Grammy winner Lil Durk charged in murder-for-hire plot near Beverly Center mall

Grammy Award-winning rapper Lil Durk was arrested by U.S. marshals in Florida on Thursday on charges of conspiring to kill a rival artist in a murder-for-hire plot, authorities said.

The 32-year-old rapper, whose legal name is Durk Devontay Banks, was arrested near the Miami airport and booked at the Broward County Jail, where he is being held without bail, according to federal officials.

Banks is accused of ordering the murder of Tyquian Bowman, a Georgia rapper called Quando Rondo, whose cousin was killed in a botched ambush near the Beverly Center mall in Los Angeles in 2022.

In an affidavit filed in federal court, FBI Special Agent Sarah Corcoran alleged that Banks put a bounty on Bowman after an associate of Bowman killed a rapper affiliated with Banks’ music group.

Dayvon Bennett, a Chicago artist who performed as King Von, was gunned down outside an Atlanta nightclub in 2020. Bennett was a close friend of Banks and affiliated with his music group, Only The Family. Corcoran described Only The Family, or OTF, as a “hybrid organization” that blurred the line between a music collective and a gang.

Citing unnamed witnesses and “open-source reporting,” Corcoran claimed that Banks put a “monetary bounty” on Bowman’s head.

On Aug. 18, 2022 — a year and a half after Bennett was killed — OTF members learned Bowman was staying at a hotel in Los Angeles, Corcoran wrote. Five men booked one-way flights from Chicago to San Diego. According to Corcoran, someone using Banks’ iCloud account wrote in a text message to the person who bought the tickets: “Don’t book no flights under no names involved wit me.”

Banks flew on a private jet from Miami to Los Angeles with a man named Kavon Grant, Corcoran wrote. Grant used Banks’ credit card to book a room at the Sheraton Universal Hotel, where the five-man hit team stayed the night before they tracked down Bowman, according to the agent’s affidavit. Banks stayed at a rented home in Encino.

According to an indictment, Grant bought ski masks at a sporting goods store and distributed weapons to the hit team, including a gun that had been modified for automatic fire. He allegedly also supplied them with a rented BMW sedan and an Infiniti sedan with fake license plates.

Traveling in both cars, the hit team tracked Bowman the next day to a hotel in downtown Los Angeles, the indictment says. Bowman departed in a black Cadillac Escalade with his cousin, Saviay’a Robinson. The two cars tailed the Escalade to a marijuana dispensary and then a clothing store on Melrose Avenue.

After Bowman pulled into a gas station near the Beverly Center, three gunmen stepped out of the Infiniti wearing ski masks. Robinson, who was standing outside the Escalade, was shot to death. Bowman survived.

A few hours later, the five-man hit team was on a flight back to Chicago, Corcoran wrote in her affidavit.

Agents arrested the alleged shooters in Chicago and raided their homes on Thursday. Subsequently, the FBI got an alert from U.S. Customs and Border Patrol that Banks had booked one-way flights to Dubai and Switzerland scheduled to leave that night, Corcoran wrote. He was also listed as a passenger on a private plane bound for Italy.

In an indictment that was unsealed Thursday in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles, OTF members Kavon London Grant, Deandre Dontrell Wilson, Keith Jones, David Brian Lindsey and Asa Houston were charged in the plot.