Lil Durk Trial Openings: Rapper Falsely Cast as ‘Big Fish,’ Lawyer Says
Lil Durk’s long-awaited criminal trial began Monday with prosecutors portraying the Grammy-winning rapper as the architect of a deadly revenge plot, while his lawyers cast him as an innocent man being falsely served up as the “big fish” by a desperate co-defendant angling for a lighter prison sentence.
Lil Durk, born Durk Banks, sat at the defense table as his lawyer, Marissa Goldberg, told jurors that authorities initially identified Kavon “OTF Vonnie” Grant as the person “in charge” of the deadly shooting. She said that when agents broke down Grant’s door to arrest him in October 2024, he realized his “only way out of jail” was to minimize his own role and give prosecutors someone bigger.
“They were pressing him about a big fish, and he thought, ‘Oh man, I’ve got an insurance policy,’” Goldberg told jurors today. She said Grant, who worked for Banks at his music management company, Astronaut Soundz, had access to a company credit card and told investigators he had purchased items for the group of alleged hit men at Banks’s direction. Goldberg said that account was false.
“Mr. Banks had nothing to do with it. He was not there. He was not connected to it,” she told the jury in a federal courthouse in downtown Los Angeles. She said Grant, who has pleaded guilty in the case and is cooperating with prosecutors, organized the deadly ambush at the center of the trial for his own personal reasons. He was acting alone when he bought the shooters their black ski masks at REI, booked the hotel accommodations, and procured the vehicles, she said.
Banks, 33, has pleaded not guilty to five charges, including conspiracy, stalking resulting in death, and murder for hire. Federal prosecutors allege he used “coded language” to dispatch a group of men to Los Angeles to carry out an execution-style hit in broad daylight on Aug. 19, 2022. The intended target, prosecutors say, was Tyquian Terrel Bowman, a rival performer known as Quando Rondo. They allege Banks wanted retribution after a member of Bowman’s entourage carried out the 2020 shooting death of Banks’ close friend and protégé King Von, born Dayvon Bennett.
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Prosecutors claim the alleged hit men stalked Bowman in Los Angeles and ambushed him at a gas station near the Beverly Center shopping mall, firing at least 18 rounds from multiple guns, including a machine gun. Bowman’s cousin, Saviay’a Robinson, also known as Lul Pab, was struck and killed as he stood outside Bowman’s 2018 Cadillac Escalade at the Mobil station.
Goldberg said today that Grant had the deepest personal motive, noting that his father and King Von’s father “went back decades,” making their sons extraordinarily “tight.” Grant personally managed King Von in Atlanta and was the one who “frantically” rushed him to the hospital as the rapper was “bleeding out” in the back seat after the 2020 shooting. Goldberg said Grant was traumatized when the “beloved” performer died and was left “floundering” in the aftermath. He was the one consumed by the urge to strike back, she argued, whereas Banks “channeled” his anger and frustration into “his artwork” instead.
“This is a case about revenge, stalking, and premeditated murder,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Daniel Weiner said today in his dueling opening. He told the jurors that Grant would testify against Banks. He said two other alleged co-conspirators also took plea deals and were cooperating, identifying the men as Jerome Kacey “OTF Jam” Hester and Keith Jones, identified as one of the shooters outside the Beverly Center.
Weiner showed jurors surveillance video of the brazen daylight shooting and at one point put a blue title card up on the screens in the courtroom along with the single word, “Revenge.” He said Banks and his two co-defendants at trial, Deondre Wilson and David Lindsey, separately traveled to Los Angeles along with other men involved in the shooting to “hunt and kill” Quando Rondo, fatally striking Robinson instead. He claimed Banks was calling the shots as both the wealthy leader of his record label, Only the Family, and a subgroup of OTF he claimed was “involved in criminality.”
Jurors saw a text message Banks sent on Aug. 18, 2022, a day before the shooting in Los Angeles, in which Banks wrote, “Don’t book no flights under no names involved wit me.” Weiner said Banks had learned Quando Rondo was visiting Los Angeles and had determined it was “time to get back” at him, while he was a vulnerable “fish out of water in a city not his own.”
Weiner told jurors the evidence would show that Banks was the one “consumed with revenge” and that he “deployed” Hester, known as “OTF Jam,” as one of the shooters. He then pointed to a group text message from Aug. 4, 2023, in which Banks allegedly warned others that Hester could not be trusted.
“Jam just ready to snitch … He gone tell soon,” the text said. Banks continued, “As long as we don’t break they can tell em what ever.”
Banks appeared in good spirits today, smiling with his lawyers, including Drew Findling, Christy O’Connor, and Brian Steel. Seated in the gallery were his wife, India Royale, and his father, Dontay Banks. After the lunch break, Machine Gun Kelly arrived and sat in the front row for nearly two hours of testimony. He chatted with Dontay in the hallway before entering.
In afternoon testimony, an LAPD detective said he identified the suspected shooters by obtaining detailed GPS records from the company that rented Grant a white BMW that was seen following Quando Rondo’s vehicle around Los Angeles. The records led him to an In-N-Out Burger after the shooting, where surveillance video showed Grant, Wilson, and Jones in the parking lot and Jones, Lindsey, and Hester entering the restaurant. The detective said he matched the men to shoes visible in surveillance footage from the gas station and determined that Hester was wearing pants from a boutique on Chicago’s South Side. He took that information to Chicago police, who later identified Wilson from photographs, leading investigators to Wilson’s Instagram account, which had a photo of Banks.
In her opening statement, Goldberg argued that prosecutors had no evidence to support their theory that Banks had offered or paid a bounty for Quando Rondo’s killing. Banks, she said, “was not sitting and waiting for a phone call” after the shooting. “If you want to follow the money as evidence, you’re not going to be able to, because there’s no money to follow,” she told jurors. “There is not going to be any evidence of direction, of instruction, of promise, of assurance. [There’s] no payment, and no bounty. Nobody gets paid. This is a murder-for-hire allegation where nobody gets paid.”
The judge previously ruled jurors can hear lyrics from several of Banks’ songs, including “Pissed Me Off,” “Who Want Smoke??,” and “Ahhh Ha,” in which he rapped, “Don’t respond to shit with Von. I’m like ‘Fuck it, you trippin’, go get your gun. They droppin’ locations, I’m gettin’ it done. Fuck tweeting, we slidin’, the feds are comin’.”
The use of rap lyrics as evidence in criminal trials is controversial, with critics saying the practice chills creative expression and allows prosecutors to distort hyperbolic art in ways that reinforce racist stereotypes.