BMF
BMF
THE RISE AND FALL
OF BIG MEECH AND THE
BLACK MAFIA FAMILY
MARA SHALHOUP
BMF: THE RISE AND FALL OF BIG MEECH AND THE BLACK MAFIA FAMILY. Copyright © 2010 by Mara Shalhoup. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
Insert photographs copyright © Ben Rose/Ben RosePhotography.com
Black Mafia Family Tree by Brooke Hatfield
Photos for Black Mafia Family Tree courtesy Atlanta Police Department; DeKalb County, Georgia, jail; Fulton County, Georgia, jail; Spartanburg County, South Carolina, jail; U.S. Marshals Service
www.stmartins.com
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Shalhoup, Mara.
BMF : the rise and fall of Big Meech and the Black Mafia Family / Mara Shalhoup. — 1st ed.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-0-312-38393-0
1. Flenory, Big Meech. 2. Black Mafia Family. 3. Drug dealers—United States—Biography. 4. Drug traffic—United States. I. Title.
HV5805.F53S53 2010
364.1092—dc22
[B]
2009040090
First Edition: March 2010
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
A NOTE ON SOURCING
This account is narrated in real time and based on allegations raised in court documents, trial transcripts, wiretap excerpts, and other law enforcement material. Although more than one hundred defendants with ties to the Black Mafia Family ultimately were convicted of their criminal charges, other associates were not charged or pleaded guilty to lesser offenses. Individuals who are mentioned in connection to certain acts of alleged misconduct but who have not been charged with or convicted of those alleged acts are, of course, entitled to a presumption of innocence.
For Peaches,
whose soul survived too great a loss
CONTENTS
CAST OF CHARACTERS
PROLOGUE
ONE CHAOS
TWO THE FLENORY BROTHERS
THREE PUSHING JEEZY
FOUR FALLEN PRINCE
FIVE STUPID AND THE GIRL
SIX SPACE MOUNTAIN
SEVEN THE BOUNTY HUNTER
EIGHT STAY STRAPPED
NINE THE GATE
TEN THE GAME DON’T STOP
ELEVEN BREAKING THE CODE
TWELVE THE EVIDENCE
EPILOGUE
ENDNOTES
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book would not have been possible without the support of Ken Edelstein, who guided me through the infancy of its research. I’m also indebted to my fellow journalists Scott Freeman and Shaila Dewan, my husband, Todd, and my parents, Diane and Alfie, for their generous insights and critical feedback. I owe a huge dose of gratitude to the investigators who helped me bridge the narrative’s gaps, to the attorneys who shared their insider knowledge of various criminal cases, to Rasheed McWilliams for noticing my early coverage of the Black Mafia Family, to my amazing agent, John T. “Ike” Williams, for listening to Rasheed, and to my ever-patient editor, Monique Patterson. Lastly, thanks to Tammy Cowins for keeping me in the loop—and to Big Meech for his willingness to sit down and talk.
CAST OF CHARACTERS
BLACK MAFIA FAMILY AND ASSOCIATES
(See insert for the BMF family tree)
Demetrius “Big Meech” Flenory
Terry “Southwest T” Flenory
Charles “Pops” Flenory
Chad “J-Bo” (“Junior Boss”) Brown
Fleming “Ill” Daniels
Barima “Bleu DaVinci” McKnight
Eric “Slim” Bivens
Benjamin “Blank” Johnson
Arnold “A.R.” Boyd
Wayne “Wayniac” Joyner
Omari “O-Dog” McCree
William “Doc” Marshall
Jacob “the Jeweler” Arabo
Jerry “J-Rock” Davis
Tremayne “Kiki” Graham
Scott King
Eric “Mookie” Rivera
Ernest “E” Watkins
Ulysses “Hack” Hackett
Jay “Young Jeezy” Jenkins
Radric “Gucci Mane” Davis
INVESTIGATORS
Bryant “Bubba” Burns
Marc Cooper
Jack Harvey
Rand Csehy
Rolando Betancourt
BMF
PROLOGUE: MARCH 2008
As bad as they wanted me, there was no winning.
—DEMETRIUS “BIG MEECH” FLENORY
The most notorious inmate ever to set foot in the St. Clair County, Michigan, jail is reclined on a ledge just off the hallway that leads to his cell. His hair, unwound hours earlier from the braids he usually wears, is pushed back from his face, falling to his shoulders in kinky waves. He’s saddled with a few extra pounds, but that’s to be expected. He’s been locked up in this suburban facility, an hour north of Detroit and just across the water from Ontario, for three Michigan winters. That’s countless days stuck in a coop where you can’t be let outside, not even to exercise, not even for an hour, unless the thermostat creeps above 40 degrees. Fat chance of breaking 40 in February, or even in March. He’s actually looking forward to prison, hopefully somewhere down South where it’s warm.
Still, he’s not complaining. They’ve been good to him here. He’s polite and well mannered, and that’s earned him certain privileges. When visitors come in from out of town—a guest list that he claims has included rap superstars Akon and Young Jeezy (Snoop Dogg tried to come, but got snowed out)—the deputies go out of their way to accommodate them. To the inmate, preferential treatment is nothing new. On the outside, he was used to getting what he wanted. Jail is no different.
Knee propped up, back pressed against the cement wall, he leans into the glass partition. There’s no chair on his side, and though a guard just announced over the loudspeaker to please refrain from sitting on the ledge, he’s sitting on it anyway. So he has no choice but to look down at me. It’s not a patronizing gesture, but one that brings to mind his unshakable pride, his famed largesse, his ability, even now, to salvage some of the grandeur to which he’d grown accustomed.
I ask about one of his other reputed traits, one that paints him in a less generous light—or, as a federal informant once put it, his street rep as “a vengeful killer who threatens people.” He kind of chuckles and takes pause, as if bemused by the question. “I’ll put it to you like this,” he says, leaning in closer, casual and friendly. “If trouble comes to me, then I’m going to deal with it.”
That kind of stuff—petty stuff, stuff that got blown out of proportion—used to happen all the time, he says. There’d be jealousy over girls, or people thinking their crew is better than his crew, and so forth. “Some guys make a fool of themselves,” he continues. “Then, before they know it, they look up and there’s a bunch of us. We just handle the problem the best way we know how.” Again, he claims, that’s only when people come asking for it. He’d prefer to keep things civil. “I’m more old-school, more family oriented,” he says. “I don’t believe in airing differences in public places.”
It’s a reasonable explanation, from a seemingly reasonable man. But it’s not hard to glimpse the darkness behind the facade. He offers it up every now and then. It slips from behind that transformative smile, peeks around a pair of otherwise warm and engaging eyes. Those eyes narrow when I bring up a murder charge filed against one of his closest crew members. It�
��s the only violent allegation to hit his inner circle that ever made it to the trial calendar. “That’s ridiculous,” he says, though witnesses say otherwise. “I can’t see him doing something to somebody like that.” He blames the murder rap on an overzealous snitch—one who came forward only after he himself was in trouble, and who claimed to have witnessed the killing but did nothing to stop it. “What was he doing? Sitting there watching? It doesn’t add up.”
As for everything else—the two decades in the game, the fast cars and grinding music, the showering cash and fawning respect, the partying that would make Tony Montana blush—well, that made his current situation worth it. The bummer is that he was good at what he did—too good, he thinks, for things to have gone the way they went. It just didn’t seem like his time. If he’d been busted with a hundred keys or had sold to the DEA, that’d be one thing. That would somehow be more understandable. But that’s not what happened. What happened, he believes, was that he became far too fascinating to those who wanted to see him fail.
By the time the Bentleys were rolled out and the billboards went up and the rappers were invoking his name in top-ten hits, he was past the point of return. His only option was to do it big. And if doing it big meant putting on even more of a show for the feds, so be it. It was a matter of necessity. But what about before? Why go down that path in the first place? Why blow it up the way he did, when blowing it up meant blowing it all away? “If I was going to stick with the illegal stuff, I would have sat in and stayed out of sight,” he says. “But what can you do when you’re expected to go out, when everybody wants to see you?”
In any case, he didn’t really think he’d get caught. He didn’t think there was anything he could get caught for. Now he knows different. Now he knows that no matter how careful he might have been, he overlooked one obvious fact: The very combination that first made him a success—his ability to attract attention and his unwillingness to slow down—was destined to make him a failure. On both sides of the law, he became all but impossible to resist. People wanted to see him, and the government wanted to see him go down. “As bad as they wanted me,” he says, “there was no winning.”
So, in the end, he’s glad he did it the way he did, because at least he had some fun. At least he flexed a little muscle, bore a little influence. He claims to have boosted the careers of T.I. and Jeezy in Atlanta and Fabolous in New York, which means they all have him to thank. Not that he’s looking for validation, exactly. Just the recognition that back in the beginning, when no one else was paying much attention, he was the one who helped float them. He was the one who helped elevate some of the biggest names in hip-hop (which, at the time, meant some of the biggest names in music, period). He was the one who helped create the fantasy that they’re still living.
Viewed from his exile on the second floor of the St. Clair County Detention and Intervention Center, the past has grown even more distant than twenty-nine months in lockup would have you believe. “Man,” he says, breaking eye contact for a brief moment, as if he could still glimpse that evaporated dream, “I sure do miss it.”
ONE CHAOS
They have a lot of money. They have a lot of drugs.
You don’t know what you’re getting yourself into.
—MYSTERY 911 CALLER
Demetrius “Big Meech” Flenory didn’t just walk into the club. He arrived.
He usually arrived under the watch of bodyguards. Every now and then, he arrived with a hundred or so hangers-on. And on those nights when egos were bruised or the wrong woman got involved, he arrived with trouble. It was hard to compete with a presence so huge, not to mention one that could drop fifty thousand dollars on a single bar tab. And so sometimes, his arrival was cause for others in the club to bolt.
The first sign he was coming: the cars. They coasted to the curb like supermodels down a runway. Bentleys and H2s, Lambos and Porsches. And, when the crowd swelled to full ranks, tour buses. Under the marquees of clubs from Midtown Atlanta to South Beach Miami, the streetlights bounced off the million-dollar motorcade, and it was blinding.
Next, the crew. Meech liked to treat all of them as family. “Everybody moves like brothers,” he used to tell them. “Everybody moves as one.” But as with any entourage, there was a definite hierarchy. Pushing into the crowd (if that were possible), you’d first find the guys who hover on the fringes, moving forward with a menacing sway. Go deeper, and the vibe would start to change. Guards would come down. Egos would edge up. Keep going, and you’d encounter a steady calm. The aura was one of undisputed confidence and quiet control. That was when you knew you’d hit Meech.
Tall and broad, with the posture of a prizefighter and the swagger of a big cat, Meech could cause the climate in a room to change. “All Meech did was walk in the spot,” one woman would later recall, “and panties got moist.” His pale bronze skin exaggerated the depth of his ink-black eyes. A movie star’s mole rested just below his left temple, at the tapered edge of an arched eyebrow. The aquiline curve of his nose offset his high, chiseled cheekbones. And a pencil-thick mustache and goatee framed a pout that barely turned up at the corners, giving the impression that, even at his most serious, he was about to break into a grin.
Waxing eloquent in his velvety drawl, bedecked with enough diamonds to stock a jeweler’s counter, Meech was the center of attention at all the best clubs and the biggest parties, and that’s where he intended to stay. He kept the company of rappers and moguls, models and athletes, and, most important, a group of men whom he employed and indulged. He fed the crew six-hundred-dollar bottles of champagne and top-notch ecstasy. He took care of them, lifted them up, behaved as their friend and benefactor. They, in turn, would honor and protect him. He was perhaps more comfortable with the arrangement than he should have been. It was easy for him to forget that there were some things he couldn’t control. And one of those things would take place on November 11, 2003. It proved to be “the big one,” the very event that Meech—as well as the jittery residents of Atlanta’s swankiest neighborhood—had long feared. Though for different reasons.
With its sparkling glass towers and Italianate architecture, its foie gras–obsessed menus and Versace shopping bags, Buckhead is the epicenter of Atlanta’s wealth, an Upper East Side with an abundance of parking lots. But by dint of its upscale offerings, the neighborhood—situated a few miles north of downtown and split down the middle by the city’s iconic thoroughfare, Peachtree Street—had begun to attract a crowd that made the resident blue bloods cringe: professional sports and music stars, and those who wanted to party with them. And a growing number of that crowd was black. For decades, Atlanta had boasted a thriving African-American middle class. The majority-black city suffered its share of racial tension, but more so than in other places, blacks and whites in Atlanta had benefited from an era of prosperity and, for the most part, the appearance of goodwill. The culture clash in Buckhead was a sharp departure from that.
Historically the provenance of sensible Southern ladies and old-moneyed men, Buckead morphed in the mid 1980s into a debaucherous entertainment district populated by a mostly white, notoriously rowdy crowd. Then, by the late ’90s, Buckhead changed again, earning an identity as the nightlife district of Atlanta’s nationally renowned hip-hop scene. Clubs that formerly catered to frat boys and bachelorette parties switched formats to rap and crunk nights. All too often, the partying got out of hand. And the hip-hop scene was easy to blame. The most notable meltdown was the post–Super Bowl stabbings for which Baltimore Ravens’ linebacker Ray Lewis was arrested for murder—and, after the case against him fell apart midtrial, walked away from with a misdemeanor. (The outcome of the case exemplified a growing trend of witnesses becoming unable to remember who shot or stabbed whom.) That was three years earlier, outside Cobalt Lounge.
About a block away, near the intersection of Peachtree and Paces Ferry roads in the heart of Buckhead, a nightclub of similar glitz was earning its name. Chaos was one of the “it” clubs. Shaquille O
’Neal and Eminem had partied there. And Monday’s hip-hop night was the club’s biggest draw. Hundreds of people would pass through Chaos’s plate-glass doors on what, for other clubs, was the slowest day of the week. At Chaos, the only thing slow about Mondays was the line.
On that particular Monday in November 2003, you couldn’t walk across the club’s lacquered wood floors, you couldn’t lean against its exposed brick walls or grab a seat on its minimalist leather sofas without catching sight of one of Meech’s guys. As usual, Meech’s crew was everywhere. Anthony Jones must have known that. Yet Jones, better known in hip-hop circles as “Wolf”—and more important, as Wolf Who Is Sean “P. Diddy” Combs’s Former Bodyguard—did something that stood a good chance of starting an all-out war.
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