BMF: The Rise and Fall of Big Meech and the Black Mafia Family (7 page)

Aside from sharing a few drivers, the brothers employed separate and distinct crews. And they had different philosophies on how crew members should be treated. Meech played the role of magnanimous leader, a friendly and revered godfather—and his second-in-command, a longtime associate out of St. Louis named Chad “J-Bo” (short for “junior boss”) Brown, handled the dirty work. J-Bo, whose slick bald head and rotund belly belied a lean cunning, often was found at Meech’s side, a literal right-hand man who watched the organization like a hawk and was known to notice a few hundred dollars missing from a stack of five thousand dollars. J-Bo could be counted on to run the ship when Meech was out of town, and he dealt with the day-to-day stuff—most important, overseeing the arrival and departure of cocaine shipments. Meech himself was seldom, if ever, in the same room as the coke. He didn’t touch the drugs, he didn’t handle the cash, and he didn’t give direct orders. Those were J-Bo’s jobs. For many of the crew members—from the drivers to the high-ranking managers—the only real interaction they had with Meech was partying with him in the clubs.

Below J-Bo were Meech’s top-level managers, Martez “Tito” Byrth, a towering and quiet figure who stayed behind the scenes, and Fleming “Ill” Daniels, a short, sweet-faced, and ill-tempered New Yorker who was likened by other crew members to the actor Joe Pesci. Meech hand-picked Ill because of his work as an enforcer on an East Coast cocaine route, and he was prized for his loyalty and protectiveness. Rounding out Meech’s crew were Barima McKnight, a fame-hungry Carson City rapper better known as Bleu DaVinci; Marque
“Baby Bleu” Dixson, a strikingly handsome Californian believed to be Bleu DaVinci’s younger brother (the two were not related); Ameen “Bull” Hight, a hulking and pale-eyed manager who’d been shot along with Meech behind Club Chaos; and, in a tier below the others but still a significant player, Omari “O-Dog” McCree, an Atlanta coke dealer from a storied, drug-infested neighborhood called Boulevard. Omari was a confidant of Meech’s slender, husky-voiced assistant, who went by the nickname “Yogi”—and a close friend of then-up-and-coming rapper Jay “Young Jeezy” Jenkins.

Terry, like Meech, was generous with his crew. But in other ways, his style was a drastic departure from this brother’s. Terry assumed a more direct role in the business. He was known to pop in on the labs to make sure they were humming along, and he often was on hand in various states to receive the cocaine shipments directly. He kept the drivers on their toes, and found ways to make them indebted to the organization. When Terry was in a particularly manipulative mood, for instance, he’d tempt a lower-tier driver with a fancy new car. Then, after the employee accepted it, Terry would make him pay off the vehicle by withholding payments for his various cross-country cash and cocaine runs. “Whatever way he could keep his foot on your neck,” one of his high-level managers, Arnold “A.R.” Boyd, once remarked.

A.R. was part of Terry’s innermost circle, and though he respected his boss, he found fault with him, too. A.R. had started off as Terry’s personal driver (the boss hated to fly), and he rose to a managerial position only after his older brother, the Flenorys’ childhood friend Benjamin “Blank” Johnson, was locked up on a cocaine charge. With the long-trusted Blank indisposed, A.R. was the natural replacement.

Of Terry’s other, numerous employees, Eric “Slim” Bivens was among his favorites. Terry lavished him with perks, such as the time he gave Slim a $200,000 black Bentley coupe for his birthday. Slim also was one of the few of Terry’s associates who’d met the Flenroys’
Mexican cocaine connection. The other anointed ones included Derrick “Chipped Tooth” Peguese, who kept watch over Terry’s side of the Atlanta operation; William “Trucker” Turner, a manager who helped handle the cocaine when it arrived in California from Mexico; and Marlon Welch, the adult son of Terry’s longtime girlfriend, Tonesa.

Below Terry’s inner circle were his midlevel managers: Terrance Short, a cousin of the Flenorys who hailed from Texas and went by the obvious moniker “Texas Cuz”; Michael “Freak” Green, a trusted childhood friend of the Flenorys and sometime overseer of the Atlanta White House; and another overseer of the White House, Innocent “50 Cent” Guerville, who resembled the rapper with the same nickname. Terry also oversaw a BMF cell in St. Louis that was manned by Danny “Dog Man” Jones and Deron “Wonnie” Gatling, the latter of whom was friendly with another kingpin, Jerry “J-Rock” Davis, who ran a sister cocaine crew to BMF.

In fact, J-Rock introduced the Flenorys to one of their most important associates, William “Doc” Marshall. Doc, a slightly built and preppily dressed Atlantan who had a knack for pulling guileless young women into the organization’s fold (he fathered twelve children by his mid-30s), had started off his lengthy criminal career as a high-end car broker. That’s how he met J-Rock. J-Rock needed someone to help him obtain Mercedes, BMWs, and Ferraris, and Doc was a wiz at coming up with people both real and imagined in whose names dozens of vehicles could be titled and paid for, so as to throw the feds off of drug dealers’ trails. One day, when Terry Flenory mentioned to his friend J-Rock that he was in need of such a service, J-Rock said he had just the guy.

After meeting Terry, Doc immediately noticed something different about him. Unlike most of the drug dealers Doc did business with, Terry didn’t sugarcoat what he did for a living. He was completely up front with Doc about being a drug trafficker. If they were going to do business, Terry told him, he needed to know exactly
where Terry was coming from. Another notable thing about Terry was that he wanted far more cars than the other kingpins who relied on Doc’s services. So when Terry requested that Doc deal with him exclusively, Doc agreed. Doc had reason to believe that Terry had some serious clout—especially after Terry flashed a few pictures of him taken with P. Diddy.

Doc—at Terry’s urging—also started getting cars for Meech and his crew. But, as with everybody else who worked with Meech, Doc didn’t do any transactions with the boss himself. Instead, he negotiated with J-Bo. After dealing with the brothers for several years, however, Doc and Meech became closer. And eventually, Doc’s job description changed. There came a point when Doc could no longer get cars for the Flenorys, because one of his cars was pulled over, and the cops found twelve kilos inside. That brought too much heat to Doc’s company, XQuisite Empire, and to all the cars that he’d brokered over the years.

But because Doc had grown so familiar with the inner workings of both Meech’s and Terry’s crews—and because he was so good with numbers—he was promoted to a new position: the Flenory brothers’ chief financial officer. As CFO, Doc kept track of how the organization was spending its money. He documented outstanding debts that were owed the brothers. And he identified ways in which the brothers could launder and invest tens of millions of dollars in drug proceeds. To that end, Doc helped set up bank accounts into which Meech and Terry’s cash could be deposited, by viable sources and in modest amounts, to avoid federal detection. (Doc did, however, bring some unwanted attention to BMF when he shot a home intruder in self-defense—one who’d most likely had his eye on the contents of a room-sized safe in Doc’s Atlanta town house.)

Doc also started distributing the Flenory brothers’ cocaine to local drug dealers. He typically moved twenty to thirty kilos per month. It was a natural progression, considering the number of drug dealer
contacts Doc had acquired in the car business. Doc, like most of the people the Flenorys employed, had a knack for the drug game.

For Doc—and for all the brothers’ employees—the rules were simple: Don’t speak of the organization to anyone outside the organization. If you get busted, take your own heat. Reckless violence is frowned upon, as it attracts too much of the wrong attention. Loyalty is prized above all else, though you should manage to keep your wits about you, too. And if you can in some way prove your undying devotion to the organization, do it. To that end, the younger and more audacious of the organization’s members (almost all of them in Meech’s camp) took the crew’s motto to the extreme—and to their skin. The tattoo they bore, in thick cursive lettering spanning the length of the forearm, made the point succinct. The letters
BMF
were intertwined with the crew’s motto:
Death Before Dishonor.

One of the first orders of business when dealing with a highly profitable cocaine enterprise is finding something to do with all that cash. It’s more problematic than one might think. To buy a house, or even a car, with a pile of money is like sending a letter to the feds asking them to investigate you. Even the type of jewelry the Flenory brothers favored—chunky diamond medallions, weighing in at increasingly astronomic carats—couldn’t be purchased outright. Same goes for an Italian leather sofa, or imported marble slabs for a bathroom renovation. All those things cost more than ten thousand dollars, and anytime a consumer pays that much or more in cash, the merchant is required to file a federal Form 8300 that documents the transaction. Rack up enough 8300s, and you’re bound to pop up on the IRS’s radar—particularly if you have no verifiable income and haven’t filed a tax return in a half dozen years, which pretty much described Meech and Terry’s situation.

Basically, the Flenorys had to come up with new ways to launder
their dirty money. One such scheme that Terry hatched involved the manipulation of the Michigan State Lottery. A cocaine distributor who worked with Terry was friends with a Detroit convenience store owner. At the distributor’s urging, the store owner set aside stacks of his shop’s winning lotto tickets, typically scratch-offs worth between five thousand and seventy-five thousand dollars a pop. Terry would buy the tickets off the store owner—at the store owner’s profit, of course (say, $5,250 for a $5,000 scratch-off). Then, Terry would have various girlfriends, and at least one of his girlfriend’s mothers, cash in the tickets. For several years, each of the women claimed between $30,000 and $100,000 in annual lottery winnings. That way, the women appeared to have legitimate incomes—incomes with which they’d buy homes, cars, and jewelry for Terry, the kind of things drug money can’t buy.

Of course, the organization couldn’t launder all its millions of dollars using the lotto scheme. And so, as any good corporation is inclined to do, BMF diversified. The Flenorys, with the help of CFO Doc Marshall, flooded money into the bank accounts of associates with clean criminal records and legit employment histories. Under the guise of those associates, the brothers invested in real estate, the businesses of friends and family, and, in Meech’s case, a hip-hop magazine and record label. The result was that the brothers created jobs, some legal and others not, for several hundred of their nearest acquaintances.

On the one hand, the brothers’ cocaine empire capitalized off the affliction of inner-city blacks who, not unlike themselves, were the product of struggling schools and limited opportunities. That could be viewed as a predatory business model. On the other hand, if it wasn’t the Flenory brothers doing that line of work, someone else would—perhaps someone not so willing to give back. To Meech, the ends justified the means. It was a warped inversion of the American dream, a Robin Hood mentality tailored to the drug trade, a belief that if you worked hard and beat the system, then funneled some of
your cash back into the community, at least some of the system’s casualties would benefit from your enterprise.

Yet the Flenory brothers didn’t exactly live like paupers so they could give to the poor. They reveled in the kind of decadence enjoyed by the nation’s most well compensated chief executives—and, in a way, they fancied themselves a member of that class.

Terry, the more understated of the two CEOs, eventually set up shop with Tonesa in Los Angeles, where the organization’s drug shipments arrived from Mexico. Terry was familiar with the lay of the city; even before he moved there, he spent much time in L.A. for business and pleasure. (Some of his California friends assumed he was in the music industry, due in part to the fact that he flew by private jet to parties in Miami and New York, including those hosted by P. Diddy.) Over the course of several years, Terry bought at least three homes in the San Fernando Valley, all of them placed in Tonesa’s name, and the houses reflected Terry’s growing stature in the City of Angels. First, there was the two-story Italianate stucco, just barely on the wrong side of Ventura Boulevard and strategically located in a small cluster of homes behind a formidable iron gate. The gate allowed the residents to control who came and went, and to enjoy a level of privacy other homes in the area didn’t offer. Nobody, including the feds, could watch the house too closely.

Crossing over Ventura to the south, approaching the more posh side of the L.A. suburbs and inching ever closer to the coveted hills, was Terry’s handsome split-level, all but obscured by a thicket of well-manicured California flora. (Again, all the better for evading detection—especially considering that the property was monitored by an elaborate system of hidden cameras.) The house was called the Jump, and its long driveway that wrapped around back was perfect for the arrival of limousines, loaded with cocaine, that went undetected by the neighbors. Terry and Tonesa didn’t live at the Jump. It was simply a place to meet “the connect.”

Something else about the split-level—it just so happened to sit on
a cul-de-sac within spitting distance of the home of another major drug dealer, J-Rock. J-Rock’s organization, Sin City Mafia, was closely aligned with the Flenorys’. The two drug rings shared the same distributor, two of the same hubs (Atlanta and L.A.), and even a few associates—one of whom, the son-in-law of Atlanta mayor Shirley Franklin, would soon bring some unwanted attention to both crews.

The most impressive of Terry’s homes, though, the one that lorded over the others, sat on the most prestigious of L.A. streets, an address from which you could climb no higher: Mulholland Drive. The house was built into the hillside, a modern terra-cotta-roofed structure with a three-car garage and three-sided courtyard. The $2.9 million home, situated at the foot of a descending driveway and tucked safely behind by a security gate, offered a commanding view of the eternal sprawl of the Valley, a repetition of palm-lined and smog-choked streets, soulless chain stores and dingy fast food joints—and, in the midst of it all, a couple of BMF stash houses through which an estimated $270 million in cocaine eventually would flow.