Inside The New Deadly Chicago Gang Civil War - How It Started

[00:00:00]Two weeks later, [ __ ] this G Herman say you [ __ ] you can't come back to this block that instantly true Shy Rack [ __ ] feel me >> to it and you think I ain't had to had them uncomfortable conversations you think [ __ ] ain't told me I done left the hood and forgot about the hood and >> but he not rapping what he living for rapping what you living is >> you know doing [ __ ] for your homies I'm boo >> right now in real time one of the most legendary street organizations in Chicago rap history is tearing itself apart from the inside out and nobody can stop it. We're talking about NLMBB No Limit Moskegan Boys. The same crew that helped put G Herbo on the map. The same crew that Lil Bby repped on every single record he ever made. The same crew that turned the east side of Chicago into one of the most watched, most talked about, most documented street stories in the entire history of drill music. And right now they're at war with each other. Not with a rival set. Not with an opposing block with themselves. Brothers who came up together. Brothers who were in the trenches together. Brothers who put Chicago on their backs together now picking sides throwing shots on social media. And according to people closely following this situation, allegedly catching bodies over the fallout. And here's the part that's going to keep you watching until the very end of this video. All of this, every single bit of the civil war that's been unfolding, every alliance that's been broken, every side that's been chosen, every loss that's been taken, it all traces back to one person's death. One man going on live and saying what a lot of people in that hood have been feeling for a long time. One moment that cracked the foundation of NLMBB so wide open that not even the people involved could put it back together. So, if you've been seeing the post, if you've been seeing the comments, if you've been wondering what is actually going on with NLMB and why the entire Chicago street rap is picking sides right now, stay right here because by the end of this video, you're going to understand exactly how one of Chicago's most legendary crews went from being untouchable to being divided down the middle. This is the story of the NLMB civil war, and it's only getting worse. Before we get into the chaos that's unfolding right now, you need to understand what NLMB actually is and more importantly what NLMB was. Because if you don't understand the legacy, you're never going to understand why this collapse hurts as deep as it does.

[00:02:28]NLMB isn't just another Chicago street clique. This isn't a random corner crew that popped up overnight and got a little shine on Worldstar. No, NLMB is the kind of organization that shaped the entire sound and image of Chicago drill music during one of its most critical periods. These are the guys that the whole world looked at when they looked at Chicago. These are the guys that media outlets wrote f pieces about.

[00:02:53]These are the guys that made politicians nervous and made record labels spent millions of dollars to sign their affiliated artists. And the reason any of that happened, the reason the entire world knew the name NLMBB was because of a young kid from the east side of Chicago named G Herbo, a rapper who took everything this crew represented and turned it into music that echoed across the entire globe. But here's what nobody really sat down and talked about seriously. What happens when that one person who made everything famous gets rich and famous? And then the people he left behind feel like they got abandoned. That's where this whole story begins. That's the crack in the foundation that everything else fell through. Because the NLMBB civil war didn't start with a shootout. It didn't start with a beef over money or a girl or territory in the traditional sense.

[00:03:40]It started with a feeling. A feeling that had been building for years inside of NLMB. A feeling that finally got spoken out loud. And once those words were out there, once people started saying what they'd been thinking, there was no taking it back. And one person paid for those words with their life.

[00:03:56]Let me break it all down for you from the beginning. Let's rewind. Let's go all the way back to where the story actually starts. Because to understand where NLMB is right now, you have to understand where they came from and what they were built on. NLMB, No Limit Moskegan Boys, is a Chicago street organization made up of two distinct groups that eventually merged into one identity. On one side, you had No Limit.

[00:04:22]On the other side, you had the Moskegan boys, also known as the MBs. Now, when you put those two together, you get NLMB. And that acronym became one of the most recognized tags in all of Chicago street culture during the drill era.

[00:04:36]These guys were from the east side. And if you know anything about Chicago, you know that the east side had a reputation that was entirely its own. The violence out there was different. The codes were different. The culture was different.

[00:04:48]And the people who came out of that environment carried all of that with them wherever they went. Now, the early days of NLMBB were defined by survival.

[00:04:56]These were young guys in an incredibly dangerous environment, forming bonds that most people could never understand unless they lived it. The kind of bonds that get formed when you're watching each other's backs in situations where the wrong move gets somebody killed.

[00:05:10]Those bonds run deep. Deeper than a handshake, deeper than a neighborhood.

[00:05:14]Those bonds become your entire identity.

[00:05:16]And out of that environment came true figures who would eventually change everything. And out of that environment came two figures who would eventually change everything. Not just for NLMB, but for Chicago music as a whole. The first was Lil Bby, a rapper out of NLM who had a raw, unfiltered delivery in a story that resonated with street kids across the country. Bby could rap and he could tell you exactly what life on those blocks felt like without sugar coating a single syllable. He was one of the first NLMBB affiliated artists to start getting real industry attention.

[00:05:50]The second and the one whose rise would ultimately become the catalyst for everything we're going to talk about today was G. Herbal, born Herbert Randall Wright Jr., known back then as Lil Herb. G Herbal was different from The Jump. He has something in his voice that made you feel every word he was saying. When he rapped about the streets, it didn't feel like performance. It felt like testimony. It felt like he was reporting from a war zone in real time. And in a lot of ways, he was. G Herbo came up out of NLMB. And he wore that affiliation proudly on every record he made. NLMB wasn't just where he was from. It was his brand. It was his identity. It was the foundation that everything he built stood on top of. His early mixtapz. Welcome to Fazo Land, Pistol P. Those weren't just street tapes. Those were documents.

[00:06:40]historical records of what life in that specific corner of Chicago looked and felt and sounded like and the world couldn't get enough of it. But here's where it starts to get complicated.

[00:06:50]Because as G Herbo's career started to explode, as the shows got bigger and the money got real and the label deals started coming in, the gap between where he was going and where his people were staying started to grow. And in street culture, that gap is one of the most dangerous things that can exist. It's not unique to Chicago. It's not unique to NLMBB. You've seen this story play out in cities across the country. One person from the hood makes it and the people they left behind either celebrate them or eventually start to resent them depending on how they handle it. And for NLMBB, based on what started coming out publicly, it sounds like how G Herbo handled it was not sitting well with a lot of people. But for a long time, nobody said it out loud. Not publicly anyway. That changed. And when it changed, it changed everything. Now, this is where it starts getting real.

[00:07:40]For years, the tension between G Herbo and members of NLMB was the kind of thing that got discussed on the block, whispered about in conversations, hinted at in comment sections, but never fully brought into the light. There was a code that kept it contained. You didn't put your people on blast publicly. You handle things internally. That's how the street code is supposed to work. But that code has a limit. And when people feel like they've been betrayed badly enough for long enough, that code breaks down. The first major public crack in the NLMB Foundation came when No Limit Carroll, an actual member from the No Limit side of NLMBB, decided he was done staying quiet. Now, let's be clear about who No Limit Caro is. This isn't somebody from outside the organization talking about something he doesn't have firstirhand knowledge of. This is somebody who was in the trenches with these guys. somebody who was there for the come-up, somebody who watched Gi Herbo go from the neighborhood to the global stage. And according to what Cairo put out publicly, watching all of that happen while being left behind was not something he was going to keep swallowing in silence anymore. Cairo came out and essentially exposed what he said was G Herbbo's abandonment of the people he came up with. And the specific allegations he made were not vague. They were detailed. They were pointed. and they resonated with a lot of people who had been watching from the outside and wondering the same things. According to Cairo, G Herbo did not help take his people out of the hood when he got rich.

[00:09:09]When guys from NLMB were catching cases, getting locked up, facing serious charges that require real money for real lawyers and real bonds, G. Kerbo, according to Cairo's account, was not stepping up to help with those bonds, was not helping with legal fees, was not using his resources or connections to try to fight for the guys who were fighting while he was up there building a career. But that wasn't even the part that seemed to hurt the most. What really stood out from what Cairo said and what got people talking was something that sounds almost small compared to everything else, but actually says everything about the relationship dynamic. According to Cairo, G Herbal had promised him a trip to Egypt. Now, on the surface, that might sound like a random detail, but think about what that represents for a second. A trip to Egypt means something to a guy who's never had anything. It means that someone you consider a brother looked you in the eye and said, "I got you. We're going to do this together. Things are going to be different." And then that promise, like apparently so many other promises made to the guys in that hood, never materialized.

[00:10:14]Cairo said G Herbo promised him Egypt and never took it. That kind of thing sticks with people because it's not just about Egypt. It's about being promised something and then being forgotten. It's about watching someone you help build rise to heights that changed their entire life while your life stayed exactly the same. Now, when Cairo put all of this out publicly, the response was massive. Chicago social media was on fire. People who followed the drill scene closely were going back and forth about it. Some people defended G Herbo.

[00:10:45]Some people backed Cary fully. And a lot of people were just watching, waiting to see how G Herbo was going to respond.

[00:10:52]And G Herbo did respond. His response, and this is important, was not what a lot of people were hoping to hear. From what came out publicly, G. Herbo pushed back on the narrative. His position was essentially that he done things for people, that he put people on when he could, and that the way things were being characterized wasn't accurate. He also made it clear that he wasn't going to be put in a position where he felt like he was being extorted or pressured into doing things because of his status.

[00:11:19]And look, from a certain perspective, that position makes some sense. No artist who's made it wants to feel like they owe unlimited resources to everyone who was around them during the come-up.

[00:11:29]That's a real conversation that a lot of successful people from the streets have had to have. But here's where it gets crazy. The way that response was received by people inside NLMBB and people watching from the outside was not good for G Herbbo's relationship with his people. Because when you're the guy who made it and someone from your hood is publicly saying you left them behind and your response sounds defensive rather than compassionate, it doesn't matter how valid your points are. It looks cold. It looks like you're protecting your bag over protecting your brothers. And once that perception took hold, it was almost impossible to shake.

[00:12:04]But here's what really compounded things. It wasn't just what G Herbal said in response. It was what happened in the aftermath because the Cairo situation then closed the chapter. It opened a book. It made other people in and around NLMBB feel like they could or should speak about their own experiences. It created a permission structure for grievances that had been building for years to finally come to the surface. And that meant things were about to get a whole lot more public and a whole lot more serious because in the time between the Cairo situation and what was about to happen next, there were other incidents, other moments that added more fuel to an already burning fire. Small things, big things, things that individually might have been manageable, but collectively were building towards something that couldn't be stopped. The relationship between G Herbo and NLMBB was fracturing in real time. And the people around them were starting to take positions, starting to pick sides, starting to ask the question that everyone in that kind of situation eventually has to answer. Who do you ride with when brothers fall out? That question was about to get answered in the most devastating way possible. But before we get there, we need to talk about another voice that came forward.

[00:13:15]another member of NLMBB who decided that what Cairo said wasn't enough. That there was more to be said and who went further publicly than maybe anyone expected. His name was NLMBB J. And what he said and what happened to him because of it is the real center of this entire story. Fast forward to a period when the tension inside NLMB had become impossible to ignore. People were watching closely. The comment sections on any post related to G Herbo, NLMB or anyone connected to that world were becoming battlegrounds. The situation with Cairo had planted seeds of doubt about the loyalty and reciprocity within the organization and those seeds were growing. And then Jay Dog went on live.

[00:13:59]Now you need to understand what an NLMB member going on live to talk about internal business means in the context of street culture. This isn't a comment.

[00:14:08]This isn't a cryptic post with a caption that could mean anything. This is someone looking directly into a camera knowing that potentially thousands of people are watching in real time and deciding that what they have to say is important enough, urgent enough that they're going to say it publicly regardless of the consequences. That's not a decision made lightly. That's a decision made by someone who has reached a point where they feel like they have nothing left to lose by speaking the truth as they see it. Jay Dog went on live and he echoed and amplified everything that Kyro had already said, but he took it further. He didn't just talk about G Herbo, he brought in the conversation to include other members of NLMBB who had gotten rich and famous.

[00:14:49]And according to Jay Dove's account, had turned their backs on the people they came up with. He talked about Mansky. He talked about Bby. He named names. He pointed fingers. And he said what a significant portion of the people still on those blocks were apparently feeling that the guys who made it got money, got status, got out and never looked back.

[00:15:09]That when brothers were catching cases and sitting in county and fighting for their lives in courtrooms, the people with the resources to help weren't picking up the phone. According to Jay Doll, there was a systematic abandonment of the guys who were still in the struggle. Not just by G. Herbo, but by multiple members of NLMBB who had risen to positions of financial comfort while others were left to fight their battles alone. That live stream spread fast. The clips got clipped. The screenshots got taken. The commentary flooded every platform that had any connection to Chicago street culture. People were reacting in real time and the reaction was loud. Some people praised Jay Dog for having the courage to say what he said. Some people said he was violating the code by putting business in the streets. Some people were skeptical about his motivations, but almost everyone agreed on one thing. The things he was saying reflected a real tension that had been simmering inside NLMB for a long time. And then not long after that live stream, Jay Dog was killed.

[00:16:08]Let that sink in for a second. A man goes on live and airs out grievances about his own organization, specifically about members of that organization failing the people they came up with, and then he ends up dead. Now, we have to be careful here because nobody has definitively proven a direct causal link between what Jay Dog said on that live stream and his death. That's not something we're going to claim with certainty because that's not how responsible reporting on this kind of situation works. But here's what we do know, and this is the part that sent shock waves through Chicago and through everyone following the NLMB situation closely. An individual connected to NLMB was charged in connection with Jay Dog's death. Let that sit. Not an outside rival, not someone from an opposing crew that NLMB had been at war with for years. News of Zach's death first broke back in 2018. The reaction across Chicago's hip-hop community was immediate. Tributes poured in across social media all morning with people specifically calling out how much Zach had done to shine a light on parts of the city that the people actually in power never bothered to address themselves. Tony Woods, his mentor and business partner, confirmed the shooting to local outlets that same morning, clearly shaken. This wasn't some YouTube personality nobody in the city had heard of. This was a guy whose death actually registered immediately across an entire community that recognized exactly what had been lost. Now, let's zoom out because Zach's case isn't actually some rare exception in Chicago. It's basically the rule. Chicago police clear less than 30% of homicides in the year they actually happen. Less than a third.

[00:17:46]That means for every 10 people murdered in the city in a given year, more than seven of those families never get an actual resolution within that same year.

[00:17:54]Some never get one at all. And in 2021 alone, Chicago recorded close to 800 killings citywide. That's not a number that comes from a small handful of conflicts. That's an entire city carrying that kind of weight. year after year with a police department and a backlog of cases that simply cannot keep pace. Part of why this happens connects directly to something we touched on earlier, the no snitch code. In neighborhoods that have been overpoliced and underprotected for generations, plenty of people who actually witness violence genuinely don't trust that going to police will lead to justice or that it won't just get them labeled a snitch and put their own life at risk.

[00:18:34]And honestly, given Chicago's actual history with its own police department, that distrust isn't paranoia, it's earned. In 2014, a Chicago police officer named Jason Van Dyke shot a 17-year-old named Laquan McDonald 16 times. The department sat on the dash cam footage for over a year before it finally got released to the public. And when it did come out, it set off protests across the entire city. That case eventually led the United States Department of Justice to launch a full investigation into the Chicago Police Department's practices. And what they found wasn't pretty. Federal investigators concluded that CPD officers resorted to using guns too quickly, routinely violated the constitutional rights of black and Latino residents, and that the department had a pattern of covering for officers who crossed the line while barely punishing the ones who did. That investigation eventually forced the city into a federal consent decree in 2019. a court order overseen by a federal judge mandating departmentwide reforms. It's the first time in Chicago police history that's ever happened. And even years into that consent decree, independent monitors and activists have repeatedly pointed out that the department has dragged its feet on actually implementing the reforms it agreed to.

[00:19:48]Tools that were supposed to flag officers with repeated misconduct complaints sat unused for years past their plan rollout date. So, this isn't a story about a department that got caught, fixed itself, and moved on. It's a story about a department that's been under direct federal supervision for years, and is still, by most independent accounts, struggling to follow through.

[00:20:09]And the cost of all that misconduct isn't just historical either. Between 2019 and 2022 alone, the exact year surrounding the AP's investigation into Zach's case, Chicago taxpayers paid out close to $300 million settling police misconduct lawsuits with over 100 individual officers repeatedly named in complaints. So when people in these neighborhoods say they don't trust police and they choose silence over cooperation, that's not some abstract cultural thing happening in a vacuum.

[00:20:39]That's a community responding rationally to decades of evidence that the system protecting them has also been actively harming them. And in a city carrying that kind of baggage on top of a homicide case load police straight up cannot keep up with. On top of prosecutors willing to lean on a legal loophole from the 1800s to avoid prosecuting gang violence. You end up with exactly what happened to Zach. A murder police say they solved. suspects they say they identify with video ballistics and cell phone data backing it up and zero accountability, four years running, going on now over half a decade with nobody ever convicted. Now, here's something that makes Zach's death hit even harder when you zoom out and look at the bigger picture of the world he was documenting. He wasn't the only person connected to Chicago's drill scene who ended up like this. Not even close. Lil Jojo, one of the earliest drill artists, got gunned down in 2012, shot from behind while riding a bike just hours after posting a video calling out a rival. La Capone got killed in 2013, shot in an alley walking home from a late night studio session. Years later, in 2020, FBG Duck, somebody who' specifically told people he was scared to let anybody know where he was going because of threats connected directly to the drill rap world, got shot as many as 21 times in broad daylight on Oak Street. In one of Chicago's wealthiest shopping districts, with his girlfriend standing right next to him, King Vaughn, another Chicago artist who came up out of this exact scene, got killed in a shootout outside a hookah lounge in Atlanta that same year. Some of these cases eventually led to federal charges.

[00:22:18]Most of them, just like Zach's, dragged on for years with no real resolution.

[00:22:23]There's one connection in particular that captures just how tangled this all is. In 2017, Zach interviewed a young rapper named Antoine Fields, who went by Lil Mr. Montana about losing his close friend, Lil Jojo, to gun violence years earlier, and about advice Lil Derk, Montana's own cousin, had given him on how to handle beef without it turning fatal. Two years after that interview aired in March of 2019, Montana himself was shot in the head in Englewood and died at the hospital. Zach had documented him grieving one friend lost to this exact cycle. And within 2 years, Zach's own camera had become part of the historical record of somebody who would go on to become a casualty of the same cycle himself. Less than a year before Zach joined that list, too. And the fallout from this entire era of Chicago drill violence is still working its way through courts right now. FBG Duck's own family filed a wrongful death lawsuit in 2024, years after his killing, accusing other figures in the industry of profiting off the conflict that got him killed in the first place. Federal prosecutors have brought charges in some of these cases. FBG Duck's killing actually resulted in federal indictments back in 2021. Unlike Zach's case, but notice the pattern. It usually takes years, federal involvement, and enormous public pressure before any of these cases move at all. Zach's case never got that same level of federal attention.

[00:23:48]Never got that same media spotlight pushing it forward. It just got a quiet internal police file mark cleared, sitting untouched for 4 years until a wire service reporter happened to file the right records request. Zach filmed almost all of these guys at some point before any of this happened to them. He gave plenty of them their very first real on camera moment. He watched this entire genre he helped document from the ground up turn into a list of names that by the early 2020s reads less like a music scene and more like an obituary page. And then he became part of that same list himself. That's the part of this story that I think gets missed the most. People hear hood CNN and they think it's just a flashy nickname, but think about what it actually means for somebody to spend 9 years as a one-man news network covering an active ongoing war. In his own city, among people he actually grew up around, Zach wasn't reporting on a conflict from a distance the way an actual news anchor does. He was incided every single day with relationships on every side of it. And the entire premise of being trusted by everybody, of being the guy who's neutral enough to walk into anybody's territory, only holds up as long as everybody agrees to keep seeing you that way. The second somebody decides you're not neutral anymore, that you're actually just a tool helping their ops look good online, that trust evaporates instantly, and there's no getting it back. At the end of the day, what makes Zach's story sting more than the typical Chicago shooting is the specific kind of betrayal baked into it. This wasn't a man killed by strangers who had no idea who he was. If the police records are right, this was a man killed by people from a set he'd actually been around in a city where he spent his entire career trying to build bridges between exactly these kinds of factions. He gave a platform to people from Gonttow. He gave a platform to people from Perry Avenue.

[00:25:40]He covered both sides of beef after beef after beef, genuinely believing that showing the full picture might do some good. And in the end, it was that exact willingness to cover everybody without picking a side that put him in a car with two friends who themselves had outstanding beef of their own on a street two blocks from a club where the wrong rivals just happened to cross paths on the wrong night. Police say they know who pulled the trigger. They arrested the people they believe did it with video, ballistics, and cell phone evidence to back it up. And because of a 19th century legal concept and a prosecutor's office that decided the case wasn't worth the risk of losing in court, every single one of those suspects walked free. Two of them are dead now anyway, taken out by whatever else this city's violence eventually does to people like that. The rest are just out there free, while Zach's family, his friends, and the entire community he spent 9 years documenting are still waiting for an actual conviction that at this point might never come. And here's something almost eerie if you go looking for it yourself.

[00:26:40]Zack TV1, the channel is still up right now. Years after his death, you can still go scroll through over a thousand of his uploads. Teenage Chief Keef, early Lil Durk, all of it just sitting there frozen in time exactly the way Zach left it. is basically an entire decade of Chicago street history archived for free made by a guy who never got an actual newsroom, never got real protection, and never got to see how much the genre he helped document would eventually blow up worldwide. Even now, people in Chicago's hip hop community still bring his name up whenever the conversation turns to who actually documented the city's real history instead of just chasing clout off of it. younger creators doing exactly the kind of street level interview Zach pioneered will sometimes credit him directly as the reason that Lane exists at all. He didn't get a statue. He didn't get a street renamed after him. What he got was a YouTube channel that's still pulling in views from people discovering his work for the first time years after he can't benefit from any of it. If there's one thing this case proves above almost anything else is that in a city like Chicago, documenting violence honestly can be just as dangerous as living inside it.

[00:27:50]Zach never pulled a trigger in his life.

[00:27:52]He never repped the set and he still ended up exactly where so many of the people he covered ended up gone too early with the people responsible never actually held accountable in a court of law. Zack Stoner spent his whole career trying to answer one question. What can we do to resolve the violence in Chicago? Almost a decade later, with his own murder sitting unsolved despite police saying it's solved, that question still doesn't have an answer. And honestly, that might be the most Chicago ending to the story there could possibly be. If you've made it this far, let me know in the comments what part of this story actually surprised you the most.

[00:28:27]Because every time I research this case, I find something that makes this whole situation even more frustrating than the last time. And if you want me to keep covering cases like this, real ones, fully researched, no fluff, no fake drama added in, make sure you're subscribed because there's a lot more Chicago's history that nobody's actually telling the full story on. And for NLNB, given everything that had been publicly put out there in the weeks and months leading up to Jay Dog's death, the live streams, the social media posts, the public airing of grievances, there was a lot of material to work with. Now, we're not going to speculate about ongoing investigations or what law enforcement may or may not be building toward because that's not responsible and it's not the point of this video. But what we can say is that the legal dimension of this situation has added another layer of pressure on top of an already catastrophically strained organization.

[00:29:20]When guys in your circle are facing murder charges, it changes everything.

[00:29:24]It changes how people move. It changes how freely people talk. It changes who's available and who's not available. It creates stress on relationships that might have been able to survive other kinds of pressure but can't survive this. And for the families involved, for Jay Dog's family in particular, none of the organizational drama matters as much as the basic human reality that someone they loved is gone. And the circumstances of how he's gone carry a particular kind of pain that goes beyond what most people will ever have to experience. on the streets. The response to Jay Dog's death was also complicated by the fact that people were not in agreement about the narrative around why it happened. Some people pointed directly to his live stream as the reason. Some people said the situation was more complicated than that and involved factors that weren't necessarily connected to what he said publicly. And some people used the uncertainty around the circumstances to push their own narratives about who was responsible and what should happen in response. That lack of consensus around the story of Jay Dog's death and the fact that someone connected to NLMBB was charged became the fuel that powered the ongoing civil war. Because when you can't agree on what happened, you can't agree on what justice looks like. And when you can't agree on what justice looks like, people start taking matters into their own hands according to their own understanding of the situation.

[00:30:45]That's a dangerous dynamic in any environment. in Chicago in a street organization that has access to weapons and has a history of violence is potentially catastrophic. Now, let's talk about the specific allegiances that have formed since the G Money main ski split because this is where the civil war takes on a dimension that goes beyond just NLMB itself and starts to involve the broader landscape of Chicago street organizations. According to people who are closely following this situation, people embedded in Chicago street culture who have tracked these relationships for years, the fallout from the NLMB civil war has pulled in organizations well beyond NLMBB's own membership. Specifically, what has reportedly happened, and this is something that has been discussed extensively in Chicago street circles, is that Chief Keith's Four Corner Hustlers affiliated Glow Gang reportedly ended up siding with Manski in this conflict. Now, let's slow down on that for a second because the weight of that needs to land properly. Chief Keef, Glow Gang, Four Corner Hustlers. We're talking about one of the most iconic names in the history of Chicago drill music. We're talking about a figure whose influence on Chicago street culture and on hip hop globally is almost impossible to overstate. Chief Keef is not just a rapper. He's a symbol. He's a representative of an entire era and an entire philosophy of how Chicago street life gets expressed through music. And Glow Gang's reported alignment with mainet ski in the NLM civil war is not just a celebrity endorsement or one side of a local beef.

[00:32:17]It represents real organizational backing. It represents connections, resources, and a kind of credibility that changes the stakes of a conflict significantly. On the other side, reportedly siding with G Money, are the Blood Hounds. The Blood Hounds bring their own history and their own organizational weight to this equation.

[00:32:36]And their alignment with G Money means that this is no longer just an NLMB internal matter. It's a conflict that has absorbed multiple organizations and created alliances and divisions that extend far beyond the original fracture point. Think about what has happened here in terms of the speed at which this escalated. You start with G Herbo making it and the hood feeling left behind. You go through Cairo's public allegations, through Jay Dog's live stream, through Jay Dog's death and the charges that follow, through G Money and Maine ski fighting over the aftermath. And then you arrive at a situation where two separate organizational power structures with their own histories and their own people are now positioned on opposite sides of what started as an internal NLMBB dispute. That's not a small thing.

[00:33:21]That's not something that gets quietly resolved with a handshake and a sitdown.

[00:33:24]That's a structural realignment of relationships and alliances in a specific section of Chicago street world. That has implications for how people move, who they can be around, and how safe anyone in these circles actually is. The social media dimension of this conflict has also been significant because unlike street conflicts of previous generations, this one has been partially documented in real time on platforms where everyone with a phone can watch it unfold. Posts going up, comments going wild, people declaring signs publicly, threats being made in ways that are visible to law enforcement, to journalists, to the general public, and to the people on both sides of the conflict who are trying to track what's happening. And that real-time documentation creates its own set of problems because things said in the heat of the moment on social media have a permanence that words on the street don't have. Screenshots live forever. Posts get archived. And in legal context, the things people say publicly about conflicts like this can become evidence. The people caught in the middle of this, members of NLMB who had genuine relationships with people on both sides of this divide, find themselves in an incredibly difficult position. In street culture, neutrality is often interpreted as cowardice or disloyalty. The pressure to declare a side is immense, and the consequences of picking the wrong side for being perceived as not being fully committed to the side you picked can be severe.

[00:34:47]Meanwhile, the original issues, the foundational grievances that started all of this haven't been resolved. G Herbbo's relationship with NLMB remains complicated. The legal situation around Jay Dog's death continues to develop.

[00:35:01]The G Money Mainski split has not been healed, and the broader alliances that have formed around each side have created a web of conflict that keeps pulling more people into its orbit.

[00:35:12]Let's talk for a minute about what the street consequences of all of this actually look like in practice. Because it's easy to talk about size and alliances in the abstract, but the real world consequences of a conflict like this are concrete and often brutal. When an organization the size and scope of NLMB fractures and when that fracture pulls in other organizations to the alliance structure that develops around it, you get a situation where people who used to move together, party together, celebrate together and protect each other are now looking at each other with suspicion or outright hostility. People who used to be safe in certain places are suddenly not safe there. People who used to rely on certain relationships for protection or support find those relationships compromised or severed entirely. And in an environment where violence has historically been a way of resolving disputes and establishing dominance, a conflict like this carries with it the constant threat of additional loss. Every escalation on social media carries the potential to translate into something that happens on the Chicago street at a time when nobody's paying attention except the people directly involved. That's the reality of what we're talking about when we say NLMB is at war with itself. We're not just talking about internet drama.

[00:36:30]We're talking about a genuine fracture in an organization whose members operate in an environment where the consequences of conflict are life and death. And the most tragic part of it all, the people most at risk are the ones who are already the most vulnerable. The ones who stayed on those blocks, the ones who never had a G Herbo moment. The ones who built their lives around the organization because the organization was the only thing that gave them a sense of identity and security. Those are the people who have the most to lose when organization turns on itself. Now, let's also acknowledge something that's been present throughout this entire story, but hasn't always been said explicitly. the role of money and what happens to a tight-knit community when one or two people get wealthy and others don't. This isn't a NLMB specific problem. This is something that is played out of street organizations connected to the music industry across the country. When a rapper from a street background blows up, they enter a world that is fundamentally different from where they came from. The money is real.

[00:37:30]The expectations placed on them by their management, their label, their lawyers, and their financial advisers are real.

[00:37:37]The distance literally and emotionally between where they are and where their people are grows every single day. And the people left behind feel that distance in ways that accumulate over time. Every time they see their guy on TV and then look at their own situation.

[00:37:52]Every time they're in a situation where they need resources and don't have them and feel like their guy could help but isn't. Every time a promise gets made and then doesn't happen, it builds and bills until somebody decides they're going to say it out loud. With NLM, multiple people said it out loud. And the fallout has been catastrophic. But there's another layer to this that we need to address because it's important for understanding the full picture. G Herbo has spoken about his background and his experiences in ways that suggest he carries real trauma from what he lived through. He's talked about mental health. He's talked about the difficulty of carrying the weight of where he came from while also trying to build a life that is different from that. He's had his own legal issues, federal charges related to fraud that complicated his ability to operate freely and to help people the way he might have wanted to.

[00:38:42]And Lil Bby, another NLMB affiliated artist who was specifically named in Jay Dog's live stream criticisms, has his own story, his own trajectory, his own set of circumstances that inform why he may or may not have maintained certain relationships with people from the hood.

[00:38:58]None of this fully excuses the feeling of abandonment that people like Cairo and Jay Dog express publicly, but it complicates the simple narrative of these guys got rich and didn't care about their people. reality is almost always more complicated than the narrative. And the truth of this situation probably lives somewhere in the messy middle between they completely abandoned their people and they did everything they could and people are ungrateful. The tragedy is that whatever the truth is, a man is dead, other men are facing charges. An organization is split apart and the conflict is still unresolved. But let's step back even further. Because the NLMBB civil war doesn't just tell us something about NLMBB. It tells us something much bigger. It holds up a mirror to a dynamic that exists in every major city in America where there is a street rap scene built on the real experiences of people living in poverty and danger. And what that mirror shows us is not comfortable. The story of NLMBB is really the story of what happens when a cultural movement is built on the reality of people's suffering and then some of those people get rich off the cultural representation of that suffering. While the people whose suffering provided the raw material for that culture are left behind. Drill music, Chicago drill in particular, was always honest about this. It didn't pretend that the streets were glamorous in the way that earlier rap movements sometimes did. It showed you the reality, the fear, the loss, the desperate calculation that goes into every decision made in an environment where your options are severely limited and the consequences of wrong moves are terminal. And because of that honesty, because of that rawness, it connected with people all over the world who recognize something authentic in it. It made careers, it made millions of dollars, it made stars. But the question that has always lurked underneath all of that, the question that the NLMBB civil war has now forced into the open in the most violent and painful way possible is who benefits from those careers and those millions of dollars? And what obligation do the people who benefit have to the community that produced the content that made all of it possible?

[00:41:08]This is not a simple question with a simple answer. And anyone who tells you it is is either not thinking about it deeply enough or has a stake in pushing a particular narrative. On one hand, artists like G. Herbo didn't create the conditions they grew up in. They didn't choose to be born into poverty in a dangerous neighborhood with limited resources and limited pathways. They survived an environment that takes many lives and built something remarkable out of that survival. The idea that survival and success create an unlimited financial obligation to everyone who was around during the struggle is not a sustainable position. On the other hand, the marketing of that survival, the business model that turned authenticity and street credibility into commercial products was built on the collective reality of an entire community. The hood wasn't just a backdrop. It was a co-author. The people who stayed, who kept things real, who were the living proof of the authenticity that made the music credible, they are part of the story in a way that deserves acknowledgement and arguably some form of reciprocity. Where exactly that reciprocity begins and ends is something that every artist from a street background has to work out for themselves. And the way they work it out or fail to work it out has consequences that they may not fully anticipate when they're in the early stages of their success. G. Herbo was not the first artist to find himself in this position.

[00:42:29]He won't be the last. The specific tragedy of NLMB is not that it happened.

[00:42:34]Versions of this have happened before, but that it escalated to the point where people are dead and people are facing murder charges and an organization that helped shape Chicago culture is now tearing itself apart publicly. And for the young people still on those blocks in the east side of Chicago, the next generation of kids who are watching all of this unfold and processing what it means, what lessons are they taking from it? What does the NLMBB civil war teach a 14-year-old in that neighborhood?

[00:43:01]About loyalty, about what success looks like, about whether organizations and codes and bonds can actually be trusted?

[00:43:09]Because the education that the streets provide is often the most powerful education young people in those environments receive. And right now, the lesson being taught by the NLMBB civil war is one about betrayal, about broken promises, about what happens when the bonds that were supposed to be unbreakable turn out to be only as strong as the money and the proximity and the self-interest that underpin them. That's a devastating lesson to learn at any age, but it's particularly devastating when you're young and you're watching it happen to people you looked up to. Now, let's talk about where things stand currently. And this is the part of this video that I want to be very clear about. The situation is ongoing. It is developing. Things that are true as of when this video is being made may change. People situations may evolve. Charges may be resolved one way or another. Relationships that are currently strained may be repaired or may deteriorate further. New information may come out. What we know right now is this. NLNB is divided. The Goney side and the main ski side represent two distinct factions of what used to be one organization. Those factions have different alliances. Glow Gang reportedly behind Main Ski. The Blood Hounds reportedly behind G Money. Those alliances bring real organizational weight to both sides of this conflict. G Herbbo's relationship with NLNB as a whole has been publicly damaged by the Kirro situation and by what Jay Dog said before his death. Whether that relationship can or will be repaired is an open question, but the public nature of the damage means that any repair would have to be equally public to be meaningful. Lil Bby, who was also named in Jay Dog's criticisms, has largely kept his public commentary on the situation limited. His position within the context of the civil war and its various factions is something that people are watching closely. The legal situation around Jay Dog's death continues to develop and the outcome of that legal process will have significant implications for everyone involved and perhaps most importantly people's lives continue to be at risk. Real human beings are navigating a situation where alliances have been broken. Accusations have been made, violence has already occurred, and the potential for additional violence remains present.

[00:45:24]Every day that this situation remains unresolved is another day that someone who woke up that morning might not make it to the next one. That's the way to what we're actually discussing here. Not just entertainment, not just street politics, but actual human lives. Now, here's what I think needs to be said in closing. And I say this with full respect for everyone who has been impacted by this situation, including the families of people who have lost loved ones, including the members of NLMB who are caught in this conflict and including the fans and followers who grew up on the music and are now watching the community behind that music fracture in real time. The NLMB civil war is a tragedy. Full stop. There's no other way to characterize it. It's a tragedy because it started from a place of real legitimate pain. People who felt abandoned by those they trusted. People who went on record to say that the bonds they built their lives around had turned out to be conditional. People who were brave enough or desperate enough to speak the truth as they saw it regardless of the consequences. It's a tragedy because one of those people ended up paying for speaking with his life. Jay Dog is gone. Whatever you think about what he said, whatever position you take on the internal politics of NLMBB, a human being is dead and the circumstances of that death have now set in motion a chain of events that is causing more damage, more division, more pain. It's a tragedy because the organization at the center of it, NLMB, represents something that was genuinely important, not just to Chicago music history, but to the people who grew up in that neighborhood and found in NLMB.

[00:47:00]something that gave their lives structure and meaning and a sense of belonging. The loss of that, the destruction of that sense of collective identity through internal conflict is a real loss that real people are grieving.

[00:47:11]And it's a tragedy because it didn't have to go this way. If the grievances that Cairo and Jay Dog expressed publicly had been addressed internally, if there had been systems within NLMB for people to raise concerns and be heard without having to go to social media, maybe things unfold differently.

[00:47:28]Maybe Jay Dog says what he's feeling to the people he's feeling it about. Those conversations happen. Some kind of resolution or understanding is reached.

[00:47:36]Maybe he's still here. Maybe if the success that G Herbo and Bby achieved had been accompanied by more intentional systematic investment back into the community, not charity, but real structural investment in legal defense funds and financial education in creating pathways out for the people who were still in. The resentment never builds to the level where people are going on live to expose their own. Those are big may. They hypotheticals. They don't change what actually happened. But they're worth thinking about for anyone in a similar situation. Anyone who's made it from a background like this and is navigating the question of what their success means for the people they came up with. Because the NLMBB story is going to be a case study. It already is.

[00:48:19]People in Chicago street circles and in the broader hip hop industry are watching and taking notes. And the note they're taking is when you don't handle this right, it can end in the worst way imaginable. For the legacy of NLMB, which let's be honest, was already complicated before all of this happened.

[00:48:35]Because that's the nature of an organization that was built in an environment as brutal as the one they came from. This civil war represents the possibility of defining them by how they fell apart rather than by what they built. And that's not what anyone who was there from the beginning would have wanted. G Herbo built something remarkable with the music he made coming out of NLMBB. Those early projects are classics. Gang way, Red Snow, PTSD. The way he documented what he lived through and turned it into something universal that connected with people across the world. That's real artistry. That's legacy. Lil Bibby's contributions, the energy, the authenticity, the way he held down the NLMB flag on records and in his public presence, that's real, too. That's part of the history. And the members who stay behind, the Chyros and the Jay Dogs and the Gonies and the Mainskis and everyone else who kept it real on those blocks, while the famous ones moved on, they're part of that legacy, too. Maybe the most important part because without their reality, without their live experience, there is no G Herbo. There is no Lil Bby. There is no NLMBB that the world knows about.

[00:49:43]Legacy is complicated. It always is when the story isn't over yet and when the story that's still being written is a painful one. But here's what I'll say about where NLMBB goes from here. Civil wars and street organizations like civil wars and nations end in one of a few ways. They end through a decisive victory by one side that effectively dismantles the other. They end through exhaustion. When both sides have lost enough that continuing doesn't make sense anymore. They end through a negotiated peace that acknowledges the grievances of both sides and creates new structures for moving forward. Or they end in a continuation of conflict that claims more lives and more relationships until there's nothing left to fight over. Nobody on the outside can determine which of those endings NLMB is headed toward. That's determined entirely by the people inside the situation, by the choices they make, by whether anyone with enough credibility, enough relationships on both sides of the divide steps up to try to broker some kind of resolution. It's worth noting that the people with the most credibility to do that. The artists who have platforms, who have resources, who are known and respected by people on both sides are also the people whose perceived failures created this situation in the first place. So, the path back from this for the famous members of NLMBB likely runs through a real tangible demonstrable commitment to the people they're accused of leaving behind. Not a press release, not an Instagram post, not a verse on a record that references the situation. Real structural sustained commitment, the kind that changes material conditions for the people involved. Whether that happens, whether anyone is willing to make that kind of commitment and whether the people in the receiving end are willing to accept it at this point is something none of us can predict from the outside. What we can say is that the cost of not finding a resolution keeps going up. Every day this continues is another day where the risk of additional loss, legal, financial, and most importantly human is real. And for the people watching this situation from the outside, including everyone watching this video right now, there's a responsibility to think about what it means to consume content about real people's real conflicts. To engage with this not just as entertainment or as drama, but as a human situation with human consequences. Jay Dog was a real person with a family who loved him. The person charged in connection with his death is a real person with a family.

[00:52:03]The members of NLMBB on both sides of this civil war are real people navigating a situation that most of us have never had to face and hopefully never will. That doesn't mean we can't discuss it. That doesn't mean there's no value in trying to understand what's happening and why, but it does mean approaching it with some consciousness about what we're actually looking at.

[00:52:23]The NLMB civil war is not just a story.

[00:52:27]It's not just content. It's the real complicated painful unfolding of a community that was already operating under enormous stress. Poverty, violence, criminalization, the particular weight of being from a neighborhood that the world sees as a symbol of something rather than as a place where real human beings with real human needs live their real human lives.

[00:52:48]and the fact that it's playing out publicly in real time in the age of social media and YouTube and Tik Tok with the whole world watching and commenting and taking sides as a layer of pressure and performance to an already overwhelming situation. The people of NLMB on both sides of this divide deserve better than to have their pain turned into content. Even this video, as carefully as we've tried to handle this, is participating in that dynamic to some degree. The least we can do is acknowledge that at the end of the day, this is a story about what happens when a community is underresourced, under supported, and overpoliced. What happens when the only economic opportunity that presents itself to talented people is one that requires them to commodify their trauma? What happens when the bonds that hold a community together get put under pressures they were never designed to withstand? The NLMB civil war is happening right now. It's real. It's painful and it's not over. We're going to keep following this story and bringing you the most accurate, most responsible coverage we can because the people involved deserve for this story to be told accurately, not sensationally. And because understanding what's happening to NLMBB right now might help us understand something bigger. Something about what happens to communities when systems fail them and about what it actually takes to keep people together when every force in their environment is working to pull them apart. Rest in peace to Jay Dog.

[00:54:13]Prayers for everyone caught in this situation and for all the families involved and to everyone watching this.

[00:54:20]Pay attention because the story of NLMBB is still being written and how it ends is going to tell us something important about Chicago, about street culture, about the music industry, and about what loyalty and brotherhood actually mean when everything gets hard. That's the real story and we'll be here to cover every chapter of it. Stay locked in.