Wolf was no stranger to conflict, and as a professional bodyguard, he didn’t go out of his way to avoid it, either. He’d been convicted in 1991 for the attempted murder of a New York cop, and he spent two years in prison. Two years after his release, he witnessed an Atlanta club shooting that defined the clash of East and West Coast hip-hop. A crew from L.A., including Death Row Records founder Marion “Suge” Knight, was pouring out of West Peachtree Street’s swanky Platinum club—only to come face-to-face with the arriving entourage of Knight’s biggest rival, Sean (then “Puff Daddy”) Combs, CEO of New York’s Bad Boy Entertainment. In the ensuing brawl, a record exec in Knight’s camp was shot several times. Weeks later, he died. Six years passed before the long-dormant investigation was resuscitated—with Wolf as the prime suspect.
Wolf also was hanging out at a Times Square nightclub in 1999 when, once again, gunshots rang out. This time, the fight started when a club-goer threw a fistful of bills in Combs’s face. After fleeing the scene with Combs, Combs’s then-girlfriend Jennifer Lopez, and his rapper-protégé Jamal “Shyne” Barrow, Wolf was arrested on a weapons charge—which he later beat. Shyne didn’t fare so well. He
was convicted of assault and reckless endangerment and was sentenced to ten years in prison.
Soon thereafter, Wolf relinquished his post as Combs’s most coveted muscle, and he came to Atlanta to start over. He wanted to make a name for himself as a hip-hop promoter. He became well known in the local club scene as a big spender and, on occasion, a big pain in the ass. Wolf, with a build reminiscent of a brick wall and a villain-styled widow’s peak, was a tough guy. He was a tough guy who would talk himself out of bad situation when he could. But when all else failed, he wasn’t exactly quick to back down. The problem was, Big Meech wasn’t the type of guy anyone should stand up to for long.
Among Meech’s distinguishing characteristics was his insistence that every guy in his crew be given his own bottle of Cristal or Perrier-Jouët at the club—even when the numbers grew to fifty or more. It was one of the obvious ways Meech built allegiances, but it wasn’t the only way. People were drawn to him not against their will, exactly, but because his aura of wealth, power, and generosity was impossible to resist. And once inside his circle, his followers rarely left. Sure, there were VIP rooms and beautiful girls and all kinds of money to be spent on whatever luxury you could possibly imagine. But more important, there was Big Meech in the middle of it, his hand resting on your shoulder like the father you never had, the one who let you drive the car your real father could never afford, the one who took you everywhere with him, wherever the business was. This management style served Meech well. His crew’s loyalty was like armor. It very nearly made him invincible. And November 11, 2003, was no exception.
In Meech’s eyes, he and Wolf were friends. A local celebrity photographer had snapped a picture of the two men just a couple of months earlier, each with an arm draped around the other’s neck, wearing glazed-over but friendly smirks. In those early morning hours at Club Chaos, however, any semblance of camaraderie between them vanished. It started when Wolf got rough with his ex-girlfriend. She wasn’t just any ex-girlfriend. She was an ex-girlfriend hanging out with Meech’s crew. Wolf made it clear he didn’t want her keeping that particular company, and he knew enough about the crew to know his objections, once they turned violent, wouldn’t be tolerated. Still, Wolf wouldn’t let up. Enraged by his ex’s refusal to bow to his demand, and with a rapt audience looking on, Wolf grabbed her by the neck.
Meech didn’t miss a beat. He stepped in and told Wolf to back off. And for a while, he did. Wolf actually retreated. But Meech had a feeling that Wolf was still angry. And he thought it had less to do with the girl than with a theory he’d hatched: that Wolf was jealous of what Meech describes as a close friendship with Combs. Both Meech and his brother claimed to be tight with the New York music magnate. And it seemed to Meech that Wolf didn’t want him on that turf, either.
An hour later, Wolf stepped back into the picture. He went straight for his ex. He started roughing her up again. That time, Meech didn’t even have a chance to react. Club security swooped in, and Wolf was tossed out.
It would seem that with Wolf’s exit, the night’s trouble would have come to a close. Meech and his boys went back to doing what they were known for doing—ingesting an obscene amount of champagne and spending an even more obscene amount of cash. It was only 1:30 A.M., after all, and the bar wouldn’t close for another two and a half hours.
Wolf, banished from the cozy confines of the club, stepped into the cool November night and headed toward the parking lot behind the building. He hooked up with his friend, Lamont “Riz” Girdy, whom he’d known since they were kids growing up in the Bronx. He found a comfortable place to lean, up against Meech’s Cadillac. And he began to wait.
… … …
For the past two years, since the spring of 2001, agents of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration had been keeping watch on a big white house tucked away in a quiet suburb twenty miles outside Atlanta. Beyond the tall iron gate that kept onlookers at bay—and a front door that admitted select guests into the modern, marble-floored, 4,800-square-foot expanse—agents believed they’d find something they were desperately chasing: evidence to boost their ongoing investigation into Demetrius “Big Meech” Flenory. The problem, however, was getting inside.
The DEA first identified Meech as a suspected drug trafficker in the early ’90s. But back then, he was only a peripheral figure. He didn’t register as a major player until 1997. That’s when special agent Jack Harvey, out of the DEA’s Atlanta office, picked up on him. Harvey had been with the DEA since 1984, and he was a good fit for any long, tedious, drug detail. With his pale freckled skin and gentle demeanor, he was unassuming as far as DEA agents go. But underneath his placid exterior, Harvey was an intense and passionate investigator. He had the smarts and the patience to build a case that can take down a kingpin. And after he picked up on Meech in the late ’90s, he began to follow him like a shadow.
At the same time that Harvey was tailing Meech in Atlanta, the DEA office in Detroit was developing leads on both Meech and his younger brother, Terry “Southwest T” Flenory. The Flenory brothers had grown up in southwest Detroit, in the downtrodden suburbs of Ecorse and River Rouge, and Michigan investigators had linked the brothers to several Detroit drug traffickers. Many of them belonged to a gang called the Puritan Avenue Boys, or “PA Boys” for short. The PA Boys were a ruthless old-school cocaine crew headquartered along Puritan Avenue in the northwest sector of the Motor City. And with the help of a wiretap investigation and confidential informants, the DEA was closing in on several of its top members. Through that investigation, the agents were beginning to realize that the Flenory brothers, though not members of the PA Boys themselves, had a drug organization of their own. And that organization would warrant some serious attention.
Harvey kept in regular touch with the agents in Detroit. He also began to track several Detroit-born gangsters who, like Meech, had relocated to Atlanta. He built relationships with more than a half dozen confidential informants who slipped him bits and pieces of Meech’s history (or at least his myth) in both Atlanta and Detroit. And with each of those tips, the picture of Meech grew more formidable.
One story Harvey heard involved the unfortunate fate of a Detroit drug dealer named Dennis Kingsley Walker. In 1994, Walker had been arrested by the DEA in Atlanta on cocaine conspiracy charges. After pleading guilty, he cut a deal with the feds in exchange for providing information on one of his co-defendants, Tony Valentine. As a result, Walker served only three years of his five-year prison sentence. He was released from a federal halfway house on October 30, 1997. And one of his first stops was the bar at the downtown Atlanta Westin, the second tallest hotel in the western hemisphere.
After chatting up several women and downing a few drinks, Walker left the shimmering glass tower. He drove his Nissan Maxima north on Interstate 85, pulling off near
Buckhead. On the exit ramp, a car slowed alongside his. One of the car’s windows rolled down. Somebody took aim with a .40-caliber Glock. In a flash, Walker’s Nissan was sprayed with bullets. He was killed instantly.
The following January, confidential informants were helping the DEA gather information on who might have murdered Walker. Agents taped a wire to the chest of one such informant, who managed to capture a key conversation: An acquaintance claimed that a man called Meechie gunned down Walker because Walker had assisted the feds in their case against Valentine. Meech immediately became the prime suspect in the murder. But the DEA’s trail went cold. Despite an intensive investigation, authorities couldn’t come up with enough evidence to make an arrest.
A year later, another confidential informant sat down with the DEA. The first thing he did was pick a picture of Meech out of a lineup. He then shared several things he claimed to know about the man in the photo. The man used fake names, and he’d probably never get a driver’s license with his real one. He often walked around with large wads of cash, but didn’t have a job. He was known to carry a handgun, sometimes two. He was aware that the DEA was following him, and he wasn’t happy about it. Lastly, one of his associates was a notorious Detroit drug dealer and PA Boys enforcer named Thelmon “T-Stuck” Stuckey.
The government already had a thick file on Stuckey. And the more Harvey learned about the flashy old-fashioned gangster, the more parallels could be drawn between him and Meech. For years, Stuckey had split his time between Atlanta and Detroit. Like Meech, Stuckey also had an interest in hip-hop. (He was a producer for the Detroit rap label Puritan Records.) And according to a federal informant, Stuckey had a violent distaste for snitches.
Yet Stuckey was far more audacious than Meech ever was. He once had the audacity to call the police to his Atlanta home after it was burglarized—an unusual move for a drug dealer, even before taking into account the items he reported stolen. Stuckey told police the thieves had made off with a wardrobe that would have made legendary Harlem gangster Frank Lucas proud, including eighteen pairs of five-hundred-dollar alligator shoes and a robust collection of men’s fur coats.
A year after the Atlanta burglary, Stuckey found himself in a dangerous confrontation with several Detroit police officers—a confrontation that culminated in him pulling off an amazing feat. The officers claimed that Stuckey fired at them with an AK-47 assault rifle and that he was wounded by return fire. Stuckey was indicted for attempted murder. But he beat that rap. He then turned around and sued the police department for inflicting his injuries. He walked away with a $150,000 settlement.
But perhaps the most outlandish of all Stuckey’s escapades stemmed from his relationship with Ricardo “Slick” Darbins, a dirty Detroit cop turned drug dealer. Darbins was fired from the police force after he was caught on a wiretap discussing a cocaine purchase. Stuckey, who was one of Darbins’s drug associates, began pressuring the former cop to kill one of the informants in the case. So Stuckey and Darbins drove to a record store where the informant was hanging out. Stuckey hung back in the pickup truck as Darbins went inside and cornered the informant. He fired at him, but missed.
Three days later, Stuckey, who was angry about Darbins’s bad aim, decided Slick was too sloppy to do business with. Stuckey drove Darbins over to a fellow drug dealer’s house. Once Darbins and the dealer got comfortable watching TV, Stuckey stormed into the room and shot Darbins four times with his .40-caliber Glock. For good measure, Stuckey stood over the body and squeezed off four more rounds. He then leaned over the fresh corpse, kissed it on the cheek, and said, “I love you and I’m going to take care of your family, but you talked too much.”
To help dispose of the body, Stuckey had called a “cleanup man,” who arrived with rope, gloves, and a roll of plastic. The men wrapped the body in blankets and plastic, tied it with the rope, and dropped it in the trunk of Stuckey’s ’91 Caprice Classic. They drove to an alley, where Darbins was unceremoniously dumped.
It took six years for authorities to catch up with Stuckey. The DEA got a tip that he was shacking up with a friend in Atlanta, and a team of agents went to the apartment to take him down. It was special agent Harvey who finally managed to arrest him. Amid Stuckey’s possessions, Harvey found a piece of paper scrawled with some rap lyrics—lyrics that a prosecutor later would describe as highly autobiographical: “I expose those who knows; fill they bodys wit holes; rap em up in a blankit; dump they bodys on the rode.”
The drug dealer who lived in the house where Slick Darbins was killed later turned on Stuckey and testified against him in court. Stuckey was sentenced to life in federal prison for the murder. With that, his association with Meech ended. But Thelmon Stuckey wouldn’t be the last of the Puritan Avenue Boys linked to the Flenory brothers. And the association would come in handy when investigators began building their case against Meech’s crew.
From the time Harvey got the tip that Meech was an associate of Stuckey’s, two more years passed before he got his next major break. In the summer of 2001, an informant told the DEA that a man named Meechie was living in a huge white house off Evans Mill Road in Lithonia, about twenty miles southeast of Atlanta.
A few days later, on August 15, 2001, Harvey went to check out the house. The sleek, minimalist mansion sat at the corner of Evans Mill Road and Belair Lake Drive, the first in a row of massive homes behind an iron gate that read: BELAIR ESTATES. Over the next few months, Harvey made a habit of driving by the house. Usually, there were high-end sports cars and SUVs parked in the driveway. But toward the end of 2001, it appeared the occupants had up and left.
A year and a half later, the DEA connected with one of its informants—the one who’d heard that it was Meechie who gunned down Dennis Kingsley Walker. Meech was back in Atlanta, the informant said. In fact, Meech would be throwing himself a birthday party that Sunday at the “White House”—the nickname the Flenory brothers had assigned the Lithonia mansion. Meech was planning the event as an after-party for a more formal affair at Sean “P. Diddy” Combs’s Buckhead restaurant, Justin’s. The grandiose invitations to the Justin’s party were printed on the cases of promo CDs, the front of which read, “MEECH’S Harem! A Birthday Celebration of Mass Proportions!” The inside liner promised a party “Fit for a King.” And the back of the case teased, “You’re invited to indulge in the … Mysterious. A Birthday Celebration for a Unique Man!”
At 1:30 A.M. on June 23, 2003, agent Harvey drove over to the White House to check out the event. Cars lined both sides of Evans Mill Road. Guests couldn’t park too close to the house, because the gate at Belair Lake Drive was locked. Partygoers came and went through a small door next to the gate. Surveying the scene from the road, Harvey noticed that groups of people were milling around outside, and the grounds, which included a pool and hot tub, were more lit up than they’d been during past drive-bys. The following afternoon, a confidential informant who’d been at the party gave Harvey a detailed account of the goings-on inside. Meech had surrounded himself with a group of men who were dressed as he was, in knee-length T-shirts printed with the letters BMF. The letters also were tattooed on Meech’s left biceps. He wore his hair in braids, huge diamonds in his ears, a large gold ring on his pinkie finger, and a heavy platinum necklace. His ensemble was complete with a hefty blunt, from which he took deep, intoxicating drags.
The guest also told the DEA that in the master bedroom, there was a gun, possibly a .45, lying in plain view.
Investigators jumped at the possibility that there could be drugs and weapons inside the White House. After running a title search on the property, investigators learned the home belonged, at least on paper, to a woman named Tonesa Welch. And DEA files showed that Tonesa was the longtime girlfriend of Meech’s younger brother, Terry Flenory. Terry’s name, incidentally, had shown up in twenty-two DEA case files dating back to 1990. And, like Meech, he was believed to be a major cocaine trafficker with ties to Atlanta, L.A., Detroit, and St. Louis. Records also showed tha
t Tonesa lived not in Atlanta but in L.A., most likely with Terry. It was a fair assumption, then, that Meech resided at the White House. And investigators hoped to make that connection in their application for a search warrant.
The application was filed on June 25, 2003, two days after the birthday party, and it was filled with the information supplied by the informants: Meech’s alleged role in the 1997 highway shooting of
Walker, his reputed association with the Detroit gangster Thelmon Stuckey—even his blinged-out attire at the birthday party two nights before. To top it all off, there was the informant’s description of the blunt and the gun.
But the judge didn’t bite, nor did he give a reason for refusing the search. The warrant was simply denied, and for a while, the deflated investigators gave up on it. Then, six months later, there arose a more pressing reason to get inside the White House.
Sometime after 4 A.M. on November 11, 2003, club owner Brian Alt was running the night’s totals. Mondays at Chaos were good money. Customers were known to spend big on hip-hop night. But those nights also carried a cost. Mondays had gotten so wild that, unlike other nights of the week, Chaos patrons had to pass through a metal detector.
Still, there’d been only a little bit of trouble at the club that night. Three hours earlier, Alt’s security team had given him a heads-up that Wolf, a club regular, had gotten aggressive with a woman. Alt was surprised. Earlier that night, Wolf had been bragging to him about his kid and acting the perfect gentleman. Contrary to his violent reputation, Wolf came across to Alt as soft-spoken and articulate, so he took it upon himself to settle the commotion Wolf had caused. He told Wolf it would be better if he left. And Wolf left without a fight.
BMF: The Rise and Fall of Big Meech and the Black Mafia Family Page 2