Federal prosecutors unsealed a superseding indictment on Thursday against Eugene Henley Jr., accusing him of trying to arrange an attack on a witness from inside federal custody, NBC Los Angeles reported.
The allegation is that Henley offered money to two inmates to kill or harm a person expected to testify against him.
Nothing here has been proven. This is a charging document, prosecutors wrote it, and Henley has not been convicted of anything.
The other new allegations
Two more sets of accusations arrived with the same indictment.
Prosecutors allege that in 2022 Henley paid a co-defendant to transport women across state lines for prostitution. They also allege he submitted a fraudulent COVID-19 disaster loan application containing false statements about a business called Celebrity Socks.
NBC Los Angeles did not publish a full count-by-count breakdown, and we are not printing one we cannot verify.
The case he was already facing
Henley was first charged in March 2025 with running a criminal enterprise. Prosecutors tie that enterprise to the Rollin' 60s Neighborhood Crips and allege extortion, along with the diversion of money from an anti-gang organization.
That organization is the reason this case has held attention in Los Angeles beyond the usual. Henley founded Developing Options, a South Los Angeles nonprofit that presented itself as steering young people away from gangs, and prosecutors allege money intended for it was diverted.
He has been in federal custody for more than a year.
What his lawyer says
His attorney, Peter Johnson, gave NBC Los Angeles a statement: "Mr. Henley maintains his innocence and looks forward to addressing these allegations at trial, where the facts, not headlines, will control."
That is a fair request and worth honoring in the way this is written. The government has made serious accusations. It has not yet proved any of them to anyone.
Why the local record is complicated
Henley occupies a specific place in Los Angeles, and the case sits directly on the fault line running through it.
For years he was a visible figure in South LA's anti-violence world, running a nonprofit that city-connected funding streams supported and that people in the community used. He is also, according to prosecutors, a longtime gang figure who used that standing as cover. Both descriptions have had adherents in the same neighborhoods for a long time, and Thursday's indictment does not settle which is right. A trial might.
What can be said now is narrower. The government has escalated a racketeering prosecution into an allegation that the defendant tried to have a witness killed to stop it, which is the kind of charge that changes the shape of a case, and the defense has answered that it will contest all of it in court.
What is not yet known
The date of the alleged solicitation, the amount of money said to have been offered, whether the witness was harmed, and the trial date are all absent from the reporting we could verify. So is any comment from the U.S. Attorney's office beyond the indictment itself, whose full text was not accessible to us.
