BMF: The Rise and Fall of Big Meech and the Black Mafia Family (17 page)

Across the country, local cops and federal agents had been teaming up for what were called High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area, or HIDTA, task forces. HIDTA was the brainchild of the Office of National Drug Control Policy, an effort to stymie the flow of cocaine, crack, and heroin into the country’s most blighted urban neighborhoods. The Atlanta HIDTA office comprised two units, manned by the best and brightest of the DEA, Atlanta Police Department, and Georgia Bureau of Investigation—including the APD’s detective Bryant Burns, who was working with the DEA’s Jack Harvey and Fulton prosecutor Rand Csehy to break the Black Mafia Family’s code of silence.

HIDTA’s responsibility was to dismantle drug trafficking organizations—the kind that, due to a lack of resources, typically evade most big-city police departments—and cut short the reign of violent career criminals. To that end, task force agents were given luxuries that cash-strapped police departments coveted: high-tech wiretapping equipment, fleets of undercover vehicles, and most important, unimpeded time. Agents had the benefit of months, or even
years, to develop confidential sources, track the finances of kingpins and sit, wait, and watch as the tide of drugs ebbed and flowed into such downtrodden Atlanta neighborhoods as Boulevard, the Bluff, and Bankhead.

The idea was to track the large shipments by starting with the smaller sales that trickled down to the street, working backwards from the corner dealers who delivered the product to the consumer, and blazing a trail toward the three-car garages of upper-level suppliers who had direct connections to overseas sources. As with most cities, Atlanta in the early 2000s was serviced by a handful of major drug distributors from whom all the city’s cocaine—bound over from Colombia or, more likely, Mexico—originated. And in Atlanta, all those distributors got their coke from BMF.

And so while HIDTA’s work could be tedious, the reward in Atlanta was clear: Follow any street-level drug purchase back to its source, and you’re bound to find yourself at Meech and Terry’s doorstep. Of course, it wasn’t so easy as strolling up to the door of the White House with an arrest warrant. For years, cops and prosecutors had fielded countless tips and rumors implicating BMF in the drug trade, but hard and fast evidence was more elusive. The dealers—even those several steps removed from BMF—usually suspected they were being watched, and so they spoke in code, relied on near-untraceable prepaid cell phones or phones in friends’ names, and made a habit of ditching numbers they thought were hot. Once word spread that a dealer had been nabbed with dope, he was immediately excommunicated, and so the dealer often was useless, even in the off chance he agreed to cooperate with authorities. Getting to those upper-level guys at the heart of BMF was like running up a down escalator; falter even for a moment, and you’re right back at the bottom.

Rafael “Smurf” Allison wasn’t exactly at the bottom rung, but he wasn’t high up, either. He was a modest crack-cocaine trafficker, a big fish in a small pond known as Pittsburgh. The Atlanta neighborhood, just across I-75 from Turner Field, was less congested than
Boulevard or the Bluffs. But street-level drug deals there were just as rampant.

Twenty-two years old and dealing in multiple ounces at a time, Smurf took in between one thousand and three thousand dollar per deal, and he sometimes did several deals a day. He’d been a HIDTA target for three years, since 2001, and he was considered by agents to be sloppy enough to maybe, possibly serve as a line to a bigger catch. In July 2004, HIDTA agents had been lucky enough to secure a confidential informant who’d ingratiated himself to Smurf—and was able to buy multiple ounces of crack from him three times in a month. Smurf even gave the informant his cell phone number, so that the informant could buy dope any time.

The agents also had an idea of who Smurf’s supplier might be. One day, a surveillance team followed Smurf to a suspected “re-up” (a replenishment of one’s drug supply). At a BP gas station on the corner of Ponce de Leon and Monroe Drive, it appeared that a man sitting in a brown Pontiac Grand Prix stepped out of the car to hand a package to Smurf. The Grand Prix, the surveillance agents learned, was titled to a woman named Charmela Hoskins.

Armed with proof of the drug deals and with Smurf’s digits, Fulton County prosecutor Rand Csehy put together a thirty-page application seeking a wiretap on Smurf’s phone. Csehy had been collaborating with the task force agents for months—ostensibly to advise on legal matters such as those pertaining to the Smurf wiretap, and perhaps more to the point, because he felt a certain kinship with cops who went after major drug dealers. Csehy felt at home with the task force. Through it, he was connected to Harvey at the DEA, whom he admired, and the APD’s Bryant, who was his best friend. It took an excruciating month and a half for the wiretap application to pass District Attorney Paul Howard’s muster, but finally, in early September 2004, the wiretap was approved. And the agents, holed up in a series of cubbyholes flanking a long hallway at HIDTA headquarters, began to pore over Smurf’s calls.

Working the wire was difficult at times. The voyeuristic novelty wore off fast. In the meantime, the higher-ups wanted results. And so the agents listening to the calls had to try to deliver that which only fate could provide. Unlike some of the other task force agents with whom they worked in tandem, the guys assigned to the wire didn’t get to experience the rush of surveillance or the satisfaction of laying their eyes on their target. They would pore over the “line sheets,” the call-by-call synopses of what came over the wire, and try to find a pattern. And it was through their work that the case finally started coming together.

The idea was to get the informant to make another crack purchase from Smurf, then listen in as Smurf rang his supplier to replenish his cache—thereby nailing down the supplier’s number. Sure enough, when the informant met with Smurf on September 3, 2004, asking if he could pick up four ounces, Smurf promptly dialed up the food chain. He asked for a “four hundred tray.” The supplier let Smurf know he had only “a deuce hard and a deuce soft”—two ounces each of crack and powder.

The task force now had Smurf’s supplier’s number. What’s more, the phone was listed under the name Charmela Hoskins, the same name that appeared on the title of the Grand Prix that the agents had eyeballed in the BP parking lot. But to succeed with another wiretap application, for the supplier’s phone, the agents would need more than the name Charmela Hoskins.

Over the next two weeks, the wiretap agents kept a close listen on Smurf’s calls, hoping he would carry them closer to the supplier whose voice materialized on the other end of the line. One day in mid-September, the wiretap team listened as Smurf told his supplier he was on his way to meet him. One of the agents contacted the surveillance team that was camped out at Smurf’s house and told them to follow the target. Keeping a safe distance, the surveillance agents split up into several cars and followed Smurf to a posh apartment
complex on the city’s industrial West Side. Now they had a suspected address for Smurf’s supplier.

Two days later, a county judge authorized a wiretap on the supplier, whom investigators later identified as Decarlo Hoskins, Charmela’s husband. Right away, as soon as the wiretap was up, Decarlo called
his
supplier. Agents perked up at the all-too-obvious drug talk. Decarlo had a complaint about a recent delivery. It sounded as if his supplier had floated him some bad dope.

“I had, like, one more that was fucked up real bad, homey,” Decarlo said.

“There wasn’t anything wrong with that, Lo,” the voice replied.

“I ain’t doin’ nothin’ out of it,” Decarlo practically spat. “But you could tell it was real fucked up. It got a logo on it, but the whole shit just like, brown. You know what I mean?”

“You sure?”

“If you’d seen it, you’d know it wasn’t right.”

Two days later, investigators caught another break. Decarlo was plotting what sounded like a major drug sale to three men from out of town. Decarlo told the potential buyers to meet him at “his spot.” HIDTA agents took that to mean his West Side apartment. They positioned themselves at the complex, one car in the lot and another in the parking deck, and they waited.

Based on what was discussed during the call, the investigators were expecting a gray Nissan Altima to pull into the apartment complex between noon and 1
P.M
. After picking up the drugs, Decarlo’s three customers were supposed to head down Northside Drive to the Georgia Dome, to watch the Falcons game.

Sure enough, agents watched as a gray Altima pulled into one of the visitor spaces at around 12:30
P.M
. Two minutes later, a black Infiniti, which agents believed was driven by Decarlo, pulled into the space in front of it. One of the guys in the Altima hopped into the Infiniti, and it took off across the parking lot to a place the surveillance team
couldn’t quite see. A few minutes later, the Infiniti returned, and the man climbed back into the Altima. Both cars bolted.

The Altima headed south on Howell Mill Road, past the neighborhood’s loft buildings and ware houses, with the surveillance agents in slow pursuit. Merging onto Northside Drive—maneuvering through the game-day traffic that snaked toward the Dome—a HIDTA agent radioed Atlanta Police. It was time to request a traffic stop.

As soon as the patrol car flashed its lights, the guy in the Altima’s passenger seat called Decarlo. He said they were about to be pulled over. And he said that if the police asked them to get out of the car, they’d gun it instead.

Keep it in drive, Decarlo warned.

An Atlanta police officer approached the Altima and asked the driver for his license. A moment later, one of the HIDTA agents approached the car on the other side. He told the passenger to quit talking on his cell phone and step out of the vehicle. That’s when the agent saw a Smith & Wesson .357 on the Altima’s floorboard.

The men didn’t act on their promise to Decarlo; they didn’t hit the gas. They didn’t put up a fight, either. And in the trunk of the car, agents found a Louis Vuitton tote bag packed with seven individually wrapped kilos of coke, and another shopping bag stuffed with two more. The coke was wrapped tightly and professionally, as if it had been cut only once or twice since landing in the States. To Csehy, that was a good sign. That meant they were closer to the Black Mafia Family than he first imagined.

Down at HIDTA headquarters on Juniper Street, the men refused to talk. But the agents didn’t need them to. Investigators now had enough evidence to take down Decarlo, the suspected source of the dope—and hopefully, by extension, Decarlo’s supplier.

Yet finding Decarlo proved trickier than expected. He was cautious. After his three customers were busted on the way to the Falcons game, he decided to ditch his phone. It would have been a smart
move—had he not used his old phone to call and establish a new account. The wiretap agents were listening as Decarlo’s cell phone provider recited his new number.

During another call, Decarlo and a drug associate tossed around the idea of throwing their phones away. The agents braced themselves for the likelihood that the wire would fall silent. But it never did. Decarlo kept on talking.

After dialing someone else, Decarlo mentioned he wasn’t sure whether state or federal officers had busted his three customers. Either way, he said, he was getting his shit together in case the police were coming for him, too. The man on the line said one of his associates was worried about Decarlo and wanted to make sure that if he were arrested, he’d hold his tongue. Decarlo said he would—and that if authorities caught up with him, he wouldn’t call anyone for a week, which would serve as a heads-up. Decarlo then called another of his suppliers, Keith “Big Homey” Patterson, to ask for a “handshake”—a term that the surveillance agents knew to mean five kilos.

Nine days later, the task force had obtained a wiretap on Big Homey’s phone. One day in October 2004, nearly a month after the West Side bust, agents listened as Big Homey set up a four-kilo cocaine deal, and they sent a surveillance team to the location where the deal was about to go down. At the same time, another set of agents tracked Decarlo to the same location, a building just off Boulevard, in the neighborhood known as Old Fourth Ward.

Csehy, eager to be part of the action, typically was on hand to listen to calls moments after they had been captured. (The law forbids anyone but the task force agents from listening to the calls in real time.) That day, he was at the HIDTA office, and he immediately started readying a stack of search warrants. If the surveillance agents were to catch Decarlo, they’d need to act fast and hit any address that could be linked to him or to Big Homey.

Decarlo knew something wasn’t right. Talking on the phone to someone inside the house, Decarlo mentioned “the white guy with
the binoculars” stationed outside. Yet he wasn’t so spooked that he turned around and left. Instead, Decarlo walked inside. Shortly thereafter, Big Homey’s customer walked out of the front door and toward his car. Moments after he pulled away, the HIDTA agents asked the Atlanta Police Department to stop the car—and the officers conducting the stop discovered the four-kilo package. The agents then moved in on the building where the deal had gone down. Inside, they found six more kilos, as well as fifteen pounds of marijuana. They also found Decarlo and Big Homey, both of whom were arrested.

That evening and into the next morning, a team of agents hit up Decarlo’s suburban home, where they found $55,000; the apartment on the West Side, where they found another $10,000; and Decarlo’s mother’s house just south of the city, where they turned up $100,000. Decarlo was looking at a steep sentence on cocaine trafficking charges. The threat of prison, however, appeared not to be so deflating as another likelihood raised by investigators. Csehy told Decarlo’s lawyer that the government might try to build a case against Decarlo’s wife, Charmela. Decarlo was devastated by the news.