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

by Shalhoup, Mara

  One of the officers tried to cover up their mistake by planting a few baggies of weed in the basement. But in the days to come, officer Junnier caved. He told the FBI the whole story of the ill-fated day, from cutting corners on the warrant to planting drugs to cover up the killing of an innocent woman. But that wasn’t all. Junnier also described the allegedly unethical and illegal practices he’d witnessed at the Atlanta Police Department. He said that officers routinely lied under oath to obtain warrants, and that supervisors turned a blind eye to the practice so long as officers hit their arrest numbers. Junnier shifted the blame away from his own actions and toward a more pervasive climate of corruption. He did so in order to serve the least possible sentence. And to represent him in his plea deal with the feds, he hired a tough former prosecutor and longtime friend to many of the officers who staffed the APD’s now-disgraced narcotics unit, a guy who’d always bonded more easily with cops than with his fellow lawyers. He hired Rand Csehy.

  The same month that Kiki was sentenced to life in prison, Junnier—with Csehy at his side—pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter. The fallen cop didn’t wish to address the court, so Csehy spoke for him. He ripped into the police department, blaming the top brass for the corruption that had trickled to the rank and file. “It’s a case where the fish rotted from the head down,” Csehy told the judge. “Hopefully, this will reverberate through the police department.”

  The plea did reverberate, in more ways than he anticipated. The officers with whom he’d worked so closely now considered him an outsider. His close friend, detective Bryant “Bubba” Burns—who’d served as Csehy’s best man when he married his third wife (a gutsy fellow prosecutor) the year before—was stunned by the position Csehy had taken. In some ways, it wasn’t all that different from Junnier’s decision to turn against his former cohorts, or, for that matter, Doc Marhsall’s or Scott King’s or Mookie Rivera’s. Tradition was tradition. Honor was honor. Rules were rules. Csehy, like the others, had broken the code.

  TWELVE THE EVIDENCE

  Most of the witnesses are specifically aimed at either one

  brother or the other. Very few are aimed at both.

  —ATTORNEYS JAMES FEINBERG AND DREW FINDLING,

  IN A SEPTEMBER 2007 COURT FILING

  On an early August morning in 2007, a fleet of bulldozers rolled through the desolate streets that once encompassed the rowdiest nightlife district Atlanta had ever known—and the most poorly placed. The two dozen bars in Buckhead Village had long been at odds with the blue bloods who wielded the real power in the neighborhood. In the end, the blue bloods won. A mall developer from the suburbs swooped in and bought every last property in Buckhead Village’s eight-block radius. The once-legendary nightclubs Tongue & Groove, World Bar, Mako’s, and Chaos were reduced to a pile of bricks. And Atlanta, a city tirelessly committed to reinventing itself, was smitten with what the seven-acre plot would one day become. A Rodeo Drive–styled shopping mecca would rise from the rubble. The raucous celebrity playground would fade from memory. And the crime scene where Big Meech unwittingly stepped into the public spotlight would disappear forever.

  Buckhead had been Meech’s primary stomping ground. It was the neighborhood where a billboard for his record label proclaimed: THE WORLD IS BMF’S. It was home to his swanky town house, the Elevator; his two stately stash houses, the Gate and Space Mountain; and the clubs and high-end boutiques where he easily dropped fifty grand in a single visit. It was where he took a bullet during a gun battle behind Club Chaos, setting into motion a sputtering police investigation and cementing Buckhead’s reputation as a destination as dangerous as it was glamorous. At one time, the existence of the Black Mafia Family in Atlanta had seemed as entrenched as those Buckhead nightclubs. Then, suddenly, everything changed.

  In the summer and fall of 2007, as Buckhead Village was being demolished, two more federal indictments were handed up in Atlanta and L.A. The government snared the few stragglers who hadn’t been busted in Detroit, where the Flenory brothers and an eventual sixty coconspirators were charged; in Orlando, where Doc Marshall was nabbed; in Greenville, where J-Rock’s crew was dismantled; or in Nashville and St. Louis, where a handful of lower-rung associates were swept up. The two new indictments brought the total number of defendants charged in the nationwide BMF investigation to 150. Every significant player now faced a major felony. In Atlanta, three of Meech’s crew members and a dozen of Terry’s were indicted. The most noteworthy on Terry’s side was Darryl “Poppa” Taylor, a BMF cocaine courier and the first-cousin of Sean “P. Diddy” Combs. On Meech’s side, the indictment charged his third-in-command, Fleming “Ill” Daniels, who’d already been indicted for the Velvet Room murder in a separate, state case; Deron “D-Shot” Hall, a drug associate of Meech’s who popped up on the feds’ radar after he boarded a private jet with the kingpin; and Barima “Bleu DaVinci” McKnight, the beloved rapper on whom Meech had pinned his hope for mainstream success.

  Bleu had been running Meech’s floundering record label in the two years that the boss was locked up. Now that Bleu was indicted, too, the label was done for. Yet despite putting an end to BMF’s hiphop aspirations, the indictment was a blessing for Bleu. It squashed speculation that he’d been spared by the feds because he’d broken ranks and snitched on Big Meech. In fact, after the indictment was filed, Bleu gave his street rep a boost by becoming a fugitive. Even after the U.S. marshals tracked him down five months later in Las Vegas, Bleu adhered to the code of silence espoused by Meech—at least for a while.

  It would seem that with the Atlanta and L.A. indictments, BMF’s forced departure from the drug trade would have left a power vacuum in the cities where the crew dominated the cocaine trade. But that wasn’t the case in Atlanta, BMF’s largest market. Meech and Terry’s organizations were responsible for the vast majority of coke that landed on Atlanta’s streets. From the ten-dollar crack rocks hawked on Boulevard to the hundred-dollar grams of powder passed around the most posh of clubs, the lineage of most of Atlanta’s cocaine was just a few steps removed from Meech or Terry’ stash houses. Yet with Atlanta’s main cocaine supplier knocked out, there was little in the way of a drug war waged for the territory. In fact, the midlevel dealers who’d relied on BMF were, by the summer of 2007, enjoying an unprecedented heyday.

  Following the police shooting the year before of ninety-two-year-old Kathryn Johnston, Atlanta’s narcotics unit had been disbanded, and it had yet to be reassembled. As a result, many of the dealers who’d once feared the APD’s heat had little to worry about. In the absence of a narcotics squad, the dealers could relax. Their drug houses—which were a notch or two closer to the streets than BMF’s cocaine warehouses—were practically warrant-proof. In the six months leading up to the narcotics unit’s dissolution, the APD had served nearly two hundred search warrants on the dealers’ suspected drug houses. In nearly the same time period after the Johnston

  shooting, only fourteen drug-house warrants were served. By the summer of 2007, the number sank to a measly one. “Do they know we’re not doing the enforcement we were before? Yes, they do,” Deputy Chief Carlos Banda told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution in the summer of 2007. “The drug dealers aren’t that stupid.”

  In addition to the carte blanche handed to Atlanta’s midlevel dealers, the problem of finding a new supplier was easily solved. Since at least 2000, an organization that was far bigger than BMF had been putting down roots in the city. As had long been the case on the West Coast, in Texas, and in certain pockets of the East, Mexican cartels were infiltrating Atlanta. The predominant cartel in Atlanta was the Federation, a crew that originated in the coastal state of Sinaloa—called the “Sicily of Mexico” because of its concentration of crime bosses. Mexican cartels already imported 90 percent of the cocaine sold in the United States, including the tens of thousands of kilos BMF moved. At its height, BMF had distributed several thousand kilos a month. But compared with the Mexican cartels, a couple thousand keys was nothing. On
e of the cartels in Atlanta had sixteen thousand kilos seized. The feds also accumulated $22 million of the cartel’s cash, setting a record for the amount of drug money confiscated from a single crew in the city. As one federal officer put it, the Mexican cartels “could wipe their feet on BMF.” In the end, the dismantling of the Black Mafia Family in Atlanta was merely the eradication of the middleman, an opportunity for Mexican cocaine importers to extend their ever-expanding reach.

  The situation was a bit different in Detroit, BMF’s second-largest distribution hub. In the Flenorys’ hometown, BMF, as a brand, had trickled further down the food chain, to midlevel and street-level dealers who claimed allegiance to the crew. Those dealers held the same positions that Meech and Terry occupied more than a decade earlier. (Atlanta had known BMF only as the city’s top players; thus Atlanta’s lower-tier guys, while in awe of the BMF, had less personal connection to the crew.) The young Detroit dealers clashed over who

  would step into the Flenorys’ void. It stood to reason that every Detroit dealer aspired to be the next Big Meech or Southwest T. But the battle to succeed BMF’s top players was messy and unorganized. While the myth of BMF was still strong, the organization itself—the cocaine-processing labs and fleets of tricked-out limos and handsome stash houses and piles and piles and piles of cash—had withered away. BMF’s army of couriers and distributors had fractured, and the lieutenants who’d directed them were AWOL. It was no surprise, then, that no successor emerged. There was no real infrastructure to inherit. One of the only tangible signs of the Flenorys’ fading empire were three spray-painted letters—B-M-F—that graced the highway overpasses on Detroit’s South Side.

  Detroit was where Meech and Terry’s cocaine enterprise started, and Detroit would be where it came to an end. By the fall of 2007, nearly all the defendants who’d been indicted along with the Flenorys had pleaded guilty. (Another twenty-three had been charged in a second Detroit indictment, most of whom eventually would plea as well.) Charles Flenory, Meech and Terry’s father, fessed up to a money-laundering charge, and New York’s Jacob “the Jeweler” Arabo admitted to lying to federal agents. Both men received less than three years in prison. Most everyone else received far stiffer sentences—the longest of which went to Meech’s second-in-command Chad “J-Bo” Brown. J-Bo, who pleaded guilty in the summer of 2007, refused to cooperate with the feds. He got fifteen years. Ultimately, a mere five of the forty-plus defendants indicted with the Flenorys, including the brothers themselves, were still standing when the November 2007 trial date approached.

  The trial, which was expected to last two months, would be complicated by the fact that Meech and Terry faced two different stacks of evidence—and planned on raising two, often contradictory, defenses. Unlike Terry, Meech hadn’t been caught on a federal wiretap, nor had he been busted with an exorbitant amount of cash. Then there was the matter of witnesses. “Most of the witnesses are specifically aimed at either one brother or the other,” Meech’s attorneys wrote in a document filed weeks before the trial, “and very few are aimed at both.” In fact, most of the witnesses that had been identified would be testifying against only one of the brothers. Judging from what had been divulged in the discovery phase of the case, witnesses against Terry were stacking up, and that didn’t bode well for him. More than a half dozen of Terry’s associates had pleaded guilty and cut deals, and that wasn’t counting those who’d stepped up in other jurisdictions. Most significant, Terry’s second-and third-in-command, Eric “Slim” Bivens and Arnold “A.R.” Boyd, both agreed to take the stand against their former boss. So did a minimum of five of Terry’s drivers, distributors, and money-launderers. But of everyone who agreed to cooperate, none—aside from “Doc” Marshall—appeared to have any substantial dirt on Meech. J-Bo, one of the few people under indictment who could provide real insight into Meech’s operation, held his tongue. Ill would do the same. Yet there was still one defendant who could nail the feds’ case against Meech. He hadn’t cooperated yet, but he might find it worth his while. After all, he had more animosity toward Meech than anyone did. He also had more to gain than the other defendants, seeing as how he was facing a mandatory life sentence. By turning on his brother, Terry could save himself.

  At the time, Meech didn’t know about the feds’ attempts to turn Terry against him. In fact, there was much that Meech and his attorneys didn’t know about the government’s case. Prosecutors successfully relied on a federal law that allows witnesses’ statements and identities to remain a secret until the very eve of their testimony. As for everything else, the evidence kept rolling in. Less than two months before the trial, the government introduced a heap of new discovery: eight hundred pages of documents, five hundred pages of photographs, and thirty-three CDs of taped phone calls that both Meech and Terry made from jail. Meech’s attorneys began sifting through the last round of what, in the end, amounted to a total fourteen thousand pages of discovery. It was the last step in a case for which the lawyers had spent two years preparing. Meech’s attorneys appeared to be confident about their client’s odds—right up until they finished sifting through the last stack of evidence.

  Something in the pile of photos and pages of DEA notes and hours upon hours of tape recordings changed Meech’s mind. Whether it was the culmination of so many small but damaging insinuations, the burden of his outsized lifestyle and inexplicable spending habits, or simply the fear of the unknown, Meech was no longer willing to risk it. He felt the hope of escaping the mandatory life sentence slip away. Less than a week before his trial was set to begin, he set his sights on a guilty plea. Only later would he learn that the government had tried to convince Terry to testify against him—and that Terry had refused.

  By pleading guilty, Meech knew there was a good chance that he’d receive the sentence recommended by the feds: thirty years. Yet he held out hope that the judge would go as low as twenty, perhaps out of appreciation for sparing the government the time and expense of such a complicated trial. It was a calculated risk on Meech’s part, but a worthwhile one. And he wanted to convince Terry that he should do the same.

  The week before the trial, Meech’s lawyers made an unusual though compelling request to the judge. They asked that the Flenory brothers be allowed to meet face-to-face. Meech wanted to talk Terry into pleading guilty. The judge agreed to the meeting, which would take place at the federal courthouse in downtown Detroit. It would be the first time the brothers spoke in nearly three years. If all went according to plan, Terry would accept the same deal as Meech.

  But once the brothers were in the same room, it wouldn’t be so simple as that. Apparently, Meech overestimated his diplomatic skills. Terry didn’t take too kindly to his big brother’s advice that he cop a plea. The peace talk quickly devolved into a shouting match. As assistant U.S. Attorney Dawn Ison later would say, the meeting between the Flenory brothers “was disastrous.” Meech’s attorneys agreed with her characterization. But they also believed Meech planted a seed in Terry’s head. The following morning, Terry would stand before the judge and say he wasn’t interested in pleading guilty; he was ready to go to trial. After he was escorted out of the courtroom, however, Terry would have second thoughts. He would ask to be allowed back in the courtroom. Like his brother before him, he would reach the conclusion that his best path was the one of least resistance.

  For Meech, pleading guilty was easier. On the afternoon of November 19, 2007, he was led, shackled and smiling, down a long linoleum-tiled hallway. He passed through a set of double doors and was steered toward the defendant’s table. The marshals uncuffed him and he slid into a chair. He glanced over his shoulder at the near-empty courtroom and paused on two familiar faces: Charles and Lucille. He locked eyes with his parents and flashed a wide grin. They nodded in return.

  Before pivoting back to face the judge, Meech offered one last gesture of solidarity to the two people who’d seen him through it all: the years of yearning, the slow and steady hustle, the meteoric rise, the precipitou
s fall. He turned around in his chair as far as he could and gently, deliberately shook his fist. It was a message to his parents that it was he who’d triumphed over this situation, not the other way around. He’d known all along that none of it could last forever. The game, for him, had run its course. But for longer than most people could begin to imagine, the world had been his. And that was enough to make everything worth it.

  EPILOGUE: 2008

  Twenty sounds bad. But it’s doable.

  —DEMETRIUS “BIG MEECH” FLENORY

  In a way, Big Meech believes his brother saved him from a lifetime behind bars. Sure, the feds had amassed more evidence against Terry Flenory—and perhaps without that evidence, Meech wouldn’t have been busted when he was. But in the end, Terry stood his ground. For that, Meech remains grateful.

  Cooped up in a suburban Detroit jail, pushing three years in lockup while awaiting his sentencing, Meech is quick to point to the deal the feds dangled in front of his brother. “He was offered twenty years to snitch on me,” Meech says. “He didn’t.”

  I don’t even have the chance to ask if he was approached with a similar deal. “They didn’t offer me that,” he says, seated comfortably on the ledge opposite a glass partition. “They know that goes against everything I stand for.” One thing does bother him, though: “He had a public defender,” Meech says of Terry, with a laugh, “and he got the same deal I did.”

  As for the time he’ll serve, he’s banking on the judge’s mercy. He doesn’t even bring up the possibility of thirty years. “Twenty sounds bad,” he says. “But it’s doable.” As long as he lands in a federal pen near Orlando or Atlanta, he’ll be satisfied. He wants to be close to his friends and family. He wants to keep tabs on the progress of his son Demetrius Jr., the child of a girlfriend he met soon after moving to Atlanta—a woman with whom he maintained ties, despite the demise of their relationship. He also wants to make sure, somehow, that his parents will be okay. “The hardest part about this situation is my kids and my mother and father,” he says. “I just hope to come home before they pass away.”