Terry was livid. He told Doc they were all out of control. And even though Doc said Meech wasn’t involved (he’d been whisked away from the scene as soon as the fight broke out, Doc said), Terry still blamed him. “Man, my brother down there’s still up to that stuff?” Terry vented. “Listen, I don’t know what they think they got away with.” But he said one thing was clear: Meech’s guys hadn’t learned their lesson. Their behavior in the clubs was endangering everyone.
Doc agreed.
“They could have pretty much said, ‘Hey, man, get out of here,’ and it could have been cool like that,” Doc recalled. “But for some reason, they took it to another level.”
FIVE STUPID AND THE GIRL
My heart goes out to all the families who face this type of crisis.
-ATLANTA MAYOR SHIRLEY FRANKLIN
It was 5 A.M. California time, dark and quiet in the Valley. Scott King, a business associate of Terry’s, was asleep. At least he had been asleep. For some godforsaken reason, his phone was ringing.
The phone was a prepaid cell, the kind you buy when you don’t want anyone listening in on your calls. Scott was on the run, and he had to be careful. The guy on the line, Scott’s close friend and business partner down in Atlanta, had to be careful, too. Tremayne “Kiki” Graham was in nearly as much trouble as Scott was. For that reason, Kiki also was using a prepaid cell.
Scott should’ve seen this coming. He’d been given plenty of signs. Still, the phone call shook him. Things were bad for him and Kiki. But what Kiki was whispering to him—news that boiled down to six deflating words—would make their situation a whole lot worse.
Not that Kiki saw it that way. To him, this was his ticket to freedom. This would be his way out of the mess he’d stumbled into. Atleast that’s what he was saying to those he trusted could keep their mouths shut.
Scott knew better. He sensed that their run soon would come to an end. Months earlier, he’d sought refuge in L.A. from the heat he was drawing down South. Back home, he was a wanted man. And considering what Kiki had just told him, now they’d want him even more.
Those six words that put an end to his slumber, cutting like a scythe through the L.A. predawn, were sure to come back and haunt him. They were haunting him already.
Scott and Kiki had been friends for a decade. In the late ’80s, Scott attended North Carolina’s Mars Hill College on a full basketball ride. Five years later, when Kiki was accepted to nearby Clemson University, he also fell in with the basketball crowd. Kiki roomed with two of Clemson’s players, Devin Gray and Andre Bovain. Devin and Andre were friends with Scott, so Kiki became friends with him, too.
Though Kiki didn’t play for Clemson, he looked the part. Like Scott, he stood six-foot-five, a born charmer with an elegant build and an easy smile. Scott and Kiki had a grace about them, one that earned them popularity not just on campus, but, later, among some of the country’s most celebrated sports stars. The two men were personal acquaintances of NBA stars Charles Barkley and Michael Jordan. Scott and Kiki had something else in common, too. While in college, they both began running cocaine on the side. For Scott, it started as a summer thing. But after dropping out of Mars Hill in his fourth year, he turned to the drug business full-time. One of Scott’s primary customers lived in Greenville, South Carolina, the biggest city between Clemson and Mars Hill. Kiki worked as a courier for that drug customer.
Four years after he ditched school, Scott’s lifestyle caught up with him. He was busted in California in ’95 after picking up twelve kilos from his supplier. As a result, he would serve three years in a state pen. He didn’t turn on his crew, though. He kept his mouth shut about his customers back in South Carolina, a display of loyalty that won him points with Kiki.
Scott was released from prison in 1998 and moved to Atlanta, where Kiki happened to have relocated. They ran into each other one night while partying at the same club. Scott noticed that Kiki was doing pretty good for himself, and Kiki didn’t hesitate to tell him why. He was still in the drug game, and it was treating him well.
Not long after, Kiki stopped by Scott’s apartment, a parole-office-approved complex in Atlanta’s historic West End. He pulled up in his new Range Rover, and he came bearing a generous gift. As a token of his appreciation for Scott’s discretion following the drug bust, Kiki handed him ten thousand dollars—a little spending money for a man who recently reclaimed his freedom. It was only natural that the relationship progressed from there—especially after Kiki’s cocaine supplier ripped him off. Scott offered to hook him up with some kilos through one of his old connects back in California, as well as some other cocaine contacts he’d made. Within months, the two old friends decided it made sense to go into business together. Scott and Kiki would split the cost of each drug package, and split the profits. Scott still had some hungry customers up in Greenville, after all, as well as a driver, a close college friend named Ulysses “Hack” Hackett, who was willing to make the two-hour delivery from Atlanta to the South Carolina city. Rounding out the arrangement, Kiki offered to turn a property he was still leasing, on Greenville’s Singing Pines Drive, into a stash house for their South Carolina–bound shipments.
Their drug ring hummed along for a year or so until, in 1999, the two partners needed a bigger supplier. This time, it was Kiki who found him: a major cocaine trafficker named Jerry “J-Rock” Davis. (J-Rock’s girlfriend, who lived in the same Atlanta apartment building as Kiki’s girlfriend, had introduced them.) Though only a year older than Kiki, J-Rock was well ahead of him in the drug game. He’d been born in Columbus, Georgia, and his family later moved to a seedy suburb, Phenix City, Alabama, just across the Chattahoochee River. The small town was infamous for its lawless past—so much so that it had been dubbed “Sin City” by the soldiers stationed at Fort Benning, on the other side of the Chattahoochee. In the 1940s and 1950s, Phenix City was in the tight grip of a crime syndicate run by good old boys turned bad. Under their reign, the town had morphed into a Western-styled outpost of freewheeling drug dealing, open-air prostitution, blatant gambling, and rampant violence. Among the syndicate’s victims was Attorney General–elect Albert Patterson, who’d run in 1954 on the promise of rooting out the city’s organized crime network, which included countless cops and politicians. One day not long before Patterson’s inauguration, he was assassinated in front of his downtown law office.
By the ’90s, the city had tried to overcome its unsavory history. But even among a population of a mere thirty thousand, Phenix City remained fertile ground for the region’s drug trade. J-Rock, who birthed a crew called the Sin City Mafia, was resurrecting Phenix City’s ignoble past. The feds estimated that the Sin City Mafia eventually would traffic as much cocaine as the Black Mafia Family, an organization with whom J-Rock built a lucrative alliance. The two crews each moved truckloads of cocaine, and authorities surmised that they relied on the same L.A. supplier.
After moving his organization’s hub from Phenix City to Atlanta and L.A., J-Rock—like Meech and Terry—maintained stash houses that held hundreds of kilos at a time. As with BMF, Sin City’s customers bought well upwards of ten kilos (or “keys”) in a single transaction, and the packages were delivered in cars outfitted with secret compartments.
J-Rock, like Meech and Terry, was a formidable kingpin. Short, stocky, and boyishly handsome, his appearance did little to reveal his sinister reputation. On the one hand, J-Rock was a family man. He looked after his mother and grandmother, as well as his own growing clan. (He would father eight children by the time he was thirty-one.) He was good to his drug crew as well, offering similar compensation to what BMF doled out. And though he was generally more feared than the BMF bosses, defections did occur from their camp to his, and vice versa. Most notably, a high-ranking BMF distributor, Richard “Baa” Garrett, jumped to the “other side” to become J-Rock’s right-hand man. Baa appeared to be a more benign manager than his boss was. Once, when a courier delivering drugs for Baa had his shipment intercepted by auth
orities, J-Rock stepped in and told the underling that, had the package belonged to him, the courier “would be dead.”
Scott, for one, considered J-Rock’s style a little too Mafia. Scott wasn’t crazy about bowing down to the don, and the two never really saw eye to eye. Kiki was closer to J-Rock than Scott was. Overall, though, J-Rock’s crew got along well, professionally and personally. Sometimes, they even took trips together purely for pleasure. Such was the case in February 2001, when Kiki, Scott, and five of J-Rock’s associates (one of his partners, the partner’s bodyguard, and three midlevel dealers) flew to Washington, D.C., for the NBA All-Star game. By then, Kiki and Scott had been doing business with J-Rock for over a year, and they were fully ingratiated. For the trip, J-Rock’s crew was furnished with a limousine and driver from an Atlanta company to which the boss had ties. Unlike any limo they might hire in D.C., this one would let them smoke weed in the car, and carry guns.
The night before the game, the crew was out on the town. They hit up a downtown strip club before calling on the white stretch Mercedes to come pick them up and take them to a party. After the men piled in, the limo began crawling up Connecticut Avenue, near Dupont Circle. The streets were jammed with cars and people—including a group of men who’d just left a Connecticut Avenue strip club, Royal Palace. Two of the men darted across the street. To avoid hitting them, the limo slammed on its brakes, throwing the men in the back against their seats. The driver yelled out the window at the
two pedestrians. They shouted something in response. The bodyguard who was traveling with J-Rock’s crew, whom everyone called Dream, asked the driver if everything was cool. Yeah, the driver said. “I can handle it.”
Dream wasn’t convinced. He asked the driver if it was okay for him to try to defuse the situation with the pedestrians. The driver told him to go ahead.
Dream stepped out of the limo and walked toward the front of the car. But the sight of the oversized bodyguard did not deter the men in the street. The men, who were Hispanic, got into a racially charged shouting match with Dream and his entourage, who were piling out of the limousine. The men in the street started banging on the limo. One of them broke a bottle. As a retort, someone in Dream’s entourage—accounts differ as to who—pulled a gun and began shooting wildly. A twenty-five-year-old Salvadoran carpenter named Raul Rosales was shot in the mouth. He was pronounced dead at Howard University Hospital. Two of Rosales’s friends also were hit, but they survived. In the melee, Dream also took a bullet, to the back. He survived, too.
Three people in the crowd identified the shooter as Michael “Playboy” Harris, who was an associate of J-Rock. But Scott was sure that it wasn’t Playboy who did the shooting. Rather, he claimed he clearly saw one of his fellow drug dealers, a man named Jamad “Soup” Ali, pull the trigger.
While Dream hobbled up Connecticut Avenue, the others hopped back in the limo. Not Scott, though. He’d had enough. He disappeared into the crowd.
The limo driver spotted Dream a few minutes later, and pulled over to pick him up. Dream climbed into the backseat, bleeding profusely from the bullet wound to his back. At that moment, Kiki realized Scott wasn’t in the limo, and he was worried. He dialed Scott’s number, to make sure he hadn’t been hit. Scott picked up—and told Kiki he thought it would be smarter to ditch the car and come meet him. “Every police agency in the world is here,” Scott warned. “They are going to stop that limo.”
He was right. The limo was pulled over, and everyone inside was questioned. Before that happened, though, Kiki had followed Scott’s advice. He bolted from the backseat and hit the sidewalk running. He and Scott stayed on the phone, weaving through the tangle of D.C. streets before meeting up on a busy corner. From there, they hailed a cab and headed to the party, later than expected but not deterred.
They were almost there when Scott noticed that Kiki’s tie was spattered with blood. He pointed out the stains, and Kiki unknotted the thing and, after stepping out of the cab, tossed it in the trash. The two men then made their way inside. They weren’t at the party long before their phones started lighting up. Word traveled fast, and friends and associates, including J-Rock, wanted to make sure they hadn’t been hurt. Of course, J-Rock also expected a full account of what had gone down.
After the party, Scott and Kiki headed back to their hotel. They didn’t meet up with the other occupants of the limo until the following day. When they finally reunited, the men told Scott and Kiki that they’d been questioned, that Playboy had been arrested on multiple charges, including murder, and that Dream was laid up in the hospital. At that point, Scott and Kiki decided to distance themselves as much as they could from the rest of the crew. They even switched hotels. They had to be careful, and not just because law enforcement was watching. Their girlfriends were flying in that day to meet them. They had to regain some semblance of normalcy.
Kiki was no longer dating the woman who’d introduced him to J-Rock. He had a new girlfriend, one he’d met through Scott. Scott, who was dating her younger sister, introduced them one night, when all four of them were hanging out at an Atlanta strip club. Kiki and the older sister hit it off. Kai Franklin was vivacious and attractive, curvy and petite—a full foot shorter than Kiki, even in heels. In that way, she took after her mother.
Despite her diminutive stature, Kai’s mother, Shirley Franklin, was a powerful woman in Atlanta politics. Her ex-husband, David, was an influential political adviser, and she herself had served in two mayoral administrations. Franklin was the chief administrative officer and city manager under Mayor Andrew Young, and she went on to become the cultural affairs commissioner under Maynard Jackson, who, as Young’s predecessor, had returned to the mayor’s office for a third term after Young’s two terms ended. (At one time, Jackson also was David Franklin’s law partner.) Shirley Franklin wasn’t so tightly bound to Mayor Bill Campbell, who would end up the target of a federal racketeering indictment—and was ultimately convicted only of tax evasion. But she was undoubtedly a crucial component of the Jackson–Young–Campbell machine that dominated the Atlanta political scene.
Which was why, when Campbell’s two-term limit was nearing its conclusion, the machine was urging her to take aim at the mayor’s seat. “To have Shirley Franklin running for mayor is just so delicious, because it’s the first true draft I’ve ever seen,” her ex-husband told the press shortly after she launched her campaign. (The two had remained close friends.)
Yet the rest of her family was surprised that her name was being batted around. She was a private person. She reveled in behind-the-scenes policy and strategy. She’d never been the type to seek the spotlight. Still, she was highly qualified and immensely likeable. Most important, she could win. And the machine was persuasive. Despite having never run for public office, and never before having seemed interested in such a thing, Shirley Franklin was game.
As Atlanta’s 2001 mayoral campaign was heating up, it became clear to Kiki that he needed to legitimize his earnings. That’s because he intended to make Shirley Franklin’s eldest daughter his wife.
In his foray into legitimacy, as with his illegal endeavors, Kiki formed a partnership with Scott King. The two men decided to open a car dealership and customization shop on the outskirts of Buckhead, one that would offer $2,000 rims and $350,000 Bentleys. Kiki and Scott incorporated their business in September 2001, and they called it 404 Motorsports—so-named for Atlanta’s intown area code. The dealership had a clublike setting, and it catered to the type of customers who might qualify for an AmEx black card. The walls of 404 Motorsports were graced with autographed jerseys of clients such as Atlanta Brave Andruw Jones and Cleveland Brown Corey Fuller. Graham’s business would be a portal to celebrities, with whom he had an easy rapport. And his fiancée would be a liaison to Atlanta’s political elite.
That year, both Scott and Kiki sat down for Christmas dinner with the Franklin family. There was much to celebrate: Shirley’s recent victory and her upcoming inauguration (she’d taken the r
ace by a seventeen-percentage-point lead), Scott and Kiki’s new business, and, right around the corner, wedding bells. Kai and Kiki were married December 29, 2001. Kiki now had all the more reason to keep up appearances. Fortunately for him, he possessed an uncanny ability to come across as legit. There was a pleasantness about Kiki, an understated ambition that made people believe in him, to convince themselves he was someone he wasn’t. He dressed in three-piece suits and smart ties. He hobnobbed with superstars. And his wife was the daughter of a wildly popular mayor—the first African-American woman to hold that post in any major Southern city. If he was careful enough, Kiki would be guaranteed a charmed life.
He and Scott ran into a snag, though. As 2002 wore into 2003, their business wasn’t making money. Even with the two men continuing to move cocaine, they couldn’t keep 404 Motorsports afloat without outside help. For that, they turned to Kiki’s father-in-law, David Franklin. For over a decade, David had run a successful—and, some say, controversial—concessions business at Atlanta’s Hartsfield International Airport. With his business partner Ed Wilson, Franklin headed Franklin & Wilson Concessions, which operated three stores on two airport concourses. Two of them were called Bijoux-Terner and specialized in luxury travel items; the other was called Bagmania. David Franklin had to obtain lucrative, city-approved contracts to do business at Hartsfield—contracts that Shirley Franklin didn’t approve and didn’t benefit from, the city’s ethics board later would rule. But two of her three children did benefit. Her twenty-eight-year-old son, Cabral, served as vice president of budget and planning for Franklin & Wilson, as well as a financial analyst and board member. And her daughter Kai, a year older than Cabral, was director of national brands.
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