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

by Shalhoup, Mara

  “It’s looking good right now,” Kiki told him.

  “What’s goin’ on?” Mookie asked.

  “The one guy that could say anything about me got murdered,” Kiki said casually, as if citing some obscure case law that worked to his advantage. “The guy is gone.”

  At that point, Mookie didn’t want to hear any more. And for a while, he didn’t.

  He’d be seeing a lot more of Kiki, though. On October 29, 2004—four days before jury selection was scheduled to begin in Kiki’s federal drug trial—his attorney requested that Kiki be allowed to leave his home to attend a meeting. The meeting would take place at the attorney’s downtown law office, a thirty-minute drive from East Cobb. The attorney and client had much to discuss in preparation of the trial. The attorney thought an exception to Kiki’s house arrest was warranted. As such, the request to the U.S. Probation Office was granted.

  But the meeting never happened. After Kiki left his house that day, he made a run for it. He cut off his electric ankle monitor and hit the road. Ernest Watkins, his associate with the inside man at UPS, rented him a car. From the highway, driving west from Georgia toward Texas, Kiki called Scott. He told him he was going to catch a plane from Dallas to Burbank, and that he’d need a ride once he landed in California. Scott said he’d be waiting.

  Sure enough, Kiki took a cab from Burbank to Van Nuys, at which point Scott picked him up and brought him to his place. The following day, they met with their boss, J-Rock, who offered to put Kiki up at the stash house way out in the burbs, the one on Oso Avenue called Third Base. As long as Kiki didn’t mind keeping the company of several hundred kilos of cocaine and a veritable arsenal of guns, the arrangement would work out just fine.

  More than a week passed before the bonding company that had sprung Kiki found out that he was now a fugitive. Free at Last didn’t get a call from the U.S. Marshals Service, or from any government agency, for that matter. Instead, one of its employees happened to be watching the local news. (Had the employee been reading the newspaper instead, Free at Last would still be in the dark; the story of Kiki’s flight didn’t even make the paper.) The newscaster was saying that the mayor of Atlanta’s son-in-law had skipped bond on major drug trafficking charges and was on the lam. That meant the bonding company, because it hadn’t secured any real collateral on the bond, such as Kai and Kiki’s home, stood a good chance of losing $300,000—should Kiki remain a fugitive.

  Back when the bond was posted, Kai Franklin Graham entered a contract with Free at Last stating she’d pay the full $300,000 in the event that her husband was to flee. But wrenching that kind of money from someone was sure to initiate a lengthy—and costly—legal battle. And despite the fact that Kai had provided the bonding company with a financial statement outlining her ability to repay the bond in the event of a situation like this, that didn’t mean she actually had the money. In fact, her father’s airport concessions business, where she’d been employed for ten years, had tanked. She didn’t even have a job.

  Free at Last didn’t want to count on Kai to come up with the money she owed. Nor did the company want to leave the task of finding Kiki up to law enforcement alone. So Free at Last’s owners decided to take matters into their own hands. They hired an Atlanta bounty hunter, Jean Gai, to track down any possible leads that could result in the apprehension and arrest of Tremayne “Kiki” Graham.

  Kiki was willing to turn his back on many things: his trial on federal cocaine charges, his home and his business, his third-of-a-million-dollar bond, and his reputation as a repentant former drug dealer who feared for his life. But there were other things Kiki couldn’t give up. He refused to abandon his young son, born four years earlier of a previous relationship. And he could not cut all ties to his wife.

  Whether or not Kiki maintained contact with Kai would be a subject of dispute. Scott would later claim that Kiki and Kai spoke regularly on a prepaid cell that was dubbed “the Kai phone”—an allegation Kai vigorously denied. Scott said he spent enough time with Kiki over at the Oso Avenue stash house to conclude that Kiki had certain obligations to his wife that he intended to uphold, including helping her pay the five-thousand-dollar monthly mortgage on their home. According to Scott, Kiki figured out a way to funnel the cash to Kai, after which she would have to be careful how she handled it; the wife of a federal fugitive couldn’t just deposit tens of thousands of dollars, origin undocumented, into her bank account—not without attracting attention.

  Scott also claimed that Kiki needed to send money to Kai for the two Porsche SUVs that were in her name, the ones that Kiki had given to Terry Flenory as a return on his 404 Motorsports investment. It wouldn’t be wise to default on those loans. That could put Terry at risk, and Kiki had enough trouble as it was.

  According to Scott, Terry might even have spoken with J-Rock about the murders of Misty and Hack. The way Scott described it—a version of events allegedly relayed to him by Kiki, who Scott claimed had witnessed the meeting—J-Rock stopped by the White House some time after the killings. During the visit, J-Rock allegedly boasted to Terry that there was nothing to worry about with Hack anymore. J-Rock told Terry that he “had took care of it,” Scott claimed.

  Now that Kiki was out in California, with debts mounting back home, he needed to rake in some cash. The obvious way to accomplish that was to do what he’d always done best. Unfortunately, Ernest Watkins, who was integral to Kiki’s UPS scheme, had called it quits. Ernest was beginning to think that Kiki was the only one who was ever going to get rich off that plan. It just wasn’t worth it to him anymore. (Ernest’s complaint was nearly identical to Kiki’s grievance, a few months earlier, that J-Rock was seeing the windfall of everyone else’s hard work.)

  Kiki and Scott’s fallback plan was to transport the drugs out East, and the drug proceeds back West, using private jets. For that, Scott and Kiki needed Mookie, who’d already proved himself highly capable of the task. And Mookie was more than game. In fact, he needed Kiki as much as Kiki needed him.

  A few days after Kiki cut his ankle bracelet and fled, Mookie suffered a falling out with J-Rock. It started when Mookie helped arrange a deal by which J-Rock gave one of Mookie’s acquaintances thirty thousand dollars for a couple of cars. But the cars never materialized, and J-Rock held Mookie responsible. Mookie got the feeling that J-Rock wanted the guy killed and that Mookie should be the one to off him. Mookie wasn’t interested in that, though. He knew that killing the guy would come back to him one way or another. So he kept avoiding the situation until, finally, J-Rock told Mookie that he’d waited too long. Mookie was forced out of J-Rock’s crew—and he now owed J-Rock the thirty grand.

  Kiki witnessed J-Rock’s excommunication of Mookie. And since Mookie already had been running drug money for Kiki on the sly, they figured they might as well make it official. Mookie would work for Kiki, and Kiki would pay him well enough that he’d eventually be able to pay J-Rock back.

  Over the next several months, Mookie flew on private jets back and forth from L.A. to Atlanta no less than half a dozen times. He ran multiple kilos of cocaine on the outgoing flight, and tens of thousands of dollars on the return. But that wasn’t all. Mookie also would drive some of the drugs up to Greenville from Atlanta and collect payment for them. And while he was in Atlanta, Mookie would deliver some of the cocaine proceeds to Kiki’s wife.

  During his first trip after Kiki became a fugitive, Mookie flew to Atlanta, then drove to Greenville to pick up fifty thousand dollars that was owed Kiki for a past drug deal. Mookie would later claim that he counted the cash, divided it in half, and dropped off twenty-five thousand dollars for Kai. According to Mookie, Kai wasn’t home at the time that he showed up. So, using the garage door code that Kiki had given him, he went inside the house and left the cash on the stairs. Mookie then taped the other twenty-five thousand dollars to his leg, wrapped an Ace bandage around it, and flew back to California on a commercial jet.

  The second time Mookie allegedly delivered cash
to Kai, Kiki had him give it to her directly, Mookie would later claim. He would describe how he flew to Atlanta, checked into a hotel, and packed a bag with twenty thousand dollars in neatly bundled bills. Kiki then called him and said Kai was on her way to the hotel. Mookie, still on the phone with Kiki, walked down to the lobby and stepped out onto the hotel’s circular driveway. Mookie would allege that Kai promptly pulled up in her Lincoln Navigator. He claimed that he dropped the money-stuffed bag onto the passenger seat of Kai’s car, and she drove off.

  Back in L.A., Mookie and Kiki were arranging yet another drug flight when, in the course of the conversation, Kiki mentioned that he missed his little boy. He asked if, this time around, Mookie would be willing to transport the child as well. Mookie said sure.

  Mookie would later claim that on that trip, after dropping off the cocaine he’d hauled from L.A. and collecting the payment, he met Kai in the parking lot of the Cheesecake Factory restaurant, where she handed over Kiki’s son. Mookie took the boy with him to a private airport in Atlanta. He loaded the child and the cash onto the plane, and accompanied them to L.A. On the flight, he played a Disney DVD for the boy, to occupy him.

  During the child’s visit, Scott stopped by the house on Oso Avenue to see Kiki. He was concerned to find Kiki’s son there. He told Kiki that he needed to “tighten up.”

  “You can’t let the authorities track you through your son,” Scott warned him.

  But Kiki was careful. When it came time for the boy to return home, he allegedly had Mookie escort the child again. This time, however, Mookie and the little boy weren’t in the presence of any drug money. In fact, they took a commercial flight, occupying two first-class seats on the red-eye. Mookie even flew under an alias, Gary Rich. After landing in Atlanta, Mookie would later claim, he and the boy took a car service directly to Kai’s house, where he handed the child over to her. He then got back in the car, returned to the airport, and flew straight back to L.A.

  If Kiki was drawing attention to himself this way, so be it. There’s no point being free if it means cutting all ties to the people you love.

  And anyway, he’d gotten this far without getting caught. Who knew if he ever would?

  For J-Rock, keeping up with his family was far easier. Inside First Base, the three-story house that sat atop a steep L.A. hill, J-Rock lived with his new wife, Tiffany Gloster, their newborn son, another two sons (one from each of their previous relationships), and J-Rock’s niece and nephew. To help care for all the children, J-Rock employed a live-in nanny who drove them to and from school (the Communion Christian Academy of Arts & Sciences). The nanny also helped them with their homework and tutored them on the weekends.

  Things were looking good for J-Rock. His family was happy. His drug business was humming. Even his record label, Bogard Music, was making strides. Bogard recently had signed a manufacturing and distribution deal with WEA Urban, a subsidiary of Warner Music Group. That meant J-Rock’s artists, Oowee chief among them, would be better equipped to sell their albums to a wide national audience. What’s more, J-Rock—at least in connection to the fugitives Scott and Kiki—wasn’t really on the feds’ radar.

  But DEA agents were poking around—not more than three blocks away.

  Over at Terry’s stash house, the one called the Jump, Terry’s crew had assembled one night with a plan: celebrate the boss’s thirty-fifth birthday. It was early January 2005, and Terry’s entourage—which included his trusted Detroit manager, Arnold “A.R.” Boyd, and his second-in-command, Eric “Slim” Bivens—was getting ready to head to a club where a big party was planned. As they were leaving, though, A.R. noticed something unusual. The home’s security cameras, which were tucked away in the bushes surrounding the house, were registering a bunch of activity. It looked as if a team of law enforcement officers was scurrying about. He couldn’t be sure, but there was no point in hanging around to find out. The crew booked it out of there and headed to the club.

  The party was well under way when, all of a sudden, people started scattering. A.R. thought someone might have been shot. But it wasn’t that. It was the feds. They swarmed the party, and they brought Terry’s festivities to an abrupt end. The crew, including Terry, made it out to their cars and took off—rattled but at least not arrested.

  That night, Terry’s crew lay low and, for the most part, steered clear of the Jump. One of them, though, headed back to the house, just around the corner from J-Rock’s, to see if it was safe. He quickly realized that the home had been raided, probably during the party. DEA agents had left the signed warrant inside, listing all the items that had been confiscated: a few drug ledgers from the exercise room, a money counter from the master bedroom and, from the bedroom’s closet, a black duffel bag stuffed with roughly $600,000.

  It was the ultimate fuck-you to Terry, a raid, perfectly timed, to what would have been a day of celebration. The feds didn’t have enough to haul him in, not yet. But with each wiretapped call (of which Terry was still clueless), with each confiscated notebook (there had been others before these, pulled from the White House), and each haul of cash (the latest, at $600,000, wasn’t exactly chump change), the case the feds were assembling grew stronger.

  On January 24, 2005, one month after Kai and Kiki’s third wedding anniversary, Kai Franklin Graham filed for divorce. The divorce papers stated that her husband’s “whereabouts have been unknown” to her since he went on the run in November 2004 and that she “has no manner of contacting” him. The grounds for the divorce, the papers claimed, was “abandonment.”

  A week later, the owners of Free at Last, the bonding company, were growing frantic. If Kiki truly was that far gone, they were in trouble. In Free at Last’s experience, 95 percent of clients show up at court as expected. The remaining 5 percent almost always are caught within 120 days. Kiki was pushing ninety. And at over $300,000, his bond far exceeded the norm.

  The bounty hunter the company had hired, Jean Gai, had turned up a couple of leads, including information that suggested Kiki had rented a Ferrari through an accomplice. But Gai wasn’t exactly close to tracking down Kiki—or, for that matter, the Ferrari. Three days before a February 9, 2005, court hearing during which Free at Last stood a fair chance of being ordered to pay the $300,000 bond in full, the company offered a ten-thousand-dollar reward for information leading to Kiki’s capture. (Earlier that week, incidentally, an anonymous donor offered the same reward for information leading to a conviction in the murders of Misty and Hack.) Free at Last also began to publicly pressure the mayor to take action. The company wanted her to hold her daughter accountable for the debt. “She’s the matriarch of the family,” Jennifer Greene, the company’s co-owner, told the AJC. “I would want [the mayor] to be a mother and encourage her daughter to do what’s right.”

  After the February 9 hearing, Free at Last’s situation was looking even more grim. The company was ordered to pay the court fifty thousand dollars by the end of the month and thirty thousand per month every month thereafter until Graham was captured—or the $300,000 was paid in full. The company, however, still had a binding contract by which they might recover that money from Kai. And Free at Last had every intention of wresting the money from her.

  Yet that would prove even more difficult than previously imagined. A week after Free at Last made its first fifty-thousand-dollar payment, Kai filed for bankruptcy, citing the looming burden of having to pay for the bond her husband skipped out on, as well as the expense of the two Porsches that were in her name. In court papers, she admitted that she’d been a “straw purchaser” for the Porsches. She stated that she signed the paperwork on the vehicles to help her husband, and that she neither saw the pair of $100,000 cars nor had any idea where they might be.

  The bankruptcy filing also described how Kai’s “estranged husband” took all the couple’s portable assets with him, including most of Kai’s diamond jewelry. “His whereabouts,” the filing said, “are still unknown.” The suggestion was that Kai was destitute.
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  As for Kai’s belongings, she claimed to have $250 on hand, $200 in checking, $1,000 in savings, $1,000 worth of clothes, and $10,000 in jewelry. She stated that she was subsisting on a $2,000 monthly handout from her parents—an amount that wouldn’t even cover half her mortgage.

  Now, Free at Last faced more pressure than ever to capture Kiki. If Kai’s bankruptcy was approved, and if Kiki wasn’t caught, the small family-run company would have a hard time recovering from the $300,000 hit.

  The day after Kai initiated bankruptcy proceedings, Free at Last took what it believed was the next logical step—and perhaps its last gasp. Jean Gai was a fine investigator, but considering what was at stake, Free at Last needed to up the ante. The company hired Rolando Betancourt, who was considered one of the best bounty hunters in the country. His fee was forty-five thousand dollars, plus expenses. And Free at Last was willing to make that investment.

  As soon as Free at Last handed over the Kiki file to Rolando, on March 8, 2005, he went to work. The most promising lead was the 2004 Ferrari Spider that Kiki supposedly was driving. Chase Manhattan was the lien holder on the vehicle, which had been leased in California. The last payment had been made on January 25, 2005.

  Rolando’s first stop was Kiki’s last known address—the East Cobb home that he had shared with Kai. At the very least, Rolando wanted to check out the vehicles that were coming and going. But all he saw was Kai’s Lincoln Navigator. Rolando talked to the neighbors. No one had seen anything like a Ferrari.

  Three days later, Rolando got a call from Free at Last’s attorney. She told him that the Ferrari was registered to an address in Sylmar, California. Running a check on the address, Rolando found that the income levels in the neighborhood weren’t exactly consistent with $150,000 Italian sports cars.