the government both in money and in promises of reduced sentences, according to the defense.

U.S. District Judge Thomas Durkin has scheduled closing arguments in the case for Tuesday.

Over six weeks of testimony, jurors at the Dirksen U.S. Courthouse have been given a crash course in the entrenched gang lifestyle that drives so much of the city’s seemingly endless violence, from typical disputes over drug turf to the more recent phenomenon where tit-for-tat disses on social media foster a cycle of retaliation and murder.

Three of nearly 20 slayings tied to the Wicked Town gang over the past two decades took place within weeks of Benson’s video taunting rivals, including a shooting the next day a few blocks away that left one Four Corner Hustlers member dead and another badly wounded, according to court testimony.

Two weeks after that, Wicked Town member Darius Murphy shot a suspected police cooperator and his girlfriend execution-style in their car after luring them to a meeting outside his home, according to testimony. Murphy has since pleaded guilty.

The trial has been subject to tight security, including metal detectors outside the courtroom and a ban on electronics. Several witnesses who failed to appear out of fear of reprisal had to be arrested and brought into court on orders of the judge, records show.

One witness, now a forklift operator in Atlanta, recounted last week how he ducked for cover when bullets ripped through his car while he was with a friend in Wicked Town territory in 2016. After checking his body for bullet wounds, he said he army-crawled through the grass to his friend, only to catch his dying breaths.

“He was mostly just wheezing,” the man said about his friend, Deandre Dale, who died later at a nearby hospital.

The trial has also included testimony from mothers still grieving the loss of their children, some of whom were not gang members but caught up in the violence nonetheless.

One of them, whose name the Tribune is withholding for security reasons at the request of the U.S. attorney’s office, testified she got a call late one night in 2016 saying that her 23-year-old son, Martel Howard, had been shot in the back. By the time she got to the hospital, he was dead.

After putting out a plea on Facebook to help find her son’s killer, the woman testified, a man who was with Howard that night secretly met with her at a McDonald’s in Forest Park and told her that the shooter was “Blackie,” a nickname for Benson.

“He told me that Martel tried to grab him and get him out of the way of the gunfire,” the mother testified. “I thanked him for taking the time to talk to me and give me closure.”

The woman said she pleaded with the witness to tell police what he knew, but “he said he would not come forward because he was frightened.”

Among the last pieces of evidence entered by prosecutors in their case in chief was a video-recorded statement Lee gave shortly after his arrest on a gun charge in 2020, before he knew of the scope of the federal investigation.

In that recording, Lee repeatedly defended Wicked Town and the street code by which he and associates lived, saying it was their only means of survival.

Dressed in a blue T-shirt, red-and-purple pajama bottoms and flip-flops, Lee spoke in a casual tone as he tried to tell the agents that he and his associates were careful only to go after rivals and snitches, who were playing the same dangerous game and deserve what they get.

“Like, that’s why I’m talking to you. I wanted to change your perception of Wicked Town,” said Lee, who was handcuffed to the cinder-block wall of a windowless interrogation room. “Wicked Town, yes, it’s a street gang. But at the same time, we don’t go killing people just to kill them. We out there hurting the right kind of people. No kids, no old lady. You see what I’m saying?”

Lee also riffed on the massive increase in firepower available on the streets, including large-capacity magazines and “switches” that turn ordinary pistols into machine guns capable of firing bursts of up to 40 bullets with a single squeeze of the trigger.

“I remember my first gun was a .38 with a nail in it,” Lee said at one point on the recording. “I had a put a nail in the barrel to keep it standing. Now these mother(expletives) got 40 clips with switches and (expletive). They think it’s a video game, we living in a (expletive) video game. This is ‘Grand Theft Auto.’ ”

Jurors got a peek at some of the gang’s arsenal through a series of social media videos shown last week, including another video posted by Benson on his Facebook account showing him and two associates coming through a gangway, with one holding up a massive assault rifle.

Another video posted on Facebook Live by Wicked Town associate Demond Brown on New Year’s Eve 2017 depicted several gang members dancing and holding up handguns in an apartment decorated with a plastic, ornament-less Christmas tree and snowflake streamers.

Brown pleaded guilty earlier this year to racketeering involving drug trafficking, armed robbery and multiple murders, including the fatal shooting of Four Corner Hustlers associate Kishaun Mobley, 21, a week before the video was filmed.

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Just 11 days after the video was posted, Brown, Lee, and two other Wicked Town members ambushed other members of the same rival gang in the 5200 block of West Ferdinand Street, spraying bullets from a stolen pickup truck and killing Uriah Hughes, 33, and wounding another man, according to his plea agreement with prosecutors.

In his June 2020 interview, Lee told agents from the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives that the difference between his life and theirs is “like heaven and hell.”

“We in two different worlds, man,” Lee said. “You in the real world. … Like, if you (expletive) up at your job, you get reprimanded. You (expletive) up in the streets, you die.“

He also said he was a “strong believer in divine intervention.”

“Everything happens for a reason,” Lee said. “Like us being right here right now, so y’all can hear my side of things, so y’all won’t think that every mother(expletive) from Wicked Town is some type of animal.”

Lawyers for both Lee and Benson have told the judge their clients do not intend to testify. Durkin is expected to ask them one final time under oath before closing arguments begin.

jmeisner@chicagotribune.com