King Slime: The Prosecution of Young Thug and YSL

Over the past decade, rapper Young Thug has become an international superstar thanks to five No. 1 hip hop albums and his own record label, YSL. But police allege that over that same period, Jeffrey Lamar Williams was running a criminal enterprise, also called YSL, that is responsible for violence and murder. Reporters Christina Lee and George Chidi profile Young Thug, the artist—and introduce Young Thug, the alleged criminal maste...

Young Thug was raised off one of south Atlanta's most notorious streets, Cleveland Avenue. But when the national Bloods gang infiltrated that part of the city in the early 2000s, that street became known as Bleveland Avenue. We meet a reformed gangster turned street minister and a gang unit detective from the Atlanta Police Department who offer us two very different perspectives on the area.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy i...

A haunting scream echoes through the courtroom in the YSL trial, causing chaos and the arrest of several defendants. It’s just another day in the craziest trial in Atlanta’s history—and we meet the district attorney prosecuting it, Fani Willis, to discuss why RICO is such a powerful, albeit controversial tool to target both criminal street gangs and Donald Trump. We also press a gang unit investigator caught in a leaked interrogati...

While prosecutors claim that YSL is a dangerous criminal organization, defense attorneys in the YSL trial argue RICO and gang laws are being used too aggressively to target neighborhood problems and young people, turning the justice system upside down in Fulton County and beyond. We go into the courtroom’s holding cell to find out why YSL defendant Lil Rod was screaming, and we unexpectedly become characters in the story of this tr...

By the time opening statements began in the YSL trial, the remaining defendants had already spent more than a year and a half behind bars. Nearly all of them are being held at the Fulton County Jail, a facility that has become notorious for a spate of deaths in recent years and has been immortalized as Rice Street in rap songs for decades. A former employee and a recent inmate reveal shocking secrets about Rice Street’s filthy and ...

On September 11, 2013, police arrested three men who had committed an armed robbery and exchanged gunfire with police in a stolen red Nissan that they crashed into a laundromat. Young Thug was not one of those three. But now, more than a decade later with the help of Georgia’s RICO laws, prosecutors are trying to put him in the car. Journalist Jewel Wicker joins the King Slime team to discuss this incident and what it says about th...