When Scott King took the stand on the morning of April 17, 2007, he spared no detail. In front of a room full of onlookers, including the families of both Misty and Hack, he methodically laid out the history of his friendship and business relationship with Kiki. He described how the two met, back when Kiki was still a student at Clemson University. He talked about how they both fell into the local cocaine trade. He mentioned that Kiki helped him get back in the drug game after he finished a three-year stint on a cocaine charge. By that time, Scott recalled, they’d both ended up in Atlanta. He said Kiki was clearly doing well for himself. Soon, he said, they combined forces. They found a big-time dope supplier in J-Rock. They opened a high-end car dealership to help their drug income seem legit. They each dated one of the mayor of Atlanta’s daughters. They pulled their friends, including Ulysses “Hack” Hackett, into their drug ring. Then, the cocaine operation they so carefully pieced together began to crumble. Scott described his decision to flee to California after he learned he’d been indicted. He said Kiki, who would be added to the indictment a little later, decided to stick it out in Atlanta. Scott claimed that, even then, Kiki was suspicious about Hack.
“Did y’all discuss any particular concerns about Mr. Hackett?” assistant U.S Attorney Mark Moore asked Scott.
“Yes. Tremayne told me he felt that Hack was cooperating, and that we might need to take care of him.”
“When you say, ‘Take care of him,’ what did that mean to you?”
“Kill him.”
“How did you feel about that, Mr. King?”
“I didn’t want no part of it. He was like my brother. But to Tremayne, he was just somebody who could finger him and get him convicted.”
“Did you agree to assist Mr. Graham in doing something to Mr. Hackett?” Moore continued.
“No,” Scott said.
“Did Mr. Graham let it die at that point?”
“No.”
“What, if anything, did he say to you?”
“That he was going to find somebody to take care of him.”
According to Scott, that person was J-Rock. Kiki had convinced the boss that Hack could incriminate him, too. “So if Jerry didn’t want to get fingered in our indictment,” Scott testified, “maybe he needed to think about taking care of Hackett.”
“Did you have any other discussions with Mr. Graham about doing something to Mr. Hackett?” Moore asked.
“Yes. He discussed getting a gun from Ernest Watkins to take care of the murder. He told me that Ernest had come across a gun and gave it to him.”
“And did he tell you what, if anything, he did with that gun?”
“He told me that he passed it along to Jerry Davis.”
Scott said Kiki was out on bond and under house arrest one morning several months later, when he was roused from sleep by a ringing phone. He said Kiki was on the line, and he had news to share: “Stupid and the girl are dead.”
Within weeks, Kiki jumped bond and joined Scott in L.A., Scott recalled.
“During the time period that he was living as a fugitive in California with you,” Moore continued, “did y’all have any other further discussions about what happened to Ulysses Hackett and Misty Carter?”
“Yes,” Scott said. “Tremayne told me that Jerry and him had went over to T’s house.”
“Who is T?”
“Big T from BMF.”
“Is that Terry Flenory?”
“Yes.”
“Did you know Mr. Flenory?”
“Yes.”
“And where did you meet him?”
“In Atlanta at my place of business.”
“Why did you meet him in Atlanta at your place of business?”
“Because he invested in the business.”
“So Tremayne told you about an occasion where he and Jerry Davis went over to Terry Flenory’s house?”
“Yes. And somehow Hack’s name came up, and Jerry boasted that he had took care of it.”
Under cross-examination, Kiki’s attorney hinted that Scott might be saying whatever he could to make sure he served the least possible sentence. “You obviously don’t want to spend any more time than you have to in prison, correct?” the attorney, J. Bradley Bennett, asked.
“I’m saying, I done the crime, so I’m going to do the time,” Scott replied.
“Do you have a desire to spend less time in prison?” Bennett reiterated.
“I have a desire to tell the truth,” Scott shot back.
After Scott wrapped up his lengthy testimony, U.S. District Court Judge Henry Herlong called a short break. When he returned to the bench, one of the prosecutors approached him with an alarming bit of information. She said the government’s next witness, Eric “Mookie” Rivera, had just been threatened by Kiki.
“May it please the court, Your Honor?” prosecutor Regan Pendleton interjected. “Mr. Rivera, the government’s witness and codefendant in this case, was brought in the courtroom by the marshals service and placed in that chair, at which time the court was in recess and everyone was standing around talking. And I glanced over and I observed Mr. Graham make a threatening gesture toward Mr. Rivera. He pointed his fingers as if shooting a gun and then put the gun to his heart. Mr. Rivera observed it and I observed it. And Mr. Rivera is very concerned about it.”
The judge said he would get to that in due time. But first, a somewhat shaken Mookie launched into his testimony. Like Scott King, he gave a sprawling narrative of his history as Kiki’s friend and drug associate. Mookie described himself as a courier-for-hire who transported kilos of coke and huge shipments of cash across the country on private jets. He recalled meeting Kiki through their mutual employer, J-Rock. He said he continued to do business with Kiki while he was under house arrest, and that the two became friends. Mookie said Kiki opened up to him.
“Did you have a conversation with him about Ulysses Hackett’s death?” prosecutor Moore asked.
“It came up,” Mookie said.
“How did it come up?”
“I was over there. We were discussing our next trip. And out of curiosity, I asked him how the case was going. And he says, ‘Oh, it’s looking good right now.’ I said, ‘What’s going on?’ He said the one guy that could say anything about him got murdered. He just said that the guy is gone. He can’t say anything about him.”
Mookie testified that after Kiki became a fugitive, he traveled to the East Coast to pick up drug money for him—and that while he was in Atlanta, Kiki had him deliver bundles of the cash to his wife. Mookie said he also met with Kai Franklin Graham to pick up Kiki’s son. He said he transported the child across the country so that Kiki could spend time with him. Mookie then returned the boy to Kai, in Atlanta.
At the end of his testimony, the judge asked Mookie to describe what had just happened between him and Kiki in the courtroom.
“He, um, made eye contact, and then he shot one time,” Mookie said, pointing with two fingers the way children do when mimicking a gunshot.
“And what did you take that to mean?” the judge asked.
“That, you know, they’re going to try and kill me.”
Later in the hearing, Mookie took the opportunity to address some of the people seated in the courtroom: “I want to apologize for the loss that the Hackett family received, and the Carter family. I hope that they do get justice.”
The judge then sentenced Mookie to three and a half years in federal prison.
As for Scott King, his situation was more serious. Scott was a higher-level dealer, one who’d spent two years as a federal fugitive. What’s more, he’d brought his friend Hack into the fold—eventually leading him to his death, even if Scott didn’t have a hand in the murder. After Mookie’s testimony, the judge asked Scott if he had anything more to say before his sentence was read. “I would like to apologize to the Hackett family and the Carter family and let them know that I loved Misty and Hack like a brother and sister,” he said. “I’m just so sorry.”
Desp
ite Scott’s extensive cooperation, his punishment was severe. Judge Herlong gave him twenty-four years.
Neither Mookie’s nor Scott’s sentence was all that unexpected. The real barometer of the government’s success would be Kiki’s prison term. Right away, the judge hinted that he was impressed with the evidence the government laid out—and with the broader investigation. “I have handled some very serious drug cases,” Herlong said. “This is the biggest one I have ever seen.”
Then, it was Kiki’s turn to speak. He tried to strike a conciliatory tone, perhaps with a poor choice of analogies. “I assure you, I have many, many regrets,” he told the judge. “And if I could take them back, I would in a heartbeat. But unfortunately, life is not like golf, so you can’t take a mullet.”
He, too, asked for mercy and forgiveness. He also tried to diminish the testimonies of Scott and Mookie. “I learned that as long as you’ve got life, you have a chance to turn your life around, Your Honor,” Kiki said. “That’s what I’ve been trying to do. And I feel I’ve been truthful, Your Honor. And I’m sorry that my story wasn’t embellished or sensationalized enough to the agents’ liking. But my plea agreement didn’t require that. All it required was for me to be truthful, Your Honor, and I was truthful.”
Last of all, he denied ever threatening anyone tied to the case—let alone wanting them dead: “I just want it on the record that there was no way I would threaten a witness or anyone in the courtroom,” Kiki said. “I mean, it just don’t make sense. And for the record, me and Rivera was very close. Actually, it broke my heart to see him get on the stand and testify against me, Your Honor, because I have never did anything wrong to Rivera. I wouldn’t want him dead or anyone dead. And I played no part in Misty Carter or Ulysses Hackett’s murder. And that’s all I want to say.”
It would seem, based on what happened next, that the judge was not moved to sympathy.
“I am familiar with life sentences that have been imposed in this district,” Judge Herlong said. “And there certainly have been life sentences imposed for crimes of this nature and less than this nature. And as far as being compared to other major drug dealers, he ranks right up there at the top.
“It is therefore the sentence of the court that the defendant, Tremayne K. Graham, is hereby committed to the custody of the Bureau of Prisons to be imprisoned for a term of life.”
If Kiki wasn’t officially a suspect in the murders of Misty and Hack before he was sentenced on cocaine charges, his status became official afterwards. But prosecutors still had a long way to go before they’d be ready to indict him for the killings—if they were ever to make such a move. By the summer of 2009, no charges had been filed in the five-year-old double-homicide. Still, in the year-and-a-half following Scott and Mookie’s testimony, the government began lining up several potential witnesses. The idea, as with the Detroit-based case against the Flenory brothers, was to bring charges against potential witnesses, then offer them plea deals in exchange for their cooperation. And there were two witnesses in particular whom federal prosecutors were eyeing.
On the surface, it might have seemed pointless to investigate Kiki on a murder charge when he’d just been sentenced to life in federal prison. But in addition to holding someone accountable for the deaths, there was another reason the government might be inclined to prosecute. Killing a federal witness is a capital offense.
Even before the feds tracked down the two witnesses they’d been circling, one person central to the investigation already had landed in federal custody: Jamad “Soup” Ali. Soup had been snared in a sting
operation at an upscale home in New Jersey suburb. He almost escaped through the window of the huge modern house, but a team of agents quickly surrounded the property. After storming the house, task force agents found a loaded machine gun in the closet of the master bedroom. As a result, Soup was charged with felony firearm possession. Two months after Kiki’s sentencing, Soup was sentenced to nearly seven years in prison—giving the feds plenty of time to focus on the double-homicide investigation without having to worry that the suspected hit man would slip away.
With Soup behind bars, investigators turned their attention to the man who was believed to have supplied the murder weapon: Ernest Watkins. At first, Ernest had been hesitant to cooperate with the feds. He was cagey in initial interviews, and the investigators believed that when he was called to testify in front of a grand jury, he misled jurors, too. Scott King had an explanation for Ernest’s behavior. He said Ernest had been kidnapped and tortured by drug-dealing acquaintances of Kiki—and that Ernest had the scars to prove it.
In the fall of 2007, Ernest was indicted for cocaine trafficking, obstruction, and giving false statements to a grand jury. Months later, the government hired a specialist to examine the scarring on his back, which he claimed was the result of a motorcycle accident. On the second day of his trial in federal court, he cut the testimony short and entered a belated guilty plea. He signed an agreement to cooperate with the government. He later received the same sentence that Scott King did: twenty-four years.
By then, the feds had another potential witness in the bag. In December 2007, Kai Franklin Graham struck a deal with the government and agreed to plead guilty to “structuring financial payments.” The feds decided not to seek the more serious charge of money-laundering. Her crime: Visiting seven post offices and buying fourteen postal money orders, totaling one thousand dollars each. She admitted that she bought the money orders in smaller increments to avoid drawing the attention of the IRS.
The government had collected additional evidence that showed Kai Franklin Graham had been handling lots of cash. The feds claimed to have tracked down not just those fourteen, but sixty money orders that she’d bought while her husband was on the run. A prosecutor alleged that she used the money orders—all of which were just shy of the three-thousand-dollar minimum that draws the IRS’s attention—to pay her credit card bills and mortgage. It appeared to investigators that Kai wanted to keep the government from finding out where that cash was coming from. However, Kai denied that the money came from Kiki—or that she was trying to evade the IRS in order to throw the feds off her then-husband’s trail. She claimed the money came from her father. That also had been her defense when the bonding company that sprang Kiki, Free at Last, sued her.
The company accused Kai of misleading the government about both her financial situation and the whereabouts of her husband. Free at Last was still hoping to recover $185,000 it had lost—a debt that Kai, who’d filed for bankruptcy, was trying to avoid. In a signed affidavit, Kai repeated her claims that she’d had no contact with Kiki after he fled, and that he’d left her destitute. (Kai eventually prevailed in the lawsuit; Free at Last settled the case for a paltry five thousand dollars.)
At her plea hearing, held in the same courtroom where her exhusband received a life sentence eight months earlier, assistant U.S. Attorney Moore contradicted her affidavit: “The government could show, if required to at trial, that she assisted her husband in structuring other transactions on other dates, and that on a couple of occasions she received drug money from her husband’s associates while he was fleeing.” The government recommended that Kai serve thirty months of probation, in exchange for her full cooperation in the U.S. Attorney’s ongoing investigation.
After Kai entered her plea and returned to her seat, her mother greeted her with a warm smile. Atlanta mayor Shirley Franklin had traveled to South Carolina as a testament of her love and support for
her daughter. She was a protective mother, and she was incensed that the case would later see a flurry of media attention. The scrutiny placed on the Franklin family was more than its matriarch was willing to endure. Months later, in an interview with National Public Radio, Franklin said the publicity surrounding her daughter had turned her off to politics altogether.
“When you run for public life, you fully expect your own life to be evaluated,” the mayor said during the interview. “I did not expect that my c
hildren’s lives would make the front page or NPR. And I’m not sure I would have run if I had known that. The truth of the matter is, I won’t run again for that reason. I will not put my children, my grandchildren, or any of my family members in the spotlight again. The public can decide whether that’s good or bad. It’s great for me.”
Yet it wasn’t Kai’s case—or the break in the three-year-old investigation into Hack and Misty’s murders—that got the lion’s share of public attention in 2007. Instead, the fallout from the death of a ninety-two-year-old woman named Kathryn Johnston mesmerized Atlanta that year. The case brought much criticism to Franklin’s administration and the Atlanta Police Department—and drove a wedge between two local law enforcement agents who’d once been consumed by the investigation of the Black Mafia Family. The bond that the lawmen had enjoyed while working on the BMF case was destroyed by what happened in the Johnston one.
When three Atlanta police officers showed up at Johnston’s house, on the fringe of the open-air drug zone called the Bluff, they believed they were serving a no-knock warrant on a drug dealer. The problem was, they’d lied to obtain the warrant. And it turned out that by cutting corners, they were targeting the home of an elderly woman who had nothing to do with the drug trade. Two of the officers, Gregg Junnier and Jason Smith, pried open Johnston’s burglary bars and took a ram to her front door. Johnston heard them trying to break in. Scared for her life in the sketchy neighborhood, she grabbed her rusty revolver. As the officers barged in, she fired and missed. Junnier and Smith returned fire, squeezing off thirty-nine rounds and striking her a half dozen times. She was cuffed and left to die in her front hallway. Minutes later, Junnier and Smith realized that there were no drugs, or drug dealers, in the house.
BMF: The Rise and Fall of Big Meech and the Black Mafia Family Page 27