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

by Shalhoup, Mara

  Rolando’s next stop was Greenville, South Carolina. He met with deputy U.S. marshal John Bridge, who gave him a full briefing of the government’s attempts to track down both Kiki and Scott King. John Bridge’s investigation thus far had revealed that Kiki and Scott might be in Las Vegas or L.A. Both men had traveled there frequently in the past, booking trips through an agency called Outbound Travel, out of San Leandro, California. He also mentioned that Scott and Kiki had ties to several NBA players and were acquainted with Charles Barkley and Michael Jordan, the latter of whom already had been interviewed by the U.S. Marshals Service.

  During a second meeting with John Bridge, Rolando was told that the phone number listed in connection to the Ferrari, like Outbound Travel, also had a San Leandro address. The number no longer was in service, but that didn’t matter. Rolando had heard enough to convince him that a trip to California was in order. He boarded a flight to L.A. the following morning.

  Once he landed, Rolando immediately headed to the address listed on the Ferrari’s registration, a down-and-out apartment complex in the thick of the San Fernando Valley. The property manager said the woman who lived in the apartment drove a Ford pickup, not a Ferrari. He also told Rolando that her rent was subsidized, meaning she had to provide him with bank statements. And it just so happened that the apartment manager recalled some strange activity on one of those statements, from back in November 2004. During that month—and mere days after Kiki went on the run—the woman’s bank statement included several airline tickets, a bunch of prepaid cell phones, and the deposit of a six-thousand-dollar check.

  Later that day, Rolando watched as the woman and a young child walked out of her apartment and took off in the Ford truck. Rolando tried to keep up with her, but lost the tail somewhere in Pacoima.

  Before the day was over, Rolando stopped by a post office in the Valley where a money order had been issued back in December, to make a payment on the Ferrari. He chatted up the clerk who had issued the money order, and she said she remembered the man who purchased it. Rolando showed her a picture of Kiki. Yep, she said, that’s him. Another clerk piped up that she had seen Kiki in the post office even more recently, definitely within the past month. Rolando then stopped by another post office that had issued a money order used to make a Ferrari payment. The clerk there said that both Scott and Kiki were frequent customers. She remembered them well—after all, two men standing six-foot-five and dressed to the nines are hard to forget.

  Ten days passed before Rolando caught his next big break. He went back to the apartment complex in Sylmar, to try his luck again with the woman who drove the pickup. This time, she emerged from her apartment, climbed into the Ford, and took off. Rolando followed her as she wound through several side streets, toward Ventura Boulevard. He lost her in a neighborhood just south of Ventura, and then caught up with her again. Rolando glimpsed her pickup pulling out of a long winding driveway on Libbit Avenue. The driveway led to a three-story house with a three-car garage and a pool. There was a silver Infiniti SUV and a pair of black and white Land Rovers parked outside. Little did Rolando know that he had just stumbled upon J-Rock’s First Base.

  Two days later, Rolando went to talk to the manager of the dealership where the Ferrari had been leased. (He would have gone sooner, but the manager had been out of town.) Rolando asked who had put the money down for the Ferrari, because surely it couldn’t have been the woman whose name was on the lease. The manager said no, it wasn’t her. Rather, a man named Eric Rivera had written the $92,000 down payment check. Rolando passed Mookie’s info on to deputy U.S. marshal John Bridge, back in Greenville.

  The following day, Rolando hit up Outbound Travel. The owner, who explained that his company was the exclusive travel agency of the NBA, said he knew Scott and Kiki and had booked tickets for them in the past. But it had been a year since their last trip. He also said that he’d heard from Charles Barkley that the two men were now fugitives.

  Over the next month, Rolando pursued whatever seemingly small lead had been left dangling. He subpoenaed bank records that would show who’d written the six-thousand-dollar check that the woman from the Sylmar apartment complex had deposited back in November. He learned that the woman’s cell phone records showed she’d been traveling on a regular basis between California and Atlanta. He discovered that the silver Infiniti parked in the driveway of the house on Libbit Avenue house a few days back was registered to Eric “Mookie” Rivera’s sister. He obtained a picture of Mookie, a mug shot from a past arrest out of Miami. Mookie’s bond file listed a Beverly Hills address. Rolando checked out the address, which was a mail drop. An employee there recognized the photo of Mookie, but the P.O. box itself was registered to a woman who lived in an apartment on Riverton Avenue, in Studio City. Rolando went there, too, and talked to the apartment manager. The manager didn’t recognize Mookie’s photo. But Rolando, just to be safe, handed him his card and said that if Mookie happened to come by, please give him a call.

  What Rolando really needed, though, was to figure out how to keep a closer watch on the Libbit Avenue house. It belonged, on paper, to a Massachusetts man who had purchased it the year before for $1.8 million. But something wasn’t adding up.

  Rolando called deputy marshal John Bridge on May 13, 2005, and told him that he wanted to put together a high-tech system of surveillance cameras that could keep an eye on Libbit in real time. That way, Rolando could watch the house from any location, at any hour—and from several angles simultaneously. The equipment, he said, would take three weeks to assemble. But he felt it would be worth it. Every clue was pointing toward the three men—Kiki, Scott, and Mookie—hovering around the same part of L.A. And the multimillion-dollar home on Libbit seemed to be the hub. The house also appeared to be consistent with a drug kingpin’s pad. There were fancy cars out front—and not-so-fancy cars, including the Sylmar woman’s pickup, were regularly stopping by. There was, on paper, an out-of-state owner, and that owner didn’t live there. There also was the physical layout of the property itself. The house, like so many other drug-lord domiciles, was very, very hard to surveil.

  John Bridge told Rolando he’d do whatever he could to help. Unbeknownst to him, however, the answer to the Libbit Avenue mystery was practically right in front of him. The man who actually lived in the Libbit house was, at that very moment, in Atlanta on business—and had been questioned two days before by Bridge’s fellow marshals. In fact, J-Rock and some of his associates had landed themselves in a rather treacherous confrontation with both the U.S. Marshals Service and the local police.

  For the past eight months, a federal manhunt had been under way for a St. Louis fugitive named Deron “Wonnie” Gatling. Wonnie (or “Magic,” as he also was known) was the leader of a midsized BMF hub in Missouri, and thanks to an aggressive investigation in that city, several midlevel BMF members, Wonnie included, had been indicted in federal court back in September. (The indictment had brought much grief to Yogi, who had complained about it to Omari during one of their many wiretapped conversations.)

  Finally, on May 11, 2005, U.S. marshals got a tip that Wonnie was hiding out at his girlfriend’s house in a northeast Atlanta suburb called Chamblee. Shortly after 2 P.M. that afternoon, a team of marshals pulled up to the house, on Anastasia Lane, and knocked on the door. The man who answered wouldn’t let the marshals inside. Instead, he said he’d speak with the homeowner, and he turned around and headed upstairs. He didn’t return, despite the marshals’ repeated knocking.

  The team then split up. A few of them walked around back, to see what they might find. Behind the house, they peeked through a window and saw four men in the basement. The marshals called for the men to come outside. They did, and as they opened the door, a strong scent of marijuana followed them. The men then insisted to the marshals that they were the only people in the house.

  At that point, the team out front decided to head inside the home. At the top of the stairs, the man who’d answered the door reappeared—and con
tradicted the men who’d just emerged from the basement. From the landing, he told the marshals that the homeowner (Wonnie’s girlfriend) was the only other person inside. Investigators called for her, and she, too, appeared at the top of the stairway.

  “There’s no one else here,” she claimed.

  The marshals decided to check it out for themselves. As they headed up the stairs and down the hallway, they noticed a .45 lying in the master bedroom. From there, they climbed into the attic—where they noticed footprints in the insulation, and noises coming from the far corner.

  Behind the wall paneling, hidden beneath a layer of insulation, the marshals found their fugitive. Wonnie was finally in custody. But the sting didn’t end there. After discovering Wonnie, the marshals called DeKalb County police for backup. Several units pulled up to Anastasia Lane—and as the DeKalb officers walked around back, to meet the other team of marshals that was still gathered there, bullets starting whizzing by.

  At least seven rounds were fired, from somewhere beyond the fence at the edge of the property. The bullets struck the house within feet of where the officers and the marshals were standing.

  After pulling Wonnie from behind the insulation—and then hearing the shots outside—the marshals grabbed his phone. They saw that he had dialed a number while he was hidden back there, not long before the shooting started. The marshals asked him whom he called.

  “An uncle in St. Louis,” Wonnie said.

  “What’s your uncle’s name?” they asked.

  He wouldn’t answer.

  Investigators quickly pulled Wonnie’s phone records and saw that he’d dialed a local cell phone. And the phone, according to cell-tower-mapping technology, was located not in St. Louis but in a neighboring Atlanta suburb, Dunwoody. The agents were able to determine that the number Wonnie called immediately called a third number—a cell phone that, the technology revealed, had been drifting around downtown Atlanta. And as soon as that third number got the call, both phones—that one and the one Wonnie himself had called—started moving toward the house on Anastasia Lane, the cell towers giving their locations away. In fact, both cell phones were in the immediate vicinity of the house on Anastasia Lane at the exact moment when the agents were fired upon.

  Not long after, both cell phones returned to the Dunwoody location. The mapping technology was able to pinpoint the exact address. It was a house on Spalding Drive. Atlanta DEA agent Jack Harvey, who had immediately joined the investigation into who might have fired on the marshals, was familiar with the house. From his extensive research of the Black Mafia Family, he knew the house was a BMF hangout.

  Shortly after midnight, investigators obtained a search warrant for the house. Before charging inside, however, they set up a surveillance operation to see who might be leaving the house. Less than an hour later, a gray Chrysler 300 fell into the trap. The Chrysler was pulled over. The driver, Michael “Playboy” Harris, had been arrested four years earlier for the murder of Raul Rosales during the NBA All-Stars game in D.C. (The charges, however, were later dropped.) Jerry “J-Rock” Davis was in the Chrysler’s passenger seat.

  The investigators confiscated both men’s cell phones. They wanted to compare their numbers to the two numbers believed to be involved in the attack that afternoon. It turned out that the number Wonnie had called while hiding behind the insulation was J-Rock’s.

  J-Rock told the investigators that he and Playboy were temporarily staying at the Dunwoody house. He also admitted that he received Wonnie’s distress call earlier that day. But he denied making any other call to assist his friend. After that, he shut his mouth.

  Once it became clear that they’d be coaxing no additional info from J-Rock or Playboy, investigators cuffed both men. By then, they had moved forward with the search warrant.

  The investigators forced their way through the front door of the house on Spalding Drive, only to find that there was no one inside. It seemed, however, that the occupants had just recently left, and that they left in a hurry. There were six cars in the driveway, an impossibly strong scent of weed in the living area, and guns and cash lying all over the place. One of those guns, ballistics tests would later prove, was the one used to fire on the marshals. And in one of the bedrooms, investigators found the cell phone that J-Rock had called after Wonnie called him, presumably to request the hit.

  While the search warrant was being carried out, investigators read J-Rock his rights. But there wasn’t enough to hold him for good. They detained him for a total of nine hours, after which he was not charged with any crime. The following morning, J-Rock was released.

  EIGHT STAY STRAPPED

  All of a sudden I feel a pop, and fall to the ground.

  —HENRY “POOKIE LOC” CLARK

  Big Meech was done with Atlanta. Back in October of 2005, after he’d given a fake name at a roadblock outside the strip club Pin Ups, he was warned by the local cops to stay out of DeKalb County. A month later and one county over, authorities raided the Buckhead house where they believed Meech lived, on Paran Place. Meech was in Miami by the time the search warrant was executed on Space Mountain—a search that, to him, seemed way out of line. At that point, he decided he’d had enough.

  There were certain rules to the game, even on the other side of the law. And the Space Mountain raid seemed to him to be a signal that authorities in Georgia weren’t playing fair. No investigator ever saw him at that house. There was nothing on paper that tied him to it. Basically, he told himself, they were just operating on the assumption that he lived there. Meech believed the Space Mountain search warrant was filled with such assumptions. To him, the investigator who drafted the warrant crossed the line when he quoted an article from hip-hop magazine the Source. In the article, Meech stated that his crew didn’t rob, steal, or kill for their money. The investigator took that to be an admission of sorts. “Although Flenory denied killing people for money,” the investigator wrote in the warrant, “he did not claim that they do not commit murder.”

  If they wanted him so bad, Meech wondered, why didn’t they just keep him in jail after the roadblock arrest at Pin Ups? Why not save themselves the trouble of trying to shadow his every move? Oh, yeah, he told himself. They don’t have shit.

  In Atlanta, Meech felt he’d never be able to live down the hype. The Chaos killings had seen to that. It was as if once he stepped into the club parking lot that night in 2003, he’d crossed into an inverted reality. The deaths of Wolf and Riz followed him everywhere. He’d never be the guy he was just five minutes before. He’d been branded a murderer, and the scar was permanent. Never mind that he’d been shot that night, too—shot from behind (literally in the behind). Never mind that no indictment was ever filed. From that point on, everywhere he went in the city, Meech was the guy who killed Wolf, despite the fact that he swears he wasn’t.

  Even the billboards, which were an attempt, however indiscreet, to restore his reputation, had been misconstrued. He put them up to make a point: I’m a businessman, with a legitimate product to promote—and I’m not going to back down. They were intended as damage control. After all, what killer would put his face on a billboard? For that matter, what drug dealer would advertise his merchandise in such a place? BMF Entertainment was a record label, pure and simple, and that’s what the billboards were trying to say.

  Never mind, though. He’d say it in Miami.

  Miami was a friendlier place, a place where the authorities didn’t seem so interested in him, and that’s where he intended to stay. He’d still have to go back and forth between the cities, for business. But for pleasure, Miami would be home. Sheltered in his South Beach mansion and encouraged by the locals to come out and party, Miami was easy. Miami was perfect weather and glitzier clubs and more beautiful women than you could stand around and count. Atlanta, on the other hand, was aggressive roadblocks and after-dark search warrants and his name in the paper for all the wrong reasons.

  In Miami, Meech would deliver his message not through the use of
billboards but with another documentary-style video, a follow-up to the 2004 DVD chronicling the making of Bleu DaVinci. Meech invited DVD magazine Smack to come down to Miami and check out BMF Entertainment in action. He hoped that what the film crew captured would resonate throughout the industry, all the way to the big-time record execs who Meech believed could validate him. Meech made the video exclusively for them, to get their attention and, ideally, some of the money they’re known to invest in smaller, up-and-coming labels.

  The docu-video was split into four chapters, each named for one of BMF Entertainment’s top players: “Meech,” “J-Bo,” “Ill,” and “Bleu.” Miami couldn’t have been a more perfect setting. The “Ill” chapter showed all four men milling around a reception in an all-white, lofty space in South Beach. Dressed identically in black cargo shirts over black tees, with black bandannas tied around their heads (with the exception of J-Bo, whose bald head gleamed unobstructed) and huge sparkling chains hanging from their necks, the four of them hobnobbed with some official-looking types. A white-haired man in a dark suit, his skin so flushed that it had assumed a hue not far from that of his ruby-red tie, appeared to be hosting the soiree. The mood in the room was celebratory, if a bit awkward. Ill, who is short, tough, and more boyish than the other BMF attendees, motioned to the corner and said in a measured and breathless voice, “That’s the mayor over there.” Miami Mayor Manny Diaz, dressed in jeans and a white linen shirt unbuttoned at the neck, waved in recognition.

  “We appreciate Miami,” Ill said, turning back to the camera. “We appreciate the hospitality. …”

  Meech, standing just to Ill’s right, smacked the gum he was chewing and grinned.

  Before Ill could continue what he was saying, the guy in the suit ambled up from behind him and placed both hands on Ill’s shoulders. He hovered over him for a second, then leaned in.