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

by Shalhoup, Mara

  Meech knew that, for years, investigators had been following him. And he always believed he was one step ahead of them. Stay off the phone. Don’t get caught with a package. Surround yourself with associates who would always remain loyal. Those were his rules. But they weren’t enough. By the fall of 2005, the FBI and IRS had joined the DEA in its investigation into the Black Mafia Family. And they were keeping a closer watch on Meech than ever. At that point, Meech knew he was putting on a show. He realized he was guilty of living too large. But he didn’t think it mattered. He still thought he was invincible.

  As 2005 wore on and Jeezy began performing at larger and larger arenas, for crowds that began to number in the thousands, he paid frequent homage to one source of his inspiration. Before launching into the first verse of “Soul Survivor,” he’d press his lips to the mic and shout out a dedication to Big Meech. All the while, the song climbed higher and higher in the charts, debuting at a modest eighty-four before rising all the way to the top 10—including a number-one spot on Billboard’s Radio Monitor. And as Jeezy’s career began to soar, Meech’s started to implode.

  The investigation into the Black Mafia Family didn’t hinge on a certain pivotal event. It wasn’t precipitated by one dramatic bust, or a single miscalculated move, or a particular lapse in judgment. Rather, it was brought on by years of painstaking surveillance, fastidious police work, and incremental victories. As the alphabet boys’ investigation neared its conclusion, the hunt was drawing to a close. But the game was far from over. Meech and Terry’s influence remained strong. And BMF’s myth was only just beginning.

  In October 2005, a team of federal agents that included members of the DEA; the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms; and the U.S. Marshals Service traveled from Atlanta to Texas on the trail of a wanted man. The agents had received a tip that their suspect was living in a $1.7 million home in a wealthy Dallas suburb. The 6,500-square-foot modernist mansion was a big blockish expanse of asymmetrical windows and angular rooflines—a home as ostentatious as its suspected occupant. Upon their arrival at the house, the agents set up surveillance outside. They didn’t have to wait long to see if their tip checked out. They watched as the man they were hunting arrived at the house and disappeared inside.

  The team kept an eye on the house late into the night and early the next morning, staking it out from several angles. Sometime before 10 A.M., they noticed the suspect emerge from the back door and step into the yard. Standing next to the shimmering pool, he lit up a blunt and took a few deep, morning drags.

  Minutes later, the team made its move.

  Agents burst through the front door of the house and announced their presence in a rapid-fire series of exclamations. “Police!” “Don’t move!” “Search warrant!” “You’re under arrest!” They swept through the home, footsteps pounding from room to room. There wasn’t much chance for the three occupants to run. Two of them didn’t need to. The agents were interested in only one person inside the house: Demetrius “Big Meech” Flenory.

  Meech had been arrested several times before, and for the most part, he didn’t give up easily. When police went looking for him after the Chaos killings, they caught up with him only because he was stuck at the hospital, being treated for a bullet wound to the buttock. When he’d been snared in a roadblock outside the strip club Pin Ups, he gave a fake name to throw the police off his trail—and, after he was detained, took a piss on the interrogation room’s wall. Another time, when he and J-Bo were pulled over in his Bentley in the parking lot of his club, Babylon, J-Bo was asked to step out of the vehicle, and Meech jumped into the driver’s seat and hit the gas.

  But this arrest was different. This time, Meech submitted quietly, and he let the tide take him. As a team of agents swarmed the house—a sure sign that the feds meant business—Meech kept his composure intact and his mouth shut. He would soon have other battles to fight.

  After Meech was cuffed, more investigators were called to the house to help conduct a search. The mansion had been equipped for a battle that never happened. Guns were strategically placed in several locations: a loaded .40-caliber in the kitchen cabinet next to the stove, tucked alongside a stack of business cards with Meech’s name; a semiautomatic with bullets that could breach a Kevlar vest, secured in a safe in the master bedroom closet; two more pistols stashed in the attic, which would have been a decent hiding place had Meech decided to secret himself away.

  The two dozen law enforcement agents also uncovered bags of weed in the upstairs closet and in the kitchen, a heap of diamond jewelry on the kitchen counter (four necklaces, two watches, two pairs of diamond earrings, and a bracelet), ten thousand dollars in cash and a handful of ecstasy pills in the nightstand drawer of the master bedroom, and Meech’s silver Bentley in the garage.

  Meech ostensibly was arrested on a warrant filed a week earlier in Atlanta. The warrant charged him with possession of a firearm and possession of marijuana—offenses stemming from the year-old search of Space Mountain. It seemed doubtful, however, that a team of federal agents would track him to his Texas retreat on such low-key allegations—especially ones that investigators sat around and waited a year to file.

  No, there definitely was something bigger at play. And Meech would have to sit in a Texas county jail for eight days before he learned what was really going on.

  A week after Meech’s takedown, a team of DEA agents and U.S. marshals descended on a quiet middle-class suburb ten miles north of St. Louis. They approached an unpretentious home at the end of a curving driveway on Jamestown Farm Road. The house sat in the middle of a clearing bordered by dense woods on one side and a sprawling wheat field on the other. The homeowner was Danny “Dog Man” Jones, a suspected BMF drug distributor in St. Louis.

  Even from outside the house, the federal agents could smell the weed. They knocked on the front door—and heard what sounded like a crowd of people scurrying from room to room, yelling that the police were outside. The agents didn’t wait for an answer. They busted through the door, interrupting what appeared to be a party. A table to the right of the door was strewn with playing cards and cash, evidence of a gambling game rudely interrupted. In the bedroom, the agents found even more money: $600,000 stacked in neat piles.

  In addition to Dog Man, who was hosting the gathering, the agents caught up with fifteen other BMF members: Terry’s childhood friend and trusted Detroit manager, Benjamin “Blank” Johnson; another of Terry’s top managers, Derrick “Chipped Tooth” Pegeuse; his girlfriend’s grown son, Marlon “Lil Dog” Welch, whom Terry treated as one of his own; three of the organization’s drivers and drug couriers; and nine other associates.

  The agents also came face-to-face with Terry “Southwest T” Flenory.

  The day after Terry’s arrest, on October 28, 2005, a twenty-eight-page, eleven-count indictment was unsealed in federal court in Detroit. The case had been filed in Detroit partly for symbolic reasons. Though Meech and Terry had moved the heart of their operation to L.A. and Atlanta, Detroit was the birthplace of their Black Mafia Family. It was the brothers’ childhood home.

  Meech was charged with seven counts and Terry with nine. The most serious of them was the allegation that the Flenory brothers ran a continuing criminal enterprise. Like the more commonly used RICO statute (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations), the CCE law was created to tackle organized crime. Both RICO and CCE charges are used to target long-term, elaborate criminal enterprises that operate like businesses. The difference is that a RICO case is brought against leaders of organizations who oversee a number of activities, including gambling, prostitution, bribery, and counterfeiting. A CCE case, on the other hand, can be brought only against drug traffickers. And the charge is reserved for the most serious of them. Of all the drug cases the feds investigate, only 1 percent ends up being a CCE prosecution. To get a CCE conviction, prosecutors must prove that the defendant was the boss of at least five subordinates, that he oversaw at least three related drug offenses, and tha
t he earned a “substantial” amount of money from the organization.

  The other major difference between a RICO and CCE charge is that while a RICO conviction is typically punishable by a maximum twenty-year sentence, a CCE conviction guarantees twenty years to life.

  In addition to the Flenory brothers, twenty-three of their associates were indicted on lesser chargers—most of them on Terry’s side. Eleven distributors and ten drivers were charged with conspiracy to distribute cocaine, as was Terry’s longtime girlfriend, Tonesa Welch. Many of the defendants also were charged with money-laundering. Among the indicted were Chipped Tooth Peguese and Blank Johnson; Blank’s brother, Arnold “A.R.” Boyd, who had replaced Blank as Terry’s Detroit manager; Calvin “Playboy” Sparks, who’d been caught on a wiretap in early 2004 talking with Terry about his recent roadside arrest on nine kilos of cocaine; Christopher “Pig” Triplett, who’d been arrested along with Playboy, and whom Playboy had complained about during the wiretapped call; and Jabari Hayes, who’d been pulled over days after Pig and Playboy in an RV loaded with more than 100 kilos of cocaine, worth an estimated $2 million wholesale and $10 million on the street.

  Because investigators were able to get a wire up on several of Terry’s phones, he was charged with three counts of using a cell phone in violation of the U.S. Controlled Substance Act. Meech mistakenly was charged in one of those counts, too. When Terry and Playboy had talked on the phone that day in May 2004, Terry had pretended to hand the phone over to Meech. (In fact, he’d handed it to his right-hand man, Slim, who did his best Meech impersonation.) The feds, who were listening in on the call, believed that it was actually Meech on the phone. That charge was soon dropped.

  Surprisingly, Slim wasn’t charged in the indictment. William “Doc” Marshall, BMF’s chief financial officer and one of the few employees who continued to have contact with both Meech and Terry, was mentioned only in passing. And despite their lofty positions, none of Meech’s top associates were indicted, either. There was no mention in the indictment of Chad “J-Bo” Brown, Meech’s second-in-command; Fleming “Ill” Daniels and Martez “Tito” Byrth, who were directly below J-Bo; or the rapper Barima “Bleu DaVinci” McKnight, one of Meech’s most trusted confidants and cocaine distributors. Nor was there any indication that the feds thought Jeezy might be involved in Meech’s criminal enterprise.

  The evidence laid out in the indictment was enough to provide a glimpse of the organization. But it did not provide the full picture. The document describes eight cocaine busts that took place over the course of six years. A collective 500 kilos were seized. But one of those busts—the 250 kilos discovered inside the house on California’s Oso Avenue, where Tremayne “Kiki” Graham had been arrested—didn’t have anything to do with BMF. Though the coke likely came from the same supplier, that shipment belonged to Jerry “J-Rock” Davis’s Sin City Mafia. The feds later struck that information from the indictment. That reduced the amount of cocaine mentioned in the indictment by half.

  None of the drugs was seized from Meech or Terry directly. And of the $3.9 million in cash that the feds claim to have confiscated from BMF, none of that was seized from the Flenory brothers either. As with the cocaine, the amount of cash seized paled in comparison to what the feds believed the Flenorys’ had pulled in. Even by conservative estimates, Meech and Terry are believed to have earned, in the course of a decade, $270 million.

  As for the brothers’ assets—proof that they’d seen “substantial” income from BMF—the evidence in the indictment stacked up much higher against Terry. Though both brothers had driven Bentleys, Lamborghinis, and Maybachs, the cars weren’t registered in their names. But Terry did buy three cars using an alias the feds cracked: a Mercedes, a Range Rover, and a Chevy van. Terry also was linked, through his girlfriend, to three homes—the White House and two of his three California residences. According to the indictment, the homes were titled to Tonesa, and she made $840,000 in payments on the California mortgages over four years. That averages out to $17,500 per month. Though Tonesa owned her own business—a high-end car shop that the feds believed was one of Terry’s fronts—she didn’t make the kind of money to pay those mortgages. The feds believed she had help from Terry.

  The only asset the indictment linked to Meech was the house he’d rented in South Beach. But the lease wasn’t in Meech’s name, making it harder to prove that he was the one paying the thirty-thousand-dollar monthly rent.

  Terry had been the understated brother, the careful one, the one who admonished the other for his extravagance. But in the end, the feds’ case against Terry was far stronger than the one against Meech. The feds had Terry, not Meech, on a wiretap. They’d indicted many of Terry’s associates, and few of his brother’s. Terry appeared to have substantial assets, while Meech had none.

  All of which meant that in order to build their case against Meech, prosecutors needed witnesses willing to take the stand against him. And they were hoping Terry would be one of them.

  ELEVEN BREAKING THE CODE

  Really, in a lot of ways Mr. Flenory is his own worst enemy.

  —FEDERAL MAGISTRATE JUDGE STEVEN WHALEN

  A Few years before Meech and Terry were arrested, their chief financial officer, the preppy and charismatic Doc Marshall, ran into DEA agent Jack Harvey at the Atlanta airport. Doc was traveling on BMF-related business, weaving through the world’s busiest terminal when the slender, soft-spoken agent approached him. Harvey had a question for the CFO—one that had been a long time coming.

  Starting in the late ’90s, Harvey had begun fielding rumors about Big Meech, and he’d spend the next five years shadowing various members of BMF. Through confidential sources, Harvey heard about Meech’s alleged ruthlessness as a cocaine kingpin and his supposed role in the highway shooting of a federal informant. Years later, Harvey staked out the sprawling White House, watching as the iron gate at the foot of the road admitted select guests to Meech’s thirty-fifth birthday party. Within a few months, Harvey found a way inside the house—as part of a law enforcement team armed with a search warrant for the weapon used in a shootout behind Club Chaos. The search didn’t turn up the gun, but it did yield documents that linked the Flenory brothers to a company called XQuisite Empire and to its owner, William “Doc” Marshall.

  Doc was under investigation at the time by another member of the White House search team, Atlanta Police detective Bryant “Bubba” Burns. For nearly a year, Burns had been working undercover to infiltrate a white-collar crime ring that Doc oversaw. By posing as a would-be “straw borrower,” Burns determined that Doc’s brokerage firm, XQuisite, was getting loans for high-end cars and homes in the names of willing participants such as himself, then passing them along to drug dealers. In the midst of the undercover sting—and two months before the White House search—Burns’s investigation got an unexpected boost. Doc Marshall shot and killed a home intruder inside a posh town house. When Burns searched the house, he found a pile of documents that listed XQuisite’s roster of workers and its illegal deals. Investigators also discovered a room-sized safe that held a single kilo of cocaine. Once Burns and Harvey linked the documents in Doc’s town house to others discovered in the White House, the two investigators concluded that Doc was closely tied to the Flenory brothers. In fact, Burns and Harvey believed that Doc had been guarding a BMF stash house.

  From that point on, Doc became a highly desirable target. Judging from the paperwork in the White House, he was integral to the Flenorys’ organization. And though he hadn’t been charged in the incident at the town house (the shooting of the armed intruder appeared to be self-defense), investigators could still dangle the threat of a few major felonies over his head. The kilo in the safe and the mortgage fraud ring were plenty incriminating. But investigators wanted more.

  When Harvey caught up with Doc at the airport that day, he had a good idea how high his target ranked in the Black Mafia Family. Harvey also believed that the well-dressed, deep-voiced businessman might be
open to negotiating. He pulled Doc aside and said he wanted to show him some pictures. He wanted to know what he might be willing to say about a few members of the Black Mafia Family. Doc’s reply was succinct: “I’m not saying anything.” But if he were to say something, Doc asked, would his cooperation prevent him from being charged with a crime?

  “No,” Harvey answered.

  “Am I going to be arrested?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well,” Doc said, issuing a not-so-subtle challenge, “let’s get it going.”

  In the years since the encounter in the airport, Doc became more intertwined with BMF. He also was one of the few associates who maintained close contact with both Flenory brothers after they split—a factor that would make him an invaluable witness. Though Doc had begun to align himself more tightly with Meech’s crew, he continued to do the books for the two separate sides of the organization. As CFO, he kept track of all the income, debts, and expenses for both Meech’s and Terry’s crews. Through XQuisite, he obtained cars, homes, and jewels for the brothers. He set up a fake travel company so that he could procure airline tickets for BMF members. He even created fake W-2s for the agency’s fictitious “employees” so that BMF members could show legitimate income.

  Doc also began to traffic BMF’s cocaine. He sometimes picked up kilo-stuffed duffel bags from Terry at the White House in Atlanta, where he witnessed the boss in the presence of a hundred bricks at a time. Though Doc couldn’t say the same of Meech (Meech didn’t handle his cocaine shipments personally; J-Bo did), Doc paid plenty of visits to Meech’s Atlanta stash houses, too: the Gate, the Elevator, and Space Mountain. Doc also tagged along with Meech and his entourage when they descended on the city’s clubs. In fact, Doc had been hanging out with the crew the night a few of its members got into a deadly fight behind the Velvet Room.