Arrest of Omi in a Hellcat

Bill Omar Carrasquillo was raised in North Philadelphia as one of 38 children. As a child, his mother died of a drug overdose and his father was a drug dealer who taught him to cook crack cocaine at the age of 12. He went between 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 before stopping drug dealing in his late 20s.[3]

After stopping drug dealing, he, alongside partners Jesse Gonzales from California and Michael Barone from New York, started a business under various names in 2016 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, which they streamed online.[5] Before being shut down in 2019, the service had 100,000 subscribers and generated US$34,000,000 of revenue.[3]

He created a YouTube channel named Omi in a Hellcat (stylized in all caps). On his YouTube channel, he was known for showing off his jewelry,[3] his home in Swedesboro, New Jersey which was formerly owned by Jimmy Rollins,[6] and his 57-car collection.[3] His collection included three Dodge Hellcats and four Lamborghinis, including a Power Rangers-themed one.[7] As of October 2023, he had 819,000 subscribers and 65 million views.[1]

Carrasquillo's home was raided by the Federal Bureau of Investigation on the morning of November 27, 2019, seizing his cars, jewelry, and the money in his bank account.[6] 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[...][8]

— Omi in a Hellcat (2021)

however he pleaded guilty in February 2022[9] and was sentenced to five and a half years of prison and fined US$30,000,000 on March 8, 2023[3] on charges of conspiracy, copyright infringement, fraud, money laundering, and tax evasion.[4] His cars were auctioned off at the B&O Railroad Museum in Baltimore on October 13[10] and his jewelry auctioned online, with the auction ending October 24.[11]

• Carrasquillo's indictment