The woman told Omari that she’d get back to him soon with some info.
A half hour later, Jeffery called Omari with an idea that he thought might help ease some of their pressure. Jeffery’s girlfriend, Courtney, was out of town, so Jeffery offered to bring the “clothes” to her apartment on Highland Avenue. She just so happened to live in the same complex where, exactly two months before, Misty Carter and Ulysses Hackett were shot to death in Misty’s bed.
“Yeah,” Omari said. “That’s cool.”
The surveillance agents weren’t able to maintain a tail on Jeffery as he drove the “clothes” over to Courtney’s. Thus the agents were left thinking that they’d missed out on a golden opportunity, a convergence of events that surely wouldn’t happen again—until they realized, listening to the wire the next day, that all was not lost.
Just before 5:30 P.M. on November 5, 2004, a taxi pulled up to Omari’s house, and the surveillance agents watched as Courtney stepped out. She’d just come from the airport, according to the wire, and was about to leave town again. Ten minutes later, agents saw her pull out of the garage in a white Cadillac SUV, followed moments later by Jeffery, driving the Porsche. The agents, who were joined by the DEA this time around, split into two teams. Three guys took off after Courtney, the other three after Jeff.
The Porsche was driving wildly. Jeffery gunned it through a red light at Spring Street and North Avenue, entering the thick of downtown Atlanta. The agents lost him.
It was at around that moment, while Jeffery and Courtney were both driving, that Jeffery decided to call Courtney to let her know the “clothes” were at her apartment. Courtney said she wanted the clothes out of there—and she wanted to be rid of Jeffery, too. So the clothes had to be moved, and quick.
Back at HIDTA headquarters, the agents were scrambling to let the surveillance team know what was going on. The team had to get to Courtney, and quick.
“I’m sick of this dirty business,” they heard Courtney say. “So I’m just tryin’ to figure out if you’re gonna be there within the next thirty minutes, because I’m about to go out of town.”
“You’re fixin’ to go outta town? Where you goin’?”
“Outta town,” she said dryly.
“Damn, well, can I keep your key while you’re outta town?” Jeffery pleaded.
“Can you keep my key while I’m outta town? You missed the point. I just changed my number—”
“Courtney, I need to keep those clothes over there for real, ’cause … you don’t even understand right now.”
“You’re right,” she said. “I don’t understand.”
“Can I just keep those clothes over there, please? Can I just keep the keys until you get back?”
“I’m sorry. You can’t keep my key.”
“Courtney, can I please keep the key. Please.”
“I already said no.”
“All right, if you’re going to be selfish like that—”
“I’m not being selfish.”
“All right, well, I’m on my way.”
Courtney, fortunately, was easier for the surveillance team to keep up with. The agents followed her all the way to her Highland Avenue apartment complex. A few minutes later, Jeffery pulled up in the Porsche. Both of them went inside her apartment. Shortly thereafter, the couple emerged with a duffel bag. They climbed into the Porsche and headed toward the highway.
The agents pursuing them called in Atlanta Police. It was time for another traffic stop.
The cops caught up with the Porsche on I-75 at Pine Street, near the heart of downtown. Jeffery pulled to the shoulder of the exit ramp. Investigators, who were met on the scene by Fulton prosecutor Csehy, approached the SUV, guns drawn. They ordered Jeffery and Courtney out of the vehicle, then cuffed them and put them in separate cars. In the backseat of the Porsche, in plain view, the agents found an open duffel bag stuffed with ten kilos.
Csehy and the agents drove the couple to Courtney’s apartment, where she consented to a search. While some agents were digging through her stuff, others tried to pressure her to talk. They said she should’ve been well aware that Jeffery and Omari were up to no good. “These guys don’t work and they live in a half-a-million-dollar home and they drive an eighty-thousand-dollar truck,” one of them told her. “Where do you think they get their money from?”
But Courtney wouldn’t budge. She just sat there staring at them. In the course of the search, the agents didn’t turn up anything, though the ten kilos in the back of the Porsche were more than enough to arrest the couple and put them away for a while. Instead, Csehy decided to let them go. It was a ballsy move, but he figured Jeff and Courtney would keep talking on the phone, and that might yield even better information over the wire.
When Omari called Jeffery a few hours later, Omari knew something was up. Yet he pressed Jeffery to talk, despite Jeffery’s insistence that it was a bad idea.
“Don’t wanna talk right now,” Jeffery said as soon as he answered. “Bye.”
“What?” Omari asked.
“Bye.”
The line went dead. Thirty seconds later, Omari called again. Jeffery greeted him with a terse, “Don’t wanna talk.”
“Hey, what the fuck you talking ’bout?”
“Don’t wanna talk, man. Listen to me, please. Just listen to me for real.”
“You in trouble?”
“Don’t wanna talk. Come on, for real. Please come on.”
Jeffery hung up. A minute later, he called Omari with instructions.
“Yogi Bear’s house,” Jeff said.
“Huh?” Omari asked.
“Yogi Bear’s house.”
“Who?”
“Yogi Bear’s house.”
“Yogi what?”
“Yogi Bear’s house! Go to Yogi Bear’s house.”
“Go?”
“Go to Yogi Bear’s house, all right?”
“Are you all right, though? That’s what I’m askin’ you.”
“Can you just go there? I’m all right right now, but can you …”
“All right.”
Omari tried Jeffery’s girlfriend next. She could barely form the words around the tears.
“Hello?” Courtney mumbled.
“What you cryin’ for?” Omari asked.
“He didn’t let you know?”
“What?”
“Everything just went wrong, O,” Courtney sobbed. “Just leave the house, all right? Are you at your house?”
“No.”
“Okay, well, as long as you left there, you should be straight.”
“Would you stop? Look, just tell me what happened.”
“I don’t wanna talk on the phone, you know what I’m saying? The fuckin’ feds, whoever they was, just dropped out on us.”
Three days later, Yogi called Meech to discuss business. By then, there was a wire up on her, too.
Of course, Meech wasn’t into talking on the phone. He said they could talk about whatever they needed to discuss once she arrived in L.A. That day, Yogi boarded a commercial jet bound for California. So did two task force agents. They followed her to California, hoping to shadow her all the way to her meeting with Meech. But Yogi proved difficult to keep up with. While driving through L.A., she made abrupt turns, turning back on her tracks and traveling in broad circles. Eventually, she shook them.
Two days later, Yogi was back in Atlanta. Over the phone, Meech told her he’d be back the day after next.
Even then, Jeff and Omari were still talking on their cell phones, but their conversations were waning. They needed to come up with a plan—and some cash. The package they’d lost was a front, meaning they owed a bunch of money to the boss. But they had no product to sell.
They weren’t exactly making themselves scarce, though. Both men were at their house when Csehy stopped by on November 19, 2004, to talk to Jeffery about the bust. Omari, who wasn’t sure whether he, too, had been tied to the cocaine in the backseat of the Porsche, jumped off t
he balcony in back of the house, gun in hand, and ran. A surveillance team stationed outside watched his retreat.
Jeffery’s girlfriend was smarter. Within days of the bust, Courtney ditched her Highland Avenue digs. She moved, she would later say, out of fear.
That evening, Meech called Yogi for an update.
“What happened?” he asked.
Yogi mentioned that the police had shown up at Jeff and Omari’s, and that Omari had skirted them.
“I thought he moved,” Meech said.
Yogi said he hadn’t.
“He’s being very stupid,” Meech told her. “And that’s why I’m not fucking with the man right now.”
Out of an abundance of caution, Meech had switched things up. He no longer felt safe distributing cocaine out of the same location Jeffery and Omari had visited. The house, in a residential, wooded part of Buckhead, would have to be shuttered. It was time to close the Gate.
Meech didn’t move the operation too far. About a mile away, in a similar upscale neighborhood, Meech set up shop at an even more impressive abode. The ultramodern house was so grandiose that some BMF associates referred to it as “the Bugsy Siegel,” because it was the type of place that only the flashiest gangster would inhabit. Meech had another name for it. He called it Space Mountain. During the first few weeks that BMF operated out of Space Mountain, the limos from California came and went, delivering a hundred kilos at a time, and driving off with millions in cash. The house held as much as $6 million at a time, which BMF associates, including a convicted murderer named Ralph “Ralphie” Simms, counted by hand.
Meech tried to make his presence scarce around Space Mountain. As always, he had J-Bo oversee the drug shipments. The customers would call first, to let J-Bo know how many kilos to set aside. J-Bo would tell the lower-tier workers, including Ralphie, to be ready and waiting for the customers to arrive. The transaction would take mere minutes. Even so, years later Ralphie would remember two of the customers vividly. One was Doc Marshall, who did BMF’s books. The other customer to whom Ralphie allegedly handed kilos of dope was hard to forget. After all, he was a soon-to-be famous rapper: Young Jeezy.
Ralphie also was on hand the day a frantic order came down from Meech. It was two days before Thanksgiving 2004. Everybody was getting ready to go to Miami for the holiday. That afternoon, Ralphie left Space Mountain, but just for a minute. He was only going to stop at the store for cigars. But shortly after he pulled out of the driveway, he was stopped by police. It appeared they’d been watching the house. Ralphie handed over a license with a fake name. Had he not adopted the alias, he’d have found himself in serious trouble. He currently was in violation of his probation, which he’d received the prior year after serving time on a Missouri murder charge.
The cops ran the license, and it came back clean. Like most of the rest of Meech’s crew, Ralphie had gotten a “legitimate” license through a crooked source inside the Tennessee DMV. The cops let him go.
At around the same time, Meech was driving over to 404 Motor-sports to check on one of his cars, which was being worked on at the dealership’s shop. He noticed that someone—apparently an under-cover agent—appeared to be following him. Once he heard about Ralphie getting pulled over, he knew that Space Mountain had been compromised. He called J-Bo and told him what to do: “Clean up the house.” There were a hundred kilos inside, and they had to be moved, fast.
That same afternoon, a contractor was at Space Mountain, doing repairs to the roof. He knew most of the crew that hung out at the house by sight, because he’d done numerous repairs at both that house and the Gate. In fact, he’d installed the gate at the Gate. The contractor believed that the men whom he’d met—both J-Bo and Ralphie, as well as a short, charming, likeable guy called Ill—were in the music business. That’s what they told him, anyway. Their claim was supported by the fact that there often were the limos, Lambos, Ferraris, and Hummers parked in Space Mountain’s driveway.
As the contractor was finishing up the job on the roof, he noticed people running from the house, scrambling for their cars. He recognized one of them as J-Bo. Soon thereafter, he packed up and left—only to return a few hours later. He was supposed to fix a leak inside the house. By then, it was dark. And he was startled to find that the house was crawling with local police and federal agents. They were executing a search warrant. But they were a few hours too late.
In his affidavit for the search warrant, HIDTA task force agent Walt Britt had cited the search a year earlier of the Flenory brothers’ White House. He described the Porsche, driven by Jeffery Leahr, that had been pulled over two weeks earlier, loaded with ten kilos. He laid out Meech’s connection to Yogi, his assistant, and her relationship with both Jeffery and Omari. He also wrote that a confidential source had claimed Meech was supposed to be paying off debts that very day—including money he owed to attorney Vince Dimmock, for his representation of Jeffery, Omari, and a handful of other BMF members. That meeting was supposed to take place at a room inside the Ritz-Carlton Buckhead. Britt even went so far as to claim that a recent article in hip-hop magazine The Source hinted at Meech’s role as a drug boss.
In the article, Meech was quoted as saying, “We all are hardworking hustlers. But none of us rob, steal, or kill for our money. … We always just hustling in whatever way we can, whether it’s selling CDs or whatever we have to do out here.” In his affidavit for the search warrant, Britt wrote: “Missing amongst the crime denials is selling drugs.”
That evening, November 23, 2004, the judge signed off on the warrant, and Britt, Csehy, Harvey, Burns, and several other law enforcement agents showed up at Space Mountain. Nobody was inside the boxy structure, which sat off the road behind an iron gate and featured a wall of windows facing the woods. But the elegant interior, which featured a spiral staircase ascending to an open-air loft, did turn up some items of interest. Inside, the agents found guns, several BMF jerseys, and a Tennessee driver’s license with J-Bo’s picture and a fake name: Derrek Williams. In the garage, they found cloth wrappings that tested positive for cocaine residue. But they didn’t find any drugs.
When the contractor showed up, DEA agent Harvey broke away from the others to talk to him. The contractor said that he had a phone number for one of the men who hung around the house. His name was Ill. Harvey told the contractor he’d follow up with him.
Upon leaving, the contractor went directly to Ill’s house in the suburbs. He knew where Ill lived, because he’d done renovations for him, too. He knocked on the front door. No answer. So he went around back to the deck, to peek through the glass doors. He knocked on the glass. A very nervous Fleming “Ill” Daniels opened. He was hanging out with Ralphie. Both men were dressed down—in their boxer shorts. In the background, Scarface was on the TV. They seemed to be spooked by something. The contractor told Ill what he’d seen at Space Mountain. But Ill, as well as the rest of the crew, already knew.
The next day, Meech decided he was done with Atlanta for a while. He was already planning on heading down to Miami to get away from things for a bit, and he figured he might as well extend the vacation. In Miami, he’d find a warmer reception—and a more grandiose home. The week before Christmas 2004, he leased (through an associate, of course) a deco-styled mansion in South Beach. The rent was thirty thousand dollars a month.
By that time, it seemed, Omari McCree had finally disappeared.
SEVEN THE BOUNTY HUNTER
We’ve not yet pinpointed a motive.
—ATLANTA POLICE DEPARTMENT SPOKESMAN
By the time the sun came up in California, leaving Scott King face-to-face with the news about Misty and Hack, Tremayne “Kiki” Graham was calling him for the second time that morning. And, in true Kiki fashion, he had a plan.
Kiki told Scott that he’d come up with an idea that would immediately throw investigators off his trail. (Never mind, Scott thought, that it was he, Scott King, who’d now look like the prime suspect, seeing as how he was on the run—and how Hac
k had been his codefendant, too.) Kiki would create the illusion that, as a result of the double shooting on Highland Avenue, he was in grave danger. He would prompt law enforcement to believe he needed protection. He would let everyone know that he now had to fear for his life.
It was widely known that Kiki was under house arrest at his and his wife Kai’s East Cobb home. That meant that if someone wanted to target him (or if he wanted people to think someone wanted to target him), he’d be easy to find. So to demonstrate just how serious the situation was, Kiki made a temporary move—to a place where any would-be attacker would be loath to tread. He sought refuge at the home of his mother-in-law, Atlanta mayor Shirley Franklin. No one, including the mayor herself, would believe for a second that Kiki had the gall to move into her house if he’d been tied in any way to the murders.
Surprisingly, the double-homicide didn’t make much of a public splash. Two days after the early-morning shooting, the deaths warranted a mere hundred words in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, buried deep inside the newspaper’s metro section. The paper quoted an Atlanta Police Department spokesman, who described the killings as baffling, but not quite out of the ordinary: “We have no suspect, no motive and no arrest at this time. It was a home invasion, but we’ve not yet pinpointed a motive.” The story did not mention that one of the victims had been the codefendant of the mayor’s son-in-law.
Apparently satisfied with the public reaction to the killings, Kiki later moved back to East Cobb. And for a time, all resumed to normal—or at least some semblance of it. With Kiki still under house arrest, his friend Eric “Mookie” Rivera continued to meet with him at his house—and to plan more trips from L.A. during which he could traffic cocaine on Kiki’s behalf. During one of Mookie’s visits, in the fall of 2004, he asked Kiki how his case was going.
BMF: The Rise and Fall of Big Meech and the Black Mafia Family Page 15
