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

by Shalhoup, Mara

  Instead of putting up her house, Kai paid thirty thousand dollars out of pocket, and Free at Last assumed the rest of the debt—with the understanding that in the unlikely event her husband was to flee, she’d be responsible for the $300,000 (though her house wouldn’t be on the line). While Kiki’s bond had plenty to do with the standing of his wife, it had little to do with Mayor Shirley Franklin. The mayor pulled no strings for Kiki. All that talk back in California, about how easy it would be for him to get out of jail, amounted to a bunch of boasting in the company of friends.

  Despite having no direct connection to the mayor, Kiki’s arrest pained her on a personal level. “I am saddened to hear of the indictment,” Shirley Franklin told the Associated Press, stressing that she was speaking not as the mayor but as a mother. “I am hopeful that he will be found innocent, but we must let the legal system run its course.

  “My heart goes out to all the families who face this type of crisis.”

  Those words would be of little consolation to another family that was about to be dragged into the crisis, in a far harsher way.

  Rather than use his time under confinement to step back from his situation and take pause, Kiki dived right back into the game. On the outside, he was quiet, repentant even. But beneath that doleful facade, Kiki was plotting. Amazingly, he continued to oversee the UPS scheme, this time from his home on Hallmark Drive—and presumably because he was hurting for money. He stayed in close contact with Ernest “E” Watkins, who handled the shipments on the Atlanta end through his UPS insider, and with Eric “Mookie” Rivera, who’d flown back and forth from L.A. with him. Mookie had grown fond of Kiki. He had sympathy for his situation. The two talked often on the phone (Kiki using a prepaid cell, of course), more like friends than drug associates.

  Kiki complained to Mookie that J-Rock wasn’t helping out with his legal expenses as much as Kiki had hoped, and Mookie thought that was highly unfair. Kiki and Mookie had helped J-Rock make tens of millions of dollars. Yet those directly under J-Rock saw nowhere near that kind of money. Paying some attorney fees was the least J-Rock could do. Fueled by the injustice of it, Kiki hatched another scheme—this time behind J-Rock’s back. Mookie wanted to help, so Kiki asked him to arrange a flight on a private jet from Atlanta to L.A., and to get to Atlanta as soon as possible. It would be hard, Mookie said, because he was still under J-Rock’s command in California, and J-Rock watches everyone and everything so closely. But somehow, he said, he’d swing it.

  One night in the summer of 2004, Mookie made good on his promise. He arrived at the house on Hallmark Drive and stayed the night with Kiki. Ernest, the guy with the UPS connection, joined them the following afternoon. The three men sat in the house, counting and packing stacks upon stacks of cash. With that task out of the way, the operation was solely in Mookie’s and Ernest’s hands.

  Mookie had arranged for a jet to meet them at a small private airport in Atlanta, and Ernest had called for a car to take them there—along with the suitcases filled with money. They flew the cash to L.A., where Mookie’s work was done. Ernest then took the money, bought a decent-sized cocaine package, and shipped it to Atlanta using the UPS method. He’d done it plenty of times before, but this occasion would be different. This time, the drugs belonged to Kiki, not J-Rock. Kiki would see the bulk of the profit. J-Rock wouldn’t even know about it.

  But Kiki did confide in J-Rock about other matters. Chief among them was Kiki’s mounting distrust of Hack. Kiki couldn’t shake the notion that Hack was a threat. And Kiki was beginning to suspect that Hack was a threat to J-Rock, too. Over the years, Hack’s dealings with J-Rock had been minimal. He wasn’t high up enough in the organization to interact with the boss. But once, when Scott and Kiki were out of town, they’d asked Hack to bring J-Rock some drug money they owed him. Hack handed over the cash to J-Rock himself. That was the extent of the connection between J-Rock and Hack, but it was enough to directly implicate J-Rock in the drug trade. And Kiki kept harping on it. He said that if J-Rock didn’t want his name tacked onto the indictment, something had to give.

  To Katie Carter, Hack came across as a very nice young man. She first met him during a trip to Atlanta in 2003. He was clean-cut and clearly crazy about her daughter, Misty. It was easy to see why. Misty was a pretty girl. She had wide, sparkling eyes. A shiny black bob framed her oval-shaped face. And according to her daddy, Misty had a million-dollar smile. She was a little naïve but deeply kind—and, when it came to her boyfriend, deeply in love.

  She was spoiled, too, and Katie Carter is quick to admit it. As an only child, Misty consumed all her parents’ attention. When she graduated from Spelman, the Carters bought her a townhome on Atlanta’s trendy Highland Avenue. They paid for her car, her clothes, and whatever else Misty could possibly need. To the Carters, it was worth it. She was a good daughter.

  When Katie first met her daughter’s boyfriend, he picked them up at Misty’s place and took them to breakfast, then to his place of work. Katie could tell he was proud of the business. And she herself was impressed. 404 Motorsports was a high-end operation. Even with a mechanic working on a car in the back of the showroom, the entire place was spotless, Katie recalled, just like a freshly mopped kitchen floor.

  At first, Katie thought Hack was one of the dealership’s owners. But she soon realized he only worked for them. Misty mentioned one of the owners, Scott, to her mother in passing. She boasted that he hobnobbed with the city’s elite and played golf with genuine sports stars.

  Hack and his friends seemed to be good people. But a couple things about him bothered Katie. One, Hack was so much older than Misty—a full ten years. Katie Carter also began to notice how often Hack went out of town. “Misty, where’s Hack going?” Katie asked her daughter over the phone one day. “Why is he always going to South Carolina? Did you ask him?’”

  “Yes,” Misty answered, exasperated. “I asked him.”

  “What did he say?”

  “He said some things are better that you not know.”

  Misty didn’t tell her parents that her boyfriend had been arrested. But Katie would soon suspect her daughter was keeping something from them. Misty wouldn’t have wanted her parents to know, of course, because they’d have insisted she come home, to Fayetteville. Misty wanted to stay in Atlanta, to support Hack.

  Weeks later, in the summer of 2004, the Carter family went to San Diego. Paul Carter, a vascular surgeon, had a medical conference to attend, and his wife and daughter wanted to tag along. Katie took the opportunity to press her daughter for more info on her boyfriend’s frequent trips.

  “He doesn’t say anything about it,” Misty insisted.

  “Well, you need to know,” her mother said. “He’s probably going to see another woman. He could have a wife somewhere. You don’t know. You just don’t know.”

  The questions didn’t seem to bother Misty. Throughout the trip, in fact, she remained upbeat. And as always, she was disappointed when she and her parents had to part ways. On their way home, Paul and Katie were on a separate flight from their daughter, though they did have a short layover in Atlanta before heading on to Raleigh. Misty’s flight arrived in Atlanta not long before her parents’, and she ran to their terminal to give them yet another good-bye.

  Over the next few weeks, Misty spent a lot of time on the phone, chatting with her mother. That was the norm. A few years earlier, Misty had insisted that Katie buy a cell phone. Misty had grown frustrated when, time after time, she would call her mother at her father’s medical practice, where Katie worked, too, only to find her out on an errand. Misty was the type who wanted to check in with her mother about everything: the fact that she was going across the street for ice cream, the property she was interested in renting to open a men’s spa (the Carters wanted to help their daughter start her own business), the furniture she was considering for her town house, and whatever else happened to cross her mind.

  One day in September 2004, Katie spoke with her daughter no fewer th
an four times. During the last call, Misty mentioned that she and Hack were staying in that evening. And so, unlike those nights when Misty went out with her girlfriends, Katie didn’t worry. She didn’t go through the ritual that mothers often endure, waking in the middle of the night to wonder if her only child was okay. She didn’t sit up in bed and glance at the clock. She didn’t stare at the ceiling and ask herself whether she knew for sure that her daughter was safe. On that night, Misty was home.

  Though Kiki kept Scott apprised of just about everything going on with him, he didn’t say much about the gun. Only that it came in such a nice case. Ernest, a gun collector and enthusiast, had gotten it for him—Ernest who’d been so integral to Kiki’s UPS scheme. Anyway, Kiki didn’t keep the gun for long. He told Scott he passed it along to J-Rock. He said J-Rock was going to take care of this.

  At first, Kiki had the audacity to ask Scott to handle it. Scott balked. Hack was like a brother to him, he’d known him for that long. No way, Scott told him. He didn’t want any part of it. Eventually, Kiki backed off. And Scott was able to put it out of his mind—until September 4, 2004.

  Police would speculate that at least three people were involved in the incident that occurred in those early morning hours, at an upscale town house off Highland Avenue. One of the men, investigators believed, waited in the car. It appeared that two others hopped the iron fence that separated the sidewalk from the buildings’ manicured grounds. They hurried noiselessly across the damp grass, unseen in the hushed predawn. They kicked in the door of one of the units and bounded up the stairs, toward the master bedroom. They left nothing to chance. Hack and Misty both were shot in the head.

  As the killers rushed back to the getaway car, they most likely believed that they’d left behind a pristine crime scene. The gun wasn’t theirs, and it would soon disappear. There were no fingerprints left behind, no shoe imprints, no fibers—no forensic evidence that could link them to the murder of Ulysses Hackett and Misty Carter.

  What they didn’t take into account was that someone in the complex saw them run. The person got a good enough glimpse—at one of the men, at least—to remember his face. The witness later would point to a picture in a photographic lineup and unequivocally state that the man in the photo was the one who sprinted from the town house after the shots rang out.

  The sun already had risen in Atlanta when Scott King was shaken from sleep and forced to face the California darkness. Kiki knew the hour was crazy, but he had to call right away. His explanation was succinct. He would get back to Scott later with the details, another of those what-to-do-next conversations that he and Scott often had. But in the meantime, he thought Scott ought to know: “Stupid and the girl are dead.”

  SIX SPACE MOUNTAIN

  If they want O, they comin’ to get O.

  —OMARI “O-DOG” McCREE

  On the evening of October 22, 2004, BMF’s lieutenants were scrambling. Regardless of whether they were disturbed by—or even clued into—what had gone down a few weeks earlier at the town house off Highland Avenue, they were faced at the moment with a more pressing matter. Meech needed a ride. The problem was, he needed a ride from the DeKalb County jail. No one wanted to show up at the lockdown in a sparkling new Porsche or late-model Benz. That would send the wrong message. But one of them needed to get the boss out, fast. And they definitely needed to figure out what had landed him there in the first place.

  Meech’s go-to girl, Yogi—the woman through whom most of his administrative orders passed—was hoping to take control of the situation.

  “I need a low-ass-key car,” Yogi mused, her husky voice taking on a softer tone. “Like a Honda.”

  Omari “O-Dog” McCree, clearly one of Meech’s favorite soldiers, was quick to offer his services to Yogi. “What time you have to pick him up? ’Cause I might could, um, get a—”

  She didn’t let him finish. “See, I just talked to the court officer, so the paperwork is goin’ in as we speak.” Yogi was always bailing people out, taking care of business, looking out for the Family. That was her job. In fact, she’d warned Omari earlier that day that he needed to take his new car home and park it. He couldn’t be doing any extra driving, not in a $100,000 Porsche. According to Yogi, Vince Dim-mock, an attorney working several of the Family’s cases, advised that all those new cars doubled as big, fat targets on wheels. “Vince said anything we’re drivin’ without a license tag on it, they’re pullin’ it,” she’d told Omari earlier that day. Then Yogi personalized it—in a way that must have made Omari cringe. “They know who you are,” she’d told him. “You got pendin’ shit. You know, it ain’t even worth it, ridin’ around or whatever-whatever.”

  “All right,” Omari had conceded.

  “So take it in, sit it down.”

  “All right.”

  Now, however, several hours later, it was Yogi who was at a loss for a vehicle. She couldn’t drive her new Benz to the jail to get Meech, but what else could she do? Nobody seemed to have a modest ride these days. “What I need is a fuckin’ rental,” she told Omari.

  But compared with everything else going on, her car frustrations were a minor inconvenience. More disturbing was the fact that someone seemed to be keeping too close an eye on the Family. The rumor was that Omari was to blame. He and his friend Jeffery Leahr—the two were so close, most people thought they were brothers—were the prime suspects in a quadruple shooting at a nightclub the week before. Nobody had been killed, and the incident quickly blew over in the local press. But the gun battle at the Atrium, one of the city’s veteran hip-hop clubs, was arousing suspicion in BMF circles. Were the cops tailing Omari and Jeffery with the hope of charging them with the shootings—or were they biding their time in an attempt to gain wider insight into the organization? Was the Atrium incident somehow responsible for Meech getting nabbed on bunk charges—or was that just a fluke? Never mind that Meech seemed to have a soft spot for O-Dog, perhaps seeing something of himself in the rebellious young tough who rose up from the corners of Boulevard to bona fide baller status. Getting your boss, even a sympathetic one, in trouble because of your own heat? Not good.

  The barrage of phone calls Omari was fielding wasn’t exactly encouraging, either. The streets were talking, and the talk was not casting him in a positive light. About an hour after Omari hung up with Yogi, his phone rang again.

  “Oh, I just callin’ to check on you, make sure you was all right,” a sweet-voiced girl gushed. “I had heard some stuff. I said, ‘Let me call him.’”

  “Yeah, I been hearin’ shit, too. What you heard?”

  “Huh? Uh, somethin’ ’bout some shootin’ shit at Atrium. And, um, I guess it’s like, they got him at the club or something.”

  “They what?”

  “They was sayin’ they had got Meechie at the club,” the girl said.

  Two days earlier, in the predawn hours of October 20, 2004, DeKalb County police had set up a roadblock outside a strip club called Pin Ups on Ponce de Leon Avenue, a few miles east of Atlanta’s city limits. The department claimed that the incident at the Atrium, as well as another recent shoot-out at a strip club called Jazzy T’s, warranted a “safety checkpoint” at the Pin Ups intersection—though it wasn’t particularly close to the site of either shooting.

  Shortly before 5 A.M., the roadblock snared a Dodge Magnum that was leaving the club. Officers claimed the car smelled suspiciously of weed. They arrested the driver, Hamza Hewitt, who was once JayZ’s bodyguard and was now believed to be Meech’s, and both passengers. (Charges against Hewitt were later dismissed.) One of the passengers gave the name Ricardo Santos. At the station, Santos was placed in an empty interview room. Shortly after 9 A.M., a detective passed by, glanced through the small observation window embedded in the door, and caught sight of something that stopped him in his tracks: The man, who’d been strolling back and forth across the interrogation room’s floor, suddenly paused—and with an air of nonchalance hanging over him, he pissed on the wall.

&nbs
p; After a while, the man finally agreed to speak to investigators. Almost immediately, he let slip his real name; an officer asked if his last name might be Flenory, and he corrected the pronunciation. Regardless, one of the cops already had recognized him as Big Meech. After all, his pictures had been all over the papers the year before, when he’d been arrested for the Buckhead double-homicide.

  By the time of the Pin Ups roadblock, the Buckhead case had gone stale, and most of the conditions of Meech’s bond had been lifted. And so DeKalb County didn’t have much to pin on Meech following his arrest. They couldn’t get him for bond violation, because there was nothing left to violate. After charging him with carrying false identification and interference with government property (“interfering” with the wall of the interrogation room), the county granted him a thirty-thousand-dollar bond. Two days later, the Family was readying to spring him—and to get to the bottom of what was going on.

  Meech had been locked up for nearly three days when, shortly after midnight on October 23, 2004, Yogi called Omari with marching orders: “Your boss said, have your ass at the Elevator.”

  “He act like I did something wrong,” Omari laughed, a trace of uneasiness in his voice. “But all right.”