In November 2018, former high-ranking Black Guerilla Family gang leader Ricky Evans pleaded guilty to a raft of federal crimes, including those involving murders. And for the last seven years, instead of receiving his sentence, nothing happened.

Or so it seemed.

Behind the scenes, Evans spent that time secretly cooperating with federal authorities, helping them build cases against his fellow gang members and others responsible for scores of murders, kidnappings and violent assaults that troubled the city for more than a decade.

He also weighed in on a notable 2015 case that raised questions about the city’s much-touted Safe Streets anti-violence program.

“‘Incalculable’ is the best way to describe” Evans’ assistance, Assistant U.S. Attorney James Wallner told a federal judge in Baltimore on Wednesday morning. The prosecutor compared the impact of Evans’ cooperation to that of flipping a consigliere of the mafia, known formally as La Cosa Nostra.

At the sentencing hearing, Evans, now 45, told U.S. District Judge James K. Bredar that his initial goal was securing a lighter sentence. But he said the process of becoming a high-stakes informant changed him.

“I want to do the right thing,” Evans said. “If we don’t clean up the community and take violent people off the streets, it’s going to constantly happen.”

For his cooperation, prosecutors recommended a prison sentence of 25 years, far below recommended guidelines, which otherwise called for Evans to go to prison for the rest of his life. His own attorney requested an even lighter sentence of between 15 and 20 years.

The sentencing hearing provided a rare look into the world of gang members-turned-cooperators. Typically, a defendant’s cooperation is shielded from public view and discussed in a locked courtroom. Until this month, every entry on Evans’ case docket since 2019 has been sealed, including both prosecution’s and defense’s sentencing memorandums.

But at the outset of Evans’ hearing, Bredar, the judge, alluded to vague “peculiar circumstances” that would lead him toward more public disclosure.

And as such, Bredar said, a sentencing hearing open to all would contribute to the broader understanding of how cases are made against such violent men who might otherwise go uncaught.

Evans’ case showed “the price the government pays to achieve some greater level of justice to prosecute other far-flung conspiracies,” Bredar added.

Founded in the 1960s in California, the Black Guerilla Family gang, or BGF, eventually expanded eastward, forming a reported stranglehold in the Maryland’s jails and prisons starting about 15 years ago as its members increased their presence on the streets of Baltimore.

As a result, federal officials struck back in 2010 when 24 people were indicted, including four state corrections officers. Prosecutors in court papers described scenes of incarcerated gang members eating salmon and shrimp, sipping Grey Goose vodka and puffing on cigars. All the while, they were directing drug deals, extorting protection money from other inmates and arranging attacks on witnesses and rival gang members, prosecutors alleged.

In 2013, another case made national news as 13 correctional officers and 12 gang members were charged in a federal case that showed how the gang had taken over the Baltimore City Detention Center. The locked-up gang leader, Tavon White, had impregnated four correctional officers.

Later that year, another 48 people were indicted on state charges centered at taking out the gang’s presence in the area around East Baltimore’s Barclay neighborhood. But Evans wasn’t among them.

Still, Evans was on law enforcement’s radar “early on” as one of the gang’s leaders in East Baltimore, a drug trafficker and “driver of violence,” Wallner, the federal prosecutor, said during Wednesday’s court hearing.

He was arrested in November 2016 while picking up drugs in Virginia, court records show. Federal prosecutors accused him of operating a murder-for-hire scheme and taking payments to order gang members to commit violence.

Among the charges was the accusation that Evans authorized the kidnapping and extortion of 33-year-old Marcal Walton, who was shot and killed in January 2010. That same year, prosecutors said, he authorized the murder of Darel Alston, a fellow gang member suspected of cooperating with law enforcement officials who were investigating Walton’s death.

In 2015, Evans also worked for the Safe Streets anti-violence program, which enlists people with underworld connections to mediate violence.

But in his 2018 guilty plea, Evans said he turned that employment on its head, using its Monument Street office to hold gang meetings, distribute drugs and stash guns used in other crimes. He worked for the program for about five months until a police raid, which led to the program’s suspension.

Mentions of the Black Guerilla Family gang’s involvement in recent years have been sparse, but the ATF and FBI have continued to try to close older open cases.

The full extent of Evans’ cooperation with law enforcement remains sealed, but Wednesday’s hearing shed some new light on violent gang activity.

Evans, for example, had been a “linchpin” in the “Triple C” case and the case against gang hitman David Warren, according to Wallner. Both cases were massive in their scope.

Members of the Triple-C gang, which stands for “Cruddy, Conniving Crutballs,” were charged in 2021 and charged with committing 18 murders and 28 attempted murders. It was said to have been formed as an “alternative” to the BGF and based in the Darley Park area of East Baltimore.

Warren, a gang assassin, was sentenced to 45 years in federal prison last fall, after pleading guilty in a case involving three murders and 10 non-fatal shootings.

Evans “was a BGF higher-up, who groomed Warren to be this nasty, violent guy,” retired Baltimore Police Sgt. Joseph Landsman told The Banner last year. “And he [Warren] was doing the exact same thing: He had these younger underlings doing” his bidding.

In his defense, Evans’ attorney Jennifer Smith at Wednesday’s sentencing described her client’s childhood, which included exposure to lead paint, domestic violence and murder before the age of 10. When it was his turn to speak, Evans told the judge that in East Baltimore, violence and dysfunction were seen as normal parts of growing up.

“I thought that was what we did,” he told Bredar. When he beat a murder case, Evans added, “instead of coming home and society making you feel bad, they put you on a pedestal.”

He also noted that he lost a son of his own to violence in February 2023, eventually leading to a greater realization about the ripple effects of violence. “I know I was responsible for a lot of mothers crying,” he said.

While he waited years to be sentenced, Evans also mediated disputes behind bars and created a jailhouse program called “Change Starts Here,” according to his lawyer.

“Mr. Evans has truly, truly changed,” Smith said.

Cooperation with federal officials has come with a high cost, Evans’ attorney told judge. He now fears for his safety, worried about retaliation. His defense team remarked that it’s unlikely he’ll ever be able to return to Baltimore after his release because the risk would be too great.

In the end, the judge said he had to balance competing interests: the need to account for Evans’ extraordinary cooperation against society’s desire for justice.

“I’m an optimist by nature and choose to believe the defendant’s change of direction is real,” Bredar said, sentencing Evans to 25 years with credit toward his time already served. “But I also have a powerful responsibility to the community I serve.”