Rapper AB Milli gets 13 years after no-contest pleas in an Oakland case

AB Milli is going to state prison for 13 years. The 31-year-old rapper, whose real name is Albert Collins, entered no-contest pleas to pimping, robbery, assault and dissuading a witness, over what prosecutors treated as a coordinated run of offences across Oakland. AllHipHop reports the sentence, citing the Mercury News.

The term can be cut roughly in half with good behaviour, which would bring it down to about six and a half years. Maurice Johnson, his co-defendant, received the same sentence for his part in the same investigation.

Three separate Alameda County cases were consolidated into one, centred on an armed robbery operation targeting people around the Bay Area. Police surveillance took investigators to Vallejo, where officers watched a suspected 17-year-old trafficking victim leave an open-air sex market and get into Collins's vehicle. Investigators alleged that he and his girlfriend then worked to keep her from cooperating with authorities, which produced the witness charge.

One piece of the restitution is unusually small next to the rest of it. The court ordered him to return a PlayStation 5 to one of the robbery victims, alongside the custodial sentence.

This is not his first case. In 2021 he was arrested after leading San Francisco police on a foot chase and putting a loaded firearm into a bin, pleaded out of the resulting federal gun case in 2022, and remained on supervised release until 2025, when Alameda County prosecutors brought these charges. He has now been moved into federal custody to answer for violating the terms of that earlier release.

His music has come up in court before, in a case he was not a defendant in. A 2016 diss track he recorded with the Bay Area rapper Yatta accused Mario Pitteard, who performs as NastyO, of cooperating with police over a burglary. Pitteard recruited three San Francisco gang members to go after the intended target, and they killed 25-year-old Shanique Marie on Highway 4 in a case of mistaken identity. Pitteard is serving life after pleading no contest to first-degree murder.

In mitigation, his defence pointed the court at a childhood in which his mother was arrested on suspicion of murder and his father was killed two years later. The use of rap lyrics as evidence keeps arriving in American courtrooms in one form or another, and Lil Durk has asked for two academics to explain drill to a jury in his own case. No appeal has been reported here, and no lawyer for Collins is quoted in the hip-hop coverage.