CLEVELAND, Ohio— A co-founder of one of Cleveland’s most violent and widespread gangs was sentenced Tuesday to three years in federal prison on a gun charge.
Donte Ferguson, who helped create the Heartless Felons in the early 2000s, said he left the gangster lifestyle behind him years ago and apologized for shooting guns off at a Parma gun range.
“I have changed,” Ferguson said. “I’ve made a lot of bad decisions. I knew I wasn’t allowed to have a gun. I’m sorry for this. I’m trying to make the wrongs right again.”
U.S. District Judge Pamela Barker handed down the sentence and ordered Ferguson to spend three years on probation and to have no contact with gang members.
Barker’s sentence went below the federal sentencing guidelines, which called for a sentence between four years and three months to five years and three months.
She acknowledged his background as one of two creators of the Heartless Felons and that Ferguson had left the gang in 2015.
“The Heartless Felons wreaked havoc on the streets of Cleveland and elsewhere, along with juvenile and state prisons,” Barker said.
She said Ferguson after his last criminal conviction in 2014 worked with the Cleveland Peacemaker’s Alliance to reach out to youth to dissuade them from gang violence.
Ferguson’s attorney, Kevin Spellacy, and Assistant U.S. Scott Zarzycki both said during the hearing that the circumstances of the crime differed from other gun charges. They urged Barker to take that into consideration.
Prosecutors charged Ferguson with possessing a gun with a felony record after someone in September 2021 posted an Instagram Live video of him firing a gun at the Parma Armory.
“He wasn’t carrying the gun on the street or driving with it,” Spellacy said. “Frankly, it was stupidity that led to him to shoot at the armory.”
Spellacy wrote in court records that Ferguson has six children between the ages of two and 17, that he has heart problems, diabetes and suffers from the effects of a 2016 prison stabbing and a 2022 shooting.
Ferguson and Antonio Peterson founded the Heartless Felons in the early 2000s inside the state’s juvenile prisons. Since then, authorities linked the group to a host of violent crimes, including murders, shootings, armed carjackings, bribery, extortion, drug dealing and threatening witnesses.
Ferguson has a history of criminal convictions for armed robbery and his role in a gang. He also threatened a Cleveland police gang detective. He served three years in prison from 2014 to 2017 for threatening the detective and gun possession.
After his release from prison, he worked at a nightclub and more recently started up businesses rehabbing and selling houses and cars.
Cleveland police working with the FBI stumbled on the Instagram video in September 2021 during an investigation into the gang.
In May 2022, someone ran Ferguson’s motorcycle off the road while firing a gun in the air. Ferguson crashed and broke his arm, wrist and hand. That same month, someone shot him three times while looking at a house he was considering buying in Cleveland’s Collinwood-Nottingham neighborhood.
