BMF: The Rise and Fall of Big Meech and the Black Mafia Family (8 page)

The next stop, for most of the coke, would be Atlanta—a market largely overseen by Meech. In prior years, a crew called the Miami Boys was responsible for most of the cocaine funneled into Atlanta. But in the early ’90s, the feds caught up with the crew, and with the Miami Boys extinguished, there was an opening in Atlanta’s drug market for a new ruling class. As it was, the city’s top-level distributors were buying their coke from various sources, often scrapping with each other over territory and pricing. In the disorder, Meech and Terry saw an opportunity. Rather than strong-arm their way into the trade, as the bloodthirsty Miami Boys had done (and the Supreme Team before them, up in Queens), Meech and Terry entered the market in a businesslike manner; they sat down with Atlanta’s major cocaine dealers and offered them a better price: seventeen thousand dollars per kilo. The brothers were able to undercut the competition because they had access to such a vast supply. And so it
made sense to move the kilos at a lesser price, even if the profit margin was lower, because it served to choke out all rivals—who, unlike the Flenorys, didn’t have nearly so deep a well from which to draw.

And so Atlanta, with its web of highways and its easygoing drug market, turned out to be a good choice for Meech. But Atlanta would become attractive for another reason, too. Less pressing than the business of setting up the drug enterprise, but closer to Meech’s heart, was the fact that starting in the late ’90s, Atlanta began to blow up on the national hip-hop scene. Rappers were flooding the streets with mixtapes, a phenomenon that allowed music to flow straight to the people—and helped build a quick buzz around new talent. The “tapes,” which usually took the form of CD compilations, were played at clubs and on the urban radio stations, were handed out at shows and on street corners, and were sold online and in underground music stores, all without the interference of a major record label. The mixtape culture brought a new immediacy to hip-hop. Artists could keep fans up to date on allegiances and feuds with other rappers. They could respond to each other’s attacks and counterattacks with freshly pressed verses, released within days rather than the months it takes a label to press a traditional album. The mixtape culture would soon catapult Atlanta rappers such as Jeezy, T.I., Lil Jon, and Ludacris—as wells as the terms
crunk
and
Dirty South
—to super-stardom. It also helped change the face of the city.

In the late ’90s, Buckhead’s clubs were booming with the bass of homegrown tracks such as OutKast’s “Rosa Parks,” followed a few years later by Lil Jon & the East Side Boyz’ “Get Low.” The scene was almost unrecognizable from a few years earlier, when Buckhead, though still debaucherous, was a far whiter place. Ironically, as blacks were enjoying increasingly more influence in the glitziest of all Atlanta neighborhoods, many of the city’s traditionally black neighborhoods were hemorrhaging residents. Across Atlanta, an intown renaissance was under way, spurred in large part by the demolition of an eventual dozen public housing projects, all of them torn down to
make room for “mixed-income” (read: whiter and wealthier) communities. The two forces—the whitening of intown Atlanta and the darkening of Buckhead—weren’t exactly at odds. The influx of young up-and-comers from the suburbs and from far-off states, coupled with Atlanta’s soon-to-crest hip-hop wave, was reshaping the city as a more upscale and glamorous place, less like the forlorn Detroit to which the Flenorys were accustomed and more like the sparkling Miami and L.A to which they aspired.

But as the city slowly morphed, forcibly displacing some down-and-out residents, several pockets of urban blight remained. The biggest of them comprised an area called the Bluffs, off the old Bankhead Highway on the West Side. On the east side of the city, the most concentrated center of poverty could be found along a corridor flanking the thoroughfare called, simply, Boulevard. While other intown neighborhoods sprouted independent coffee shops and $400,000 condos, the drug trade flourished in the Bluff and on Boulevard, making the influx of crack and powder cocaine all the easier for the Flenorys to control. And control it they did, from the safe distance of several unassuming stash houses in upscale Atlanta neighborhoods.

For Meech’s bigger vision to work, he actually
needed
both Atlantas: the one embodied by Boulevard and the other by Buckhead. Thanks to the cocaine distributors who thrived in the drug districts such as Boulevard, Meech raked in the kind of money that laid the groundwork for another endeavor, one that necessitated his presence in the Buckhead clubs. At first, he cut a shadowy figure there, almost blending into the backdrop except that he struck club-goers as something exotic, a light-skinned, ever-so-slightly thuggish figure with chiseled features and braided hair, watching the crowd with an air of authority. He seemed to always be around, solitary and unassuming and yet, when you look at it in retrospect, most certainly plotting something—and imagining the day, not too far in the future, when the spotlight would be focused on him.

At the same time, Meech was gaining a sinister reputation in some
of the city’s seedier corners. Those who knew him, if only peripherally, knew the rumors about his dark side. There was one incident, back in 1996, when he was arrested at one of the city’s most popular watering holes for both rappers and ballers, a place where new tracks were dropped to gauge the crowd’s reaction and, subsequently, where many a career took a boost or a nosedive. The scenery wasn’t too shabby, either, depending on your taste. Magic City, directly across from the downtown Greyhound station, boasts Atlanta’s finest selection of buxom all-black strippers, capable of gravity-defying, seemingly unnatural feats. From the finely polished bumpers of H2s and Lambos in the parking lot to the equally well-buffed curves gracing the fleet of women inside, Magic City was a place you came to show off. In 1996, Meech wasn’t quite ready to expose the full potential of his wealth. He hadn’t reached full potential yet. But he was able to prove that he was a badass. One February night, he was taken out of Magic City in handcuffs, having been accused of throwing a bottle at another patron and slicing his neck. And still, Meech was allowed back inside the downtown club.

The Magic City agg assault charge was dropped a month later. It had been filed under one of Meech’s alias, Ronald Ivory, the name on his Georgia driver’s license, and authorities hadn’t yet caught on to the ruse. Two years later, he was arrested again in Atlanta, during the raid of a suspected drug house; that time he fell back on one of his earlier, Michigan aliases, Rico Seville. After he was charged with felony obstruction and misdemeanor marijuana possession (the raid was pretty much fruitless), he was released. Soon thereafter police discovered a match between Rico Seville’s fingerprints and Ronald Ivory’s, and the DEA helped draw the connection between Rico, Ronald, and Demetrius “Big Meech” Flenory.

And then, it seemed, Meech disappeared from Atlanta. Over the next few years, some of the few hints that law enforcement gleaned to his whereabouts came from confidential informants and a minor arrest. In 2000, he was charged with DUI in L.A., and he identified
himself using a recently issued California driver’s license in the name of Aundrez Carothers. Again, his fingerprints gave him away, but not until after he was released. A year later, an informant told agents in Atlanta that Meech was making regular trips across the country in a white van—loaded with up to two hundred kilos of coke. According to that informant, Meech made the trip from L.A. to Detroit, where he’d typically drop off half the load, and then to Atlanta, where he’d deliver the rest. The following year, a third informant heightened the profile on Meech. He told the DEA that the kingpin from Detroit was a vengeful killer who vowed to “whack” anyone who cooperates in an investigation against him. And in 1997, Meech’s name was mentioned in connection to the Atlanta drive-by killing of the federal informant Dennis Kingsley Walker.

Meech’s low profile didn’t last. In 2003, he was back in Atlanta, bigger and more visible than ever. He descended on the strip club circuit with newfound rigor, religiously showing up on Monday nights at Magic City—and purportedly finding himself banned from another club, 24-K, after getting into a fight with one of the dancers. This time around, he was almost always in the company of a large crew, and the crew was throwing around fistfuls of cash. The outings were among the first obvious displays of allegiance to Meech and the mysterious organization he’d created. Wads of dough aside, the crew members weren’t exactly difficult to pick out of the crowd. Proof of their affiliation was even less subtle than the blue bandannas favored by Crips, the L.A.-based gang with whom Meech’s crew was loosely affiliated, or the red ones worn by rival Bloods. Meech’s entourage wore black T-shirts printed with three letters, ones that might have puzzled onlookers at first. Yet within months, in circles not only in Atlanta but also in Detroit, L.A., Miami, and New York, the abbreviation BMF would become synonymous with the Black Mafia Family—as well as with a particular brand of partying that bordered on the absurd.

The letters were not only displayed on members’ shirts (or, in some cases, tattooed on their forearms), but were also spelled out in
diamonds hanging from their necks on platinum chains. At first, the medallions were modestly sized, perhaps an inch tall and a couple of inches across. (Referring to the diminutive carat count of one of those early chains, one crew member said in a whisper, “BMF.”) Over time, however, the medallions grew, as if along an arc drawn by BMF’s growing dominance in the cocaine trade. And so Meech and Terry would have to employ a jeweler, one of the world’s best—and that would necessitate an increasing number of trips to New York, to the posh Upper East Side shop of celebrity jeweler and self-pronounced “King of Bling,” Jacob Arabo.

Long before he had the pleasure of creating diamond-encrusted “Five Time Zone” watches for the likes of David Beckham, or of dressing Christy Turlington in a $180,000 necklace for her wedding to actor Ed Burns, Jacob was a struggling immigrant working in Brooklyn’s then-not-so-chic Williamsburg. In his midteens, he’d landed work in a jewelry factory, welding bracelets for $125 a week. He found the work was inspiring, and in his spare time he sketched out jewelry ideas in a notebook he carried with him. Twenty years later, his eye for design had turned him into a multimillionaire—thanks in no small part to the status heaped upon him by rappers who coveted a “Jacob,” as his pieces were affectionately called. It was Jay-Z who helped popularize the phrase “Jacob the Jeweler” among the hiphop set, and others followed suit: “I went to Jacob an hour after I got my advance,” Kanye West would later rap. “I just wanted to shine.”

His Upper East Side store, Jacob & Co., was designed to look like the inside of a diamond mine (a mine perhaps inhabited by a Rockefeller), and the walls were hung with autographed photos of Jacob’s clientele: Jessica Simpson, P. Diddy, and 50 Cent. In wealth and appearance, Meech and Terry came across no different from a vast number of Jacob’s customers. But the Flenorys would stand out in one significant way. Jacob was more than familiar with the federal Form 8300, the one that the IRS requires for any cash transaction totaling more than ten thousand dollars. The vast number of Jacob’s
pieces exceeded that price—and many of his clients actually carried that much cash. But with Meech and Terry, as with most of the associates who showed up at Jacob & Co. on their behalf, no such forms were filed.

One of those associates, Terry’s upper-level manager A.R. Boyd, recalls accompanying his boss during one of his more exorbitant purchases: a $300,000 pinkie ring. Another associate, Slim (the one who impersonated Meech on the phone), traveled with Terry to Jacob’s so that Terry could pick up some jewelry for Tonesa. On that occasion, Slim recalls that Jacob’s wife, Angela, said she didn’t like how Meech and Terry came into the store with large groups of people. So from then on, Terry would meet Jacob in various New York City hotel rooms—where A.R. helped count and pack between $100,000 and $300,000 that Terry was shelling out for Jacob’s bling.

Terry and Meech also purchased jewelry with the assistance of friends who actually earned, through legitimate channels, the kind of money that would allow them to shop at Jacob & Co. Damon Thomas, an L.A. music producer who constitutes half the Grammy-nominated production duo the Underdogs, met Terry in 2004. They were introduced by Damon’s cousin, who described Terry as the manager of several rappers. A year later, Damon would try to cover up the fact that he helped Terry buy jewelry from Jacob—a decision Damon would come to regret. Similarly, Meech used Swift Whaley, the Orlando auto dealer who procured his silver Lamborghini, as a go-between to buy jewelry from Jacob. In the end, that arrangement didn’t work out so well, either.

But for all the hoops the Flenory brothers had to jump through, it was worth it to see those three diamond-studded letters—
BMF
—grow bigger and bigger with each passing pendant. It was an honor to bestow increasingly massive medallions on their most loyal associates. And it was a source of pride to see others gawk at the sparkle that hung from the crew’s neck. Most onlookers could only fantasize about the wealth that made such a thing possible.

One of those onlookers was a man hired in the spring of 2003 to remodel the White House. Over a period of six months, the contractor built a granite wall, installed new cabinets and kitchen appliances, and laid a limestone floor in the basement, among other tasks. The bill for his work came to about $200,000, and all of it had been paid by a man called Pops—typically in cash installments between seven thousand and nine thousand dollars.

The contractor soon learned that Pops was Charles Flenory, the father of the man who owned the house. Pops’s son, Terry, supposedly was an investor in several Atlanta nightclubs. Thus the explanation for the stacks of bills seemed reasonable enough; after all, nightclub owners had access to large amounts of cash. But the contractor’s bank wasn’t buying it. He was warned by bank officials that his deposits looked suspicious, as if he or his client was trying to avoid the ten-thousand-dollar reporting requirement.