- Source: Arrest of Omi in a Hellcat
Bill Omar Carrasquillo (born September 6, 1986), known professionally as Omi in a Hellcat (stylized in all caps), is an American YouTuber who was sentenced to five and a half years of prison and fined US$30,000,000 on charges of conspiracy, copyright infringement, fraud, money laundering, and tax evasion over a cable television piracy scheme.
Background
Bill Omar Carrasquillo was born to Julio Carrasquillo and Soledad Diaz on September 6, 1986. He was raised in North Philadelphia. His mother, Soledad, died of a drug overdose while he was a child. His father, Julio, was a drug dealer who taught him to cook crack cocaine at the age of 12. He went between the care of relatives, foster parents, and his father. He said he was once sent to a mental health institution for his guardian to gain access to prescription narcotics to sell. He became a drug dealer as a teenager and continued selling drugs until his late 20s.
After he gave up drug dealing, he started a business in 2016 with partners Jesse Gonzales from California and Michael Barone from New York which offered subscribers content from Comcast, Verizon FiOS, DirectTV, and HBO for as low as US$15 a month. According to federal authorities, they bought encoders from China which removed copyright protections from legitimate cable subscriptions, then used these to stream the content online. Before being shut down in 2019, the service had 100,000 subscribers and generated US$34,000,000 in revenue.
He created a YouTube channel named Omi in a Hellcat (stylized in all caps). The channel features videos showing off his jewelry, his home in Swedesboro, New Jersey (which was formerly owned by professional baseball player Jimmy Rollins), and his collection of 57 automobiles. His collection included three Dodge Hellcats and four Lamborghinis, including a Power Rangers-themed one. As of December 2023, the channel had 819,000 subscribers and 65 million views.
Arrest
Carrasquillo's home was raided by the Federal Bureau of Investigation on the morning of November 27, 2019, seizing his cars, jewelry, computers, SD cards, televisions and the money in his bank account. He was then indicted by the FBI on September 21, 2021, on 62 counts, including 19 counts of public performance of a protected work and six counts of wire fraud. Facing 514 years in federal prison, he initially maintained his innocence:
I don’t think I ever did anything wrong. Obviously, I was running businesses wide open in the public. Now, we are going to have our day in court[...]I found a loophole, I ran through it and I did great. There is [sic] other colleagues in the same business I was in and they never got in trouble with the FBI[...]
He pled guilty in February 2022 and was sentenced to five and a half years of prison and fined US$30,000,000 on March 8, 2023 on charges of conspiracy, copyright infringement, fraud, money laundering, and tax evasion. His cars were auctioned off by United States Marshals at the B&O Railroad Museum in Baltimore on October 13 and his jewelry auctioned online, with the auction ending October 24.
References
External links
Carrasquillo's indictment
