“[If] you just happen to snatch that muthafucka off his neck …”
“I’m gonna shoot you the ten-stack, man.”
As if the ten-thousand-dollar bounty wasn’t obvious enough, the title of the track, “Stay Strapped,” doubled as a threat. If Gucci wasn’t already carrying a gun, he ought to start.
Gucci was quick to fire back. And his track, “Round 1,” showed he was eager to play this game. In “Round 1,” Gucci insulted Jeezy’s skill: “Jeezy can’t make a hit with a Louisville Slugger.” And, in a verse that took balls, if not a disregard for self-preservation, to record, Gucci elevated the feud to the next level: “Put a dress on, nigga, you Meech’s bitch.”
In May 2005, two members of the rap trio Loccish Lifestyle hopped in the car to make the hour-and-a-half drive from Macon to Atlanta. They’d been to the city countless times before, to perform in rap tournaments and hit the clubs to catch up with friends. But this trip was different. This time, Henry “Pookie Loc” Clark III and Shannon “Luke” Lundy were hoping to meet with representatives of Corporate Thugz Entertainment—and maybe sign a record deal.
The anticipation leading up to this trip was not unlike the thrill of another visit to Atlanta five years earlier, back in Loccish Lifestyle’s infancy. On that occasion, Luke, Pookie Loc, and Loccish’s third member, Carlos “Low Down” Rhodes, came to town for a freestyle rap competition at hip-hop club the Atrium. The three of them didn’t even have a song ready, just a beat from somewhere, an undeniable chemistry, and a name for their three-man crew.
Loccish refers to a way of life on the streets, loc having its origin in Crips gang lingo. (The term loc is used to refer to a friend, supposedly standing for “love of Crips.”) In Macon, a lot of people claimed the lifestyle. But few actually lived it. For a while, Pookie, Luke, and Low Down did. They shared a callused, survival-at-all-costs mentality. And so when the three of them started writing songs together, their material blended seamlessly. In life and in art, they were part of the same song. Back in 2000, when the Macon trio drove to Atlanta to perform in the rap tournament at the Atrium, they were mostly unrehearsed and had no real repertoire from which to draw. And still, they managed to take home the prize.
Loccish Lifestyle spent the next five years putting out two albums and building their name in the street, without the assistance of a label. Without so much as a push from its three members, Loccish Lifestyle’s songs reached up from the ghetto to grab airplay on the radio. The three rappers were surprised to hear their songs there. The men never really had a plan for their music. There was no trajectory that they knew to follow. There was just their reputation, followed by a succession of shows that drew a decent crowd, mostly to Macon’s hiphop ground zero, club Money’s. For a long time, their attitude was to just have fun with it.
Not that their music was “fun.” Over the years, Loccish Lifestyle went from glorifying ghetto life to waxing moody and introspective about it. Their delivery was stoical, and their lyrics unapologetic. Loccish Lifestyle’s biggest single, “Ridin’ High,” described a young man trying to navigate, and rationalize, the pull of the streets: “You know I ride since I was five,” followed by, “Don’t blame me, nigga, blame the game.”
The group had been hustling for five years when they heard that Young Jeezy, whom they remembered from his Macon days, might be considering making them an offer. Pookie and Luke were thrilled at the prospect. The two of them drove to Atlanta in May 2005 and checked into the Marriott Courtyard downtown. They were ready to sign. Low Down, however, was holding out. He wasn’t exactly opposed to a deal with CTE; he just wasn’t yet convinced it was the right move. All three of them were getting older, at least by street standards. They were nearing thirty. Even Pookie, the wildest of the three (he’d been arrested twenty times in less than a decade, on charges ranging from participating in gang activity to possessing a weapon), was slowing down. But Low Down was by far the most cautious. They’d been so alike at one time, but Low Down was starting to drift. He’d gone through the jungle, so to speak, hoping he might make it out—and come to appreciate what was on the other side. His path diverged from the others. He wasn’t sure they wanted the same thing anymore. And so Luke and Pookie had gone to Atlanta without him.
On a dead-end Decatur street called Springside Run, five men dressed in black piled out of a van and began trudging up one of the driveways. One of them carried brass knuckles. Another had duct tape. A third had a gun. A neighbor glanced up from trimming his hedges and thought it odd, a sight so menacing in broad daylight. He watched as the door swung open and men disappeared behind it. There was no knock, nothing.
Inside the house, Gucci Mane was hanging out with a woman he’d met earlier that afternoon at Blazin’ Saddles, a strip club on the southernmost stretch of Atlanta’s busy Moreland Avenue—the part where the $300,000 condos and colorful boutiques fade away, replaced by trucker bars, wearied strip malls, and industrial yards. Gucci had gone to the club to shop a few songs around. He hoped the strippers would like one of his tracks enough to want to dance to it on stage, a move that would help generate some buzz. One of dancers, in fact, seemed particularly interested. She even invited Gucci and his friend back to her place, where the listening party could continue.
They weren’t at her house long before company arrived.
One of the men dressed in black, the one with the brass knuckles, punched Gucci in the head. Another pistol-whipped his friend. They said something about killing him. Someone drew a gun. Gucci drew faster. “Stay strapped,” he’d been warned.
He aimed and fired.
The five men piled out the front door. As they made their way to the van, one became separated from the others. He ran along Springside Run, away from the dead-end and toward the busier Columbia Drive. A middle school was up ahead. So was a cop car. He veered into the woods, stumbling, stumbling, falling.
When the neighbor heard the shot and saw the five men come rushing out of the house, he dialed 911. While driving to the scene, the responding officer saw the man running. But he proceeded to the house. There wasn’t much to find there. Gucci Mane and his friend had already bolted.
Three days later, DeKalb County Police got a call. Four men had shown up at Columbia Middle School to search for something in the woods. Based on what they discovered, the school’s security guard called the cops.
One of the four men was Loccish Lifestyle’s Shannon “Luke” Lundy. Another was Demetrius “Kinky B” Ellerbee, co-owner, along with Young Jeezy, of Corporate Thugz Entertainment. Luke gave the police their story. He said they’d been at a video shoot across town, in Atlanta’s West End, when he overheard someone talking about a shooting on Springside Run. Luke told the officer that his bandmate, who’d gone missing, happened to know a woman who lived on that street. So he and his buddies came to check out the area. What they discovered was an eerie reflection of lyrics from one of the band’s tracks:
All of a sudden I feel a pop and fall to the ground …
Realizing that I’m shot, and real slowly I’m dying.
Luke had found Pookie Loc there in the woods. He was dressed in all black, a white Braves cap lying at his side. There was a sound coming from him—a buzzing. It was the flies. They had descended, like a funeral shroud, over his body.
A week later, Gucci Mane was in New York, promoting his album Trap House, which was due out in days. BET had asked him to appear on its hip-hop talk show Rap City, and he was on the set in New York when he heard the news. A warrant had been issued for his arrest. Gucci was wanted in the murder of Henry “Pookie Loc” Clark.
Gucci flew back to Atlanta and, in the presence of his attorney, turned himself in to authorities. On May 24, 2005, exactly two weeks after his visit to the stripper’s house, he was released from jail on a $100,000 bond—the same day that Trap House hit the streets. Judging from the response at local record stores, his arrest was generating greater-than-expected interest in his record. His single “Icy” debuted at a solid (though not outstand
ing) number twenty-four on Billboard’s rap-singles chart. But Gucci was not celebrating. He was on a mission to clear his name.
“As a god-fearing person, I never wanted to see anyone die,”
Gucci told hip-hop Web zine SOHH.com the day he got out of jail. “I found myself in a predicament, and even though there was an attack on my life, I truly never intended to hurt anyone. I was just trying to protect myself.”
His lawyers raised the defense that the assault at the stripper’s house was the culmination of a business dispute. One of Gucci’s attorneys, Dennis Scheib, told the press shortly after Gucci’s arrest that his client had refused to relinquish control of his music to “some people.” He didn’t name names.
Jeezy and his camp denied any link to the events. During an interview with AllHipHop.com, Jeezy said he’d never even been interested in the rights to “Icy.” “It was our song, but it was always understood that it was for him to blow up,” Jeezy told AllHipHop. “And that’s how it was supposed to be, and I was cool with that.”
Jeezy’s attorney, Janice Singer, fired back more fiercely: “It is offensive and outrageous that Jeezy’s name is being used by Gucci Mane’s defense team and his CD producer as a strategy to sell CDs and defend against the charges leveled against Gucci Mane,” she told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
Gucci’s label, Big Cat Records, then announced that it was seeking evidence to prove that Gucci was the real victim on Springside Run. The label offered a ten-thousand-dollar reward for information leading to the arrests of the four men who accompanied Pookie Loc during the attack on Gucci.
But none of those men was arrested or identified. Neither Jeezy nor anyone else was named a suspect in the incident, even after DeKalb County authorities turned the case over to the FBI—and even after the charges against Gucci were dropped.
After conducting their own investigations, Gucci’s two attorneys (he fired one to hire the other) continued to claim that a business dispute was to blame—and that, in some way, so was the Black Mafia Family. “Here’s the situation,” Scheib would later say. “Five guys came in. They were BMF.” Gucci’s other attorney, Ash Joshi, made a similar claim: “Law enforcement was always interested in BMF, throughout all this.” Law enforcement officials, however, would not confirm those allegations.
Looking back at the situation more than a year later, Low Down didn’t want to speculate too much. As the third member of Loccish Lifestyle, the one who decided not to go to Atlanta with Pookie and Luke, he wasn’t sure what to think about what happened on Springside Run. But he wasn’t angry—or even surprised—about Pookie’s death. He did have his doubts about BMF’s supposed involvement, though. Like anyone close to the streets, Low Down knew that in the weeks and months following the shooting, BMF was getting so hot, the crew would be easy to blame for just about anything. In the spring and summer of 2005, BMF was about to be on fire.
The soaring dining room at Justin’s on Peachtree Street, hung with floor-to-ceiling ivory drapes and a massive chandelier, was set on May 22, 2005, for a birthday party. And the guest of honor was the father of the former-R&B-icon-turned-Atlanta-bad-boy, Bobby Brown. The past year had been hard on the fallen star. He’d been jailed several times, first for probation violation that stemmed from a DUI conviction, then for failure to pay child support to an ex-lover, and, finally, for accusations that he assaulted his wife of twelve years, super-diva Whitney Houston. By the time of his father’s birthday party at Justin’s, however, Bobby Brown was making a comeback—of sorts. It would be a uniquely American resurrection. Brown’s sagas, including his tumultuous relationship with his famous wife, had been deemed surreal enough for reality TV. A month after the party, the voyeuristic cable show Being Bobby Brown was set to air on Bravo.
Had there been cameras capturing the festivities at Justin’s that night, Being Bobby Brown would have been all the more disturbing. On that night, the film crew would have captured footage of a crime scene.
Sundays at Justin’s drew a celebrity-heavy crowd, thanks in large part to the restaurant’s owner, Sean “P. Diddy” Combs. Performers would pop in and take the stage unannounced, or just soak up the scene. Brooklyn rapper Fabolous, who had appeared in the BMF Entertainment video for Bleu DaVinci’s “Still Here,” showed up the night of Brown’s event. So did several BMF members, who paid regular visits to the restaurant. In fact, three years earlier, Meech had hosted his own birthday celebration there.
The party was packed. And it was about to get interesting.
The Brown family sat down for dinner, after which the pop star took the stage at the far end of the dining room. A few hours after his performance, at around 1:45 A.M., Bobby Brown, his sister, his niece, and two nephews pushed through the crowd to one of the restaurant’s two lounges. As the two elder Browns found a seat at the bar, the younger ones mingled, and a guy in the crowd—handsome, slim, and muscular—bumped into one of them.
“That was disrespectful,” Bobby Brown’s nephew, Shayne Brown, told him. “You need to say, ‘Excuse me.’ ”
But the man didn’t apologize. Instead, he and Shayne got into a shouting match, which escalated into the man pushing Shayne in the chest.
Shayne’s cousin, Kelsey Brown, stepped in to try to break up the fight. But he was stopped in his tracks by a frighteningly large friend of the man who pushed Shayne. The big guy jumped over a table and struck Kelsey before he could do much to help.
The smaller of the men, the one who started the fight, told the cousins: “We kill niggas like you.”
Bobby Brown’s niece, who was standing in the middle of the brawl trying to pull Shayne away, started to cry. She called out for her uncle. Bobby Brown stood up on a chair at the bar. “What are you guys doing?” he yelled over the crowd. “That’s my nephew!”
By the time he made it over to Shayne, Bobby Brown was too late. The men had fled. And Shayne’s blood was everywhere. Kelsey was bleeding, too, though his injury wasn’t so bad. He didn’t realize he’d been cut until he saw his blood on his hands.
As the family screamed for an ambulance, Bobby Brown’s niece ran outside, following her cousins’ attackers. She watched as the two men and several others—one of whom she recognized as the rapper Fabolous—jumped into a Cadillac Escalade and made for the parking lot’s exit. (Fabolous was never a suspect in the attack.) She raced over to the valet stand and asked the attendant to jot down the SUV’s license plate number. The attendant got most of it, writing it down on the back of a blue valet ticket.
By the time she made it back inside, the police had arrived, and Shayne was gone. He’d been rushed to the hospital. One of the officers asked her to stay at Justin’s and answer some questions, but she said she couldn’t. She’d give her statement later. She handed the officer the blue ticket with the license plate number on it and told him she had to go to the hospital immediately. Shayne, she feared, was dead.
Doctors would later say that the stab wounds to Shayne’s face, neck, and chest appeared to have been the work of an ice pick. Nerves, muscles, and glands had been severed. An artery had to be repaired. One of the punctures barely missed his jugular. Fortunately, he would live. But the twenty-year-old would be seriously disfigured. His injuries were so bad that he’d be incapable of normal facial expressions.
The following day, police brought a photo to Shayne’s hospital room. The picture was of a man named Cleveland Hall, and it came from the department of motor vehicles. Based on the tag number provided by Brown’s niece, police were able to pull the title of the Escalade that had fled the scene. It was registered to a sixty-two-year-old man who lived in a suburb just south of the city. And the man’s twenty-three-year-old son, who stood six-foot-seven and weighed nearly 350 pounds, fit the description of one of the two attackers. Glancing at the photo, Shayne said the man definitely had been involved.
As for the other attacker, the one who started the fight, both Kelsey Brown and a witness who wasn’t related to the family told police that he wen
t by a nickname: Baby Bleu. The cops were aware of Baby Bleu, too. In a police report filed that morning, the incident was described as the “case involving Bobby Brown’s family and members of BMF.”
Less than thirty-six hours after the stabbing, police tracked down and interviewed Cleveland Hall. He told them he’d been at Justin’s the night of the attack, and that he saw the fight break out between “Bobby Brown’s nephew and some other individual.” He said he tried to break it up—but after he saw the blood, he backed away, toward the exit. He then climbed into his Escalade, along with Fabolous, the rapper’s manager, and three other men, and they bolted.
“Do you know any of the people involved in the altercation?” the investigator asked him two days after the stabbing.
“No,” he answered.
“Was Fabolous or any of his companions involved in the altercation?”
“No,” he said. “Nobody in my vehicle was involved.”
“How do you know Fabolous?”
“I used to work in the clubs as security.”
“Are you involved or affiliated with any type of gang in the city of Atlanta or elsewhere?”
“No.”
The police weren’t buying it. Based on the fact that Cleveland Hall drove the Escalade that was identified as the getaway vehicle—and that Shayne Brown identified him as one of his attackers—he was arrested shortly after his interview and charged with aggravated assault and party to a crime.
The following day, investigators were able to determine the real name of the second suspect. Baby Bleu was in fact Marque Dixson. They pulled his DMV photo, too, which Shayne Brown also identified. Shortly thereafter, a warrant was issued for his arrest, on charges of aggravated battery and aggravated assault.
That same day, Bobby Brown’s twenty-year-old niece arrived at police headquarters to give her statement. She told the investigator how the fight started. She recounted the “We kill niggas like you” threat. And she described how she followed the two men into the parking lot and got the Escalade’s tag number from the valet.
BMF: The Rise and Fall of Big Meech and the Black Mafia Family Page 19