It was, perhaps, a sign of incipient insanity when Augustus Romain decided that he preferred the stage name Commander Gazi: his parents really had given him a name worthy of Plutarch's Lives to begin with. I could find just one source reporting that a long list of criminal charges against him had been dropped…
[Source 1 of 3:] https://www.tampabay.com/news/crime/2025/01/29/augustus-romain-uhuru-st-petersburg-black-hammer-party-gazi-kodzo/
…while a separate court proceeding accused him of knowingly working as a Russian agent, with one possible interpretation being that his whole political movement was little more than an attempt to disrupt "politics as usual" in America as a service to their Russian paymasters.
According to prosecutors, the four carried out a number of actions in the US between 2015 and 2022 on behalf of the Russian government and received money and support from Aleksandr Ionov, the president of the Moscow-based group Anti-Globalization Movement of Russia.
Mr Ionov used the APSP, Uhuru Movement and Black Hammer to promote Russian views on politics, the Ukraine war and other issues, they said.
[Source 2 of 3:] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c624ppg14jpo
The BBC might mislead you into assuming that he was sentenced to five years in prison, but no: merely five years' probation is reported by MSNBC.
The Justice Department said that in addition to protesting Meta on Russia’s dime [i.e., objecting to Facebook censorship policies on what could be said about the War in Ukraine], Romain posted Russian propaganda to social media at Ionov’s direction and sought Ionov’s input on a news release from their organization that condemned President Joe Biden’s support for Ukraine. […] This case is a prime example of why voters must be wary of ostensibly radical activists whose rhetoric closely mirrors Russian far-right rhetoric.
[Source 3 of 3:] https://www.msnbc.com/the-reidout/reidout-blog/russia-propaganda-black-americans-augustus-romain-jr-rcna183843
On the contrary, this is a prime example of how utterly meaningless "far right" and "far left" have now become, in the careless parlance of our times. If Commander Gazi can be described as "far right" instead of "far left"… ?
I do not know if there is a single injured party uploading anywhere on the internet to reflect on the long list of crimes that Gazi will (apparently) never be punished for, as most of the charges against him were inexplicably dropped. These were not victimless crimes —and, of course, in a more abstract sense, I would assume that many of the people who donated money to support him now feel that they were victims of a kind of hoax, in retrospect.
In terms of what youtube does best, here's a purely personal set of reflections from a woman who knew him before he was corrupted by money, fame, power, respect and sex: https://youtu.be/TMMDqlsIWKs?si=DluJ99-hyFK80YTQ
The barbarity of political discourse in our century. It's enough to make a man learn Ancient Latin, quite honestly.