BMF: The Rise and Fall of Big Meech and the Black Mafia Family

by Shalhoup, Mara

  Three hours later, the night appeared to be winding down without a hitch—until one of Alt’s employees came running in shortly after last call, saying something bad had gone down outside. Alt raced out of the club, toward the back parking lot. As he rounded the corner near the club’s rear stairway, he passed Wolf’s ex-girlfriend, who was running away from the parking lot with tears streaming down her face. Alt feared the worst, and when he got to the parking lot, he found it.

  One of his bartenders, a security guard, and two off-duty medics were trying to keep the two men on the ground alive. For one of the two, it was too late. Wolf’s friend Riz, who had come to Wolf’s aid, was dead. A gun lay at his side.

  Wolf, however, was still alert. He’d been shot in the chest but was holding on. While waiting for the ambulance, Alt stuck by his side, imploring Wolf to stay awake, to stay with him. Because sleep might mean there’s no waking up.

  As Wolf lay bleeding on the asphalt, a car was speeding up GA 400, carrying two other men wounded in the gun battle. They were on their way to North Fulton Regional Hospital. One of them would later claim that after the first shots rang out, he turned and ran and didn’t see a thing—a version of events that would be supported, in part, by the fact that he’d been shot in the ass.

  On the other side of Atlanta, at Grady Memorial Hospital downtown, Wolf was rushed into the emergency room. Grady’s trauma team is one of the country’s most adept when it comes to such wrenching injuries as car accidents and shootings, of which Atlanta has no shortage. For Wolf, however, there was little the surgeons could do. Even a wall of bricks can’t stand up to several high-caliber bullets. Wolf had walked away from other conflicts, but not this one. Within minutes, he was dead, too.

  By the time Atlanta homicide detective Marc Cooper pulled into the club’s parking lot, the crime scene had been roped off. His fellow officers were trying to corral as many witnesses as they could, and those patrons unfortunate enough not to have fled were trapped at the scene. No one was allowed to leave. The problem was that none of the people in the crowd claimed to know anything about the gun battle—despite the fact that close to forty rounds had been fired from several weapons.

  Detective Cooper’s lumbering frame, closely shaven head and matter-of-fact Southern monotone can get him wrongly mistaken for a good old boy. But the detective is a far cry from the stereotypical Deep South lawman. Within minutes, he realized this was no run-of-the-mill club shooting. The strange silence among so many witnesses in such a public place was something he hadn’t encountered before. In the next two years, however, after visiting two more crime scenes with ties to this one, Cooper would become more familiar with the phenomenon.

  While the swarm of Atlanta cops combed through Chaos’s parking lot to cobble together what bits of evidence they could—a shell casing, a bullet fragment, a few drops of blood—Investigator J. K. Brown fielded the night’s first significant clue. It was a phone call. The woman on the line had been transferred to Brown’s cell phone after first dialing 911. She said she was calling because she knew who one of the shooters was. She claimed to have seen him reach into the waistband of his pants and pull a pistol. By her estimation, he fired at least seven times. She said that as she ran, she heard more shots. “They have a lot of money,” the woman told Brown. “They have a lot of drugs. You don’t know what you’re getting yourself into.” The shooter, she claimed, went by “Meechie.”

  A second significant clue came a few hours later, when police learned that two men had shown up with gunshot wounds at North Fulton Regional Hospital. One of them had been shot in the foot, the other in the buttock. Atlanta officers picked up both men from the emergency room that morning. They were transported to police headquarters at City Hall East. Seated in separate interrogation rooms, they were asked about their possible involvement in the Chaos killings. After interviewing the man with the foot injury—a lumbering, pale-eyed, and heavily tattooed twenty-seven-year-old named Ameen “Bull” Hight—police decided not to charge him. Instead, they arrested his friend, who said little during the interview and maintained a steady cool, for the murders of Anthony “Wolf” Jones and Lamont “Riz” Girdy. Big Meech was in big trouble.

  The only thing Meech did say about the Chaos incident was that he had nothing to do with the murders, that he turned and ran, that he saw nothing. Investigators, hoping to learn more about their suspect, then asked a simple question: Where do you live? “All over,” he told them. He had girlfriends he stayed with, he said. Nothing permanent.

  Yet the DEA had a pretty compelling argument that Meech lived in a big white house off Evans Mill Road. And it seemed he didn’t want them to find whatever was inside.

  In light of the Chaos shootings, investigators now had a more specific goal in their application for a search warrant: find the murder weapon used to kill two men in a Buckhead parking lot. The first time around, when investigators initially filed their application, the judge didn’t feel there was enough to go forward. Now, things were different. With a few new paragraphs about the double-homicide to flesh out the application, the judge signed off.

  On November 17, 2003, a search team led by special agent Harvey filed into the White House, no-knock warrant in hand. In the closet of the master bedroom, the team found the sole occupant of the house, a Haitian immigrant and associate of Meech’s brother named Innocent Guerville. Investigators snapped a photo of Innocent and eventually let him go. Then, moving from room to room, the investigators took note of the residence’s gaudy splendor. The house was outfitted with $170,000 in marble alone and nearly $50,000 in modern furniture, most of it from an ultraslick Buckhead home store, Huff Furniture and Design. Then there was the rather eccentric assortment of art. The walls of the master bedroom and office were hung with three framed photographs of Al Pacino, lifted from various scenes in Scarface; two photos of infamous Gambino family mob boss John Gotti (including one with an encased cigar and bullets); a portrait of slain rapper Tupac Shakur; and, rounding out the collection, a photo of Tupac’s archnemesis, fellow deceased rapper Christopher “Notorious B.I.G.” Wallace.

  The master bedroom turned up other curious items: a police scanner,

  a stack of fifty CDs titled Meech’s Harem (including the invitation to his birthday party five months earlier), a fifteen-thousand-dollar medallion that spelled BMF 4 life in white gold, and a loaded 9 mm machine gun in the nightstand.

  Moving on to the guest bedrooms, the search team found two more handguns (a .40-caliber semiautomatic and a .45), another BMF pendant, and a red spiral-bound notebook. The notebook was filled with scribblings that investigators were all but certain pertained to the drug trade. There were columns titled “airline ticket,” “car notes,” “money owed,” “money paid,” “first run,” “cali run,” “2 nights,” “cellular phones.”

  The notebook also was littered with nicknames that were familiar to one member of the search team, Atlanta police detective Bryant “Bubba” Burns. The detective had seen the names recently, in paperwork pulled from a seemingly unrelated crime scene. And he was about to make a stunning connection.

  Like DEA special agent Jack Harvey, Burns was a good match for the intense investigation he was about to undertake. He’d been raised on Atlanta’s forgotten West Side, in the shadow of the public housing behemoth Perry Homes and the virtually open-air drug market called “the Bluff.” He’d come of age with one ear trained to the police scanner, an obsession handed down from his father, who wasn’t a cop but always wished he’d been. It was almost as if Burns’s friendly, breathless banter, punctuated by bursts of excitable laughter and grave protestations of the bad guys he chased down, was lifted straight from those crackling airwaves.

  For the past year, Burns, a newly appointed member of the APD’s organized crime unit, had been working undercover to infiltrate a white-collar crime ring. A purported luxury rental-car company called XQuisite Empire had been using the identities of straw borrowers to purchase BMWs, Jaguars, and Range Rov
ers for suspected drug dealers. Two months before the Chaos killings, Burns got a major break in the XQuisite investigation. On the night of September 7, 2003, XQuisite’s owner, William “Doc” Marshall, called 911 to report that he’d just shot and killed a home invader. When police arrived at the Midtown Atlanta town house, they found that it was outfitted with a peculiar feature. The home had a room-sized safe. If that wasn’t strange enough, in a tight passageway flanking the safe there sat a single shoe and a lone kilo of cocaine.

  Detectives figured that somebody had been in a big hurry to empty the contents of the safe—such a hurry, in fact, that when his shoe slipped off, he kept on running. The detectives also concluded that the home was a drug safe house. At one point, they figured, the vault likely had sheltered a small fortune in cocaine. And the town house was probably targeted by burglars because the attackers—a crew that targeted coke dealers—knew they’d find drugs inside.

  Detective Burns obtained a search warrant for the property, to see if he might find any records pertaining to XQuisite Empire and its owner, Doc Marshall. When he carried out the search, Burns found what he was looking for—and more. The day after the burglary-gone-bad, Burns removed several boxes of documents that divulged intricate details of XQuisite’s inner workings, including the names and phone numbers of its employees, a list of cars that had been diverted from straw borrowers to suspected drug dealers, and ledgers that listed the colorful nicknames of the company’s shadier clients.

  Two months later, after stepping inside the White House, detective Burns was surprised to find paperwork with strong similarities to the XQuisite files. In the White House, Burns discovered documentation for nineteen vehicles (including several limos) and applications for nearly as many cell phones. Many of the cars and phones listed in the White House ledger were registered to the names and aliases of XQuisite’s employees. And the mysterious nicknames of XQuisite’s clients matched some of the nicknames jotted in the red spiral-bound notebook: E, Country, Cuzo, Wetback. It appeared that XQuisite was funneling cars and phones to the Flenory brothers’ associates. Now that Burns had established the link between XQuisite’s owner, Doc Marshall, and the murder suspect Demetrius “Big Meech” Flenory, both his and Harvey’s investigations were going to get a lot more interesting.

  Something else about the phone numbers listed in the White House paperwork struck investigators: about a half dozen of the numbers had been in regular contact with numbers under wiretap surveillance in Detroit, where DEA agents were building a case against the Puritan Avenue Boys. That investigation was about to wrap up. Eight members of the PA Boys, including the crew’s leaders, Reginald Dancy and Damonne Brantley, were indicted on cocaine conspiracy charges three days after the White House search. Meech was not part of that investigation. But his apparent relationship with the PA Boys would help bolster the DEA’s suspicion that Meech and his brother Terry were big-time cocaine traffickers.

  Rounding out their search of the White House, investigators found a photo in the office that showed the Flenory brothers posing with the PA Boys kingpin Brantley in front of Atlanta’s hip-hop mega-venue, Club 112. Also in the office, investigators found an electric money-counter, several bags of rubber bands, and a stack of business cards with the name Terry Flenory and the company 404 Motorsports. One of the owners of the company, federal agents soon would learn, was Atlanta mayor Shirley Franklin’s son-in-law. And as the investigation progressed, his connection to Terry would become more and more obvious.

  What investigators didn’t find, however, was anything connecting Meech to the Chaos killings. Of the three guns pulled from the house—the 9 mm, the .40-caliber, and the .45—none tested positive for a match to any of the bullets or casings found in the club’s parking lot. The big-picture investigation, into the scope of Meech’s suspected drug organization, was taking off. But the murder investigation was sputtering.

  … … …

  Two weeks after the White House search, Meech was granted bond—an unusual move in a double homicide, especially one that had grown so sensational. In the wake of the shootings, well-heeled and well-organized Buckhead residents were angrily calling for a crackdown on the violence in their neighborhood. (“My question is, how many more body bags have to come out of this area,” one exasperated resident, Katy Bryant, told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.) The incident was so emotionally charged that, less than two months after it occurred, it was cited as the impetus for Atlanta City Council’s decision to roll back bar closing hours citywide.

  Basically, the Chaos gun battle wasn’t the type of crime the Fulton County DA’s Office liked to leave unresolved. But the prosecutors were left with little choice. Their case against Meech was simply too thin. As it turns out, the seemingly strong lead—the woman who spoke on the phone to the investigator—fizzled out. She was quick to provide the name Meechie, but as for her own name, she wouldn’t say. She told police she was scared for her life. Even after she agreed to come down to APD headquarters and give a statement, investigators kept her identity a secret. Investigators didn’t name her in any of the subsequent court hearings, either—of which there were only a few.

  No grand jury would indict a case without a murder weapon, a witness, or a confession. Indeed, the case never made it to the grand jury. The most that could be concluded was that Meech acted in self-defense, if he acted at all. Meech’s attorney claimed the charge was bullshit. Two armed men, one of whom had been tossed from the club, fired on Meech and his crew. Meech said he turned and ran—a fact substantiated by his own bullet wound to the derriere. The injury was sufficient foundation for the defense his attorney would raise: that Meech, far from an aggressor, was in fact a victim.

  To Big Meech and his crew, to residents of Buckhead, and to other concerned Atlantans, the Chaos investigation appeared to be a battle the police had lost. But while the murder case against Meech had fallen apart, the APD and DEA were able to take what they learned from the White House search and combine it with other information they’d already unearthed. Judging from the breadth of the evidence, investigators were able to see that they were on to something. It was something big. It was something organized. It was something called, formidably enough, the Black Mafia Family.

  TWO THE FLENORY BROTHERS

  If you haven’t heard of us, you soon will.

  —UNIDENTIFIED BMF MEMBER

  The thirty-mile stretch of highway between Waynesville and Rolla, Missouri, is among the most taxing of all of Interstate 44, which covers 634 miles from northern Texas to central St. Louis. Heading east from Waynesville, the road grows steep and winding, traversing a rugged terrain that includes the town of Devil’s Elbow, so-named for the sharp bend in the Big Piney River. It’s a countryside both lush and imposing, and the road that runs through it demands a driver’s attention. Imagine, then, the difficulty of navigating not a mere car along those slow curves, but a lumbering, forty-foot RV. On the afternoon of April 11, 2004, Jabari Hayes was doing just that. And the RV, a 1999 MCI Coach that more closely resembled a tour bus than a vacationer’s motorhome, was carrying some precious cargo.

  Given the conditions of the road, it was predictable that the vehicle would at some point drift across the fog line that hugs the highway shoulder. The infraction was small enough, but it was sufficient cause for a Phelps County deputy to flash his patrol lights and pull the RV over. Sitting in the motorhome’s cab awaiting the deputy’s approach, Jabari had reason to believe this was no random traffic stop. Was he being followed by the feds? He couldn’t have known for sure. But he was clearly nervous.

  The deputy told Jabari to step down from the vehicle and take a seat in the back of his patrol car. He then ran a check on Jabari’s license—a license that didn’t identify him as Jabari Hayes from Atlanta. Instead, it listed a Nashville address, one that had been chosen for Jabari at random, and a fake name, Kenneth Tory Collins. Jabari had been issued the license just two weeks before, shortly after he’d been pulled over while driving ano
ther vehicle. He couldn’t risk getting nabbed again, not after he played dumb the last time. So one of his associates had hooked him up with an inside source at the Tennessee driver’s license bureau. The woman helped Jabari obtain the seemingly legit ID, just as she had done for his associates countless times before. After he received it, he was told to memorize all its details. He needed to be ready, just in case.

  Now the license was being put to the test. The deputy ran a check on it. It came back clean, just as the woman had promised. Then the deputy started asking questions.

  “Where are you from?” he asked.

  “Tennessee,” Jabari called out from the backseat.

  “Where are you going?”

  “To visit family in St. Louis, for Easter.”

  “Did you make any stops along the way?”

  “Yeah, one in Georgia and another in Texas, to see my cousins.”

  Having noticed that the motorhome had neither Georgia nor Texas nor Tennessee plates, the deputy asked, “Where did the RV come from?”

  “I rented it in Orlando,” Jabari said. “But I left the paperwork at home.”

  “How much did it cost?”

  “About four thousand dollars for the month.”

  “And how are you employed?”

  “I own a valet company.”

  “Okay,” the deputy said, switching topics. “Can you tell me why you have three cell phones?”

  Drug dealers are often armed with multiple phones, a fact of which Jabari was well aware. And he was as prepared for this question as the others. His response was quick—and under less tense circumstances, might have gotten a chuckle out of his interrogator. “I like to separate my business calls from my personal ones,” Jabari said. “Plus, it helps keep my girlfriends from flipping through my call history and finding out about each other.”