BMF: The Rise and Fall of Big Meech and the Black Mafia Family (22 page)

After the February 9 hearing, Free at Last’s situation was looking even more grim. The company was ordered to pay the court fifty thousand dollars by the end of the month and thirty thousand per month every month thereafter until Graham was captured—or the $300,000 was paid in full. The company, however, still had a binding contract by which they might recover that money from Kai. And Free at Last had every intention of wresting the money from her.

Yet that would prove even more difficult than previously imagined. A week after Free at Last made its first fifty-thousand-dollar payment, Kai filed for bankruptcy, citing the looming burden of having to pay for the bond her husband skipped out on, as well as the expense of the two Porsches that were in her name. In court papers, she admitted that she’d been a “straw purchaser” for the Porsches. She stated that she signed the paperwork on the vehicles to help her
husband, and that she neither saw the pair of $100,000 cars nor had any idea where they might be.

The bankruptcy filing also described how Kai’s “estranged husband” took all the couple’s portable assets with him, including most of Kai’s diamond jewelry. “His whereabouts,” the filing said, “are still unknown.” The suggestion was that Kai was destitute.

As for Kai’s belongings, she claimed to have $250 on hand, $200 in checking, $1,000 in savings, $1,000 worth of clothes, and $10,000 in jewelry. She stated that she was subsisting on a $2,000 monthly handout from her parents—an amount that wouldn’t even cover half her mortgage.

Now, Free at Last faced more pressure than ever to capture Kiki. If Kai’s bankruptcy was approved, and if Kiki wasn’t caught, the small family-run company would have a hard time recovering from the $300,000 hit.

The day after Kai initiated bankruptcy proceedings, Free at Last took what it believed was the next logical step—and perhaps its last gasp. Jean Gai was a fine investigator, but considering what was at stake, Free at Last needed to up the ante. The company hired Rolando Betancourt, who was considered one of the best bounty hunters in the country. His fee was forty-five thousand dollars, plus expenses. And Free at Last was willing to make that investment.

As soon as Free at Last handed over the Kiki file to Rolando, on March 8, 2005, he went to work. The most promising lead was the 2004 Ferrari Spider that Kiki supposedly was driving. Chase Manhattan was the lien holder on the vehicle, which had been leased in California. The last payment had been made on January 25, 2005.

Rolando’s first stop was Kiki’s last known address—the East Cobb home that he had shared with Kai. At the very least, Rolando wanted to check out the vehicles that were coming and going. But all he saw was Kai’s Lincoln Navigator. Rolando talked to the neighbors. No one had seen anything like a Ferrari.

Three days later, Rolando got a call from Free at Last’s attorney.
She told him that the Ferrari was registered to an address in Sylmar, California. Running a check on the address, Rolando found that the income levels in the neighborhood weren’t exactly consistent with $150,000 Italian sports cars.

Rolando’s next stop was Greenville, South Carolina. He met with deputy U.S. marshal John Bridge, who gave him a full briefing of the government’s attempts to track down both Kiki and Scott King. John Bridge’s investigation thus far had revealed that Kiki and Scott might be in Las Vegas or L.A. Both men had traveled there frequently in the past, booking trips through an agency called Outbound Travel, out of San Leandro, California. He also mentioned that Scott and Kiki had ties to several NBA players and were acquainted with Charles Barkley and Michael Jordan, the latter of whom already had been interviewed by the U.S. Marshals Service.

During a second meeting with John Bridge, Rolando was told that the phone number listed in connection to the Ferrari, like Outbound Travel, also had a San Leandro address. The number no longer was in service, but that didn’t matter. Rolando had heard enough to convince him that a trip to California was in order. He boarded a flight to L.A. the following morning.

Once he landed, Rolando immediately headed to the address listed on the Ferrari’s registration, a down-and-out apartment complex in the thick of the San Fernando Valley. The property manager said the woman who lived in the apartment drove a Ford pickup, not a Ferrari. He also told Rolando that her rent was subsidized, meaning she had to provide him with bank statements. And it just so happened that the apartment manager recalled some strange activity on one of those statements, from back in November 2004. During that month—and mere days after Kiki went on the run—the woman’s bank statement included several airline tickets, a bunch of prepaid cell phones, and the deposit of a six-thousand-dollar check.

Later that day, Rolando watched as the woman and a young child
walked out of her apartment and took off in the Ford truck. Rolando tried to keep up with her, but lost the tail somewhere in Pacoima.

Before the day was over, Rolando stopped by a post office in the Valley where a money order had been issued back in December, to make a payment on the Ferrari. He chatted up the clerk who had issued the money order, and she said she remembered the man who purchased it. Rolando showed her a picture of Kiki. Yep, she said, that’s him. Another clerk piped up that she had seen Kiki in the post office even more recently, definitely within the past month. Rolando then stopped by another post office that had issued a money order used to make a Ferrari payment. The clerk there said that both Scott and Kiki were frequent customers. She remembered them well—after all, two men standing six-foot-five and dressed to the nines are hard to forget.

Ten days passed before Rolando caught his next big break. He went back to the apartment complex in Sylmar, to try his luck again with the woman who drove the pickup. This time, she emerged from her apartment, climbed into the Ford, and took off. Rolando followed her as she wound through several side streets, toward Ventura Boulevard. He lost her in a neighborhood just south of Ventura, and then caught up with her again. Rolando glimpsed her pickup pulling out of a long winding driveway on Libbit Avenue. The driveway led to a three-story house with a three-car garage and a pool. There was a silver Infiniti SUV and a pair of black and white Land Rovers parked outside. Little did Rolando know that he had just stumbled upon J-Rock’s First Base.

Two days later, Rolando went to talk to the manager of the dealership where the Ferrari had been leased. (He would have gone sooner, but the manager had been out of town.) Rolando asked who had put the money down for the Ferrari, because surely it couldn’t have been the woman whose name was on the lease. The manager said no, it wasn’t her. Rather, a man named Eric Rivera had written
the $92,000 down payment check. Rolando passed Mookie’s info on to deputy U.S. marshal John Bridge, back in Greenville.

The following day, Rolando hit up Outbound Travel. The owner, who explained that his company was the exclusive travel agency of the NBA, said he knew Scott and Kiki and had booked tickets for them in the past. But it had been a year since their last trip. He also said that he’d heard from Charles Barkley that the two men were now fugitives.

Over the next month, Rolando pursued whatever seemingly small lead had been left dangling. He subpoenaed bank records that would show who’d written the six-thousand-dollar check that the woman from the Sylmar apartment complex had deposited back in November. He learned that the woman’s cell phone records showed she’d been traveling on a regular basis between California and Atlanta. He discovered that the silver Infiniti parked in the driveway of the house on Libbit Avenue house a few days back was registered to Eric “Mookie” Rivera’s sister. He obtained a picture of Mookie, a mug shot from a past arrest out of Miami. Mookie’s bond file listed a Beverly Hills address. Rolando checked out the address, which was a mail drop. An employee there recognized the photo of Mookie, but the P.O. box itself was registered to a woman who lived in an apartment on Riverton Avenue, in Studio City. Rolando went there, too, and talked to the apartment manager. The manager didn’t recognize Mookie’s photo. But Rolando, just to be safe, handed him his card and said that if Mookie happened to come by, please give him a call.

What Rolando really needed, though, was to figure out how to keep a closer watch on the Libbit Avenue house. It belonged, on paper, to a Massachusetts man who had purchased it the year before for $1.8 million. But something wasn’t adding up.

Rolando called deputy marshal John Bridge on May 13, 2005, and told him that he wanted to put together a high-tech system of surveillance cameras that could keep an eye on Libbit in real time. That way, Rolando could watch the house from any location, at any
hour—and from several angles simultaneously. The equipment, he said, would take three weeks to assemble. But he felt it would be worth it. Every clue was pointing toward the three men—Kiki, Scott, and Mookie—hovering around the same part of L.A. And the multimillion-dollar home on Libbit seemed to be the hub. The house also appeared to be consistent with a drug kingpin’s pad. There were fancy cars out front—and not-so-fancy cars, including the Sylmar woman’s pickup, were regularly stopping by. There was, on paper, an out-of-state owner, and that owner didn’t live there. There also was the physical layout of the property itself. The house, like so many other drug-lord domiciles, was very, very hard to surveil.

John Bridge told Rolando he’d do whatever he could to help. Unbeknownst to him, however, the answer to the Libbit Avenue mystery was practically right in front of him. The man who actually lived in the Libbit house was, at that very moment, in Atlanta on business—and had been questioned two days before by Bridge’s fellow marshals. In fact, J-Rock and some of his associates had landed themselves in a rather treacherous confrontation with both the U.S. Marshals Service and the local police.

For the past eight months, a federal manhunt had been under way for a St. Louis fugitive named Deron “Wonnie” Gatling. Wonnie (or “Magic,” as he also was known) was the leader of a midsized BMF hub in Missouri, and thanks to an aggressive investigation in that city, several midlevel BMF members, Wonnie included, had been indicted in federal court back in September. (The indictment had brought much grief to Yogi, who had complained about it to Omari during one of their many wiretapped conversations.)

Finally, on May 11, 2005, U.S. marshals got a tip that Wonnie was hiding out at his girlfriend’s house in a northeast Atlanta suburb called Chamblee. Shortly after 2
P.M.
that afternoon, a team of marshals pulled up to the house, on Anastasia Lane, and knocked on the
door. The man who answered wouldn’t let the marshals inside. Instead, he said he’d speak with the homeowner, and he turned around and headed upstairs. He didn’t return, despite the marshals’ repeated knocking.

The team then split up. A few of them walked around back, to see what they might find. Behind the house, they peeked through a window and saw four men in the basement. The marshals called for the men to come outside. They did, and as they opened the door, a strong scent of marijuana followed them. The men then insisted to the marshals that they were the only people in the house.

At that point, the team out front decided to head inside the home. At the top of the stairs, the man who’d answered the door reappeared—and contradicted the men who’d just emerged from the basement. From the landing, he told the marshals that the homeowner (Wonnie’s girlfriend) was the only other person inside. Investigators called for her, and she, too, appeared at the top of the stairway.

“There’s no one else here,” she claimed.

The marshals decided to check it out for themselves. As they headed up the stairs and down the hallway, they noticed a .45 lying in the master bedroom. From there, they climbed into the attic—where they noticed footprints in the insulation, and noises coming from the far corner.

Behind the wall paneling, hidden beneath a layer of insulation, the marshals found their fugitive. Wonnie was finally in custody. But the sting didn’t end there. After discovering Wonnie, the marshals called DeKalb County police for backup. Several units pulled up to Anastasia Lane—and as the DeKalb officers walked around back, to meet the other team of marshals that was still gathered there, bullets starting whizzing by.

At least seven rounds were fired, from somewhere beyond the fence at the edge of the property. The bullets struck the house within feet of where the officers and the marshals were standing.

After pulling Wonnie from behind the insulation—and then
hearing the shots outside—the marshals grabbed his phone. They saw that he had dialed a number while he was hidden back there, not long before the shooting started. The marshals asked him whom he called.

“An uncle in St. Louis,” Wonnie said.

“What’s your uncle’s name?” they asked.

He wouldn’t answer.

Investigators quickly pulled Wonnie’s phone records and saw that he’d dialed a local cell phone. And the phone, according to cell-tower-mapping technology, was located not in St. Louis but in a neighboring Atlanta suburb, Dunwoody. The agents were able to determine that the number Wonnie called immediately called a third number—a cell phone that, the technology revealed, had been drifting around downtown Atlanta. And as soon as that third number got the call, both phones—that one and the one Wonnie himself had called—started moving toward the house on Anastasia Lane, the cell towers giving their locations away. In fact, both cell phones were in the immediate vicinity of the house on Anastasia Lane at the exact moment when the agents were fired upon.

Not long after, both cell phones returned to the Dunwoody location. The mapping technology was able to pinpoint the exact address. It was a house on Spalding Drive. Atlanta DEA agent Jack Harvey, who had immediately joined the investigation into who might have fired on the marshals, was familiar with the house. From his extensive research of the Black Mafia Family, he knew the house was a BMF hangout.