This guy must be insane from the time he spent in prison.

Man who used $25 million wrongful conviction award to revive gang faces prison in brazen shooting


The top was down on Thaddeus Jimenez's shiny Mercedes convertible and opera music blared on the stereo as he and a gang associate drove around Chicago's Northwest Side looking for someone to shoot.

Just three years earlier, Jimenez had won a staggering $25 million verdict for his wrongful murder conviction. But instead of building a new life, he used the windfall to rejuvenate his old gang, paying recruitment bonuses, buying guns and fancy cars, and even giving cash prizes to members willing to tattoo their faces with the Simon City Royals insignia.

Cruising the Irving Park neighborhood on that muggy Monday morning in August 2015, Jimenez carried a sapphire blue, custom-plated pistol and had Gucci luggage bags crammed with extra ammunition stowed in the back seat, court records show. His passenger, Jose Roman, held a .22-caliber Mossberg semiautomatic rifle at his side as he filmed their travels with his iPhone.

Shortly after 11 a.m., Jimenez pulled the Mercedes up to an ex-gang member who knew the two men and greeted them warmly. As the camera rolled, Earl Casteel, 33, was startled to hear Jimenez threaten him.

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"Why shouldn't I blast you right now?" Jimenez declared.

"Blast me, n----?" Casteel replied, according to a transcript of the video in court records. "You my brother, man! I ain't got nothing against you."

Without hesitation, Jimenez nonchalantly aimed his pistol at Casteel's legs and opened fire, shooting him once in each thigh.

"Why would you do that?" Casteel cried out as he fell to the street.

"Shut up, bitch," Jimenez said before speeding away.

The graphic video recorded by Roman that day is expected to be played publicly for the first time in a federal courtroom on Thursday as both face sentencing for their guilty pleas to a single federal weapons count. Each still faces charges in Cook County criminal court related to Casteel's shooting.

In a recent court filing, federal prosecutors called the shooting a "uniquely appalling" act even for a city with a national reputation for rampant gang violence. Had Jimenez and Roman not been arrested, they likely would have posted the video on social media, alongside dozens of other clips depicting how Jimenez's influx of cash had put the Simon City Royals back on the map, prosecutors said.

"(Jimenez) could have used this money in any number of ways — to assist friends and family, contribute to the community, sponsor others wrongfully convicted or simply live in comfort for the rest of his natural life — instead he chose to build a gang," Assistant U.S. Attorneys Michelle Petersen and Kathryn Malizia wrote.

Jimenez's zeal for the gang life didn't end with his arrest. Weeks after Casteel's shooting, authorities intercepted a six-page letter Jimenez wrote from Cook County Jail decrying "impostors" who had taken his money and assuring his fellow Royals he was still in control.

"When the big dawg is away, the cats will play," Jimenez wrote in neat printing. "Not a scratch on me, and yes, I'm still running the s---."

Prosecutors signaled they'll seek a 10-year prison term, the maximum possible, for Jimenez, while his attorney, Steven Greenberg, sought the minimum sentence, noting that his client had already spent 16 years in prison for a murder he didn't commit.

Once he was back on the streets, Jimenez had little guidance and quickly squandered what was left of his settlement on "status-enhancing material goods" and other efforts to rebuild his gang, Greenberg said.

"Ironically, the restitution he received for his terrible injuries did not bring healing, it just drew other vultures to pick at his wounds," wrote Greenberg, who asked U.S. District Judge Harry Leinenweber for a sentence of about 31/2 years.


Born in 1979 to a working-class single mother, Jimenez was introduced into the gang lifestyle as a young boy by uncles who were father figures but also Simon City Royals gang members. By the time he was 10, Jimenez was skipping school and "dabbling in drugs," according to Greenberg's filing. Soon he had amassed a juvenile record of mostly minor infractions.

Thaddeus Jimenez
A family photo of Thaddeus Jimenez when he was 12.
But that changed when Jimenez was just 13 and charged as an adult in the February 1993 gang-related slaying of Eric Morro, 19, during an argument on West Belmont Avenue. Several witnesses identified Jimenez as the shooter. He was convicted in 1994 and again in 1997 after an appeals court reversed the original conviction on a legal technicality. Ultimately, he was sentenced to 45 years in prison.

Jimenez spent the first several years of incarceration in a state youth facility, where he was repeatedly "jumped" due to his small size and suffered bouts of depression, Greenberg said. When he turned 17, Jimenez was transferred to an adult prison where he was "terrorized on a daily basis" by both other prisoners and guards, he said.

"His response when confronted was that of a cornered animal — he fought back," Greenberg wrote.

Behavioral infractions kept Jimenez in segregation and without access to a phone or little human contact for long stretches, including once for close to four years, Greenberg said. Overcome with anger, depression and despair, Jimenez's moods swung wildly from combative to nearly catatonic.

After years writing letters begging lawyers and other advocacy groups to take a look at his case, he finally caught a break in 2005, when attorneys and students from the Northwestern University Bluhm Center on Wrongful Convictions decided to reinvestigate his conviction.

The lawyers uncovered that an alternate suspect, Juan Carlos Torres, had been surreptitiously recorded confessing to the Morro killing by the father of one of the other youths involved in the argument — a recording that was discounted by the police at the time.

After two key witnesses recanted their earlier statements that Jimenez had fired the fatal shots, the Cook County state's attorney's office in 2007 agreed to reopen its own investigation. Two years later, prosecutors indicted Torres in Morro's murder, but he was acquitted by a judge in 2013.

When Jimenez was released, he was hailed in national headlines as one of the youngest murder defendants in the country to ever be exonerated. He was quickly awarded a certificate of innocence that allowed him to recoup nearly $200,000 from the state for his wrongful imprisonment. But it wasn't until 2012 that a federal jury awarded him the $25 million in his lawsuit against the city and Chicago police — a verdict that still ranks as one of the biggest police misconduct payouts in the city's history.

At the time, Jimenez's civil attorney, Jon Loevy, told the Tribune that Jimenez was working at a restaurant and still "trying to acclimate to life without prison."

"He's trying to figure out what to do with the rest of his life," Loevy said.

Thaddeus Jimenez
Thaddeus Jimenez. (Cook County sheriff's office)
Burning through his share

The Simon City Royals formed in the 1950s as a predominantly white greaser gang and rose to prominence through a series of turf battles with Hispanic and black gangs on the city's North Side. The Royals' influence had waned after many of its leaders were either killed or locked up, and by the time Jimenez was released from prison in 2009, the gang was all but defunct, according to court records.

In his first few years of freedom, Jimenez managed to stay busy with his legal team working on his civil lawsuit. He began dating a woman and had two children with her. But it wasn't long before problems arose — including run-ins with police and "self-medicating" with illegal drugs to combat symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, according to Greenberg.

Court records show Jimenez was convicted in 2012 of felony narcotics possession and sentenced to a year in prison after police searched his home and found three firearms and a bag of psilocybin, the active ingredient in psychedelic mushrooms. In 2014, he and several other gang members were convicted of misdemeanor reckless conduct for donning masks and bandannas over their faces and surrounding vehicular traffic, prosecutors said.

After the huge jury award came in, nearly half went to Jimenez's civil attorneys, Greenberg said, but Jimenez quickly began burning through his share, buying fancy cars, throwing lavish drug-fueled parties and paying bonds to free associates facing criminal charges from jail.

"His new family became the gang, reconstructed from his childhood memory of his uncles, the kids he had run with before his first arrest," Greenberg wrote. "They became his crew — for a price — and gave him the self-esteem he had always craved and had never had."

Police and prosecutors said that to re-establish the Royals as a force in the city's gang-infested streets, Jimenez paid $50,000 bonuses to new members and offered cash to those who would tattoo the gang's insignia on their face. He also launched a social media campaign, posting videos on YouTube and Facebook of himself and other gang members brandishing firearms, flashing gang signs and stacks of cash, and threatening violence against police and rival gangs.

Jose Roman composite image
Simon City Royals gang member Jose Roman, left, brandishes a gun in this YouTube video posted shortly before the Aug. 17, 2015, shooting of a man in the Irving Park neighborhood. Roman, right, in a Cook County Sheriff's office photo. (States Attorney's Office; Cook County Sheriff's Office)
One video from November 2014 showed a shirtless Jimenez loading a clip into a pistol and flashing the Royals' two-fingered hand symbol. The video depicted images of an assault rifle before concluding with a hooded figure aiming a gun at the camera and the sounds of gunfire, prosecutors said.

Jimenez spent millions of dollars on luxury vehicles alone — including a 2011 Range Rover for Roman and a Porsche Panamera for fellow gang member Luis Candelaria, who has since been sentenced to five years in prison for using a gun in a hate crime, according to court records. He also paid $90,000 for the Mercedes he eventually crashed after Casteel's shooting, prosecutors said.

In September 2013, Jimenez posted $100,000 to bond out another Simon City Royal who was charged in a drive-by shooting that left a teenager paralyzed, according to prosecutors.

Records show that the money Jimenez was spreading around was having an impact. Violent crimes attributed to the Simon City Royals began occurring on a regular basis, including the January 2015 shooting at a West Side gas station that wounded two innocent bystanders and several killings in the Harrison police district that targeted their main rivals, the Traveling Vice Lords.

On a Saturday afternoon in April 2015, six months before Jimenez's arrest, an admitted Simon City Royal on the payroll walked into a crowded convenience store on West Chicago Avenue, pulled out a .45-caliber submachine gun and jammed it into the ribs of a customer, saying, "I should kill you right here," according to court records. Tyrell Thomas pleaded guilty to a federal weapons violation and was sentenced last year to nine years in prison.

In all, nearly a dozen members of the Simon City Royals have been charged with state and federal weapons offenses since 2015, an escalation of criminal activity that demonstrates the gang's rejection of law and order and its "feudal means of self-governance," prosecutors wrote in a sentencing memo for Thomas' case.

"Their behavior … promotes an atmosphere of terror that devastates neighborhoods and leads only to increasingly longer prison terms, or death," the filing said.

Crashed car
Thaddeus Jimenez's wrecked Mercedes is shown in the 3800 block of North St. Louis Avenue in Chicago, where Jimenez crashed after allegedly shooting a man on Aug. 17, 2015, and leading police on a chase through the Irving Park neighborhood. Jimenez had paid $90,000 for the car. (U.S. attorney's office)
'The ruling government'

On the morning of Casteel's shooting, surveillance cameras captured Jimenez and Roman loading the Gucci bags of ammunition into the Mercedes behind an apartment building in the 3200 block of West Belle Plaine Avenue, according to the prosecution filing. Jimenez had switched the rear license plate to throw off law enforcement, and the two had portable police scanners with them as they drove.

Riding through the neighborhood in baseball caps and sunglasses, Jimenez and Roman hammed it up for the camera as they sipped from cans of grape Crush soda. As a female singer belted out an aria, Roman explained how opera was their music of choice when looking for targets to shoot, unlike other "wannabe rappin'-ass n---as."

As the car cruised down Irving Park Road and onto residential streets, the two bragged about shooting gang members and took mock aim at passersby. They yelled obscenities at one woman as she crossed the street, then honked the horn at another motorist and laughed at the reaction.

"Neighbors are scared of us," Jimenez remarked, according to the transcript. "We are the police around here. We are the ruling government in our own communities."

After Roman made a crack about the police, Jimenez said the cops "gonna get it too" if they tried to protect citizens from the Royals.

"Y'all bitches better get bulletproof vests and bulletproof helmets," Roman said.

At one point during their tour, the pair encountered a man driving a white car. Roman yelled out to the man, "What you is? You ain't (expletive)? All right, this is Royals hood, homie." After the man drove away without answering, Roman panned the camera back to his hand as he lowered the rifle and said, "Ooh-ee, I got thirsty."

Moments later, they encountered Casteel, a onetime gang member and friend from the neighborhood who was getting out of his car near Belle Plaine and St. Louis avenues. The video showed Casteel, unarmed and dressed in a black T-shirt, walk up to the driver's side of the Mercedes and say, "What's up, folks?"

"To (Casteel's) palpable shock, and for no reason rooted in reality, the trigger is pulled," Greenberg wrote in his filing.

The video ended with Jimenez yelling, "Get the f--- out of here!" as Casteel, who dropped out of view of the camera, screamed in pain. Prosecutors said Jimenez ran a red light a few blocks away, then drove the Mercedes at speeds up to 70 mph down busy residential and commercial streets with police in pursuit, weaving in and out of oncoming traffic. He lost control and struck a parked car in the 3800 block of North St. Louis Avenue.

Jimenez crawled out of the damaged Mercedes and ran, dropping his handgun before police caught up with him on North Elston Avenue. Roman was arrested near the Blue Line Irving Park station after tossing the loaded rifle in the back yard of a residence, according to prosecutors.

Casteel needed steel rods to repair fractures to both legs and spent months in physical therapy learning to walk again, according to his lawyer, Kevin O'Brien. He later filed a lawsuit against Jimenez and was awarded a $6.3 million judgment in December in Cook County Circuit Court. O'Brien said he's currently trying to track down any assets Jimenez may have left.

In his letter to his soldiers from the county jail, Jimenez made no mention of Casteel's shooting or the mayhem he'd caused that day. But he said being back behind bars would not deter him from his goal to keep the Royals on top. In fact, he implied he was back where he belonged.

"If any of you know anything about me at all, you should know this is where I came from," Jimenez wrote. "This is where I was created. This is my home."

He's a lifer not so much insane (somewhat) just hardcore. One of the many causes of Chicago's spike in homicides last year. TVL member shot up a car with Royals & GDs. The Royals choosing to expand into the Westside is peculiar. Last time Royals had a Westside deck was over 20 years ago. Making a tactical move against the TVL is quite a bad choice. TVLs in that area, i think , are one of the deepest decks.

This could be a power move so it should be interesting how this plays out.

Video of the shooting:

There's a reason he got shot. It's something from the past.

WATCHDOGS: How millionaire’s gang fantasy ‘blew up the West Side’
THE WATCHDOGS 04/14/2017, 02:15pm

On his social media sites, Thaddeus “T.J.” Jimenez called himself Batman and Bruce Wane — misspelling the name of the comic hero’s alter ego, millionaire Bruce Wayne.

But unlike Bruce Wayne, Jimenez used his fortune for evil.

In 2012, he won an astonishing $25 million in a wrongful-conviction lawsuit against the city of Chicago. Half went to his lawyers. And he showered millions of what was left on his street gang, the Simon City Royals.

What really caught the attention of the police, though, was that he started expanding his gang beyond its stronghold in Albany Park and other neighborhoods on the Northwest Side, where the members were mostly white and Hispanic. He paid black gang members who lived miles away on the West Side to switch sides and join his gang, according to law enforcement sources.

Jimenez’s aim wasn’t to elbow his way into the lucrative drug trade on the West Side, they say, but to act like a kingpin and wage war on rival gangs for the fun of it.

The pace of violence picked up not long after Jimenez created his West Side franchise in 2014, according to a Chicago Sun-Times investigation that’s found that at least 19 people were shot, four of them killed, in the months-long battle that broke out as a result of Jimenez creating the No Love Money Gang — what his crew of West Siders called themselves.

“That’s when things started going haywire,” says Derrick House, an outreach worker for the Institute for Nonviolence Chicago on the West Side. “You have all of these people dead. If he wouldn’t have come down here, it probably would have been different.”

Robert Tracy, who was chief crime strategist for the Chicago Police Department at the time, agrees.

“He did have a heavy role in escalating the violence in that area,” says Tracy, now police chief in Wilmington, Delaware. “It was incredible. In Chicago, they were supposed to have a reputation for being loyal to their gangs. Obviously, money changed their minds.”


Robert Tracy. | Sun-Times files

The chaos that Jimenez, now 38, brought to the West Side lasted nearly until he got locked up in the summer of 2015, according to police and community activists.

“As we started picking people off, though, he did quiet down a lot,” Tracy says.

Jimenez’s early childhood was spent on the Northwest Side — the Royals’ base for decades. After he got out of prison in 2009, he took over the gang, which, over the next few years, terrorized the Northwest Side, shooting and threatening people, authorities say.

Last month, Jimenez was sentenced to more than nine years in federal prison for possessing a handgun the police said he used to shoot a man in the legs in August 2015 in Irving Park.


Thaddeus “T.J.” Jimenez is caught on a cellphone video shooting Earl Casteel in the legs on Aug. 17, 2015 in Irving Park on the Northwest Side. Jimenez was arrested minutes later after crashing his Mercedes-Benz while fleeing from police. He’s been sentenced to nine years in prison on a federal gun conviction and still faces trial in Cook County criminal court for the shooting. | Court exhibit

A fellow gang member, riding with Jimenez, recorded the shooting on his cellphone. It’s a jarring video, showing the pair listening to “Ave Maria” blasting out of the speakers of Jimenez’s $90,000 Mercedes-Benz convertible and threatening bystanders on their way to the shooting. A police scanner in the car crackles in the background.

After being convicted of illegal gun possession in U.S. District Court, Jimenez was moved from a federal lockup to the Cook County Jail to face state charges for the shooting itself.

Awaiting trial, he recently was sent from there to the Kendall County Jail because “his presence in the jail causes tension,” says Cara Smith, policy director for Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart.

Jimenez has spent much of his life behind bars, which he called “my house” and “my world” in a letter he wrote in jail in 2015.

His uncles were Simon City Royals, and he views the gang as his “family.” In the 1960s and ’70s, the Royals were known for their white supremacist ideology. In the 1980s, the gang formed an alliance with the Gangster Disciples, one of Chicago’s biggest black gangs, to protect Simon City Royals members in prison.


Thaddeus “T.J.” Jimenez. | Cook County Sheriff’s Office

But the Royals haven’t changed their racist ways, court records show. In early 2014, a black couple walking from their car to their home with their 2-year-old child and their groceries were accosted by members of Jimenez’s crew on the Northwest Side. According to a police report, they flashed a gun, called the couple monkeys and said, “Get the f— out of our hood, we will f—— kill you!” One of them, Luis Candelaria, was convicted of a hate crime and sent to prison.

Despite such racist activity, Jimenez, whose mother is Polish-American and dead father was Hispanic, decided to extend the Royals’ reach by recruiting young black men. Most of them hailed from the 700 block of North Trumbull and surrounding blocks on the West Side. Some even tattooed Royals logos on their faces and necks to prove their allegiance to Jimenez, who handed them thousands of dollars in cash, let them drive his stable of luxury cars and threw lavish parties for them.

The expansion touched off an outbreak of violence in West Humboldt Park that lasted from mid-2014 through much of 2015 and illustrated what one cop calls “the delicate ecosystem of gangs in the area.” Gang factions in the neighborhood generally coexisted, selling drugs on the blocks they controlled. But Jimenez’s No Love Money Gang shattered the relative calm there, authorities say.


Thaddeus “T.J.” Jimenez in police lineup photo at 13.

Jimenez and his lawyer, Steven Greenberg, declined requests for comment.

In a sentencing memo in Jimenez’s federal gun case, Greenberg said his client’s problems date to when he was just 13 and was charged in the fatal 1993 shooting of 19-year-old Eric Morro on the Northwest Side. He was convicted and sentenced to 50 years in prison.

“He was terrorized on a daily basis, at times assaulted by both prisoners and guards,” Greenberg said in court papers.

A witness in the case later recanted and implicated another man, Juan Carlos Torres. Jimenez’s conviction was overturned, and he was freed in 2009 after serving 16 years in prison. Torres was later tried and acquitted when the judge said he didn’t trust any of the witnesses.

After he got out, Jimenez had a son and a daughter with his girlfriend. He doted on his family, according to his mother, Victoria Jimenez.

In 2012, a jury awarded him $25 million — one of the biggest judgments in a wrongful-conviction lawsuit against the city.


In happier times, Thaddeus “T.J.” Jimenez with and his mother Victoria after being awarded a certificate of innocence in June 2009. | Sun-Times files

Despite all of that, Jimenez started getting into trouble. He went to prison at the end of 2012 for a drug-possession conviction. When he was released, he acted differently, his mother says.

“Now, he wanted to be the Al Capone of Chicago,” she says. “Family didn’t matter to him anymore.”

Victoria Jimenez says she was stung by comments his girlfriend made in March after his sentencing in his federal gun case. The girlfriend told reporters his family didn’t care about him and was just concerned with getting his money. “That’s not true,” his mother says.

Victoria Jimenez says she visited her son while he was first in prison and attended hearings in his other cases. She wasn’t able to go to his federal sentencing last month because she was in the hospital with pneumonia, she says, but says, “I am still here for him,” even though she says he won’t put her on his jail visitation list.

She says she was heartbroken by the video of her son shooting a man in the legs for no apparent reason in 2015.

“He’s got to pay for what he did,” she says. “You don’t go around playing God.”

In court papers, Greenberg said his client fashioned himself an untouchable king.

“His settlement was squandered on status-enhancing material goods and on reviving the Simon City Royals, the all-but-defunct gang of his childhood, where Thaddeus provided financial assistance to others on the street who joined him,” Greenberg wrote.

“He reimagined it on a clinically grandiose scale — a kind of Camelot of loyal comrades-in-arms — with himself as its head, not a broken, shaken man unable to function in the real world, but in this more familiar realm, a leader, a king, in control, powerful, invulnerable.”


Dantrell Williams. | Cook County booking photo

Jimenez’s idea to expand his gang kingdom to the West Side grew out of a friendship forged in the Cook County Jail after he was charged with drug possession in 2012, according to a law enforcement source.

The source says a drug dealer he met in jail was part of the Traveling Vice Lords from the 700 block of North Trumbull, and that led Jimenez to Dantrell Williams, another Traveling Vice Lord from that area. Williams, now 21, got an “R” tattooed on his neck and became one of the original leaders of Jimenez’s No Love Money Gang, the source says.

But Jimenez wasn’t interested in selling heroin on the West Side like the Traveling Vice Lords or their rivals, the Conservative Vice Lords, according to authorities — only in taking on rival gangs.

The police knew of the gang war, says Tracy. “We were tracking him,” he says of Jimenez. “But this guy had counter-surveillance. He knew we were watching him.”

The first time Jimenez was documented hanging out with his West Side crew was on May 22, 2014, in the 4100 block of West Chicago. A police report shows Jimenez was stopped by officers for a traffic violation in his green Humvee, riding with No Love Money Gang members. Jimenez also allowed those in the gang to drive the Hummer, nicknamed the “Tank,” according to sources who say reports of shots fired were often linked to a vehicle matching its description.

CLICK HERE for timeline of shootings linked to gang’s spread:


Police think the No Love Money Gang first targeted the Conservative Vice Lords on July 3, 2014. Witnesses saw a green Hummer right before a shooting in the 600 block of North Ridgeway, sources say. Martin Satterfield, a former Marshall High School basketball player, was left partially paralyzed. The 24-year-old now uses a wheelchair.


Tyris Ferguson, 23, was killed and three others, also believed to be members of the No Love Money Gang, were wounded when the Pontiac Grand Prix they were riding in was sprayed with bullets from a military-style rifle in the 700 block of North St. Louis Avenue, on Nov. 19, 2014. | ABC7

No one has been charged in that crime. Satterfield, whose family says he wasn’t a gang member, wouldn’t cooperate with investigators, according to a police report.

Before Satterfield was shot, the neighborhood was relatively quiet, police records show. Afterward, a back-and-forth gun battle raged in the approximately 16-block area. By the end of October 2014, the Traveling Vice Lords were fed up with those members who defected to the No Love Money Gang, according to one knowledgeable source who says the TVLs thought Jimenez’s upstart crew was hurting their narcotics business by drawing cops to the neighborhood with violence.

In response, sources say, the TVLs killed Owen “Oskeeno” Spears, a No Love Money Gang member, on Oct. 27, 2014, in the 700 block of North Trumbull, though no one’s been charged. Spears, a 22-year-old rapper, was shot to warn the No Love Money Gang to get out of the neighborhood, sources say.


Owen “Oskeeno” Spears.

“Rest in peace Oskeeno,” Jimenez wrote in the 2015 jailhouse letter. “You’re in my heart forever.”

Some core members of the No Love Money Gang got the hint and left. Others stayed. Many of them went to jail, including three of Jimenez’s top lieutenants.

Williams was arrested Jan. 31, 2015, for having an illegal 9mm handgun while riding in an SUV pulled over for a traffic violation.

“Everybody trying to kill me because I’m a Royal,” officers said Williams told them. “I gotta protect myself.”

The same gun was used to shoot a Four Corner Hustlers member in the leg earlier that month on the West Side, authorities say.

On March 22, 2015, while free on bail, Williams was driving a Chrysler 300 on the West Side with No Love Money Gang members when he got pulled over, after a chase, for running a stop sign. Officers said a loaded AK-47-style rifle was in the car. Again, Cook County prosecutors charged Williams with illegal gun possession, and he was freed on $100,000 bail.

On Aug. 13, 2015, Williams was shot in the forearm but wouldn’t cooperate with the police.

Weeks later, federal authorities charged Williams with illegal possession of the 9mm handgun and the rifle. He pleaded guilty and was sentenced to four years in federal prison. In a sentencing memo, federal prosecutors noted that Cook County judges had released Williams on bail for gun possession — twice.

“Despite having been arrested in possession of an even more deadly weapon than his already pending charge, defendant was once again released on bond,” prosecutors wrote.

They said Williams’ rap sheet included more than a dozen arrests for drug possession and threatening people with guns, that he was given repeated chances “to get his life back on track but has instead chosen again and again to ally himself with violent street gangs — first, the Traveling Vice Lords and, most recently, the Simon City Royals, led by Thaddeus Jimenez.”


Tyrell Thomas (right) identified by authorities as a member of T.J. Jimenez’s gang, was caught on a security video on April 12, 2015, outside a convenience store near Chicago and Homan avenues with a submachine gun. It was a gun “fit for a Hollywood action film,” federal prosecutors later wrote. | Court exhibit

On April 12, 2015, another Royals member, Tyrell Thomas, walked into a convenience store near Chicago and Homan avenues with a submachine gun tethered to his neck by a shoestring. It was a gun “fit for a Hollywood action film,” federal prosecutors later wrote.

Thomas’ two accomplices also were members of the Royals, after flipping from the Traveling Vice Lords, according to police, who say the trio stole about $370 from rival gang members. A security camera showed them entering and exiting the store.

Thomas, now 30, pleaded guilty to possession of a MasterPiece Arms .45-caliber submachine gun. He’s serving a 108-month federal prison term. No one else was charged.


Divonte Hall. | Facebook

Divonte Hall, identified as another member of the Royals, got locked up for a triple shooting in 2016. On March 7, 2016, he and an accomplice shot two men and a woman near 13th and Lawndale, police said. Witnesses said one of the gunmen yelled, “I told you I ain’t playing.” Hall, now 20, is in Cook County Jail awaiting trial for aggravated battery with a firearm.

After Jimenez and his closest No Love Money Gang/Simon City Royals members got locked up, the violence began to ebb in the West Side neighborhood, police records show.

House, the outreach worker, says far fewer people have been shot near Homan and Chicago since Jimenez was busted in August 2015.

“Since he’s gone, it’s quieted down,” says House, a former CeaseFire outreach worker on the West Side. “I know. I am still through the area every day.”

In his jailhouse letter, Jimenez railed at fellow gang members he thought turned their backs on him.

House says it’s the other way around.

“He used them up and threw them out,” he says.

w-o-w !!!!

LOL its how a young wannabe would try to rebuilt a defunct mafia family.

Explained one of the upticks in violence last year. He should of just focus expanding on the North Side instead going out west.

What is all that no love money gang stuff? Are they royals or no love money gang, whatever that means

What's sad is that dude could have used that money to start businesses and put on his guys legit and give the guys coming home job oppprtunitues. A street guy is always going to be a street guy but he could of built a legit business infrastructure that could have helped folks and stood up even if he still dabbled in the street and caught another case.

Funny thing is that this white mob isn't defunct LoL.

It's the name of his Deck. All the mobs have decks which are equivalent to crews. No Love Money Gang is a Simon City Royal deck.