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The tale of Tekashi 6ix9ine is a complicated one, to say the least. The rapper, born Daniel Hernandez, infiltrated the world of hip-hop by becoming the clown prince of rap. He leveraged his polarizing persona (and ability to troll other artists) to become a constant topic of conversation. 6ix9ine’s ascent was paused, however, when he was arrested on racketeering, weapons, and drugs charges in 2018, due to his affiliation with the Nine Trey Gangster Bloods.
6ix9ine’s subsequent escape from a life sentence (in part, by snitching on his fellow Nine Trey gang members) is a story that’s just as chaotic as his rap career, and trying to make sense of it all is a daunting task. That’s where Shawn Setaro comes in. The journalist, podcaster, and author of the new book, Complex Presents Dummy Boy: Tekashi 6ix9ine and The Nine Trey Gangsta Bloods, began reporting on the rapper long before the racketeering charges were brought up against him. Despite having never written a book before, Setaro says Dummy Boy was born out of a realization that after covering 6ix9ine extensively through editorial articles and his podcast, Infamous: The Tekashi 6ix9ine Story, the next logical step was to put all of this information into one cohesive story.
“I didn’t even really think about a book until I was approached by the guy who is now my agent, William LoTurco,” he says. “He hit me up during the trial. He said, ‘I’ve seen your coverage and I think there’s something here. I think we could do a book.’ And I was intimidated, but I thought, ‘You know what, for whatever combination of reasons, I know this material better than anyone else in the world. If I’m ever going to write a first book, it’s going to be about this. And if someone else does it, I’m going to be mad, so let me just try it and see how it goes.’”
Dummy Boy encapsulates the rise and fall of the New York rapper in detail, through first-hand reporting from the courtroom of his racketeering case and interviews from 6ix9ine’s producers, friends, Nine Trey affiliates, and more. The story goes much deeper than just the case and the social media buzz, though, including numerous claims of domestic abuse and a 2015 case where the rapper pleaded guilty to using a child in a sexual performance.
At this point, everyone has an opinion about 6ix9ine, but Setaro attempted to tell the story as objectively as possible. He focused on the facts instead of injecting too many of his own personal thoughts (although he admits “there are little digs that maybe make it clear how I feel about some things”).
To Setaro, 6ix9ine’s career arc represents much larger trends about society today, which is what makes the whole thing so compelling. “I think it’s honestly the hip-hop story of the decade,” he says of 6ix9ine’s rise and fall. “I just don’t know what else compares to it in terms of scope and how we live now and how we’re all in this attention economy. Tekashi is the ultimate example of this, but we’re all guilty of needing that hit of oxytocin when we pick up our phones. ‘Did enough people like my funny observation on Twitter? Did enough people buy my book?’ We’re all caught in this, so it’s really an example of the real cost of this attention economy.”
Now, 6ix9ine has disappeared again, and his Instagram account hasn’t been active since May 2021. So the question now is the same one it’s always been: What will Tekashi 6ix9ine do next? With Dummy Boy available to purchase now, we talked with Shawn Setaro to get that answer, discuss some of the most intense moments in the courtroom during 6ix9ine’s racketeering case, the process of writing the book, and more.
The book opens when 6ix9ine’s album TattleTales flopped in September 2020. Why start there, before jumping into the case and giving his chronological backstory?
I would say that post-TattleTales is such a snapshot. It was pretty contemporary at the time I had started writing [the book], but it was just sort of a snapshot of me saying, “This isn’t the end of the story, or the end of his story, but it’s kind of the end of this section of it.” He’s trying for a comeback, and it just doesn’t work out. And so it seemed like a good kind of snapshot to be, like, “Well, here’s where this all ended up.” He’s literally standing on a street corner in the middle of Brooklyn trying to give his music away.
As far as the chronology, a lot of that comes out of the very first draft of the book. I kind of tricked myself into writing this book. What I mean by that is: the idea of writing a book, at the time, seemed so intimidating to me that I was just like, “I’m not writing a book, I’m just going to write down everything that I know that happened from day one until the day I finished typing, and that won’t even be a book. That will just be me getting it all down and we’ll see what happens.” Things have changed a lot from that, but you can still see a lot of that structure in the finished book. I found that it actually ended up working really well to tell things more or less in order. But that was just a result of me trying to psych myself into writing it.
Did you have any experience in criminal reporting prior to your coverage on 6ix9ine? If not, was there a learning curve you had to overcome when it came to sitting in the courtroom and wading through documents with a lot of legal jargon?
No, I didn’t really have a background in this. I just kind of jumped in. When the arrest happened, I kind of got told, “See if you can go to court and see what happens,” and I did. This didn’t make it into the book, but the very first day I went to what I thought was a hearing for the Tekashi case, I got the courtroom and building right, but the day wrong. So I actually sat in this courtroom for probably 20 minutes and listened to a story about how a guy stole some stuff from Whole Foods before I realized I had gotten the day wrong.
I would say it was a lot of learning on the job, and there were two big things that I think helped. One was Complex giving me the time and space to go to literally any court hearing I could get a heads up on. I was going to all of the little ones, including the ones where it’s just to set a date for the next thing, and just showing up and hearing the jargon and looking at the documents afterward and getting to know the people and hearing them talk. This all helped me to not have to learn everything at once. I had to learn stuff as it happened, and cases like these are very slow-moving, so I could pick up bits of stuff as it happened. Another part of this was actually the judge’s style, Judge Paul Engelmayer. One of the things about the way he worked is he seemed very concerned that people watching the proceedings understood what was going on. From the very beginning of my experience with him, that was the case, so that definitely helped me. And it wasn’t for my sake, it wasn’t for the reporters’ sake, it was because there are often friends and family there, and as the person directing this whole thing, he wants to make sure that the folks who showed up for their loved ones know what’s happening and know what the next steps are.
From your experience, what was the most intense moment during this case?
His biological father showing up at his sentencing was absolutely insane. He actually walked by me at one point, literally in front of me, to get where there was a seat. And he was mumbling something. I didn’t hear what it was, but the woman sitting next to me wrote it down on a piece of paper and showed it to me. She wrote, “He’s saying, ‘Tekashi is my son.’” It was just such a wild thing, and I get into this in the books: so much of sentencing hearings are basically scripted. You don’t know what the end result is going to be, you don’t know if the judge is going to say 20 months or 60 months or 120 months, but you know some things are going to happen. You know the lawyer is going to talk about how he was such a great guy. The government lawyers are either going to say this guy is great or terrible. You know the person is going to get up and say how sorry they are, and then the judge is going to give a long speech where he says some good stuff and some bad stuff, and then pronounces the ruling. It’s very structured. So to have this absolute bit of chaos thrown in the middle of it was nuts. Some guy gets up and he wants to speak, and he’s saying, “This is my son.” It threw Tekashi completely off. When he started speaking again afterward, he was cursing in the courtroom. He said, “I can’t believe this is happening. I haven’t seen this guy in 15 years.” You just couldn’t make that up, so that was an insane moment.
One more moment that was really surprising to me was when Shotti [Kifano Jordan] was pleading guilty. There was a moment where basically, again, this was scripted. He was supposed to say, “I did all these crimes. It was for the benefit of Nine Trey. I’m very sorry. Thank you, judge. Goodbye.” And then months later, the judge sentences him. It was a guilty plea. That’s what he was there to do, and his lawyer knew the script was. He was supposed to say, “I did these two or three things for the benefit of Nine Trey.” So he gets up there and says, “I did these couple of things,” and the judge says, “So you did them for what reason? Who did they benefit?” The judge was fully expecting to hear Nine Trey Gangster Bloods, and Shotti says, “Tr3yway Entertainment.” Shotti’s take on this is, “I was actually telling the truth. I never said I was a member of Nine Trey.” He’s actually basing his whole appeal effectively on this moment. But to me, that was an admission that Tr3yway Entertainment, this business he’d been running, and the Nine Trey Gangster Bloods, are the same thing. And they were so close in his mind that you might as well say one or the other interchangeably. Shotti has not said this is how he was thinking about it, but to me, it was a real peek behind the curtain and a real admission that these two entities were the same thing. I don’t think there was ever a Tr3way that was in any way separate from the street gang.
To that same point of conflating street gangs with music entertainment, what are your thoughts on rap lyrics being admissible in court?
I think most of the time, rap lyrics being used in trial is terrible. There is a fantastic book on this by Erik Nielson called Rap on Trial that goes into some of these issues of using artistic expression and saying it’s literal truth and prosecutors trying to use it against the artist. Tekashi’s case was different. This was Tekashi himself collaborating with the government to say, “Yes, when I rapped about ‘all my dudes really gang bang,’ what I meant was all my dudes really gang bang.” He was saying, “My lyrics in these songs are literally true and literally do demonstrate that I was a member of a gang.” That, to me, is a different thing than the government hearing some songs and calling someone a gang member. So it was sort of like a mirror image of how rap lyrics are used in court, for the most part. There’s some stuff around the edges where I don’t really agree with how the government used rap lyrics. I think, in relation to Kooda [B] specifically, they took issue with some songs he had recorded after he pled guilty and thought that since he was still rapping about gang stuff, it meant that he didn’t feel bad enough about what he had done. I thought that was not great and a more typical use of this stuff.
Given 6ix9ine’s problematic history of abuse, was it ever challenging to tell this story and report the facts in Dummy Boy without letting your personal opinion on him get in the way?
That’s a great question. I would answer it like this. First off, you’re right, in the book there are little digs that maybe make it clear how I feel about some things without making it the center of the narrative, and I think those hopefully are fun for the readers. Mostly, I would say I don’t think my opinion is that important. I don’t think what I think about Tekashi is particularly notable or worth sharing with the world. I think what is notable and worth sharing with the world is what happened, and I know I have a lot of information and context to add to that to give the full story, so that’s what I was trying to do. Of course, my opinion is going to come across. You talked about him doing bad things. I think that is absolutely true, and one of the things I’ve been trying to do in interviews around the book and in the book itself is to center that yes, he had some terrible things happen to him growing up, and yes, he entertained a lot of people, but he also did some unforgivable stuff, and I’m not talking about snitching.
That’s another thing where I don’t think my opinion on it is particularly important. I’m talking about the domestic abuse, and I’m talking about the 2015 case, and I think that you do have to reckon with those things when thinking about him. Like, yes, the story is fun and colorful and crazy and it tells us about the internet and why we’re always on our phones every second, but we should also keep those serious things in mind.
It looks like 6ix9ine is now on another hiatus. Do you think he comes back, and if he does, do you think he’ll use the same tactics to get people’s attention again?
I would never rule him out. One thing I’ve learned from looking at this is he’s great at captivating people’s attention. In some ways, maybe the culture has moved on, both overall in terms of it’s no longer Trump’s America, and musically hip-hop moves really fast. I think the things that kept the world fascinated in 2018 don’t work anymore. But I wouldn’t rule him out. Maybe something will happen, and lightning will strike again. But I will say he has tried to use these trolling tactics consistently. Trolling Lil Durk and whomever else over and over again, and there’s been diminishing returns. He’s done the same tricks: insulting dead friends and relatives and crossing the same supposedly uncrossable lines, even insulting Nipsey Hussle and all of this kind of stuff, and it just doesn’t seem to have riled people up in the same way. I don’t know if he can leave that tactic behind. I think it’s always worked for him. Poking at people and insulting people got him from hunting for clothes in the garbage to worldwide stardom, so it’s like, who is it for anyone to tell him to stop or that it won’t work again? I don’t know if he’ll be able to leave that way of interacting with the world behind him.
I know he’s been making a soft transition into YouTube stuff with this guy SteveWillDoIt. Maybe that’s where he goes. Maybe he does wacky YouTube stunts. Certainly, one of his first producers I talked to, Jordan Granados, was very set on this idea that maybe Tekashi could be a Twitch streamer or a video game livestreamer. But I don’t know, I can’t see him giving up public life. I don’t necessarily know if he’ll be a musician. He certainly wasn’t a musician before a guy in a deli asked him, “Hey man, I like the way you look. Can you rap?”
Speaking of YouTube, I also noticed how he’s aligned himself with these other edgy counter-culture characters like SteveWillDoIt and the Nelk Boys. What are your thoughts on him aligning with them?
It’s been strange. The first thing I noticed about it was something around the edges: his older brother is in a couple of the videos. During the height of his fame, his brother was nowhere. No pictures, no videos, no anything, so I thought that was interesting. I wonder what is going on now that his family members are more comfortable with being in the spotlight and being a part of the entourage. I don’t have any answers to that, it was just something I noticed. But yeah, SteveWillDoIt is someone who likes to piss people off by being like, “I love Trump, look at me. I’m performing this kind of sexism where maybe I’m joking, but maybe I’m not.” This kind of post-South Park attitude. So it makes sense that Tekashi would align with him. Tekashi has expressed some admiration for Trump, at least in terms of personality. I don’t necessarily know if he thinks about policy or politics, but he’s expressed some admiration for Trump’s style, so it makes sense that he would link up with this guy. I viewed it as a possible way to try out a new path and a way to stay in the spotlight where your gimmick, instead of recording rap songs, is now giving away trucks. It also ties into something about Tekashi’s image. He already tried to show himself as someone who gave back, and that really kicked into overdrive often when he had to convince judges he was a good person. But I think he views himself that way, and so I think this idea of doing these highly publicized giveaways that millions of people watch fits in with plenty of stuff he’s done in the past.
After 6ix9ine’s case, you also covered other heavily publicized cases involving rappers like YNW Melly’s. How did covering 6ix9ine’s case help inform your approach to reporting on others?
The more you do anything, the better you get at it, and I had the opportunity with Tekashi’s case to really get very granular. I went to every hearing that I found out about in advance, read all the documents, and really figured out how this stuff works. So I learned that you have to look at stuff pretty carefully, and you never know what you might find. I took that approach to Melly’s case. That’s the one thing that I really delved into most for the second season of the Infamous podcast. So I took that approach, and you find that a footnote on the last page of a document could actually be a key to a whole thing that no one really paid attention to. There was the research element of it, but you also get more comfortable reaching out to defense lawyers, and you learn the lingo a little bit, and I have to thank the other court reporters that I spent time with during the Tekashi case for that. They let me into their little fraternity, which was great, and I learned a lot from just being around people who were writing for The Guardian and Daily News and the Post and the Times, and just getting to talk to them. Then, at the end of the day, we’d be in the same hearing, and I would see what I wrote and what they wrote, and I would learn so much just by comparing those things.
Do you see yourself writing a sequel to Dummy Boy, or another book covering a giant case like Tekashi’s?
I think that a lot of people around me, including my wife, would be very happy if I never mentioned the word “Tekashi” again. There were years where I would learn something new, and anyone I would run into, I would be like, “You couldn’t possibly believe this, but they ran into Times Square in the middle of the day, and it was rush hour, and he just took the subway home with a gun in his bag.” Every time I met someone, it was a variation of that, so I think a little break from that will be healthy. I think this will hopefully be the definitive word on Tekashi. Obviously, there have been a couple of documentaries, one of which I was in. I think this part of his career is very much covered, and I don’t know if I can see myself coming back to it. Certainly never say never, but I think this book leaves things in a good place.
I definitely would love the challenge of writing long-form stuff about other situations. The next thing I really want to do will hopefully focus more broadly on the connections between hip-hop and policing, and the history of how police have investigated and treated rappers and people in the hip-hop world. I think there is a long and fascinating history there, and a lot going on every day that really demands to be looked at and analyzed, and I think it can tell us a lot about the justice system in general in America. One thing I’ve learned in investigating this is that the problems that rappers face with law enforcement and the problems that Black people in America face from law enforcement are interrelated and very tough to break apart. So I think you can get a good grip on things by looking specifically at, like, “Why are all these rappers charged in racketeering cases? What’s going on with that?” Or, “What’s going on with all these gang databases?” Or, “What’s the connection between rappers and street gangs, and why do police think every rapper is in a gang?” Hopefully a close look at these issues will be pretty revealing, and I hope that, in some form or other, I will get to look at that in a long-form way soon.
What do you hope people take away from Dummy Boy?
Well No. 1, I hope you’re entertained, and I think you will be. It is just a wild story. I hope you take away a couple of things. First, just seeing what this guy’s drive for attention led to—the extreme lengths to get attention no matter the cost, and the wild places that ended up going. Also, at its heart, this is really a story about a relationship. This is a story about the relationship between Tekashi and Shotti, the Nine Trey member who was his big homie and his pseudo manager. It’s about Shotti taking Tekashi under his wing and how, ultimately, each sort of wanted what the other had. I don’t think you get this story without the two of them, so in a lot of ways their relationship is at the heart of this.
I think it’s honestly the hip-hop story of the decade. I just don’t know what else compares to it in terms of scope and how we live now and how we’re all in this attention economy. Tekashi is the ultimate example of this, but we’re all guilty of needing that hit of oxytocin when we pick up our phones.” Did enough people like my funny observation on Twitter? Did enough people buy my book?” We’re all caught in this, so it’s really an example of the real cost of this attention economy.