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

by Shalhoup, Mara

  At 9 P.M., the agents saw Soup pull up in a Cadillac Escalade and disappear behind the set of double doors that opened into the foyer. The agents then spread out to form a perimeter around the property. Two sides of the house were flanked by broad balconies, which could offer an easy escape route. Several agents kept an eye on them. Some of the other agents knocked on the front door to announce their presence.

  Almost immediately, the sliding-glass door to one of the balconies opened, and two men started to climb over the railing. As soon as they noticed the agents, though, they scampered back inside. On the other side of the house, Soup opened an upstairs window and was about to jump when he, too, noticed the agents. He dipped back into the house. Seconds later, the lights on that side of the house switched off. Throughout the house, in fact, lights began clicking off.

  The federal warrant for Soup’s arrest allowed the agents to enter the house, if necessary. And at that point, the agents determined that Soup wasn’t going to give up willingly. The agents stationed at the front of the home tried the front door. It was unlocked. As they stepped inside, they saw Soup and one of his associates walking out of the upstairs master bedroom. The agents told the two men to show their hands and walk down the stairs. They complied. When they reached the bottom of the steps, the agents cuffed them.

  As the agents made their way from room to room, they detained another of Soup’s associates in the kitchen, where a loaded handgun was sitting on the counter. A fourth man was handcuffed in the dining room, and two more in the garage (they were hiding between the cars). The last man to be found in the house was hiding out in the laundry room closet. Upstairs, the agents discovered two more guns: a .40-caliber semiautomatic in the master bedroom, and a loaded 9 mm machine gun in the bedroom’s closet. Since Soup was spotted walking out of that room, authorities in New Jersey were able to press gun charges against him—possession of a firearm by a convicted felon.

  The agents also found a single kilo of cocaine—and a far more impressive amount of cash. Bundles of shrink-wrapped bills were stacked throughout the house and were secreted away in hidden compartments built into two of the cars parked in the driveway. Between the cash in the house and the vehicles, the search team turned up more than $1 million.

  Soup was held without bond on the New Jersey gun charges. The older drug charges in Florida—which carried a minimum sentence of ten years—were still pending. Basically, Soup wasn’t going anywhere. And that gave investigators down in Georgia some much-needed time.

  In Atlanta, local and federal agents were trying to piece together a murder investigation, but it was slow going. The crime seemed like a fairly professional job. No prints or fibers were left behind. A getaway car had been idling at the curb. And the assailants struck in the predawn hours, when most people, including the victims, were asleep.

  Someone was still awake, though—a neighbor. He saw two men leave the scene of the crime. As they stepped away from the town house, the one where Misty Carter and Ulysses “Hack” Hackett had just been shot to death in her bed, the neighbor caught a good glimpse of the second man.

  DEA agent Jack Harvey, who was leading the Atlanta investigation into the Black Mafia Family, was called in to assist the murder investigation. He sat down with the neighbor and showed him a bunch of photos. There were eight photos in the lineup. All of them were mugshots, showing the faces of similar-looking men.

  When the neighbor made his choice, he didn’t hesitate. He pointed straight at Jamad “Soup” Ali.

  TEN THE GAME DON’T STOP

  I can sleep when I die.

  —YOUNG JEEZY

  When Eric “Slim” Bivens saw the flashing blue lights rushing up behind the rental car, he knew it meant trouble. The car reeked of weed. Plus there was a shitload of jewelry in the rental, which might look a little suspicious. But Slim wasn’t sweating it. As far as he knew, this was a run-of-the-mill traffic stop. He didn’t think for a second that the stop was anything but a minor inconvenience. His boss, Terry, who was beside him in the car, would know how to handle it.

  As Terry’s right-hand man, Slim traveled nearly everywhere with him. They’d met back in 2000, and in five short years, Slim had climbed the ranks from entry-level drug distributor to BMF under-boss. His position in Terry’s drug organization was almost as lofty as Meech’s had been before the brothers split. Slim wasn’t an equal partner to Terry, but he was still way up there. His primary responsibilities were to keep track of BMF’s drivers as they hauled cash and cocaine across the country, and to make sure the couriers got paid—and the distributors paid up. Most important, though, Slim could be counted on to do as Terry told him. Slim was a yes-man. And on July 11, 2005, when Slim and Terry were pulled over in the rental car, that trait came in handy.

  Slim knew that most of the jewelry in the car was from Terry’s personal collection, and that it had been bound for a Young Jeezy video shoot in St. Louis. Terry claimed to be tight with Sean “P. Diddy” Combs, the owner of the label that had signed Jeezy’s rap collective. (Jeezy’s solo deal was with another label, Def Jam.) At the very least, the kingpin was indirectly linked to the music mogul in several ways. Terry employed Diddy’s cousin, Darryl “Papa” Taylor, who’d been hired under the pretense of working at 404 Motorsports, the company belonging to “Kiki” Graham in which Terry had invested a quarter of a million dollars. Rather than work for 404, though, Papa became one of Terry’s drug couriers—and recently had been promoted to a major distributor. Another of Terry’s cocaine associates was the man who’d introduced Papa to Terry: Diddy’s chief of security, Paul Buford. Paul held the job under Diddy that once belonged to Wolf Jones, who was killed behind Club Chaos. So it was nothing out of the ordinary for one of Diddy’s guys to call Terry and request a favor—and in this case, it was Paul requesting the use of his impressive array of diamond-encrusted watches and multiple-carat pendants. Paul asked Terry if he’d travel to St. Louis from L.A. and bring whatever bling he could spare. Young Jeezy needed a little more sparkle for his shoot.

  In July of 2005, Terry and Slim, carrying $5 million in jewelry, boarded a private jet in L.A., where they both lived, and flew to their hometown Detroit, where they had one of their cocaine couriers pick them up in a BMF van. From there, the three of them drove nine hours to St. Louis.

  Once they arrived, however, they learned the video shoot had been canceled. Hoping to prevent the trip from being a total waste,

  Terry made other arrangements. He decided that he and Slim would drive to Cleveland to meet up with Corey Fuller, the former NFL defensive back. The plan was to do a little gambling. So they left the van and the courier behind and had another drug associate rent them a car in St. Louis. A third associate was enlisted to drive them to Cleveland.

  They were barely out of the St. Louis suburbs, crossing through Bond County, Illinois, when the patrol car’s blue lights flashed in the rearview mirror. The trooper asked about the strong smell wafting from the vehicle. Terry and Slim admitted to smoking weed in the car. He asked for their licenses, and they handed over fake IDs. He searched them and found twenty-one cell phones—and, in Terry’s pocket, four thousand dollars in crisp fifty-dollar bills. Finally, the trooper discovered nearly two dozen pieces of wildly opulent jewelry. Terry needed to come up with a story about the origin of the bling, fast. He couldn’t claim it as his own. How could he explain why he, with no verifiable income, possessed a fortune in diamonds?

  The jewelry was confiscated, and the three occupants of the car were driven to the sheriff’s office. After sitting down with the trooper, Terry agreed to give a statement. He admitted that the licenses were fakes. He said they only carried the false ID to distance themselves from his brother, Demetrius “Big Meech” Flenory, who tended to attract trouble. Terry said he didn’t want anything to do with his brother, from whom he’d been estranged for more than a year. Terry also said the jewelry wasn’t his. He said his friend in

  L.A., a successful music producer named Damon Thomas
, had bought or rented all the pieces. Terry went so far as to tell the cops where Damon had gotten the jewelry: the ritzy New York boutique Jacob & Co., owned by celebrity’s king of bling, Jacob Arabo. Jacob was known in hip-hop and Hollywood circles as, simply, Jacob the Jeweler. And his iconic designs—big, flashy, and colorful—were one of high society’s ultimate status symbols. In fact, Terry told his interrogator, the pieces of jewelry in question were to be props in a

  video shoot. He said he was merely delivering them to the set on behalf of their actual owner.

  After Terry’s interrogation was over, he instructed Slim to repeat the story he just told, with a few extra flourishes. Terry told Slim that he needed to present himself as a music producer, a colleague of Damon Thomas’s. Tell them you make beats for a living, Terry said. Tell them you earn $150,000 per year. That might help deflect attention away from Slim and Terry’s true profession. Slim had no problem following his boss’s orders. And he wasn’t at all worried about what would happen if he lied. No way, he thought, was the government on to them. They were just going through the motions of a traffic stop.

  Slim and Terry’s story appeared to have convinced the cops. Once the questioning was over, the troopers acted satisfied with what they heard. They kept the jewelry, to be sure the story behind the diamonds checked out. And they let the men go.

  Once they were back on the road to Cleveland, Terry called his friend Damon Thomas in L.A. He told Damon that he needed him to jump through a few hoops. Terry wanted Damon to create a fake paper trail to support the illusion that the jewelry belonged to him. That way, Terry could send Damon to Illinois to claim the bling. Terry already had laid the foundation for the ruse. Terry’s assurances to the officers, coupled with Slim’s story about being a music producer himself, would make the whole incident seem less suspicious.

  Of course, to produce the kind of paperwork showing that Damon was the actual owner of the diamonds, Jacob the Jeweler had to be involved. That meant a trip to New York. Terry asked Damon if he could fly to the city for a meeting with Jacob the following day. The two of them would need to sit down with the jeweler and come up with a plan. Damon said he’d be there.

  Slim and Terry spent the night in Cleveland. The next day, they flew by private jet to New York and booked a room at the Swissotel on Park Avenue. The meeting with Jacob would take place at the hotel, because Jacob’s wife wasn’t crazy about Terry showing up at

  Jacob’s Upper East Side jewelry store. After Damon and Jacob arrived at Terry’s suite, Slim stepped out of the room to give them some privacy. Once the meeting was over, Terry filled him in on the details. He said Jacob had agreed to help him and Damon retrieve the $5 million in bling that the authorities had taken.

  Jacob and Damon said they’d handle the paperwork. After the meeting, the two of them headed over to Jacob’s home to figure out how they could lay claim to the twenty-two pieces of confiscated jewelry. They decided that the documentation for the majority of pieces should show that the jewelry had been purchased by Damon. A few of the other pieces would be portrayed as loaners—items that, though consigned to Damon, technically belonged to Jacob. That way, Damon could request the return of most of the jewelry, and Jacob could claim the rest.

  With the details hashed out, the two men left Jacob’s house and went to his Upper East Side store, where Jacob drafted a memo dated June 21, 2005—three weeks earlier. The memo stated that Jacob & Co. had lent five pieces of jewelry to Damon Thomas on that date, and that each of the pieces was valued between $95,000 and $420,000. As further “evidence” that Damon owned the jewelry, Jacob pulled copies of six checks that Damon actually had written him over the past year. On those occasions, as with this one, Damon had come to Terry’s aid. Federal law requires that retailers file a form with the IRS any time they conduct a cash transaction over ten thousand dollars. Terry wasn’t cool with the forms being in his name; he didn’t want to draw the feds’ attention to his spending habits. So he had given Damon the cash for a few pieces he wanted for his collection, and Damon wrote several personal checks to Jacob—checks that Jacob now would use in his effort to fool the authorities.

  Several weeks after Jacob the Jeweler drafted the fake memo, he had it on hand when two DEA agents called on him at Jacob & Co. The DEA had arranged the meeting, with Jacob’s consent. They told him that authorities in Illinois had confiscated some jewelry during a traffic stop, but they didn’t get into any details. So the agents were surprised when, upon arriving at the super-slick jewelry store fashioned to look like the inside of a space-age diamond mine, Damon Thomas’s file was sitting on a table, waiting for them. One of the agents asked Jacob how he knew which file to pull.

  Jacob—always cool, always collected—told the agent he’d received a phone call from Damon Thomas shortly after the jewelry had been seized on an Illinois highway, and that Damon was eager to get his diamonds back. So Jacob figured he’d help speed things along. Jacob pulled from Damon’s file the fake memo dated June 21, 2005, and handed it to the agents.

  Jacob then handed over several other documents from the file. He gave the agents invoices for nine of the twenty-two pieces of confiscated jewelry. Those invoices showed that Damon had purchased the pieces in 2004 and early 2005. Jacob also produced the six cleared checks written to him by Damon over the past year, totaling over $700,000. The checks were the clincher. They’d been written to Jacob months earlier and were drawn from Damon’s account—evidence that the bank would be able to verify.

  The agents asked Jacob if he’d ever sold any pieces to Terry Flenory. Jacob told them that he was in fact familiar with Mr. Flenory, a heavyset black gentleman who typically accompanied Damon when he came by the shop. But he said he’d never sold any jewelry to him. Certainly not.

  The agents sat back and let Jacob try to convince them of his story. But they already knew something was up. A year earlier, in August 2004, the feds intercepted several phone calls between Terry Flenory and Damon Thomas. Over the wire, the agents heard the two men discussing a jewelry deal. Terry had asked Damon if he could write a few checks in Terry’s behalf to Jacob the Jeweler. So when the DEA began investigating the jewelry that the troopers found in the rental car, they suspected Terry was trying to trick them. And now it appeared that both Jacob and Damon were in on it, too.

  In addition to the intercepted phone calls, the feds had other evidence pointing to the cover-up. Federal banking records showed that in the summer 2004, two weeks before the first intercepted call, Damon Thomas deposited $215,000 cash into his checking account. Judging from what was said on the phone, the cash came from Terry. Sure enough, three days after the money was deposited, Damon wrote Jacob the Jeweler a check for the same amount: $215,000. A short time later, Damon deposited another $150,000, presumably from Terry, and wrote Jacob another check—for $150,000.

  Now, Jacob was presenting those checks to the agents—trying to pass them off as something they weren’t. Little did he know that, far from helping Terry, he was strengthening the federal investigation into Black Mafia Family.

  On July 26, 2005, two weeks after Slim and Terry’s traffic stop, Young Jeezy’s major-label debut, Let’s Get It: Thug Motivation 101, was released—and the Atlanta rapper was met with instant mainstream success. In its first week, Let’s Get It sold 172,000 copies, earning it a number-two spot on Billboard’s top-selling albums chart. It eventually would go platinum. And in the eyes of music critics across the country, Jeezy was pure gold. In the months following the release, Jeezy was called “a great rapper,” “your favorite rapper’s favorite rapper,” and “a first-rate narrator, lovable although never quite trustworthy.” The praise was equally effusive for Let’s Get It: “mesmerizing,” “brilliantly simple,” “endlessly entertaining.”

  “This is sly, insinuative music,” according to a flattering review in the New York Times. The newspaper later christened Let’s Get It the best album of the year.

  With Let’s Get It, Jeezy made good on his promise
to acquaint the

  masses with the perils and poetry of street life. The album made frequent and unapologetic references to the drug game, and T-shirts emblazoned with Jeezy’s mascot, a menacing snowman, were selling like crazy—thanks in part by the publicity they generated when several school districts across the country banned them for being a blatant reference to cocaine.

  That summer also saw the release of BMF Entertainment’s lifestyle magazine, The Juice, which hit the streets with far less hoopla. Though stylish, there was little substance to the publication, and virtually no advertising. The glossy, dual covers (Meech was featured on one side, Jeezy on the other) mostly served as a prop in photo shoots, promotional DVDs, and music videos, including the one for Jeezy’s hit single, “Soul Survivor.”

  The song has a chilly, stoical quality. Over the backdrop of tinny synthesizers, Jeezy’s dark and breathless rasp is offset by the more ethereal flow of guest rapper Akon, the Senegalese MC who delivers a chorus that rivals the rawest of street anthems: “Everybody know the game don’t stop; tryin’ to make it to the top ’fore your ass gets popped.” The lyrics paint a grim and realistic picture of the drug game that Meech all but perfected. And as with virtually every other line of the track, it could just as well have been Meech speaking.

  The video for the song follows a narrative in which Jeezy, earning a living at a dry-cleaning business, stumbles upon a drug deal gone bad. He snatches a backpack full of cash belonging to the gunned-down distributor. He then begins slinging full-time, only to end up the victim of a fate similar to the backpack’s original owner—the difference being that Jeezy survives the attack on his life.

  Toward the end of the video, the camera pans over a crowd congregating on a bleakly lit street corner. All of a sudden, the camera pauses. It fixates on a man wearing a white T-shirt and white baseball cap, a telltale diamond cross swinging from his neck. As Big Meech turns slowly to face the camera, he seems to be gazing far beyond his surroundings. His distant expression appears to be locked on what lies ahead—as if he knew, at that moment, that the spotlight would be shining on him for the last time.