Judge Greg Mathis has voiced his surprise at the decision by OTF Jam, also known as Jammy the Bull, to testify against Lil Durk in an ongoing murder-for-hire trial that could reach a verdict within days.
Mathis, who has a personal connection to Durk, described the rapper as someone who had been moving in a positive direction before his legal troubles mounted.
Durk had agreed to write an uplifting song for young people, which Mathis said “became the biggest hit of the year,” referencing “All My Life” featuring J. Cole.
Durk also donated $100,000 to Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson’s youth program and had plans to visit the Mathis Community Center in Detroit. “He was trying to redeem himself,” Mathis said, “but that gang life, being in that gang life is tough.”
Against that backdrop, the cooperation of OTF Jam landed with particular weight for Mathis. Jam has admitted to two murders and is seeking a negotiated sentence rather than life without parole, which Mathis confirmed is the motivation behind his testimony.
“He kept saying on the stand that he’s looking for a number,” Mathis said, meaning a fixed term of years rather than life without the possibility of release.
What surprised Mathis was not the legal calculus but the cultural one. “I was kind of shocked that he would cooperate,” he said, citing the gang ethics Jam had publicly embraced.
Mathis argued that for someone deeply embedded in street gang culture, reputation and credibility are not incidental but central to identity.
If you are a shooter in a street gang, if you’re going on drills, you have no circumstance under which you would tell because then you lose the notch,” he said.
That view was challenged directly. The counterargument put to Mathis was that killers, by the very nature of what they are willing to do, should not be expected to hold any particular moral line, including silence.
Mathis pushed back, insisting that the street code carries its own internal logic and that the power derived from a reputation for loyalty is something many gang members will protect even from inside a prison cell.
“If you don’t tell, they do,” he said, referring to the notches of credibility that survive incarceration so long as silence is maintained.
Mathis did acknowledge that mass cooperation among street-level defendants became far more common once the government began handing down sentences of thirty, fifty, and sixty years in the early 1980s alongside the crack epidemic.
The severity of those sentences, he argued, changed the calculation for many who might otherwise have stayed quiet.
The conversation also touched on Nate Boon Craft, a Detroit figure Mathis confirmed he knew personally, who died recently and was reputed to have admitted to killing approximately nineteen people.
When asked whether Boon Craft had ever cooperated with authorities, Mathis said only that he did not know, adding with a laugh that he lives in Los Angeles and tries to stay careful when navigating the politics of Detroit and Chicago.
With the Lil Durk trial potentially concluding this week, the question of what OTF Jam’s testimony ultimately means for the case remains open.
For Mathis, whatever the verdict, the cooperation itself represents a rupture in a code he understands well, even if he cannot fully explain why it still surprises him.
