Chicago City Wire

President Trump’s commutation of Gangster Disciple founder Larry Hoover shocked police and prosecutors, crime writer and former Chicago cop Maritn Preib recently told former gubernatorial candidate Jeanne Ives on her podcast, The Real Story.

Preib says the move shows that GOP fails to grasp the lasting impact of the far-left's agenda that, over the past six decades, has transformed criminals into folk heroes.

“They started out as bomb throwers,” Preib said referring to the Weather Underground and other violent left-wing groups that had their beginnings in the 1960s. “But they realized that turning criminals into victims is a much more effective way to go.”

Hoover was first sentenced in 1973 from to 150 to 200 years in prison for murdering a 19-year-old drug dealer. Then in 1995 he was indicted  for overseeing his gang operations from prison, and convicted two years later on 40 criminal counts. He was sent to the ‘Supermax’ prison in Colorado—reserved for some of the nation’s most notorious criminals—where he was serving six life sentences.

Pressure is now on Gov. JB Pritzker to commute Hoover’s state sentence as well, which would set him free. The latest development is Hoover’s wife penning a letter to MK Pritzker, the governor’s wife, to urge her husband to set him free.

The governor has given no indication whether he intends to commute Hoover's state sentence.

Preib said that rather than commuting Hoover’s sentence, the Trump administration, through the Department of Justice, should be investigating other cases where the left, aided by its allies in the mainstream media, have campaigned to get violent offenders set free. 

He cites the case of the 2011 murder of Chicago police officer Clifton Lewis, shot dead will working part-time at a West Side convenience story to earn extra money for his upcoming wedding.

Three members of the Spanish Cobras street gang were arrested for the murder. Two were convicted, but charges against all three were dropped by former Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx. The media had a role—as it does with most exoneration cases—of portraying the three as victims.

“…the media machine in Chicago began the familiar tactic of drumming up the most ludicrous theories that the men were innocent, despite the fact that the murder was captured on tape and the men confessed,” Preib wrote in his column “Crooked City,” which is published on Substack. “The media unleashed a familiar, if tired attack on prosecutors and cops who worked the case, as if cops and prosecutors would knowingly convict the wrong men for a police murder.”

The Chicago FOP has urged Cook County prosecutor Eileen O’Neill Burke recharge the three, but her office has given no indication it intends to do that.

“Wouldn’t Trump’s DOJ be better occupied retrying these men civilly rather than spending time on commuting the sentence of a maniac like Larry Hoover?” Preib wrote.  

“Wouldn’t that be a wise and powerful step for Trump’s administration to enter the world of Chicago’s radicalism?”