“Did the altercation start from just a push?” the investigator asked the young woman.
“Yes,” she answered.
“Did you see who stabbed Shayne or Kelsey?”
“No,” she said. But she knew it wasn’t Fabolous.
“Are you able to identify the person that started the argument if you viewed a photo?”
“Yes.”
“[Some of] the individuals that you saw get into the vehicle were the people that started the altercation with Kelsey and Shayne?”
“Yes.”
In the ensuing week, as authorities hunted for Baby Bleu, local prosecutors believed they had a solid enough case against Cleveland Hall to present the evidence to the grand jury. At that point, the investigation seemed to be on solid ground. On June 3, 2005, the grand jury indicted Hall for aggravated assault in the attack on Shayne Brown.
Then, something strange happened.
Despite the fact that Cleveland Hall had been identified by the victim as one of the two attackers; despite the fact that the evidence firmly suggested he drove the getaway car; despite the fact that the investigation, at a month old, was still in its infancy; and despite the fact that a grand jury had just given the charges the green light, the case against Hall came to a screeching halt. One week after his indictment was handed up, Hall’s charges were shelved at the request of the Fulton County District Attorney’s Office. The government offered a succinct explanation of its decision to dead-docket the case. In fact, the reason for letting Hall off the hook boiled down to a single sentence: “Victims and witnesses in this case have been reluctant to come forward and cooperate with the State in its investigation, therefore the State has insufficient evidence to proceed at this time.”
At one point, Bobby Brown’s family had been more than willing to assist in the investigation. Then, all of a sudden, they weren’t.
NINE THE GATE
Dude is Meech.
—OMARI “O-DOG” MCCREE
The 500 block of Boulevard is one of the most incongruous blocks in Atlanta. It’s not a ghetto, per se. A ghetto, by definition, is a place tucked away, pushed aside, disenfranchised, and disconnected from the rest of society. Boulevard’s 500 block, on the other hand, sits in the middle of one of the most vibrant sectors of the city. Travel north or south on the thoroughfare, and you’ll quickly hit upon vastly different landscapes. To the south, Boulevard is flanked on one side by historic Oakland Cemetery, the final resting place of Gone with the Wind author Margaret Mitchell and golf legend Bobby Jones, and on the other side by the artists’ enclave Cabbagetown, named for the once-ubiquitous cabbage soup boiled by cotton mill workers who inhabited the neighborhood’s shotgun shanties. (Those residents were mostly displaced after the mill was turned into high-end lofts, and the shanties became coveted real estate.) Beyond Cabbagetown to the south, million-dollar Victorians and historic Craftsman bungalows line the gentle green hills of Grant Park.
A few blocks north of Boulevard’s 500 block, crossing over Ponce de Leon Avenue, the street changes not only in appearance but also in name. Several north–south thoroughfares assume new identities at Ponce de Leon, stemming from a pre-segregation attempt to distinguish the addresses of the mostly white neighborhoods on the north side of town from the mostly black ones on the south. Moreland Avenue transitions into Briarcliff Road. Courtland Street starts over as Juniper Street. And Boulevard reinvents itself as Monroe Drive, home to modern furniture stores, an art-house movie theater, and due to the proximity of Piedmont Park (Atlanta’s equivalent of Central Park East), some of the highest-priced homes outside of Buckhead.
Driving from one end of Boulevard to the other, from Cabbagetown, say, to Piedmont Park, the stretch of road at the 500 block rudely interrupts the flow. On that block, even an act as mundane as parking the car is done with a flippant lawlessness. Vehicles are left in the outermost lanes of traffic, so that drivers unfamiliar with the practice must adjust at the very last second, swerving inward at the part of Boulevard where four lanes inexplicably narrow to two—a maneuver complicated by the fact that pedestrians tend to drift from the sidewalk into the street with little warning.
The common sentiment on the 500 block is that the outside world never cared about what happened there. Nobody ever succeeded in improving the schools or staving off the drug flow or fixing up the seven-hundred-plus units of subsidized housing that anchor the neighborhood. As a result, Boulevard is a world unto itself, and it flaunts its identity without a care for those who look down on it. Boulevard is brazen. In that way, Boulevard is much like one of its best-known inhabitants, who dropped off investigators’ radar in late 2004 after losing ten kilos of cocaine that belonged to the Black Mafia Family. Omari “O-Dog” McCree and Boulevard were practically inseparable.
On June 8, 2005, Fulton County prosecutor Rand Csehy wasn’t looking for Omari. He’d gone down to Boulevard to give legal advice to a few Atlanta narcotics officers. The officers had noticed a car parked on Boulevard that they believed belonged to a local drug dealer, and they were hoping to secure a warrant to search it. Csehy advised them on the situation, and the warrant was obtained. With that out of the way, he was about to call it a day. It was sometime after 5 P.M., a warm and muggy Atlanta evening, and he walked the several yards back to his own car.
Boulevard is the type of place where any outsider, let alone a county prosecutor, would be on guard. And Csehy, being the vigilant type, kept tabs on his surroundings. He didn’t notice anything out of the usual, though, just the older men and women lazing on the battered stoops of brick apartment buildings, and the younger ones kicking back on the littered sidewalks. Csehy started his car and pulled away.
He’d been driving for only a few minutes when he got the call. One of the officers told him he needed to turn around. Csehy had missed something. He’d walked right past it. Csehy, in fact, had walked right past him—the man who Csehy had worked tirelessly, for months, to build a case against, only to lose him just when the case seemed rock solid. Somehow, Csehy didn’t even recognize Omari. But one of the officers did. The officer knew the players who populated the neighborhood he patrolled, and on Boulevard, Omari was a legend—a true BMF soldier, a man who had dealings with Big Meech himself, a former child of the streets who’d been memorialized by the rapper Young Jeezy. As any good cop working Boulevard would know, Omari was hot shit. And the cop told Csehy that, at that second, he had Omari in his sights.
Seven months earlier, Csehy had been faced with a choice. Omari’s drug partner, Jeffery Leahr, and Jeffery’s girlfriend, Courtney Williams, had been pulled over in a Porsche that had ten kilos stuffed inside a duffel bag sitting on the backseat. At the time, Csehy had plenty of evidence to take to the grand jury and indict all three. Even before that, Csehy believed he had enough to indict Omari and Jeffery. One of the men whom Jeffery and Omari supplied with dope, Decarlo Hoskins, had been caught on a wiretap setting up a sale of nine kilos to three men from out of town. The men were busted with the coke minutes later near the Georgia Dome. A month after that, Decarlo was arrested. And when faced with the prospect of investigators charging his wife, Decarlo offered up something that could save her: his suppliers. He admitted to investigators that Omari and Jeffery had fronted him the cocaine. And he was willing to testify to that in court.
But Csehy wanted to take it slow. He thought that if Omari remained free, he might lead investigators to someone higher up in BMF—perhaps even to Big Meech himself. And so instead of indicting Omari and Jeffery after Decarlo flipped on them, Csehy took another route. He helped HIDTA task force agents draft wiretap applications for Omari and Jeffery’s phones, whose numbers came courtesy of their customer, Decarlo. The wiretaps, coupled with intense surveillance, culminated in the discovery of the ten kilos in the Porsche. And it brought local investigators closer than they’d ever imagine to the upper echelon of the Black Mafia Family. While listening to Omari’s conversations, task force agents identified one frequent caller as a woma
n believed to be Meech’s personal assistant, Yogi. Omari and Yogi chatted on the phone several times a day—and she was quick to describe how much access she had to Big Meech. Based on what she said, it appeared that Meech was willing to bend his own rule about talking on the phone, at least a little, in order to communicate with Yogi.
And so rather than charging Omari, Jeffery, and Courtney with the cocaine discovered in the Porsche, the investigators—advised by Csehy—held off . They focused on the bigger prize. After the raid on the Porsche, the investigators applied for a wire on two phones that belonged to Yogi. And once the investigators were up on her phones, they heard Meech’s voice crackle over the wire. The snippets of conversation between him and Yogi were brief, and what he said wasn’t exactly revelatory. But investigators finally had Meech’s number. The next logical step was to get a wire on his phone, too.
Investigators began drafting Meech’s wiretap application. It would be the zenith of months spent surveilling street-level drug dealers, tracking those smaller fish as they drifted closer to bigger catches, and filing wiretap application after wiretap application (six in all) for suppliers a step or two removed from the Black Mafia Family. All of it—the watching, the waiting, the listening—had been leading to this one thing: Meech’s phone.
But the long-awaited wiretap never came to fruition. According to Csehy, the Fulton County District Attorney’s Office didn’t want to go after Meech. The office let the investigation into Yogi fizzle out, too. Instead, the local agency yielded to the feds, who were building their own case against Meech and the Black Mafia Family.
By June of 2005, it seemed to Csehy that all the hard work of the HIDTA task force had yielded virtually nothing. Close as they had been to Meech, he was now a distant memory. And Omari and Jeffery, who had once been such a sure thing, had turned to dust. For a while, the task force (and by extension, Csehy) had known every move Jeffery and Omari made. They knew the men’s paranoia and fears, their weaknesses and inconsistencies. Now, the government knew nothing, not even where Jeffery and Omari lay their heads. For that, Csehy blamed himself. It was his decision to let Jeffery and Courtney walk on the ten kilos. He just didn’t think that Omari, upon hearing about the bust, would disappear so quickly—or that the trail the investigators blazed toward Big Meech would be so coolly disregarded. Csehy was starting to think he’d made a bad call, that he’d blown the whole investigation—until Omari showed his face in the most obvious of places.
Once Csehy got the news that Omari was hanging out on Boulevard, he raced back to the 500 block. He called one of the HIDTA agents and told him to get a warrant ready. A county judge quickly signed off on the warrant, which accused Omari of trafficking the cocaine discovered on the backseat of the Porsche. By then, a small team of officers and investigators had formed on Boulevard. They surrounded their target. And they took Omari down.
Less than two hours later, Omari McCree was sitting in a HIDTA interview room with two Atlanta police investigators (who also were part of the HIDTA task force), Walter Britt and Bryant “Bubba” Burns. Britt went through the drill: “You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can be used against you in court …”
When he finished, Britt asked, “Do you understand?”
“Yes,” Omari answered.
“Are you willing to answer some questions?”
“Yes.”
But first, Omari said, he wanted his attorney. Britt said go ahead and make the call. Omari dialed the attorney’s number several times. No answer.
At that point, Britt told Omari he was being charged with trafficking cocaine, ten kilos of which had been discovered in a vehicle driven by Omari’s “brother,” Jeffery Leahr.
Omari piped up that Jeffery wasn’t his brother. People just thought he was.
Britt asked again if Omari wished to speak with him and Burns. Omari said yes.
Britt told Omari that his willingness to cooperate would be relayed to the district attorney’s office, which would look kindly upon his assistance when it came time to recommend a prison sentence. Britt then handed Omari a confidential-source agreement form. Omari signed it. And Britt launched into his questions.
“Are you familiar with BMF?”
“I learned about BMF back in 1999,” Omari said. “They were not called BMF at that time.”
“In 1999, whom did you know as members of BMF?”
“I knew of only Meech and Bleu DaVinci.”
“When did you become a part of BMF?”
“In 2002.”
“Have you ever heard of the Elevator?”
“Yes.”
“Where is the Elevator located?”
“On Glenridge.”
Investigators had not yet determined the exact location of the Elevator, though it was clear from the wiretaps that it was a BMF meeting place—the place where the crew gathered hours after Meech was released from jail on the Pin Ups arrest.
As for the next location Britt asked about, it, too, had been described over the wire, and investigators already knew where it was. They’d staked it out before. It had been one of Meech’s distribution centers, later to be replaced by Space Mountain.
“Have you ever heard of the Gate?”
“Yes.”
“Have you ever purchased or obtained drugs from the Gate?”
“Yes.”
“How did you obtain the drugs?”
“I would call J-Bo, and then I would go and pick it up.”
“Would anyone be there when you arrived?”
“Yes, J-Bo.”
“Who is J-Bo?”
“He works for Dude.”
“Who is Dude?”
“Dude is Meech.”
With those three words, Omari became the first criminal suspect on record to implicate Meech as a cocaine boss.
“Who is responsible for the drugs getting to the Gate?” Britt said, hurrying to the next question.
“Dude.”
“How much have you seen while at the Gate?”
“About fifty keys.”
“Would you be willing to show me where the Gate is located?”
It was with that question, and not the one about Meech, that Omari began to backpedal. “Man, I ain’t talking no more,” he said. “These people know my family.”
Omari’s next words hinted at the fact that he thought he’d get off easier than he would.
“Will I walk?” he asked Britt.
“No.”
Two days after Rand Csehy caught his lucky break, so did the bounty hunter Rolando Betancourt. A detective from L.A. called him with unexpected news, and Rolando liked what he heard. After he hung up, he made arrangements to return to California. It was time to resume the hunt for the fugitive Tremayne “Kiki” Graham.
Three months had gone by since Rolando was hired by the Atlanta bonding company Free at Last to track down Kiki. With each passing month that the fugitive remained on the lam, Free at Last had to pay the court thirty thousand dollars. If Kiki didn’t turn up at all, the company stood to lose the entire $300,000 bond it had posted. Rolando’s job was to stop that from happening. And he was racing against the clock.
Rolando had been the second bounty hunter Free at Last hired. The company chose him because he was considered one of the best in the country. But Kiki proved tricky prey. Rolando tracked him from Atlanta to L.A., where the focus of his investigation became a three-story house in the San Fernando Valley—a house that seemed to be at the epicenter of Rolando’s web of clues. After exhausting every other possible lead, Rolando decided to put together a system of surveillance cameras, which would allow him watch the house in real-time from a remote location. The house sat so far back from the road that traditional surveillance—a car and binoculars—proved difficult.
Rolando decided to leave L.A. while the system was being built. But before he left, he made a few last stops. One of them was a well-tended four-story apartment building with boxy white balconies and chocolate-brown awnings. The bu
ilding was the upshot of a tip that had to do with one of Kiki’s suspected associates, Eric “Mookie” Rivera. Rolando didn’t know much about Mookie—only that he’d written a down payment check for a Ferrari that Kiki had been driving. Still, it was a lead worth following. After a roundabout search of addresses that had been linked at one time or another to Mookie, Rolando ended up at the Studio City apartment building. Rolando hoped he’d find Mookie there. But the building manager didn’t recognize a photo of Mookie, nor was his name on the apartment’s lease. Rolando gave the manager his card, just in case something came up.
A month later, something did.
Rolando was in the midst of securing the high-tech snooping system when he got the call from Los Angeles. The detective on the line explained he’d gotten Rolando’s name and number that very day from the manager of the Studio City apartment building. The manager told the detective that Rolando already had been by to talk to him. The bounty hunter had been looking for someone called Mookie.
The detective and his partner now knew where Mookie was. They’d just arrested him, and they were at the apartment to execute a search warrant stemming from the arrest.
The day before, on the afternoon of June 9, 2005, Mookie had shown up at Van Nuys Airport to board a private jet. He booked the seventeen-thousand-dollar flight the previous night and paid the five-thousand-dollar deposit in cash. But before he and his three pieces of luggage made it past security, he was stopped by several agents working for a local drug task force.
“Where are you going?” one of the agents asked Mookie.
“Atlanta,” he answered.
“Business or pleasure?” the agent replied.
“Business,” Mookie said. “I’m in the Internet raffle industry.”
“Can we search your bags?”
“No,” he replied. “I’m not comfortable with you searching my bags or me.”
BMF: The Rise and Fall of Big Meech and the Black Mafia Family Page 20