L.A.’s Rollin’ 60s Crips: The rise of a notorious gang and its reputed boss ‘Big U’
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Even in the cutthroat world of Los Angeles street gangs, the saying associated with one Crips faction stands out as cold-blooded: “You ain’t a Rollin’ 60 ‘til you kill a 60.”
The Rollin’ 60s Neighborhood Crips — which is said to be named for West 60th Street that rolled through its territory in South Los Angeles — have a reputation for violence, sometimes even against fellow members. But that hasn’t stopped them from growing into one of the largest and most notorious street gangs in the city, if not the country.
The gang’s foot soldiers and shot callers have been many over the years, but one name has seemingly remained constant: Eugene “Big U” Henley.
Henley came up around the time that Hollywood turned gang life in the City of Angels into the stuff of legends. By the time the Rollin’ 60s were name-dropped in the 1991 classic “Boyz n the Hood,” he had already risen through the ranks.
Much has changed since then. Gang-related shootings have plummeted from the historic highs a generation ago. Along the way, Henley has seen his own ups and downs — serving time in prison, emerging to build himself up as a community leader and music industry honcho, and now once again facing charges in a sprawling criminal case with 18 other alleged members and associates of the 60s.
City and police leaders announced double-digit declines in homicides compared with 2023, including a halving of gang-related slayings, but the recent election results show public safety remains a concern.
Federal prosecutors paint the picture of a gang whose fearsome reputation allowed Henley to intimidate businesses and people throughout L.A. for decades, touching the lives of NBA superstars and a Grammy-winning producer.
Indicted last month on charges including fraud, robbery, extortion and a racketeering conspiracy that involved the murder of an aspiring rapper, Henley has pleaded not guilty. His court-appointed lawyer told The Times last month that his client “maintains his innocence.”
More details about Henley’s alleged gang activities could emerge at a detention hearing set for Tuesday. But so far, the case against him has been met with skepticism in his old neighborhood.
Gang interventionists and others who do outreach on South L.A.’s west side describe the Rollin’ 60s as a loosely structured group with no real leader. Some argue that only a few of those arrested with Henley have actual ties to the gang.
A federal grand jury indicted Eugene “Big U” Henley on charges of wire fraud, bank fraud, extortion, robbery, theft of government funds, prostitution across state lines, tax fraud evasion and violating the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act.
To his supporters, Henley has remained a larger-than-life figure who achieved their version of the American dream: A successful businessman who managed to rise out of a neighborhood battered by years of unemployment, over-policing and government neglect — but never forgot his roots. It’s an image Henley worked hard to cultivate, and one he defended amid the latest charges.
“I ain’t been nothing but a help to our community,” Henley said in a video. “This the price of being Black and trying to help somebody, trying to help your community and do what you can.”
Arrest of an ‘OG’
The FBI began investigating the Rollin’ 60s in August 2020, according to the federal complaint charging Henley and others. The following year, the agency launched an investigation into the so-called “Big U Enterprise,” a term coined by investigators to describe Henley’s alleged Mafia-like organization.
Federal authorities said Henley was regarded as an “original gangster,” or “OG,” who had earned standing with fellow gang members over decades.
“He has been able to use that standing to intimidate businesses and individuals and to commit various forms of violence,” Ted Docks, FBI special agent in charge of the criminal division in Los Angeles, said at a news conference last month.
After news of the raid on Henley’s home hit social media, some commentators dredged up years-old rumors about Henley’s supposed ties to the killing of Nipsey Hussle, a rap star, activist and entrepreneur who was shot to death in front of his South Los Angeles clothing store.
Another 60s member was convicted of Hussle’s murder, and multiple law enforcement sources familiar with the case — who requested anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly — said they found no evidence tying Henley to the crime.
The slaying led to a temporary ceasefire between rival Black gangs. Henley was in the middle of the effort, organizing a vigil attended by gang members of all stripes.
Those who know Henley said that over the years they witnessed his transformation from tough-nosed street brawler to businessman and — at least outwardly — advocate for peace.
Eugene ‘Big U’ Henley helped launch Nipsey Hussle’s career and was called rap’s ‘godfather’ by Wiz Khalifa. Now federal authorities are accusing him of murder, kidnapping, robbery, extortion and fraud.
“As far as anything outside his work for his organization and his work in the music industry, I didn’t see anything,” said Skipp Townsend, a prominent gang interventionist in L.A. “Never nothing criminal.”
But according to federal authorities, behind the veil of redemption Henley lived a double life as a ruthless gang boss. When famous athletes and musicians visited L.A., authorities say, Henley required them to “check in” — and sometimes pay — to guarantee their safety around town. He allegedly helped collect a debt owed by a current NBA All-Star, whose name was withheld in court filings.
Henley also allegedly extorted tens of thousands of dollars from an unlicensed marijuana dispensary and directed underlings to carry out robberies.
But before building his alleged criminal empire, he was just a kid from South L.A.
Birth of a Crip
When Henley was born in 1966, the Crips didn’t yet exist.
It was three years later, as the story goes, when Raymond Washington, a teenager, formed the gang. Washington is the focus of an upcoming documentary, “Crip: The Boy Who Built An Army” — for which Henley sat for interviews.
“It’s not a roses story: it has some bad points, but it started out positive,” said Kenya Ware, who created both the documentary and a planned TV series called “The Birth of a Crip.” “Things change, in the midst of it, but the intention was good.”
Steeped in the Black Panther Party teachings of self-pride and community control, historians say, the first generation of Black gang members in the 1960s banded together to defend against outsiders from neighboring communities, as well as police harassment. Over time, more and more crews sprouted, forging alliances and becoming rivals.
“Before it was killing and all that it was just hand fighting, like fistfights,” said Ronald “Ron Ron” Thompson, Washington’s nephew. After his uncle went to prison on a robbery charge, Thompson said, “the ‘hoods started forming.”
The 60s were one of the first cliques — or “sets” — of the Crips to take root in the western fringes of South L.A. in the mid-1970s.
“Crippin’ was almost like a religion,” said Donald Bakeer, a former schoolteacher in South L.A. who wrote a historical novel on the gang’s early history.
Among his students was Henley, who Bakeer said he met while teaching at Horace Mann Junior High School. Even then, he said, Henley “was a natural leader.”
Federal authorities this week announced that there are 19 Rollin’ 60s Crips members and associates, including two rappers, in custody tied to a sprawling criminal case centered on Eugene “Big U” Henley.
“He was not the back-down kind of youngster,” Bakeer said.
In “Hip Hop Uncovered,” a six-part documentary series, Henley said he and several other kids formed the Arlington Gang and that it eventually morphed into “our section of what was the Rollin’ 60s.”
“I’m not the one that started it or gave it the name,” Henley said in the documentary, which credited him as an executive producer. “I’m just in the first generation of it becoming Rollin’ 60s. We the babies in that.”
In 1981, police raided the homes of suspected Rollin’ 60s members. One prosecutor at the time boasted in The Times that the raid had “effectively wiped out” the gang.
But Henley and the gang were just getting started.
Crack spreads, murders shake L.A.
Henley recounted in his documentary series helping rob cars and making tens of thousands of dollars in the early 1980s. When he finally got caught, he said, he went to juvenile detention and had so many cases tied to him that authorities refused to release him to his mother. At her wit’s end, she sent him to live with his father in Chicago to keep him from getting into more trouble, Henley said.
After Henley left L.A., the 60s also began making their mark elsewhere. The crack epidemic had taken hold of South L.A., and it would soon spread across the country, bringing gang violence with it.
In 1988, two men identified by police as members of the 60s were accused of shooting someone in the head several times in a heavy drug-trafficking area in Tacoma, Wash. The next year, a Kansas newspaper with the headline “L.A. gangs make Midwest entry” detailed the spread of the Bloods and Crips across the country and their arrests for cocaine and crack possession.
In “Hip Hop Uncovered,” Henley described selling drugs in Minnesota, Atlanta and Chicago — where they would fetch a higher price — and being in L.A. for only a week or two at a time.
“We was really landing in cities, taking over blocks,” he said.
In a confidential LAPD report prepared in 1989, detectives identified 459 hard-core members of the 60s, who had been arrested a total of 3,527 times, according to a Times article. There were convictions for murder, attempted murder, assaults with a deadly weapon, robberies, burglaries and other crimes.
Apart from two cliques devoted to drug trafficking, the report said, most of the gang members commit crimes for their personal gain and “hold no allegiance to any organization and do not act at the direction of a recognized leader.”
Thompson, the nephew of the reputed Crips founder, recalled joining the gang around 1986 almost of necessity. People used to assume he was a member based on where he lived and would jump him anyway, he said, so he figured he might as well be part of the gang.
“These dudes are my friends anyway,” said Thompson, now a former member. “They had my back like I had they back and that’s just how it was.”
A series of brazen bank robberies landed the gang on the radar of the LAPD and the FBI. In 1988, the murder of Karen Toshima, a 27-year-old graphic artist shot in the head by crossfire in a gang dispute as she walked along a street in Westwood Village.
Until then, many of those living outside South L.A. assumed that gangs were confined to those neighborhoods, said Alex Alonso, a gang historian.
Toshima’s killing was one of several gang slayings that led to a large-scale show of law enforcement muscle called Operation Hammer, in which then-LAPD Chief Daryl F. Gates vowed to “eradicate” gangs by flooding streets with officers. The crackdown rounded up hundreds of people — many for minor crimes — and sowed resentment in wide swaths of South L.A.
“In hindsight I was glad Gates did that because it just showed that massive suppression, sending everything you have, spending all kinds of money, didn’t really put a dent in the gang problem in L.A.,” Alonso said. “It just proves that you cannot arrest your way out of the problem.”
‘It’s not like the Mafia’
After a string of arrests in the late 1980s, Henley went away for his longest prison stretch. Busted trying to rob an undercover sheriff’s deputy of 33 pounds of cocaine, he was convicted and sentenced in 1992 to 23 years.
Eight years after Henley’s arrest, David Ross, now a retired LAPD detective, landed at 77th Division, where he worked multiple gangs at a time. But in January 2002, he recalled being assigned only one: the 60s.
He called them “the largest Black criminal street gang in Los Angeles by far.” They claim various logos — including the Rolls-Royce symbol and the baseball hats of the White Sox and Mariners — and count a number of Crips factions as enemies in addition to their traditional rivals, the Bloods.
“There’s no real hierarchy, it’s not like the Mafia, for example, where it’s really, strictly tightly controlled and people are really disciplined because they don’t want to lose their life by crossing the boss,” Ross said. “There’s a lot of this jealousy and rivalry that goes on if somebody has something good going on and getting money.”
Around 2004, a fellow LAPD officer told Ross that Henley would soon be released.
“I did hear that Big U had quite a reputation,” Ross recounted. “I can’t see very many Rollin’ 60s of any age that would cross him or go against something that he said.”
But Henley said his mentality had shifted by the time of his release.
During his last stint behind bars, he said, he began a transformation, which included converting to Islam. He described in one interview how he gradually distanced himself from the gang lifestyle that earned him respect and fear on the streets.
“You spend the front part of your life destroying a community and when I came home, it was about being known as somebody who has helped to heal it and bring it to a better place,” Henley said in his “Hip Hop Uncovered” interview. “I know I want to help people. I want to be able to effect change.”
‘Ain’t no leaders in 60s’
After getting out of prison, Henley created Developing Options, dedicated to gang intervention work and offering sports programs for kids. The work eventually drew major backing from the city.
Authorities have accused Henley of fraudulently obtaining $2.35 million from the Gang Reduction and Youth Development program from 2018 to 2023. Henley’s organization is one of more than 20 involved in the program overseen by the L.A. mayor’s office, the city said last month.
The tax dollars were allocated at a time when Henley was thought to be a positive force in Los Angeles, but federal authorities say behind the scenes he was a ruthless killer.
Federal authorities have accused Henley of kidnapping and fatally shooting a young rapper in the face over perceived disrespect and leaving his body in the Las Vegas desert.
Henley’s supporters refuse to believe the charges.
Shamond “Lil AD” Bennett, 46, joined the Rollin’ 60s when Henley was already an established figure. The two didn’t meet until Henley’s latest release from prison, but Bennett said he’d heard “just the great person he was, been there for his community.”
“I thought the world of him, he was a great dude,” he said. “I still hope to God he beat that s—.”
Bennett, who has each letter of “Rollin” tattooed down the side of his face, said many of those arrested with Henley were not tied to the 60s. He argued that authorities “try to paint a picture to make us look bad” — pointing to what he said was law enforcement’s long history of targeting Black men of influence.
And as far as Henley being a gang leader?
“Ain’t no leaders in 60s,” Bennett said. “Ain’t none. Not one.”
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