Julian Bynum walked out of a townhouse in North Hollywood, oblivious to the man crouched behind a car with a gun. The Chicago native was having problems with a roommate. Each accused the other of theft.
The roommate was missing a gold chain; Bynum was out a Rolex. To settle the issue, police suspect the roommate turned to a professional killer. The same assassin is also charged with killing three people and wounding six more in the upscale Westside neighborhood of Benedict Canyon in 2023.
Both cases trace their origins to Chicago, according to records reviewed by The Times. And last week, in an unrelated indictment brought by federal prosecutors in Los Angeles, the Chicago rapper Lil Durk was charged in an alleged murder-for-hire plot that left a man dead near the Beverly Center. The alleged hit men in all three cases are not the urbane assassins of James Bond or Jason Bourne films, court records show.
They fly on Spirit Airlines and sleep five to a single hotel room. Sometimes they get sloppy. They leave DNA at crime scenes and forget to turn off their phones.
Los Angeles draws Windy City natives for all the expected reasons. They come for vacation or to find fame in the music industry. They come looking for glamour and settle for a cheap version of it in short-term rentals and leased luxury cars.
Petty beefs that began elsewhere follow them to Los Angeles. Bynum, 30, had been living in Las Vegas with another Chicago native, Nasir Warfield, according to an affidavit written .
