With a federal trial looming, an FBI agent got a troubling text message from a gang member who had agreed to cooperate against six associates charged in the killing of rapper FBG Duck.
“My brother got killed,” David Sloan wrote to his handler on Oct. 5, “im in the hospital wit my family.”
Sloan said he believed O Block, his faction of the Black Disciples that’s now at the center of a federal case, was responsible for the slaying — an alarming claim that left the FBI scrambling for answers.
“Turns out everything you told them that day about your brother being killed … was a lie,” Keith Spielfogel, an attorney representing one of the alleged members and associates of O Block, said in questioning Sloan on Wednesday.
The revelation came during Sloan’s third day on the stand, where he sat with his back to the defendants, his long dreads shielding his face. He identified some of them from surveillance footage and offered inside information about O Block and its yearslong war with FBG Duck’s Tookaville faction of the Gangster Disciples.
Duck, real name Carlton Weekly, was killed in a brazen daytime shooting in the Gold Coast on Aug. 4, 2020. On trial are Marcus Smart, 24; Christopher Thomas, 24; Kenneth Roberson, 30; Charles Liggins, 32; Tacarlos Offerd, 32; and Ralph Turpin, 34.
Defense attorneys repeatedly questioned Sloan’s testimony and knowledge of O Block’s inner workings while detailing his lengthy criminal record, highlighting a felony gun case pending in Cook County court that he picked up when he was on parole and already cooperating with the FBI.
But Sloan’s acknowledgment that he had lied to federal authorities about his brother being killed served as the most glaring impeachment of his credibility.
When FBI agents came to Sloan’s home Oct. 13 after he stopped responding to them, he claimed his brother had been gunned down during a confrontation at a house party. In reality, Sloan’s brother had been killed in 2019 under different circumstances — and O Block had nothing to do with it, he said.
Sloan only acknowledged that he lied when he was confronted Tuesday. He later told jurors that he did so because he feared he and his family could be killed because he violated the no-snitch code of the street.
Gregory Mitchell, one of Liggins’ attorneys, insisted that Sloan was well aware of what he had signed up for.
“You understand that you were putting your life on the line by talking to them,” Mitchell said, referring to the FBI.
Sloan explained that he was initially approached by the bureau while he was being held at Cook County Jail in May 2018. Agents asked about O Block’s leadership, and he provided a list of names, he said. The feds came calling again in October 2020 — two months after Duck was killed — and Sloan formally agreed to cooperate with the investigation while he was in prison in February 2021.
FBI Special Agent Kevin Doyle testified this week that the cooperation agreement was severed that June after Sloan grew unresponsive when he was released, noting that a parole violation stemming from the outstanding gun charge played into the decision to sever the agreement for that period.
The cooperation deal was reinstated in January 2022 and has netted the convicted felon $21,515, Doyle said. Sloan said he earned $5,000 in a single cash payment for identifying defendants in surveillance footage from the Parkway Gardens apartment complex, which is also known as O Block and serves as the gang faction’s power base.
Sloan faces up to 30 years in prison in the pending case in Cook County but isn’t being offered leniency, unlike another gang-tied informant.
Sloan said he lived at Parkway Gardens in Woodlawn between 2008 and 2018, though he acknowledged that he was either locked up or living with his grandmother in North Dakota for some of that time. He painted O Block as a hierarchical clique that routinely held meetings with “killers” and drug dealers to pass out guns and dope and discuss potential retaliatory shootings.
But during cross-examination, he was presented with a transcript of a previous interview with the FBI in which he said there were no orders given or structure within O Block. At one point in his testimony, he acknowledged that he had essentially provided authorities with bogus information.
By the end of Wednesday’s testimony, Assistant U.S. Attorney Jason Julien sought to set the record straight in a final line of questioning.
“Is there a leadership structure in O Block?” Julien asked.
“Yes,” Sloan responded in his raspy drawl.
