Local YouTube star pleads guilty in large-scale cable piracy case

Local YouTube star Bill Omar Carrasquillo built a sizable following online with his rags-to-riches tale of ascending, in just three years, from slinging drugs on a North Philadelphia street corner to overseeing a multimillion-dollar business.

In slickly produced videos shared with legions of online fans, he routinely flaunted the trappings of his success: the diamond-encrusted bling, the spacious Swedesboro home, and a fleet of 57 high-end sports and luxury cars parked out front.

But in a secret federal court proceeding earlier this month, the internet celebrity, better known to his more than 800,000 followers as “Omi in a Hellcat,” admitted he’d achieved that wealth through yet another, more sophisticated, type of crime — running one of the most brazen and successful cable TV piracy schemes ever prosecuted by the Justice Department.

Carrasquillo, 35, pleaded guilty in a case charging him with multiple counts of conspiracy to commit copyright violations, tax evasion, and fraud, according to court documents filed Monday. Prosecutors had accused him and two associates of illegally selling content hijacked from cable boxes to thousands of subscribers paying fees as low as $15 a month.

Details of the plea agreement remain under court seal. And the U.S. Attorney’s Officedeclined to discuss the specific charges to which Carrasquillo pleaded guilty, how much prison time he could be facing, and whether he has agreed to forfeit assets worth more than $35 million that the FBI seized from him as part of its investigation.

His lawyer also declined to comment. But in a post to his YouTube channel a day after The Inquirer contacted Carrasquillo seeking to discuss his plea, he acknowledged his admission of guilt.

“Ignorance is no excuse,” he said in the video titled “OMI IN A HELLCAT IS GUILTY.” “It’s about accepting responsibility. … To me, it’s narcissistic behavior, the s— that I do. I’m always the victim, America is against me. No, I wouldn’t have had this issue if I hadn’t created this service — that’s a fact.”

He added: “It just sucks. It sucks to lose my house, to lose properties, money, all my cars, my jewelry. It’s an embarrassment.”

In a 62-count indictment unsealed in September, prosecutors described Carrasquillo’s company, known at various points by names like Gears TV and Gears Reloaded, as a leader among so-called illicit IPTV services — a $1 billion-a-year industry in the United States.

It provided its subscribers hundreds of on-demand movies and television shows as well as access to dozens of live cable channels and pay-per-view events at cut-rate pricing — all of it stolen from encrypted cable box signals of legitimate services like Comcast, Verizon FiOS, and DirecTV.

The service proved wildly successful, prosecutors say, netting him and his partners more than $34 million between 2016 and 2019, when federal investigators shut it down.

In that time, Carrasquillo filed no personal or corporate tax returns. The only legitimate income he reported before launching his streaming service was roughly $550 a year in advertising royalties from his YouTube channel.

The case against Carrasquillo hardly came as a surprise. In 2019, federal agents descended upon his home, seizing bank accounts, Lamborghinis, Porsches, Bentleys, and McLarens and a portfolio of more than four dozen properties he’d amassed across Philadelphia and its suburbs. Since then, he’d openly discussed his legal problems on YouTube.

But his decision to plead guilty was unexpected — at least among his online fans.

Since the raid, he had vowed to fight the case and, in a defiant video, accused the FBI of targeting him because he is a Black man from North Philadelphia who grew up poor, then struck it rich.

Though Congress moved last year to more clearly define the type of business run by Carrasquillo as illegal, he and his lawyer maintained that at the time he was running Gears TV, he was operating in a gray area of the law.

He legally paid for subscriptions to all of the cable services whose content he is accused of pirating, and he likened what he did to inviting friends who don’t have cable over to your home and taking up a collection to pay for a pay-per-view event.

“I’m only guilty of making money,” he said in a 2019 video posted under the title “THE FBI SEIZED EVERYTHING FROM ME.” “I ain’t guilty of nothing else.”

However, in his more recent video discussing his decision to plead guilty, Carrasquillo admits to having a change of heart — one inspired, ironically, by a television show produced by Disney, a company whose content he had been accused of stealing.

He described viewing a behind-the-scenes documentary on Pixar and the work of thousands of employees that goes into making each of its animated films.

“Think about all the money [they’re] investing [and] all the people running back and forth. Imagine what a copyright holder has to go through,” he said. “Toward the beginning, I felt like what I did wasn’t illegal, but the more I sit back and dwell on it, I was feeding myself bulls—.”

Left unremarked upon were other factors that might have influenced his decision — namely, a guilty plea entered a month before by one of his business partners and codefendants, Jesse Gonzales, 42, of Pico Rivera, Calf.

It, too, remains sealed by the court, a step typically taken for plea agreements that involve some form of cooperation with the investigation.

Kathryn Roberts — a lawyer for the third man charged in the case, Michael Barone, 36, of Richmond Hills, N.Y. — said her client still maintains his innocence and intends to take his case to trial.

She marveled at the fact that despite his earlier bravado, Carrasquillo had made a different choice.

“He’s this larger-than-life character. He’s kind of a chest thumper online and boasts a lot in his videos about ‘I’ll never cooperate with the government. I’m not wrong,’” she said. “And yet, somehow he’s pleaded guilty.”

Barone’s trial is scheduled for September.