The detail that cracked a cold trail in Lil Durk’s federal murder-for-hire trial was not a phone tap or a tipster.
It was a pair of black pants with “Rats to Riches” printed down one leg, spotted on camera footage from an In-N-Out Burger about 35 minutes after a shooting near the Beverly Center in Los Angeles.
LAPD Detective Warner Carias told jurors he had hit a wall trying to identify three masked gunmen who fired on a black Escalade on August 19, 2022, killing Saviay’a “Lul Pab” Robinson. Facial recognition came up empty, and photos sent to other agencies went nowhere.
Carias went back to the In-N-Out footage and looked harder at the clothing. He ran a plain Google search for black pants with “Rats to Riches” on the right leg and found they were sold at two shops on Chicago’s South Side, which pointed the investigation in a completely new direction.
Chicago police identified one of the men as Deandre Wilson from the photos Carias sent over. Wilson’s Instagram page, under the name OTF_Dede, gave investigators a warrant target and opened up a chain of photos, account data, and connections to others already on the radar.
One photo from that account showed Wilson with Lil Durk and Jerome Kacey Hester, known as OTF Jam. Another showed Wilson wearing a chain marked “VRoy,” though the judge blocked testimony about what that label was meant to signify.
Flight records then placed Wilson, David Lindsey, and Keith Jones arriving in San Diego on August 18. Hester and Asa Houston flew in separately the same day, and airport video showed the first group walking past the baggage claim without stopping to collect any luggage.
The feds pointed to Jason Smith paying for those flights with an American Express card tied to an Astronaut Soundz account.
That account had cards in the names of Durk, Smith, Ola Allibalogun, and Durk’s father, Dontay Banks, with state records listing Durk as a manager of the company in 2021.
Durk’s defense lawyer Marissa Goldberg pushed back hard on what those financial links actually prove. She argued that Kavon Grant had wide access to company cards and resources, and that Grant, not Durk, was the one who arranged cars, hotel rooms, masks, and rides connected to the Los Angeles trip.
A white BMW M5 rented from VEM Exotics in Studio City became another thread in the case. Police found a framed photo of Durk inside the shop, and GPS records from the car placed it near an Encino home more than 15 times over six days, a property rented by Allibalogun from July through October 2022.
On August 18, the BMW’s GPS put it near an REI in Woodland Hills, where a receipt showed four black ski masks were purchased for $39 each.
Carias later compared those masks to the face coverings worn by the gunmen on video near the gas station where Robinson was killed.
Grant returned the BMW to the shop on August 20, the day after the shooting. The defense said Grant had deep personal reasons to want revenge after King Von was killed in Atlanta in 2020, reasons that had nothing to do with any order from Durk.
Goldberg told jurors that Grant was in the car with a badly wounded Von that night, driving toward Grady Memorial Hospital while Von bled in the back seat. She said Von turned to Grant and asked, “Why did you let me get shot?”, and that those words, and that moment, shaped everything Grant did afterward.
The feds say Grant was not operating independently because he was carrying out tasks for Durk. Prosecutor Daniel Weiner described the case as one about “revenge, stalking, and premeditated murder,” saying Durk became consumed with getting back at those connected to Von’s death.
Three cooperating witnesses, Grant, Hester, and Jones, have all made deals with the government, and their credibility is now a central battleground.
Goldberg noted that Hester met with agents more than 30 times but only a handful of those sessions were recorded, and that Jones spent roughly five recorded hours with police without once naming Durk in the alleged plan.
A separate fight broke out after jurors left the courtroom over messages between Durk and Hester. In one exchange, Durk wrote, “We ain’t handing ourself over to them people,” followed by, “They got to do they job.” The feds say “them people” means police, while Durk’s team says the context points somewhere else entirely.
Judge Michael Fitzgerald admitted the messages but acknowledged how difficult it is to manage the sheer volume of digital evidence in a case like this.
Durk’s lawyers said they were still working through material they had received, and the fight over what those messages actually mean is far from settled.
