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

by Shalhoup, Mara

  Another agent, drug dog in tow, joined the interrogation. The dog sniffed around Mookie’s luggage. A moment later, it barked to the agents, signaling that there was something suspicious in all three bags.

  The agents asked Mookie for his ID, and he handed over a fake driver’s license with the alias Gary Rich. A moment later, they told Mookie that until they obtained a search warrant for his luggage and took a look inside, he wouldn’t be allowed to board his plane.

  While the task force agents waited on the warrant, Mookie’s phone rang. Unbeknownst to the agents, their suspect wasn’t planning on traveling alone. His associate, the federal fugitive Scott King, was supposed to meet him at the airport. Scott was calling to check in with Mookie. Out of earshot of the agents, Mookie told Scott not to come, to turn around. There was trouble at the airport.

  Shortly thereafter, the search warrant was approved. The agents pulled Mookie’s luggage aside and unzipped his bags. Inside, the agents found twenty tightly wrapped bundles. Each of the packages was bound in black plastic and topped with a flyer of a Hummer SUV. Peeling away the flyers and the packaging, the agents uncovered kilo after kilo of cocaine. All twenty keys had the word HUMMER pressed into the powder, branding the product to match the flyer.

  Mookie was promptly arrested and fingerprinted, after which the agents learned his real name: Eric Rivera. The next day, they obtained a search warrant for the address on his fake driver’s license, the apartment building in Studio City. And that’s when the manager told them about the bounty hunter. One of the detectives gave Rolando a call, to let him know Mookie had been busted at Van Nuys Airport with a significant haul of cocaine.

  Rolando told the detective that Mookie was a known associate of two federal fugitives, Scott King and Tremayne “Kiki” Graham. And considering the amount of coke that Scott and Kiki were known to have trafficked, the twenty kilos in Mookie’s luggage was just the beginning of it. If the detectives were interested in additional drug seizures, Rolando said, just wait. The content of the suitcases would pale in comparison to what they’d find when they caught up with Kiki and Scott.

  Four days later, Rolando flew to L.A. to chase down any clues Mookie might have left behind—clues that hopefully would lead to Kiki. Rolando met with the L.A. detectives, who handed over the few items found on Mookie’s person: two dry-cleaning receipts and a business card from a local pool-cleaning company. Rolando perked up when he saw that both businesses were in the same part of L.A. where he’d narrowed his hunt for Kiki. He was sure that Scott and Kiki would turn up somewhere in that neighborhood—if they were still in the city, that is.

  Rolando tried the dry cleaner first. It was a nondescript sort of place on bustling Ventura Boulevard, out in the western reaches of L.A.’s sprawling grasp. He showed the shop owner some photos of Mookie, Scott, and Kiki. The owner looked nervous. Glancing around, he motioned for Rolando to follow him into a side office. From the safety of the enclosed room, the shop owner told the bounty hunter that Scott had been by that very day. Scott’s white Land Rover had pulled into a parking space, and the six-foot-five driver, a regular customer, climbed out. He had dry cleaning to retrieve. Had Rolando been a few hours earlier, in fact, he might have run into him. Instead, the bounty hunter received a small consolation prize. The shop owner fished Scott’s dry-cleaning receipt out of the trash and handed it over.

  Rolando gave the owner his card and told him to get in touch immediately if Scott or his friend Kiki (whose picture, unlike Scott’s, the owner didn’t recognize) showed their faces. Rolando then called deputy U.S. marshal John Bridge in Greenville, South Carolina. Bridge’s office had been handling the federal investigation into the whereabouts of Scott and Kiki, both of whom had been indicted in U.S. District Court in Greenville and had been on the run since 2004. (Scott had skipped town early that year, to avoid arrest, while Kiki had cut his ankle monitor and jumped bond days before his November trial.) When Rolando was first hired onto the case, he’d met with Bridge several times to compare notes, and he’d kept the Greenville marshals’ office in the loop as far as what his investigation revealed. Now, he was calling Greenville with good news. He told Bridge it might be a wise idea to get the U.S. Marshals Office in L.A. involved. Rolando felt he was just a step or two behind the two fugitives. A few more leads, perhaps, and he’d be right on top of them. For that, he’d need backup.

  Later that day, Rolando followed up on the only other tip that the L.A. detectives had gathered from Mookie, the card for the pool-cleaning service. He drove out to the company and showed the man behind the counter the photos of Kiki, Mookie, and Scott. The man glanced at them and pointed at one. He said he’d cleaned that guy’s pool. He was sure of it. He’d been to his house several times. It was out in Woodland Hills, on a street called Oso Avenue.

  He was pointing at Kiki.

  Rolando immediately drove to the address to check it out. Compared with the three-story house on Libbit Avenue, the one that seemed to be at the hub of Kiki’s circle, this house was rather plain. The shoebox-shaped ranch had an attached two-car garage and was surrounded by an equally unremarkable middle-class neighborhood. Unlike the house on Libbit, it sat conspicuously close to the road. And its flat corner lot left it exposed on two sides—making it all the easier to surveil.

  Rolando didn’t think anyone was inside. All the shades were drawn and the driveway was empty. But Rolando did find trash on the curb, which led him to believe that someone had been there fairly recently.

  He called the L.A. detective with whom he’d been in contact, and the two sat and watched the house together. At around 7:30 P.M., the garage door opened and a black Volvo pulled out. Someone had been home, after all. Rolando followed the car long enough to write down the tag number, and the detective ran a search on it. The Volvo came back as having been registered to Gary Rich—Mookie’s alias. About an hour later, Rolando got a call from the U.S. Marshals Office in L.A. A supervisor said he’d have a team assembled the following morning, and they would meet him just off Oso Avenue.

  The bounty hunter and detective kept an eye on the Oso house for a few more uneventful hours before calling it a night. Rolando wouldn’t be gone long, though. He took a mere five-hour break before returning to the house at 7 A.M. When you’re following a guy like Kiki, sleep is a luxury. To catch him, you have to work with half as much rest as he gets, and twice as much concentration as everyone around him.

  In the morning, Rolando checked out the house from several vantage points, to make sure the team would have all sides covered. An hour later, he met with several U.S. marshals at a location around the corner. He briefed them on the situation and handed over photos of Kiki and Scott. Rolando and the marshals then retreated to various points around Oso Avenue. For four hours, they waited.

  At 12:30 P.M., they watched as the Volvo pulled out of the garage. Rolando and a few of the marshals kept a tail on it, maintaining a safe distance while the rest of the team continued to watch the house. The Volvo meandered along several surface streets, rising up over the crests and dipping into the valleys of Woodland Hills. A few minutes later, it pulled to a stop in a parking lot. Rolando and the marshals watched as the driver of the Volvo stepped out of the car and ducked into a Subway sandwich shop. Rolando followed him inside and stood watch as the man ordered a sandwich. Rolando then gave the takedown signal to the marshals outside.

  Once the man stepped back into the parking lot, he was quickly surrounded. The marshals asked for his identification. He handed over a very real-looking California driver’s license. But he wasn’t fooling anyone. His slender six-foot-five frame, his narrowed eyes and crooked grin, a style of dress more suggestive of a bank executive than of a cocaine kingpin—all of it was hard to deny. Rolando had his man. The search for Tremayne “Kiki” Graham was over.

  As the marshals read Kiki his rights, he refused to acknowledge what he heard. He even sat mute when the authorities booking him into the county jail asked the usual questions: name, addre
ss, date of birth, social. Kiki wasn’t talking, not at all.

  Meanwhile, there was still work to be done on Oso Avenue. Though Rolando’s job was finished, the marshals were holding out hope of finding Kiki’s fellow fugitive, Scott King. Other law enforcement agencies had become interested in the house, too. If what Rolando had said was true—if Kiki and Scott had access to far more drugs than their associate, Mookie—then authorities were more than ready for an even bigger bust. The local drug task force that had arrested Mookie at the airport quickly filed for a search warrant for the Oso Avenue address, and they arrived at the house to join the marshals in their surveillance.

  Two hours after the task force arrived, its agents were still waiting on the warrant when one of them noticed a silver Infiniti drive past the house several times. Finally, it pulled up to the curb a few houses down. One of the agents radioed the rest of the team and told them to keep an eye on the Infiniti. A few minutes later, the door to the house opened, and a man dressed in dark clothing walked out. He strode toward the Infiniti and was about to reach for its door when five task force agents jumped out of their cars, guns drawn. “Get on the ground!” they yelled.

  The man did as he was told. He was cuffed, and the agents pulled his wallet and keys from his pocket. His Michigan driver’s license identified him as Kevin Miller. The agents stuck him in a surveillance van and told him he’d have to stay there while they searched the house for a fugitive.

  “Is there anybody else inside the residence?” one of task force agents asked him.

  “Yes,” he answered.

  “How many?”

  He wouldn’t say.

  At about that time, the surveillance team spotted another man walking away from the house in another direction, carrying a backpack. They stopped him and asked his name. “Richard Garrett,” he told them, which was the truth—though he was known in BMF and Sin City Mafia circles as Baa, a former high-ranking lieutenant under the Flenory brothers who had jumped ship to become J-Rock’s right-hand man. Baa told the agents he was walking to his girlfriend’s place around the corner. The agents said they’d have to hold him while they searched the house he’d just left.

  “Man, I didn’t come from that house,” Baa said. “I was just walking to my girlfriend’s house.”

  “Which house is your girlfriend’s?” one of the agents said.

  “You can talk to my lawyer,” he answered. “I know you guys try to get people to say things.”

  “If you give me the name of your girlfriend and where she lives,” the agent offered, “I will contact her to verify your story.”

  “I know how you guys do things,” Baa shot back. “I don’t want you to raid her house.”

  He refused to say any more—except to tell the agents, who asked if he had any weapons or contraband in his backpack, “I just have some weed, man.”

  By then, a Los Angeles County Superior Court judge had signed off on the search warrant for the house on Oso Avenue. The agents marched the man in the van, the one with the Michigan ID, through the front door. They sat him down on the sofa and stood guard over him. One of the agents prodded the man for his real name.

  “My name is Kevin Miller,” the man said.

  “If you’re arrested, you’ll be fingerprinted,” the agent told him. “Your identity will be revealed.”

  The man looked down at his lap. “My name is Jerry Davis,” he said.

  As the agents combed through the house, they found that one of the bedroom doors was locked. Among the keys taken from Jerry “J-Rock” Davis’s pocket, they found one that opened the door. Up to that point, the agents had come across a few things of interest strewn about the house. They’d discovered four handguns, three of which had their serial numbers scratched off, as well as a .223-caliber assault rifle. The agents also found mail addressed to Eric Rivera, which meant they had a more-than-direct link between him (and the coke they pulled off him at the airport) and the house on Oso Avenue. But the link was about to get stronger.

  Inside the locked room, the agents came face-to-face with their prize: stacks and stacks and stacks of bricks—250 kilos of cocaine, to be exact, with a street value of approximately $25 million. Even at wholesale prices, a big-time distributor could expect to rake in $5 million on the haul. Also, like the coke at the airport, the bricks in the house were pressed with the word HUMMER.

  It quickly became apparent to the agents that the house on Oso Avenue—better known to its inhabitants as Third Base—was a stash house. And whoever was running it had broken one of the major rules of the game. Usually, a drug trafficker keeps his product separate from his proceeds, because that makes it harder for authorities to prove he was selling the drugs. But behind the locked door, the agents found not only 250 keys, but also a large pile of money—totaling $1.8 million.

  The marshals still didn’t have Scott King. But thanks in large part to the bounty hunter, they had Kiki. They also seized a massive amount of cocaine, and an impressive amount of cash. And as an unexpected bonus, they had Scott and Kiki’s boss, J-Rock.

  Unlike the incident five weeks earlier in Atlanta—when J-Rock allegedly helped his friend Deron “Wonnie” Gatling place a hit on federal marshals who’d cornered him after he climbed into the attic of his girlfriend’s house—the Sin City leader wouldn’t be getting off so easy this time. Two months after his arrest in L.A., J-Rock’s name was added to the indictment that had charged Scott King, Tremayne “Kiki” Graham, and the late Ulysses “Hack” Hackett with trafficking cocaine. J-Rock was facing twenty years to life. And he was no longer untouchable.

  With the arrest of Kiki, Rolando was ready to head home. But there was one more favor he was willing to do. A few hours after the day-long showdown on Oso Avenue, one of the L.A. detectives called the bounty hunter. Since Rolando had been so thorough in his investigation of Kiki, the detective was wondering if he might be willing to offer any insight into their fresh catch, J-Rock. The Infiniti, for instance, the one in which J-Rock almost fled the scene. Did Rolando have any clue to whom it might belong? Obviously, considering the volume of the drugs and cash discovered in the house on Oso, the government would be interested in seizing any cars or property that could be linked to the suspected kingpin.

  Rolando told the officer that he’d seen the Infiniti before. It was pulling out of the driveway of a three-story home at the other end of the Valley, in a far more posh neighborhood south of Ventura Boulevard. That house, in fact, had seemed to be a hub for Kiki and his associates. Rolando gave the detective the address of the home on Libbit Avenue.

  The detective assembled a small team to scope out the house. They climbed up its long, steep driveway and peered through its glass

  doors. Inside, the detective saw several empty duffle bags, similar to ones that were inside the locked room on Oso. He also noticed boxes and packing materials, multiple security cameras, a monitor in the kitchen into which the cameras fed, and food left sitting out, as if the occupants had up and left in a hurry. The detective knocked on the door. No answer. He and the rest of the team dipped inside.

  All over the house, the detectives found family photos of J-Rock and his children. There was a checkbook in his wife’s name, and her name was on a bill from the Communion Christian Academy of Arts & Sciences, too. In the master bedroom, the detectives checked out the drawers of both nightstands. In one, there was a .40-caliber Glock, with ammo. In the other, there was a book: The Power of a Praying Wife.

  Just like that, the detectives had found First Base, too.

  Before the month of June 2005 was up, another of J-Rock’s associates was picked up, this time by authorities in New Jersey. The arrest would have broad implications. Though the suspect was nabbed on a three-year-old drug-trafficking warrant, his capture was a small but reassuring step in an unrelated homicide investigation nine hundred miles away.

  Back in 2002, Jamad “Soup” Ali was indicted in Florida on federal drug-trafficking charges, and he’d been a fugitive ever since.
Authorities considered him dangerous. He’d been convicted of manslaughter in the early ’90s and had served nearly four years in prison. And in 2001, he was connected to another violent crime. Soup was questioned in a fatal shooting that rocked the streets of D.C. the weekend of the NBA All-Star game. After the interrogation, authorities let Soup go and arrested one of his friends, Michael “Playboy” Harris. But the case remained unsolved. Playboy’s murder charge was dismissed that summer for lack of evidence.

  The night of the D.C. shooting, Soup, Playboy, and several of

  their friends had been riding around in a limo. But after someone in the limo fired at a pedestrian who’d crossed the limo’s path, two of Soup’s friends hopped out—just in time to avoid getting pulled over and hauled in for questioning. Scott King had abandoned the limo first, and when Kiki called him moments later, Scott advised that he do the same. Had Scott stuck around for questioning, though, authorities would’ve been interested to hear his side of the story. According to Scott King, it was Soup, not Playboy, who shot the man dead in the street.

  In the years following the D.C. shooting, Soup had maintained a low profile. Even after the Florida indictment, he stayed off of the feds’ radar. But in June of 2005, the feds had a pretty good idea of where he was. And by then, catching Soup had become more urgent.

  The information the feds had pieced together on Soup led to a ritzy neighborhood in Livingston, New Jersey, called Chestnut Hill. Soup supposedly was hiding out in a big white modern house with a three-car garage and a teardrop-shaped driveway. On the evening of June 29, 2005, a team of twenty U.S. marshals, DEA agents, and local police officers set up surveillance outside the home. They watched as several cars came and went, and several men walked in and out of the house with duffle bags slung over their shoulders—a likely sign that drugs and money were changing hands inside.