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

by Shalhoup, Mara

  Sometime after she got married, though, Kai and her husband ran into money trouble. The problem was that, on paper at least, the couple wasn’t making enough money to support their lifestyle, which included a $600,000 home in the snooty Atlanta suburb East Cobb and Kai’s expensive furs and jewels. In order to become more convincing, Scott and Kiki were hoping that 404 Motorsports could somehow show more income. And income from a company as entrenched as David Franklin’s would be all the better. According to Scott, he and Kiki invested $150,000 in Franklin & Wilson Concessions—with the expectation that David would write a check every month to 404 Motorsports, which would help create more IRS-friendly revenue. But, as Scott recalled, David Franklin didn’t write any checks to 404. According to Scott, David Franklin instead made out the check to his daughter Kai—even after she quit working for him. Unfortunately, Kai drawing an income, even one she shared with her husband, wasn’t equivalent to 404 Motorsports doing so. As a result, Scott would claim, the investment turned out not to be what the company needed.

  Another business deal, one that Kiki arranged, had more substantial benefits for the company. A powerful drug associate of J-Rock’s wanted to sink $250,000 of his own cash into Kiki and Scott’s car shop. Kiki was thrilled. Early in 2003, he stopped by the White House to pick up the money from his new investor, Terry Flenory, whose top-level associate, A.R., loaded the bundles of cash into secret compartments in Kiki’s car. The contribution was enough to qualify Terry as a silent owner, and though the money did nothing to help 404 Motorsports show legitamite income, it did offer a quick infusion for the bleeding business.

  The remission was short-lived. By April of 2003, Terry wasn’t seeing enough of a return on his investment, and he expected some payback. Kiki couldn’t give him money, so to stave him off, he offered up a pair of $100,000 Porsches. Kiki put the cars in his wife’s name, who signed off on the paperwork and financing, and then presented them to Terry. Kai never even saw them.

  Kiki and Scott’s veneer of legitimacy was wearing thin. And as they were struggling to maintain the illusion, their boss, J-Rock, was busy creating one of his own. Like his friend Meech, J-Rock was hoping to make inroads in the music biz. At around the same time that 404 Motorsports was incorporated, J-Rock began building a studio, Platinum Recording, on Atlanta’s West Side, an area that already was home to the renowned Dallas Austin Recording Projects (DARP) and Patchwerk Recording Studios. Platinum was comparable to those ventures in cost and equipment, if not prestige. It boasted a $360,000 soundboard, a $315,000 tour bus, and an in-house label, Dep Wudz Records, named after a rap group J-Rock had signed. J-Rock even hired Meech and Terry’s dad, Charles, who had experience putting together more humble recording studios, to do the renovations on the state-of-the-art space.

  Unlike the other studios in the neighborhood, however, Platinum was not pulling in any significant business. In its early days at least, Platinum never earned more than two thousand dollars in a given recording session—a paltry sum compared with the tens of thousands of dollars that competing studios collected per day. In fact, it was J-Rock’s drug business, and not any paying clients, that covered the studio’s expenses. J-Rock pulled in far more money than Scott and Kiki, and so he did a better job supporting his studio than they did their car dealership. J-Rock sank thirty thousand dollars a month into Platinum Recordings between the studio’s equipment, bills, and salaried employees, one of whom was paid to make sure members of Dep Wudz made it to their shows and stayed out of trouble. Another Platinum employee, hired to do accounting work, began to suspect that the studio was a front, but continued to work there for fear that J-Rock wouldn’t accept a resignation without retribution.

  Looking to expand his roster, J-Rock assumed the role of manager in 2002 to an aspiring teenage rapper out of North Carolina. Born Walter Tucker, Oowee was a promising addition to J-Rock’s label, which he renamed Bogard Records in early 2003. Oowee also was tight with BMF. Meech had made a habit of befriending young rappers, even those who had other representation and pending record deals, and he was particularly fond of the tough-but-pretty lyricist (fond enough to feature him prominently in Bleu’s video, “Still Here”). As for Meech and J-Rock, they were cool, both in matters lawful and otherwise. J-Rock had one crew and Meech had another, but the two bosses looked out for each other.

  In fact, in many ways, Meech and BMF Entertainment took after J-Rock and Bogard. Both bosses had a genuine passion for the industry, and the industry, in turn, valued their street smarts. Meech and J-Rock also possessed the bravado, if not the acumen, of more traditional music moguls. But there were some notable differences between the two bosses. For starters, J-Rock was a silent partner in his label and recording studio, presenting himself as a freelance artist’s rep rather than the money and leadership behind the venture. (He went so far in his charade as to meet Bogard’s accountant in random parking lots, usually behind the wheel of a Ferrari or Lamborghini, to clandestinely hand off any cash the studio might need.) Meech, on the other hand, put himself out there. He was the very public face of BMF Entertainment, which, even as record labels go, was a highly noticeable organization. The fact that BMF, like Bogard, was financed with drug money appeared not to dissuade Meech from flooding the market with excessive displays of exorbitant wealth—money that had no verifiable, legal origin. J-Rock was more understated.

  Yet no matter how careful he was in separating himself from Bogard, J-Rock remained inextricable from the Sin City Mafia. J-Rock was Sin City Mafia. And once investigators started sniffing around J-Rock’s crew, the boss had reason to worry—but only to a point. That’s because J-Rock, like Meech, considered himself fairly impenetrable. He was near the top of his game, after all. Only further down the food chain, or so the logic goes, does one become vulnerable.

  Barron Johnson existed somewhere along the middle of that food chain. The Greenville coke dealer had a few street-level guys working for him, and he was buying about ten kilos at a time from his supplier. Vice detectives at the local police department stumbled onto him in 2002, after orchestrating a few undercover, street-corner buys from West Greenville dealers, whom Barron was supplying. From there, the detectives landed a wiretap on one of Barron’s phones. Based on what they heard, it appeared he was getting his drug shipments from Atlanta. One of his Atlanta suppliers, they learned, was a man named Scott King. And one of Scott’s associates, Ulysses “Hack” Hackett, was driving the coke up to Barron on a regular basis.

  After nailing down Scott as Barron’s supplier, the local investigators went to the Greenville office of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration in the summer of 2003 to see if the federal agents might be interested in the case. The DEA was interested, as was the criminal division of the IRS. The two agencies immediately launched a full-scale investigation into Scott King’s drug ring and assets.

  In December 2003, Barron Johnson, Scott King, and Ulysses Hackett were indicted under seal in federal court in Greenville. The indictment charged them with conspiracy to distribute cocaine and to launder drug money. Barron was quickly apprehended, and it didn’t take long for investigators to convince him to talk. He went so far as to arrange a four-kilo shipment from Scott, who knew nothing of Barron’s arrest or his own pending charges. And so Scott sent Hack to Greenville with the package, as he’d done countless times before. Hack planned to meet Barron at the stash house on Singing Pines Drive, the one Kiki had leased.

  But he didn’t make it that far. On the afternoon of January 21, 2004, a highway patrol trooper acting on DEA orders pulled over Hack’s SUV on I–85, a few miles shy of his destination. In the backseat, investigators found four neatly wrapped and barely disguised kilos of cocaine. That same day, a federal judge signed off on a search warrant for the house on Singing Pines Drive. During the search, investigators found another ten keys inside the stash house. The drugs, along with eighty thousand dollars, were tucked away in five underground safes.

  Later that afternoon, Scott was hanging out at
his town house when Hack’s girlfriend, Misty Carter, knocked on his door. She’d heard about Hack’s arrest, and she wanted to help. Misty was twenty-four years old, a graduate of Atlanta’s historically black, all-female Spelman College, and a salesgirl at an upscale Atlanta boutique. Not that she needed to work. As the daughter of a well-to-do physician in the idyllic town of Fayetteville, North Carolina, Misty was still pampered by her parents. She had little experience with the ins and outs of the drug game, or the workings of the legal system. But she did have access to cash. She broke a savings bond in order to free Hack from jail, and Scott promised to pay her back.

  Immediately after she left, he called Kiki. The two made arrangements to pay for Hack’s lawyer, a move they mistakenly believed would give them access to the sealed evidence filed in the case—which in turn would allow them to see how close the government might be to nabbing them, too. Scott, however, didn’t have to wait long to find out what the feds had in store for him. Days after Hack’s arrest, the full indictment was unsealed—and Scott learned that he (though not Kiki) had been charged. Scott wasn’t going to wait around for authorities to find him. Using a fake ID, he caught a flight to California, where he intended to start over.

  The move across country was an easy one. J-Rock had just relocated to L.A., too, along with his new wife. The couple had taken up residence in one of three houses where J-Rock stored his fresh-to-the-U.S. drug shipments. The $2 million home was still in the L.A. hills, technically, but close to the belly of the Valley—and even closer to Terry Flenory’s primary stash house, the Jump. You could walk from one home to the other in less than five minutes. Like Terry, J-Rock had little choice but to maintain several L.A. properties to keep up with the drugs he purchased—allegedly from their supplier-in-common, the one with a direct Mexican connection.

  J-Rock’s crew called the house where he lived First Base. It was located in a neighborhood called Sherman Oaks, at the crest of a long, climbing driveway. The three-story stucco-and-terra-cotta structure was exposed to the road—but so far away from it that, as with Terry’s Jump, any outside surveillance was all but impossible. J-Rock’s Second Base was a nearby pad where his crew usually stayed, in the same L.A. neighborhood. And Third Base was way out on Ventura Boulevard, in a part of L.A. so far west that even the locals, who had a looser definition of sprawl than most of the rest of world, considered it the distant reaches. That house, on a cheerful, tidy street called Oso Avenue, was home to the largest of J-Rock’s drug shipments—several hundred kilos at a time.

  With all that property, there was plenty of room for Scott King. And also plenty of work. While living as a fugitive, Scott stayed deep in the game, and he maintained regular contact with Kiki, who seemed to be better situated in this whole mess. Barron Johnson didn’t know Tremayne “Kiki” Graham. He’d never seen him, never spoken to him. And so while Barron could (and did) contribute to Scott’s undoing, Kiki would prove a harder catch.

  The one thing that concerned Kiki was the possibility that Hack might turn government’s witness. Hack did, in fact, meet with federal investigators. In the early spring of 2004, he agreed to provide a statement. In that statement, he talked, a lot, about the fugitive Scott King. That’s what the feds were expecting to hear. What surprised them, though, was how little Hack was willing to say about Kiki. Even at that point, investigators had enough on Kiki to know that Hack was hiding something. Hack, they believed, was lying to protect him. And so one of Hack’s interrogators, DEA agent Jay Rajaee, let him know that he saw right through the act. “This is over,” Rajaee told him. “I’m not talking to you anymore.”

  Hack told Kiki about the meeting—an admission that had the unintended consequence of further fueling Kiki’s paranoia. Kiki was sure that Hack would cooperate against him—if he hadn’t already—and he confided this to Scott. By then, the two friends had begun to refer to Hack as “Stupid,” because of the little white lies Hack was always telling. To Kiki, those white lies were beginning to assume a darker hue. Kiki was convinced: Hack was out to get him, and the only way he could possibly be indicted would be if Stupid were to fold.

  Yet despite his growing belief that he was, in fact, fallible, Kiki continued to traffic cocaine. He was more careful about it than ever. He came up with what he thought was a foolproof plan, and to put that plan into motion, he decided to join Scott and J-Rock in California for a while. He was a free man, after all, one who could travel anywhere he pleased. And if he were added to the federal indictment while he was out in L.A.? Well, maybe he’d make the move permanent.

  Before Kiki came up with his plan, J-Rock’s primary method for transporting his drugs from California to Georgia (and his drug money in the opposite direction) was by private jet. Of course, you couldn’t send just anyone on a thirty- thousand- dollar flight across the country with luggage that contained three hundred kilos of uncut cocaine, or $4 million in bundled bills. Such a job called for a professional. In early 2004, J-Rock had learned that a man named Eric “Mookie” Rivera was up to the task, and he quickly brought Mookie on board. As with past couriers, Mookie lived where J-Rock lived, which meant Atlanta at times, alternating with L.A.

  J-Rock typically would have his couriers make at least one “clean” cross-country trip. During that flight, neither drugs nor drug proceeds, the latter of which were typically packed in boxes and topped with rap flyers, would be brought on board. The idea was to get a feel for things. But in 2004, Kiki arrived in California to meet with both J-Rock and Mookie—and based on what he proposed, the practice flight would not be necessary. With Kiki’s help, J-Rock was about to change things up.

  Kiki’s cocaine-trafficking plan was so impressive that the boss offered to pay him sixty thousand dollars for every load of drugs he shipped. “The Graham Method,” as one associated called it, relied on a friend of Kiki’s, Ernest “E” Watkins. It utilized the well-oiled delivery system of the United Parcel Service. And it was designed in such a way to protect everyone involved. That’s because the only people who could possibly get caught transporting the drugs across the country could claim complete ignorance if they happened to be busted.

  The first time they tried out the plan, Kiki met J-Rock at First Base, where they snugly packed bricks of cocaine into large cardboard boxes. Once full, the boxes weighed in at about seventy pounds each. They were addressed to a fictitious address in Atlanta, from a fictitious sender in L.A. One of J-Rock’s associates then met them at the house, having been forewarned by Kiki to dress conservatively. The associate loaded the boxes into a van and drove them to a UPS store just up the street, off Ventura. Once the shipment left the associate’s hands, the rest of the trip was cake. The boxes were unceremoniously pushed, hoisted, and shoved, passing from van to plane and back to van again, along with countless other large brown boxes. They plodded across the country, indistinguishable from other packages—the difference being that the contents of these particular boxes couldn’t be insured to their actual value. Even wholesale, the cocaine inside was worth well over $500,000. If street value was taken into account, each box would be worth millions.

  Once the boxes landed in Atlanta, Kiki’s friend Ernest, who had an inside source at UPS, orchestrated the interception. The insider watched for the boxes bearing the fictitious Atlanta address. Sure enough, he found them. After setting the boxes aside, he then hand-delivered the precious cargo to Ernest.

  After seeing the boxes off in L.A., Kiki and Mookie flew to Atlanta a few days later to catch up with the shipment. Ernest met them at the airport with the good news. The plan had gone off without a hitch. And so Kiki and Mookie returned to L.A., to do it all over again—and again. The two went back and forth several times in early 2004.

  During one of those trips, however, Kiki received news from back home. The news brought his involvement in the scheme to a screeching halt. His wife Kai called him. The feds were at their house in East Cobb. They had a warrant. And they were digging through everything.

  DEA age
nt Rajaee, the one who’d interviewed Hack a few months earlier, had traveled to Atlanta from Greenville to participate in the search. Fellow DEA agent Jack Harvey, out of the Atlanta office, had drafted the warrant for Kiki’s house, which was located on Hallmark Drive. Harvey was deep in the throes of his investigation into BMF, and several of his subjects had trickled over into Rajaee’s investigation. So the two agents joined forces.

  When they first arrived at the house, a handsome, two-story brick traditional with a circular drive, it appeared that no one was home. The agents knocked on the door, sat back, and waited. Finally, Kai Franklin Graham, the mayor’s daughter, answered. The agents gathered several items as they combed through the house, including a receipt for a storage shed issued to someone named Ernest Watkins. The name meant nothing to them at the time. That would change.

  As Kiki soon would learn, the search warrant coincided with his name being tacked onto Scott and Hack’s indictment. Out in California, Kiki and Scott discussed what he should do and, more important, how they were going to climb out of their deepening hole. The next day, Kiki and Scott headed over to First Base to continue the conversation. They needed guidance from J-Rock. As the three men sat and talked, Scott decided he would remain a fugitive. He might as well ride this one out, make the feds sweat him a little more. Kiki, on the other hand, was leaning toward surrendering. After all, he bragged, his mother-in-law was the mayor. He seemed to think she’d pull some strings, and he’d be out of jail in no time.

  Two weeks after his indictment, Kiki showed up at the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Atlanta to turn himself in. A few days later, a federal magistrate set a $300,000 bond for Kiki—with the condition that he wear an ankle monitor and remain under house arrest. The bond had nothing to do with the fact that he was the mayor’s son-in-law, though, and everything to do with his clean criminal history. Federal prosecutors didn’t even push to keep Kiki locked up. His wife, Kai, with the help of her younger sister, found a bonding company willing to spring her husband. In the application for the bond, she noted that she earned an $80,000 salary through her father’s airport concessions company—her father being the well-connected ex-husband of the mayor. The woman behind the desk at Free at Last Bail Bonds was impressed with Kai, and the fact that she was driving a Porsche convertible. The bondswoman didn’t require Kai to secure the bond with any asset, such as her and Kiki’s home. It was an unusual move, but it also was an unusual case: the defendant was the son-in-law of the mayor.