A.R. also was close enough to Terry to tag along with him while
he checked out an investment opportunity: a car dealership and customization shop called 404 Motorsports. The slick showroom was located on the southern fringe of Buckhead, just north of a seedy row of strip clubs on Cheshire Bridge Road. The business, with its polished floors and $100,000 whips, was impressive—as was its co-owner, Tremayne “Kiki” Graham. Kiki’s shop had sold tricked-out rides to mega-producer Jermaine Dupri and Atlanta Brave Andruw Jones. And Kiki, a sinewy, six-foot-five Clemson University graduate, was the equivalent of local royalty. The seemingly gentle and soft-spoken giant was married to the daughter of Atlanta mayor Shirley Franklin.
It appeared that the meeting between Terry and Kiki went well; a week later, Kiki stopped by the White House, and A.R. helped load Terry’s investment in 404 Motorsports into the secret compartments in Kiki’s customized car. Terry’s investment totaled $250,000, broken down into rubber-banded stacks of cash.
Later that year, Terry offered a friend from New York a job at the dealership—not that the friend didn’t have other employment opportunities. After all, the man, Darryl “Poppa” Taylor, is the cousin of music mega-producer Sean “P. Diddy” Combs. Terry first met Poppa through Diddy’s chief of security, Paul Buford. Terry and Paul were tight, and Paul had impressive credentials of his own. In addition to working as Diddy’s personal security (a job that had once belonged to Wolf Jones, whom Meech was accused of killing), Paul also had been the bodyguard of Diddy’s most prized rapper, Christopher “Notorious B.I.G.” Wallace. But Paul wasn’t just a bodyguard. He also distributed cocaine that he got from Terry. And on at least one occasion, a BMF driver delivered sixty thousand dollars from Terry to Paul, who received the money at Diddy’s New York record label, Bad Boy Entertainment.
Terry made frequent trips to New York, often to visit Jacob the Jeweler. During one of the trips, Paul set Terry up with a car and chauffeur: Poppa, Diddy’s cousin. Poppa was paid two thousand dollars to drive Terry from New York to Detroit. From then on, whenever Terry came to New York, Poppa would drive him around and would supply his crew with vehicles. Poppa picked them up at the airport, drove them to their hotel, took them shopping, dropped them off at parties—whatever the trip entailed. Then, toward the end of 2003 (close to that fateful night when Wolf was shot dead behind Club Chaos), Terry offered Poppa a job in Atlanta. He said he wanted Poppa to work at the car dealership, 404 Motorsports.
Poppa moved his wife and children to Atlanta, but the job at 404 never materialized. Instead, he started driving Terry’s vehicles—which, supposedly unbeknownst to him, were packed with cash and cocaine—from Atlanta to St. Louis, Detroit, New York, and L.A. Poppa claimed he first found out that he was transporting cocaine when, upon dropping off a van at Doc Marshall’s house, Doc asked him how to “open it.”
“Open what?” Poppa asked.
Doc then called Slim to get the combination to the van. Poppa stood by, startled, when Doc revealed a secret compartment stuffed with bricks of cocaine. For months, Poppa had been led to believe that Terry was a car broker and music producer. And yet, even after the truth emerged, Poppa continued to work for him—eventually becoming one of Terry’s major distributors in New York.
Wolf’s murder didn’t appear to seriously dampen the relationship between BMF and Diddy’s camp, either. After the shooting, Terry and others in BMF still did business with Poppa and Paul. But while there appeared to be no lingering bad blood between Diddy and the Flenory brothers over the death of Wolf, the killing did put a strain on Meech and Terry’s own relationship. After Meech was arrested in November 2003 for the double-homicide, investigators received a long-awaited invitation to dig through the White House. The heat Meech brought to the organization as a result of the warrant quickly drove a wedge between him and Terry—a wedge so deep that the brothers’ differences could not be reconciled.
… … …
By mid-2004, Terry was fed up. He was back in L.A., chatting on the phone with a family member and letting her know that Meech had failed him. He was saying how he and Meech had always been partners, fifty-fifty. But these days, it was as if Meech was responsible for 100 percent of the organization’s grief. The partying, the drugs, the violence, the clamoring for attention—all of it was bad for the Family. It’s one thing for Meech’s lifestyle to land him in jail; it’s something else for it to land Meech and Terry in jail. Terry said he wasn’t worried about a small charge. He could deal with five years or so. But the way Meech was acting, the feds could come down hard, and that was more than Terry could handle. Terry knew his limitations, and he wasn’t shy about sharing them. He confided over the phone: “I can’t do no twenty.”
But as Terry fumed over his brother’s insensitivity to the organization’s self-preservation, he appeared unaware of the damage he himself was inflicting. Months earlier, a federal investigation into the BMF cell in St. Louis had culminated in a judge approving a Title III wiretap investigation. After climbing onto several St. Louis numbers linked to suspected drug dealers, investigators caught up with one that had a Detroit area code. It was the cell phone of Benjamin “Blank” Johnson, the Flenory’s childhood friend who lived up the street from them and used to help himself to the cocaine stashed in the hole above the linen closet. Johnson’s number was turned over to DEA Detroit, which initiated its own wiretap. Through listening to Johnson’s calls, the agents were able to jump onto Terry’s number—three of Terry’s numbers, in fact. To have a wire running on Terry was a major coup.
The Detroit wiretap ran for five months on eight phone numbers, three of them belonging to Terry, one to Johnson, and the others to various BMF associates. Yet the agents never were able to identify a number for Meech, who was more careful about talking on the phone. Terry, for all his caution, was less reserved when it came to phone calls. He didn’t speak directly about the drug trade, but agents, reading between the lines, got a pretty clear picture of what was going on. Early in the investigation, they picked up on a call during which Terry, much in the style of a traditional crime boss, offered those reassuring words to Playboy’s family. There were other hints, too. For instance, during one call, Terry mentioned his recent purchase of a $200,000 Bentley—and his interest in buying another for $160,000. He spoke of the expense of securing tickets for the Pistons–Lakers playoff game. (“You know what I’m saying—if you going with a group, you going to spend fifty to sixty thousand dollars to sit in the prime seats.”)
Bentleys and Lakers playoffs aside, some of the most illuminating conversation had to do with the growing rift between the two brothers. More than most anything else, Terry’s complaints about Meech offered insight into BMF—and offered some clues as to why the agents couldn’t catch Meech on the line, not even to offer his brother a friendly hello. When the topic of Meech came up on the wire, Terry didn’t mince words. “Shit, that crazy motherfucker running around over there, he mad at me,” Terry told one associate. “He letting them motherfuckers put shit in his head. He don’t even know why he is mad.”
Within a month’s time, the chasm between brothers was all but complete. And BMF was starting to splinter. While talking with his friend Shep, who’d called from federal prison, Terry offered a final and ominous prognosis of his and his brother’s failing relationship. When Shep asked how Meech was doing, Terry told him: “Losing his mind, man. We don’t even speak. He lost his mind.”
THREE PUSHING JEEZY
We comin’ in at the top of the game. … We don’t
need nothing else but to make good music.
-BIG MEECH
Inside a windowless Atlanta ware house, Meech is seated at the head of a marble slab table, watching the events unfold with untrusting eyes. A man in a white dress shirt, the only one in the room who’s not wearing all black, starts his spiel. “Yo, Meech,” he says excitedly, leaning into the table, “I got the deal of a lifetime. …”
On the expanse of table in front of the
CEO, stacks of bills are piled to generous heights. To his left, his second in command, J-Bo, maintains a stony silence. Flanking them at the table are two more men. In the dark, cavernous background, two scantily clad women and a guy wearing a T-shirt that says FREE MEECH barely make an impression against the shadows.
Meech quickly puts an end to the negotiations.
“Look here, man,” he says in a low, raspy drawl. “The deal don’t mean nothing to me, man.”
Meech turns to the guy to his right. “I’m not even supposed to be talking to this dude.” Turning the other way, to face J-Bo, Meech hollers, “Get Bleu on the phone. Somebody get Bleu on the phone, man.”
Bleu DaVinci, the rapper from Carson City and a close friend of Meech, answers the call.
“What up, dude?”
“Bleu, man, this man is interfering with my business,” Meech says. His agitation is starting to dissolve into hysteria. “You need to get down here and talk to this man. I don’t know why somebody let him in the room to see what’s goin’ on anyway, man.”
“All right,” Bleu says. “Just let me, um, run down here and check on that little shipment I was telling you about yesterday, and I’ll get down there in a little while. Just give me a minute.”
Not long after, Bleu, loaded with chains, his cornrows tucked behind a black bandanna, swaggers into the room, singing, “ ’Cause I’m a boss … when I’m runnin’ …” By then, the man in the white shirt is gone.
Bleu glances up to greet Meech. “What up, man?”
Meech is mumbling to no one in particular about the music, the money, the problem at hand. Motioning to Bleu, he says, “You cannot be havin’ that music dude comin’ up in here, seein’ all this money like this, man. You gotta be able to separate the two. You can’t do it. We cannot do it, man.”
What’s going on in the room is not what it seems. Or maybe it is.
The two scenes—Meech calling Bleu and Bleu showing up at the warehouse—are bookends of a $500,000 video for Bleu’s 2004 single, “We Still Here.” Directed by famed hip-hop videographer Benny Boom, bankrolled by Meech, and with guest appearances by Brooklyn rapper Fabolous, California’s E-40, and Bleu’s protégé, an equal parts beautiful and frightening teenager called Oowee, the video has all the cinematic appeal of well-done Hollywood. There is a story arc, sophisticated aerial camerawork of downtown Atlanta, a choreographed dance scene, and Meech leaning comfortably against a steel-colored Rolls-Royce Phantom, taking in the dazzling production at hand.
If it seemed ballsy for a major drug-trafficker to finance a video in which he’s cast as what appears to be a major drug-trafficker, well, it was ballsy. It also wasn’t the first time Meech commissioned art that perilously reflected life, and it wouldn’t be the last. Somehow, he felt safe presenting himself as a drug lord. He was flaunting it, sure, but flaunting it alone is not a crime. In fact, in this instance, flaunting it was a strategy.
Meech sensed that in order to continue making money, he’d have to come up with a legitimate explanation for where his money was coming from. One way to rake in that kind of cash was through the music business. To Meech, the move was a natural progression, a way to transition from one kind of hustle to another. More than that, it fulfilled a passion. What better way to legitimize your wealth than by doing something you love—and something your father always wanted to do, but couldn’t? To Meech, the key to liberating his “family” (both his criminal and blood-related one) was to launch a successful hip-hop label.
As early as 2003, Meech began to direct his resources toward rappers he believed stood a chance of stardom. If they succeeded, they would sell enough albums to elevate Meech’s name from street lore to national renown. In turn, the artists would need him as much as he needed them. That’s because Meech could create for them the illusion of wealth, a prerequisite for hip-hop fame. He could deliver the symbols of success—the cars, the jewels, the videos, and so forth—that would boost their notoriety. And if they were to hit it big, so would his newly incorporated record label, BMF Entertainment. It would be the ultimate return on his investment—but only if the feds didn’t catch him first.
Meech was so confident about his plan that, even before his label landed a hit (let alone released a full-length album), he publicly spelled out his intentions. By doing so, he hoped to get noticed in an industry where there’s no such thing as too much excess. Yet to some, both inside and outside the business, his words were offensive—in part for the assumption that he could buy success. “We comin’ in at the top of the game,” Meech boasted in a 2004 DVD that chronicled the making of Bleu DaVinci’s album. “We got all the cars we want, all the houses we want, all the clothes we want, all the jewelry we want, and all the hos we want. We don’t need nothing else but to make good music. That’s it. And bring everybody else in with it and create jobs.
“We can do all kinds of things if we start from Bleu DaVinci.”
Meech anticipated that Bleu’s track “We Still Here” would be the break-out hit for BMF Entertainment, and he spared no expense when the time came to produce and promote Bleu. As the label’s CEO and sole financier, Meech could throw as much support as he wanted to at Bleu, his lone artist. “We Still Here” was recorded, along with a handful of other tracks, at Atlanta’s Patchwerk studio, whose vocal booths have been graced by Whitney Houston, Cher, Britney Spears, and Snoop Dogg. But according to Patchwerk chief operating officer Curtis Daniels, Bleu booked more time at the studio than any other artist.
In addition to the pricey studio time and glitzy video, Meech lavished other luxuries on Bleu: fancy cars, diamond-studded chains, and parties, parties, parties. The label hosted a listening party for “We Still Here” at Patchwerk, attended by such guests as Goodie Mob front man Big Gipp. Then there was the after-party at the Westin in Buckhead, followed by the after-after-party at a ware house space downtown.
When it came time to perform—be it for an audience or in front of a camera—Bleu easily fell into the role of the rap superstar he wasn’t. In one documentary-style video, he brandished a .357 Magnum that he casually claimed could “blow you back about four feet.” On another occasion, he talked about getting in shape so that he could fire an AK-47 with one hand. On film, he often spoke of himself in the third person, waxing philosophical about “who is Bleu DaVinci?” Basically, he ate it up. He was a goofy showman, one who overacted the part of the sinister gangster with a lighthearted side.
While performing live, it was the same drill. Bleu hammed it up for the camera, and the rest of the BMF crew quickly fell into place. As hundreds of guests thronged the stage at Bleu’s after-after-party, he spat his lyrics into the mic while swaying in a mass of VIPs including BMF honchos J-Bo and Fleming “Ill” Daniels, rappers Oowee and Young Jeezy, and, at Jeezy’s side, an upper-level BMF distributor named Omari “O-Dog” McCree.
The only one missing was Meech. He was still under house arrest for the Chaos killings, as evidenced by the FREE MEECH shirts that J-Bo and Ill wore on stage. But the boss did make a cameo, of sorts, with the help of a film crew that visited an Atlanta high-rise where he was holed up.
He was dressed in all white—white T-shirt topped by a baggy white tracksuit. He was sporting a huge diamond cross. And because the film was shot in grainy black-and-white, with the camerawork slightly out of focus, the result was a vision of Meech as an ethereal, thuggish angel. “Even though I’m not there,” he told the camera, as if speaking from the grave, “I’m not the focus. Bleu DaVinci is the focus. That’s what y’all are here for tonight. I wish I could be there tonight—God knows I wish I could be there tonight. But one day soon, I’ll be there, with God’s blessing.”
And so Bleu became the center of attention—the attention of the film crews paid by Meech to follow him, of the club-goers who aspired to BMF’s style of partying, and, most important, of the CEO himself. As Meech said from his exile, “All our independent focus is on what Bleu DaVinci gonna do and how he’s gonna make it. If he take off, then w
e take off. If he don’t take off, then we don’t want to take off. Simple.”
Meech’s explanation as to why he put everything behind Bleu doubled as a wider, inspirational message to anyone who might be listening. Meech didn’t intend merely to lift BMF Entertainment up to the level of “Universal, or Interscope or DreamWorks or Def Jam.” He wanted Bleu’s ascent to serve as a ghetto Cinderella story. “We want Bleu in the best of everything,” Meech told the camera, “show him the best of everything, show him that a person can come from nothing to something and step in this game and keep going. He have everything that he could want right now, and he’s still trying to do something to bring other people up with him.”
The problem was that in the summer of 2004, it wasn’t Bleu who was taking off. All the sparkly bling and fancy cars and state-of-the-art studios in the world couldn’t compensate for the one thing Bleu DaVinci lacked: raw talent. Bleu’s rhymes were straight gangster rap, and he delivered them with an appropriate dose of animosity: “You can’t catch me on no corner pushin’ nickels and dimes / I got the bricks flying right out of Buckhead.” But despite his air of credibility, Bleu was not coming up with the kind of lyrics that would raise the genre to art—let alone generate any serious radio play. It was as if Bleu were the caricature of another rapper who actually did possess that rare combination of gritty authenticity and transcendent poetry. That rapper was Jeezy.
Jay “Young Jeezy” Jenkins grew up on the outskirts of the history-rich, have-and-have-not middle Georgia city of Macon. Rooted in the rock ’n’ roll and R&B sensibilities of the Allman Brothers Band, Otis Redding, and Little Richard, Macon had grown into a hip-hop hub, a farm team to Atlanta’s booming rap industry. Like Atlanta, Macon had a strong mixtape culture and some heavyweight hip-hop clubs, allowing young rappers to find fame on the streets before approaching the big leagues. Jeezy, who was known as ‘Lil’ J’ when he first started rapping, quickly established himself in those venues. In his early twenties, he relocated seventy-five miles north to Atlanta, where he fell in with the crowd that hung out along Boulevard. He
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