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

by Shalhoup, Mara

  Doc’s first testimony was in front of a federal grand jury in Detroit. Terry’s high-ranking associate, A.R., testified, too. The grand jury had been called in the spring of 2006 to decide whether more charges should be filed against the Flenorys, and whether evidence of several specific drug deals should be added to the indictment. The grand jurors agreed that the charges and evidence had merit. Due in part to Doc and A.R.’s testimony, Meech and Terry faced a few extra counts of cocaine distribution, and the indictment was enhanced with a lengthy description of the hundreds of kilos the brothers allegedly trafficked on specific occasions.

  The new allegations seemed minor compared with the charges the brothers already were facing. But there was one catch. Due to the amount of cocaine now alleged to have been trafficked by BMF, the case surpassed an important milestone in federal law. The sheer volume of drugs was enough to increase Meech and Terry’s mandatory prison sentence. If convicted, they’d no longer have the option to get the minimum twenty years. If convicted, they’d be sent to prison for life. And in the federal system, there is no parole.

  Of all the information Doc fed investigators, there was one area in which his assistance would be of little use: the aftermath of the gruesome fight at Sean “P. Diddy” Combs’s Atlanta restaurant, Justin’s. During the brawl, Bobby Brown’s nephews were stabbed, and BMF member Marque “Baby Bleu” Dixson was arrested on aggravated assault charges. Yet Fulton County prosecutors were having a hard time getting the witnesses, including Brown’s family, to cooperate. Though a few of them provided statements shortly after the incident, they later backed away from what they said. Prosecutors then dropped the case against the other man allegedly involved in the attack: a six-foot-seven, 350-pound member of Baby Bleu’s entourage named Cleveland Hall. The DA’s office believed that without the cooperation of the victims and witnesses, Hall’s charges wouldn’t stand. But prosecutors were still plowing ahead with the case against Baby Bleu.

  As Doc would later explain to Harvey, the hush fell over the witnesses for a reason. Doc told the federal agent that a message from BMF’s top brass had quieted the Browns. Apparently, Meech had gotten through to them. “J-Bo told me that Meech contacted their family members and said, ‘Well, let’s just squash this thing,’ ” Doc recalled to Harvey. “ ‘We are prepared to take this to another level.’ ”

  Baby Bleu initially was denied bond on his aggravated assault charges. Detective Burns, who testified at the bond hearing, tried to ensure that he stayed locked up. But in the fall of 2005, Baby Bleu’s attorney convinced a judge to release him pending trial. Had the attorney failed, Baby Bleu’s life might have been spared.

  Doc was friendly with Baby Bleu, a young, handsome, and heavily tattooed member of BMF. He passed himself off as Bleu DaVinci’s younger brother, and though the two weren’t actually related, they did have a few things in common. They both had relocated from Southern California to Atlanta. They both had matching tattoos on their forearms bearing BMF’s motto, DEATH BEFORE DISHONOR. And both were highly visible members of Meech’s entourage—Bleu DaVinci because his songs, along with Jeezy’s, were BMF’s club anthems, and Baby Bleu because he was a perfect specimen for the spotlight. He had a slender, muscular build and the perfectly chiseled features of a statue.

  After Baby Bleu was released on a fifty-thousand-dollar bond, he immediately went to visit Doc. He said he didn’t feel like he should have to go down for the stabbings. He said he intended to beat the charge. He’d just graduated from Talladega College, in Alabama. At age twenty-seven, he said, it wasn’t too late for him to turn this mess around.

  The following spring—two days after Doc had his first debriefing with the feds—Baby Bleu and his girlfriend were hanging out at a Buckhead club called the Living Room when he ran into an ex-girlfriend. The two women got into a fight, after which Baby Bleu asked his ex to meet him in a nearby parking lot. At the lot, they got into a screaming match. His current girlfriend stayed in the car. His ex called her friends for backup. Within minutes, they pulled up in a black BMW. Baby Bleu told the driver that he’d kill him if he didn’t back off. Moments later, Baby Bleu approached the driver’s side window. For once, he didn’t have the protection of the foreboding entourage to which he’d grown so accustomed. This time, he was on his own.

  When Baby Bleu pulled on the door handle, the driver panicked. He pulled a gun, fired twice, and peeled out of the parking lot. With his girlfriend standing by helplessly, Baby Bleu collapsed on the pavement. He was dead by the time police arrived. And the investigation into the brutal stabbings at Justin’s was closed.

  … … …

  Later that month, federal agents in Greenville, South Carolina, reached what they thought was the end of a two-year investigation into Tremayne “Kiki” Graham. A year had passed since a bounty hunter and a team of U.S. marshals surrounded the unsuspecting fugitive outside a Subway sandwich shop in suburban Los Angeles. For months after, Kiki held his tongue. But on March 27, 2006, his change of heart arrived—a week before he and his boss, “J-Rock” Davis, were scheduled for trial on cocaine-conspiracy charges. The last time Kiki was about to face a jury, back in November 2004, he’d cut his ankle monitor and fled across the country. This time, though, he decided to take what seemed to be a less resistant route. Kiki pleaded guilty to his charges and immediately agreed to cooperate with the feds.

  DEA special agent Jay Rajaee, out of Greenville, South Carolina, interviewed Kiki that very afternoon. There were a couple of things the government was eager to know, and one of them had to do with a man Rajaee had interrogated two years earlier: Kiki’s codefendant, Ulysses “Hack” Hackett. During the interrogation of Hack, Rajaee had been surprised to find that Hack was defending Kiki. Hack denied to the agent that Kiki had much of anything to do with the cocaine trade—and at that point, Rajaee cut the interview short. He didn’t believe what he was hearing, and he didn’t want to continue an interview with someone who was lying to protect another suspected drug dealer.

  Within months, Hack and his girlfriend, Misty Carter, were dead. Six months after Hack met with Rajaee, he and Misty were gunned down in the middle of the night as they lay in bed. It appeared that someone thought Hack said too much, and the DEA was left wondering if Hack had been intentionally silenced. Nearly two years later, as Rajaee began asking questions of Kiki, he felt he was interrogating one of the few witnesses who could offer any insight into the double-homicide.

  But when Rajaee asked about Hack and Misty’s deaths, Kiki said he had no idea who was behind the killings. He said he’d been scared when he heard about what happened. He pointed out that he was under house arrest at the time, and he said he immediately called his mother-in-law, Atlanta mayor Shirley Franklin, upon hearing the news. He said she confirmed the killings through her police department. She then allowed Kiki to stay at her house—for his own safety, he claimed. Less than two months later, he went on the run.

  Kiki told agent Rajaee that while he was a fugitive, he didn’t want to leave his wife, the mayor’s daughter, destitute. So he funneled cash to her through his associate, Eric “Mookie” Rivera, who’d ferried Kiki’s drugs and drug proceeds across the country in private jets. Kiki wanted to make sure Kai Franklin Graham had enough money to cover the couple’s mortgage and bills. He also said that he never had any direct contact with her while he was on the run, which was consistent with what Kai herself had told authorities—though quite inconsistent with what others would say.

  Before Kiki was caught, his wife filed both for bankruptcy and divorce. In court documents, she claimed her husband had abandoned her. She claimed she was destitute and couldn’t afford to pay the bond Kiki had broken, let alone her five-thousand-dollar monthly mortgage and her everyday expenses. The eighty-thousand-dollar salary she’d earned while working for her father at his airport concessions company had dried up, too. David Franklin’s business was failing, and he could no longer afford to pay his daughter. (In fact, the company would declare bankruptcy and
be shuttered a year later.) Kai was making a successful case for bankruptcy protection. Court documents described her as subsisting off a two-thousand-dollar monthly handout from family and friends, having received no other contributions in the past two years.

  Shortly thereafter, Kiki’s associate Mookie was arrested at the Van Nuys airport with a suitcase packed with cocaine. He eventually agreed to cooperate with investigators—several months before Kiki

  did. As a result, Kiki’s revelation about funneling money to Kai didn’t come as a surprise; Mookie already had told the agents about the deliveries. However, there was one part of the narrative where their stories didn’t match up: Mookie described conversations Kiki had with his wife, letting her know the cash was coming. Yet Kiki insisted that Kai had no knowledge of what was going on. He told agent Rajaee that not once, during his three years of marriage, did he tell Kai he earned nearly all his cash from cocaine. “If she knew about it,” Kiki said during the interview, “it’s not because I told her.”

  Rajaee would later testify that he was skeptical of Kiki’s denial. It would have been a crime for Kai to harbor her fugitive husband. It also would have been illegal for her to pay her bills with known drug money. Regardless of what went on between the couple early in the marriage, Rajaee thought Kai would have a hard time claming ignorance about the origin of the money that showed up on her doorstep. After all, by that time her husband was a federal fugitive wanted on major drug charges. Back in 2004, agent Rajaee suspected that Hack was lying to protect his friend Kiki—a plan that appeared to have tragically backfired. Now, Rajaee believed he was being fed another line of bullshit, and he would later testify that he believed Kiki was lying to protect his wife.

  In the end, Rajaee’s interview with Kiki was far from revelatory. Even after Kiki was given a list of names and asked to divulge what he knew about each one, he didn’t exactly elaborate. When Rajaee asked about Terry Flenory and Demetrius Flenory, Kiki said they were the leaders of BMF, but he didn’t delve much further than that. It was the same deal when Rajaee brought up Jamad “Soup” Ali—the man who’d been spotted by an eyewitness leaving Misty Carter’s town house the night she and Hack were killed. Again, Kiki was vague. And the feds reached the conclusion that Kiki was lying to protect Soup, too.

  But Kiki did help the feds in one substantial way. He agreed to testify in the impending trial of his boss, Jerry “J-Rock” Davis. The following day, after learning about the recent development, J-Rock followed Kiki’s lead and entered a guilty plea. Unlike Kiki, J-Rock wasn’t interested in sharing info with the feds in exchange for a lighter sentence. The reason: J-Rock’s lawyer claimed his client didn’t want to expose his loved ones to retribution from his associates in the Black Mafia Family.

  Six weeks after the two pleas, Kiki sat down to a lie-detector test. The polygraph was a condition of his plea deal. Federal prosecutors expected full and truthful information from him, and they intended to make sure they got it. If they didn’t, Kiki’s guilty plea would still stick—but the feds would be allowed to withdraw their offer of a reduced sentence and push for the maximum. There were two things that polygraphers planned to ask Kiki about, both of which agent Rajaee already had gone over. First, they wanted to find out if he knew anything about the murders of Misty and Hack. They also wanted to know if he’d ever told his wife that his income came from the cocaine trade.

  During the polygraph, Kiki’s interrogator asked several “relevant” questions (“Did you shoot those people?”), each of which were sandwiched between ten nonrelevant ones (“What is your shoe size?”). That way, the test could determine whether he reacted differently to the controversial versus the noncontroversial inquiries. His reaction was measured by any change in his breathing rate, heart rate, and sweat gland activity. Over and over, in the midst of all those mundane statements, the polygrapher would let slip the loaded questions:

  “Did you shoot those people?”

  “Did you participate in shooting those people?”

  “Do you know for sure who shot those people?”

  “Did you tell your wife that any of that money came from drug proceeds?”

  It took six hours to plow through the test. Each set of questions had to be repeated several times, and the questions themselves had to be asked slowly, with a twenty-second pause between each one to give the machine ample time to gauge Kiki’s reaction. His attorney peeked in on him several times, and he complained about how cold it was in the stark room. He said he hadn’t eaten all day. (His interrogator eventually brought him an apple.) The experience was exhausting.

  After the test was over, the polygrapher gave Kiki a rough idea of how he did. The results weren’t final; they’d first have to be vetted by the DEA. But the polygrapher was able to draw a few broad conclusions. He said Kiki’s reaction to the questions about the murder was “positive,” indicating he was telling the truth. But the DEA later determined the results were inconclusive. The questions were not asked in the proper sequence, the agency ruled. His reaction to the questions about Kai, on the other hand, showed he was being deceptive, the polygrapher said. The DEA would rubberstamp those results.

  After hearing the results, Kiki turned away from the table. His hands flew to his face several times. He laughed a tired laugh. And he told the polygrapher that the test was wrong. He repeated to him what he’d told agent Rajaee: that he never, ever let Kai know that his money came from the drug trade.

  Two weeks after the polygraph, the holes in Kiki’s story got a lot more pronounced. The U.S. Marshals Service finally fielded a tip as to where Kiki’s close friend and business partner, Scott King, might be hiding out. Scott had been a fugitive for more than two years now. Somehow, when the feds caught Mookie, Kiki, and J-Rock in L.A. the year before, Scott managed to slip away. From then on, he remained a step or two ahead of the feds, even after a high-speed police chase during which he crashed his SUV and fled the scene by foot. But on June 6, 2006, the game was up. Investigators finally cornered Scott, who was hiding out at a friend’s house in the L.A. suburbs. The marshals found him in the closet, under a pile of clothes.

  Within weeks, Scott agreed to tell investigators everything, and to tell it in great detail. Unlike Kiki’s version of events, Scott’s story made sense to the feds. It also was consistent with the information

  Mookie provided. Scott said that while Kiki was on the run, he spoke regularly to his wife. In fact, he had a special phone that received her calls, a phone Kiki referred to as “the Kai phone.”

  Scott also described an event that he and Kiki witnessed in D.C. in 2001. He said they were riding around in a limo with a bunch of friends when one of the guys, Jamad “Soup” Ali, shot a man dead in the street. Scott said Kiki clearly saw what happened—yet Kiki hadn’t mentioned it during his debriefing. Nor did Kiki mention a man named Ernest Watkins, whom Scott described as an integral part of his and Kiki’s drug ring. Scott said Ernest helped ship kilos of cocaine across the country using an inside source at the United Parcel Service. According to Scott, Ernest also played a crucial role in the murders of Misty and Hack, perhaps without knowing it. Ernest allegedly provided Kiki with the murder weapon, which Kiki in turn passed along to J-Rock. Yet when Kiki met with agent Rajaee, he never so much as brought up Ernest’s name. The feds didn’t think that was an oversight. They thought Kiki was trying to protect Ernest for the same reason he might want to protect Soup: It was in his best interest to keep investigators in the dark about the details of Misty and Hack’s deaths.

  Agent Rajaee, with the help of agent Harvey, quickly tracked down Ernest in Atlanta. He’d not yet been charged with a crime, but he was told he might be soon. As a precautionary measure, Ernest agreed to speak with the agents. He told them that Kiki was an acquaintance of his. He said he wouldn’t call him a friend. When shown a photo of Kiki’s codefendant, Mookie, Ernest said he didn’t recognize him. (Mookie, on the other hand, had told investigators that he and Ernest had worked closely together.) “Are
you sure?” the agents prodded Ernest. “Yes,” he said, “I’m sure.” The agents then asked if Ernest, an admitted gun collector, ever had a weapon stolen. No, he said. The agents asked if he’d ever traded in a gun. No, he replied. Ever given one away? No. Finally, the agents asked Ernest if he was willing to take a polygraph test. He said he wasn’t.

  A month later, Ernest was served with a subpoena to appear before a Greenville grand jury. At that point, some of his answers changed. Once under oath, Ernest said that he did know Mookie after all. He also said that in 2003 his home had been burglarized, and three guns were stolen.

  Meanwhile, investigators continued to hunt for evidence against Kiki. Even though he’d already pleaded guilty, there was still a case to build. The prosecution wanted to convince the judge that Kiki had fed them lies when they’d bargained for truth. By October 2006, the government had amassed two hundred pages of new allegations, most of them raised by Scott King. The following day, Scott pleaded guilty to cocaine and money-laundering charges. Also on that day, Greenville U.S. Attorney Reginald Lloyd sent a letter to Graham’s attorneys. Kiki’s guilty plea would stand, the letter stated, but the government’s promise of a reduced sentence was null and void. Prosecutors would now aggressively pursue the maximum punishment. According to the letter: