On their way to kill a rival gang member 10 years ago, Romeo Blackman took a teenager under his wing and offered some words of encouragement from a leader in Englewood’s “Goonie Boss” street gang, prosecutors said.
Blackman allegedly told the younger gang member to “make sure your shoelaces are tied tight” and to “tie the hood tight.”
The boy then walked into a barbershop on May 26, 2016, opened fire —but missed the target, records show. He killed someone getting a haircut, instead.
“Blackman killed and ordered to kill without remorse,” prosecutors alleged. “The bodies and lives destroyed by Goonie rests upon his shoulder.”
Now, U.S. District Judge John Blakey has sentenced Blackman, 30, to life in prison, more than three years after a jury convicted Blackman and two others of a racketeering conspiracy and held Blackman responsible for several murders, including the one in the barbershop in May 2016.
While handing down the sentence Tuesday, Blakey said Blackman participated “not only in the taking of other people’s lives, but the corruption of young people.”
“The debt he owes to society is significant,” Blakey said.
Blackman’s life sentence was mandatory, and he appeared largely unmoved by the proceedings at the Dirksen Federal Courthouse. At one point during the hearing, he leaned back in his chair and put his hands behind his head, elbows out, as a prosecutor detailed his murders.
When the judge asked Blackman if he had anything to say before the sentence was handed down, Blackman told him, “No, I’m OK.”
The jury convicted Blackman in July 2023, along with Terrance Smith and Jolicious Turman, at the end of a roughly seven-week trial. Smith and Turman are set to be sentenced in the coming months, with Smith also facing a mandatory life sentence.
Their hearings were delayed while the trio argued for acquittal or a new trial. Blackman’s attorneys encouraged Blakey to hand down a lighter sentence, calling the mandatory life term unconstitutional.
They also argued that Blackman was born with cocaine and alcohol in his system and grew up in a fractured home surrounded by violence.
Other victims of Blackman’s reign of terror included a man taking groceries out of his car who was apparently mistaken for a rival gang member, and a man who simply walked over to a car in which Blackman was a passenger in December 2015, prosecutors told the judge.
“Blackman got out of the vehicle and shot Andre Donner in the face,” they wrote, “killing him and sending a citizen running for his life.”
Blackman later “bragged that he FaceTimed” the man, a prosecutor told Blakey in court.
Trevante Reed, the young gang member who opened fire in the barbershop at Blackman’s direction, pleaded guilty in state court to the resulting murder of Gerald Sias and is now serving a 20-year prison sentence, records show.
Jurors also found Blackman responsible for the murders of Stanley Bobo on Oct. 23, 2014, and Krystal Jackson on Nov. 19, 2014.
But prosecutors say the damage went beyond those victims.
“There is also the Englewood community, the City of Chicago, and all those unnamed or unknown that were shot, killed, or scurried away while Goonie indiscriminately shot and terrorized others so they could become the toughest gang on the South Side of Chicago,” the feds wrote in a court filing.
“All of this was done under the guidance of Romeo Blackman, and he bears responsibility for those actions.”