BMF: The Rise and Fall of Big Meech and the Black Mafia Family (27 page)

When he finished, Britt asked, “Do you understand?”

“Yes,” Omari answered.

“Are you willing to answer some questions?”

“Yes.”

But first, Omari said, he wanted his attorney. Britt said go ahead and make the call. Omari dialed the attorney’s number several times. No answer.

At that point, Britt told Omari he was being charged with trafficking cocaine, ten kilos of which had been discovered in a vehicle driven by Omari’s “brother,” Jeffery Leahr.

Omari piped up that Jeffery wasn’t his brother. People just thought he was.

Britt asked again if Omari wished to speak with him and Burns. Omari said yes.

Britt told Omari that his willingness to cooperate would be relayed to the district attorney’s office, which would look kindly upon his assistance when it came time to recommend a prison sentence. Britt then handed Omari a confidential-source agreement form. Omari signed it. And Britt launched into his questions.

“Are you familiar with BMF?”

“I learned about BMF back in 1999,” Omari said. “They were not called BMF at that time.”

“In 1999, whom did you know as members of BMF?”

“I knew of only Meech and Bleu DaVinci.”

“When did you become a part of BMF?”

“In 2002.”

“Have you ever heard of the Elevator?”

“Yes.”

“Where is the Elevator located?”

“On Glenridge.”

Investigators had not yet determined the exact location of the Elevator, though it was clear from the wiretaps that it was a BMF meeting place—the place where the crew gathered hours after Meech was released from jail on the Pin Ups arrest.

As for the next location Britt asked about, it, too, had been described over the wire, and investigators already knew where it was. They’d staked it out before. It had been one of Meech’s distribution centers, later to be replaced by Space Mountain.

“Have you ever heard of the Gate?”

“Yes.”

“Have you ever purchased or obtained drugs from the Gate?”

“Yes.”

“How did you obtain the drugs?”

“I would call J-Bo, and then I would go and pick it up.”

“Would anyone be there when you arrived?”

“Yes, J-Bo.”

“Who is J-Bo?”

“He works for Dude.”

“Who is Dude?”

“Dude is Meech.”

With those three words, Omari became the first criminal suspect on record to implicate Meech as a cocaine boss.

“Who is responsible for the drugs getting to the Gate?” Britt said, hurrying to the next question.

“Dude.”

“How much have you seen while at the Gate?”

“About fifty keys.”

“Would you be willing to show me where the Gate is located?”

It was with that question, and not the one about Meech, that Omari began to backpedal. “Man, I ain’t talking no more,” he said. “These people know my family.”

Omari’s next words hinted at the fact that he thought he’d get off easier than he would.

“Will I walk?” he asked Britt.

“No.”

Two days after Rand Csehy caught his lucky break, so did the bounty hunter Rolando Betancourt. A detective from L.A. called him with unexpected news, and Rolando liked what he heard. After he hung up, he made arrangements to return to California. It was time to resume the hunt for the fugitive Tremayne “Kiki” Graham.

Three months had gone by since Rolando was hired by the Atlanta bonding company Free at Last to track down Kiki. With each passing month that the fugitive remained on the lam, Free at Last had to pay the court thirty thousand dollars. If Kiki didn’t turn up at all, the company stood to lose the entire $300,000 bond it had posted. Rolando’s job was to stop that from happening. And he was racing against the clock.

Rolando had been the second bounty hunter Free at Last hired. The company chose him because he was considered one of the best in the country. But Kiki proved tricky prey. Rolando tracked him from Atlanta to L.A., where the focus of his investigation became a three-story house in the San Fernando Valley—a house that seemed to be at the epicenter of Rolando’s web of clues. After exhausting every other possible lead, Rolando decided to put together a system of surveillance cameras, which would allow him watch the house in real-time from a remote location. The house sat so far back from the
road that traditional surveillance—a car and binoculars—proved difficult.

Rolando decided to leave L.A. while the system was being built. But before he left, he made a few last stops. One of them was a well-tended four-story apartment building with boxy white balconies and chocolate-brown awnings. The building was the upshot of a tip that had to do with one of Kiki’s suspected associates, Eric “Mookie” Rivera. Rolando didn’t know much about Mookie—only that he’d written a down payment check for a Ferrari that Kiki had been driving. Still, it was a lead worth following. After a roundabout search of addresses that had been linked at one time or another to Mookie, Rolando ended up at the Studio City apartment building. Rolando hoped he’d find Mookie there. But the building manager didn’t recognize a photo of Mookie, nor was his name on the apartment’s lease. Rolando gave the manager his card, just in case something came up.

A month later, something did.

Rolando was in the midst of securing the high-tech snooping system when he got the call from Los Angeles. The detective on the line explained he’d gotten Rolando’s name and number that very day from the manager of the Studio City apartment building. The manager told the detective that Rolando already had been by to talk to him. The bounty hunter had been looking for someone called Mookie.

The detective and his partner now knew where Mookie was. They’d just arrested him, and they were at the apartment to execute a search warrant stemming from the arrest.

The day before, on the afternoon of June 9, 2005, Mookie had shown up at Van Nuys Airport to board a private jet. He booked the seventeen-thousand-dollar flight the previous night and paid the five-thousand-dollar deposit in cash. But before he and his three pieces of luggage made it past security, he was stopped by several agents working for a local drug task force.

“Where are you going?” one of the agents asked Mookie.

“Atlanta,” he answered.

“Business or pleasure?” the agent replied.

“Business,” Mookie said. “I’m in the Internet raffle industry.”

“Can we search your bags?”

“No,” he replied. “I’m not comfortable with you searching my bags or me.”

Another agent, drug dog in tow, joined the interrogation. The dog sniffed around Mookie’s luggage. A moment later, it barked to the agents, signaling that there was something suspicious in all three bags.

The agents asked Mookie for his ID, and he handed over a fake driver’s license with the alias Gary Rich. A moment later, they told Mookie that until they obtained a search warrant for his luggage and took a look inside, he wouldn’t be allowed to board his plane.

While the task force agents waited on the warrant, Mookie’s phone rang. Unbeknownst to the agents, their suspect wasn’t planning on traveling alone. His associate, the federal fugitive Scott King, was supposed to meet him at the airport. Scott was calling to check in with Mookie. Out of earshot of the agents, Mookie told Scott not to come, to turn around. There was trouble at the airport.

Shortly thereafter, the search warrant was approved. The agents pulled Mookie’s luggage aside and unzipped his bags. Inside, the agents found twenty tightly wrapped bundles. Each of the packages was bound in black plastic and topped with a flyer of a Hummer SUV. Peeling away the flyers and the packaging, the agents uncovered kilo after kilo of cocaine. All twenty keys had the word
HUMMER
pressed into the powder, branding the product to match the flyer.

Mookie was promptly arrested and fingerprinted, after which the agents learned his real name: Eric Rivera. The next day, they obtained a search warrant for the address on his fake driver’s license, the apartment building in Studio City. And that’s when the manager told them about the bounty hunter. One of the detectives gave Rolando a
call, to let him know Mookie had been busted at Van Nuys Airport with a significant haul of cocaine.

Rolando told the detective that Mookie was a known associate of two federal fugitives, Scott King and Tremayne “Kiki” Graham. And considering the amount of coke that Scott and Kiki were known to have trafficked, the twenty kilos in Mookie’s luggage was just the beginning of it. If the detectives were interested in additional drug seizures, Rolando said, just wait. The content of the suitcases would pale in comparison to what they’d find when they caught up with Kiki and Scott.

Four days later, Rolando flew to L.A. to chase down any clues Mookie might have left behind—clues that hopefully would lead to Kiki. Rolando met with the L.A. detectives, who handed over the few items found on Mookie’s person: two dry-cleaning receipts and a business card from a local pool-cleaning company. Rolando perked up when he saw that both businesses were in the same part of L.A. where he’d narrowed his hunt for Kiki. He was sure that Scott and Kiki would turn up somewhere in that neighborhood—if they were still in the city, that is.

Rolando tried the dry cleaner first. It was a nondescript sort of place on bustling Ventura Boulevard, out in the western reaches of L.A.’s sprawling grasp. He showed the shop owner some photos of Mookie, Scott, and Kiki. The owner looked nervous. Glancing around, he motioned for Rolando to follow him into a side office. From the safety of the enclosed room, the shop owner told the bounty hunter that Scott had been by that very day. Scott’s white Land Rover had pulled into a parking space, and the six-foot-five driver, a regular customer, climbed out. He had dry cleaning to retrieve. Had Rolando been a few hours earlier, in fact, he might have run into him. Instead, the bounty hunter received a small consolation prize. The shop owner fished Scott’s dry-cleaning receipt out of the trash and handed it over.

Rolando gave the owner his card and told him to get in touch immediately if Scott or his friend Kiki (whose picture, unlike Scott’s, the owner didn’t recognize) showed their faces. Rolando then called deputy U.S. marshal John Bridge in Greenville, South Carolina. Bridge’s office had been handling the federal investigation into the whereabouts of Scott and Kiki, both of whom had been indicted in U.S. District Court in Greenville and had been on the run since 2004. (Scott had skipped town early that year, to avoid arrest, while Kiki had cut his ankle monitor and jumped bond days before his November trial.) When Rolando was first hired onto the case, he’d met with Bridge several times to compare notes, and he’d kept the Greenville marshals’ office in the loop as far as what his investigation revealed. Now, he was calling Greenville with good news. He told Bridge it might be a wise idea to get the U.S. Marshals Office in L.A. involved. Rolando felt he was just a step or two behind the two fugitives. A few more leads, perhaps, and he’d be right on top of them. For that, he’d need backup.

Later that day, Rolando followed up on the only other tip that the L.A. detectives had gathered from Mookie, the card for the pool-cleaning service. He drove out to the company and showed the man behind the counter the photos of Kiki, Mookie, and Scott. The man glanced at them and pointed at one. He said he’d cleaned that guy’s pool. He was sure of it. He’d been to his house several times. It was out in Woodland Hills, on a street called Oso Avenue.

He was pointing at Kiki.

Rolando immediately drove to the address to check it out. Compared with the three-story house on Libbit Avenue, the one that seemed to be at the hub of Kiki’s circle, this house was rather plain. The shoebox-shaped ranch had an attached two-car garage and was surrounded by an equally unremarkable middle-class neighborhood. Unlike the house on Libbit, it sat conspicuously close to the road. And its flat corner lot left it exposed on two sides—making it all the easier to surveil.

Rolando didn’t think anyone was inside. All the shades were drawn and the driveway was empty. But Rolando did find trash on the curb, which led him to believe that someone had been there fairly recently.

He called the L.A. detective with whom he’d been in contact, and the two sat and watched the house together. At around 7:30
P.M.
, the garage door opened and a black Volvo pulled out. Someone had been home, after all. Rolando followed the car long enough to write down the tag number, and the detective ran a search on it. The Volvo came back as having been registered to Gary Rich—Mookie’s alias. About an hour later, Rolando got a call from the U.S. Marshals Office in L.A. A supervisor said he’d have a team assembled the following morning, and they would meet him just off Oso Avenue.

The bounty hunter and detective kept an eye on the Oso house for a few more uneventful hours before calling it a night. Rolando wouldn’t be gone long, though. He took a mere five-hour break before returning to the house at 7
A.M.
When you’re following a guy like Kiki, sleep is a luxury. To catch him, you have to work with half as much rest as he gets, and twice as much concentration as everyone around him.

In the morning, Rolando checked out the house from several vantage points, to make sure the team would have all sides covered. An hour later, he met with several U.S. marshals at a location around the corner. He briefed them on the situation and handed over photos of Kiki and Scott. Rolando and the marshals then retreated to various points around Oso Avenue. For four hours, they waited.