BMF: The Rise and Fall of Big Meech and the Black Mafia Family (31 page)

None of the drugs was seized from Meech or Terry directly. And of the $3.9 million in cash that the feds claim to have confiscated
from BMF, none of that was seized from the Flenory brothers either. As with the cocaine, the amount of cash seized paled in comparison to what the feds believed the Flenorys’ had pulled in. Even by conservative estimates, Meech and Terry are believed to have earned, in the course of a decade, $270 million.

As for the brothers’ assets—proof that they’d seen “substantial” income from BMF—the evidence in the indictment stacked up much higher against Terry. Though both brothers had driven Bentleys, Lamborghinis, and Maybachs, the cars weren’t registered in their names. But Terry did buy three cars using an alias the feds cracked: a Mercedes, a Range Rover, and a Chevy van. Terry also was linked, through his girlfriend, to three homes—the White House and two of his three California residences. According to the indictment, the homes were titled to Tonesa, and she made $840,000 in payments on the California mortgages over four years. That averages out to $17,500 per month. Though Tonesa owned her own business—a high-end car shop that the feds believed was one of Terry’s fronts—she didn’t make the kind of money to pay those mortgages. The feds believed she had help from Terry.

The only asset the indictment linked to Meech was the house he’d rented in South Beach. But the lease wasn’t in Meech’s name, making it harder to prove that he was the one paying the thirty-thousand-dollar monthly rent.

Terry had been the understated brother, the careful one, the one who admonished the other for his extravagance. But in the end, the feds’ case against Terry was far stronger than the one against Meech. The feds had Terry, not Meech, on a wiretap. They’d indicted many of Terry’s associates, and few of his brother’s. Terry appeared to have substantial assets, while Meech had none.

All of which meant that in order to build their case against Meech, prosecutors needed witnesses willing to take the stand against him. And they were hoping Terry would be one of them.

Really, in a lot of ways Mr. Flenory is his own worst enemy.

—FEDERAL MAGISTRATE JUDGE STEVEN WHALEN

A
Few years before Meech and Terry were arrested, their chief financial officer, the preppy and charismatic Doc Marshall, ran into DEA agent Jack Harvey at the Atlanta airport. Doc was traveling on BMF-related business, weaving through the world’s busiest terminal when the slender, soft-spoken agent approached him. Harvey had a question for the CFO—one that had been a long time coming.

Starting in the late ’90s, Harvey had begun fielding rumors about Big Meech, and he’d spend the next five years shadowing various members of BMF. Through confidential sources, Harvey heard about Meech’s alleged ruthlessness as a cocaine kingpin and his supposed role in the highway shooting of a federal informant. Years later, Harvey staked out the sprawling White House, watching as the iron gate at the foot of the road admitted select guests to Meech’s thirty-fifth birthday party. Within a few months, Harvey found a way inside the house—as part of a law enforcement team armed with a search
warrant for the weapon used in a shootout behind Club Chaos. The search didn’t turn up the gun, but it did yield documents that linked the Flenory brothers to a company called XQuisite Empire and to its owner, William “Doc” Marshall.

Doc was under investigation at the time by another member of the White House search team, Atlanta Police detective Bryant “Bubba” Burns. For nearly a year, Burns had been working undercover to infiltrate a white-collar crime ring that Doc oversaw. By posing as a would-be “straw borrower,” Burns determined that Doc’s brokerage firm, XQuisite, was getting loans for high-end cars and homes in the names of willing participants such as himself, then passing them along to drug dealers. In the midst of the undercover sting—and two months before the White House search—Burns’s investigation got an unexpected boost. Doc Marshall shot and killed a home intruder inside a posh town house. When Burns searched the house, he found a pile of documents that listed XQuisite’s roster of workers and its illegal deals. Investigators also discovered a room-sized safe that held a single kilo of cocaine. Once Burns and Harvey linked the documents in Doc’s town house to others discovered in the White House, the two investigators concluded that Doc was closely tied to the Flenory brothers. In fact, Burns and Harvey believed that Doc had been guarding a BMF stash house.

From that point on, Doc became a highly desirable target. Judging from the paperwork in the White House, he was integral to the Flenorys’ organization. And though he hadn’t been charged in the incident at the town house (the shooting of the armed intruder appeared to be self-defense), investigators could still dangle the threat of a few major felonies over his head. The kilo in the safe and the mortgage fraud ring were plenty incriminating. But investigators wanted more.

When Harvey caught up with Doc at the airport that day, he had a good idea how high his target ranked in the Black Mafia Family. Harvey also believed that the well-dressed, deep-voiced businessman might be open to negotiating. He pulled Doc aside and said he
wanted to show him some pictures. He wanted to know what he might be willing to say about a few members of the Black Mafia Family. Doc’s reply was succinct: “I’m not saying anything.” But if he
were
to say something, Doc asked, would his cooperation prevent him from being charged with a crime?

“No,” Harvey answered.

“Am I going to be arrested?”

“Yes.”

“Well,” Doc said, issuing a not-so-subtle challenge, “let’s get it going.”

In the years since the encounter in the airport, Doc became more intertwined with BMF. He also was one of the few associates who maintained close contact with both Flenory brothers after they split—a factor that would make him an invaluable witness. Though Doc had begun to align himself more tightly with Meech’s crew, he continued to do the books for the two separate sides of the organization. As CFO, he kept track of all the income, debts, and expenses for both Meech’s and Terry’s crews. Through XQuisite, he obtained cars, homes, and jewels for the brothers. He set up a fake travel company so that he could procure airline tickets for BMF members. He even created fake W-2s for the agency’s fictitious “employees” so that BMF members could show legitimate income.

Doc also began to traffic BMF’s cocaine. He sometimes picked up kilo-stuffed duffel bags from Terry at the White House in Atlanta, where he witnessed the boss in the presence of a hundred bricks at a time. Though Doc couldn’t say the same of Meech (Meech didn’t handle his cocaine shipments personally; J-Bo did), Doc paid plenty of visits to Meech’s Atlanta stash houses, too: the Gate, the Elevator, and Space Mountain. Doc also tagged along with Meech and his entourage when they descended on the city’s clubs. In fact, Doc had been hanging out with the crew the night a few of its members got into a deadly fight behind the Velvet Room.

Doc hadn’t been indicted along with the Flenory brothers. But he
was named in a related federal indictment filed under seal the same day in Orlando. The indictment charged eight defendants with helping BMF obtain luxury cars outfitted with secret traps for hauling cash and cocaine. And it described Doc as both the leader of the car ring and BMF’s chief financial officer. Eight days after the indictment was filed, on October 28, 2005, Doc was heading home to Atlanta from a meeting in Miami with Slim, Terry’s right-hand man. (Terry required that Doc and Slim meet once a month in person, because the fiscal reports Doc prepared couldn’t be discussed over the phone.) Before Doc made it to his house, he was surrounded by a federal task force. Agents arrested him, and the indictment against him was un-sealed. The feds hinted that more charges would be coming. And they immediately began to discuss with him the benefits of cooperating with the government.

To investigators, the difficulty of any BMF probe boiled down to the crew’s strict code of silence. Crew members lived by it, and they often pressed the importance of the code upon outsiders who’d witnessed their crimes. The silence was infectious. It was common for police to begin interviewing witnesses, only to find that, once the witnesses learned the identity of the suspects, they’d go south. That had been the problem in the Chaos investigation, after Sean “P. Diddy” Combs’s former bodyguard, Wolf Jones, and Wolf’s childhood friend, Riz Girdy, were killed. The same issue plagued the investigation of the Velvet Room incident, during which Rashannibal “Prince” Drummond was severely beaten and then shot to death. The attack at P. Diddy’s Atlanta restaurant, Justin’s, was no different. Two nephews of R&B superstar Bobby Brown were brutally stabbed—and Brown’s family quickly clammed up.

But once a potential witness is under indictment, convincing them to talk gets easier. That’s because the authorities have a powerful bargaining chip: the possibility of a shorter prison sentence. Defendants
who cooperate typically get 20 percent of their sentence shaved off, sometimes more. If a defendant decides to assist the government, the information he shares often leads to more indictments and additional defendants, which means a larger pool of potential witnesses from which to draw. That was the government’s strategy in its case against the Flenory brothers. And by the time the brothers were arrested, the feds had leads on several insiders who they thought could help build their case.

One potential witness on Meech’s side seemed particularly promising. Three months before the Flenorys’ indictment and minutes before his cocaine-trafficking trial was set to begin, Omari “O-Dog” McCree surprised a number of people—including Rand Csehy, the assistant district attorney working his case—and decided to plead guilty. For Csehy, the plea was the end of an exhausting wiretap investigation in which he and a handful of Atlanta’s best law enforcement officers (including his close friend, detective Burns) had come within a breath of getting a wire up on Meech’s phone. With Omari’s guilty plea, that local investigation into BMF was nearing its conclusion.

The feds had taken over the broader investigation, and Csehy wasn’t entirely happy about it. He felt that the Atlanta-based officers were the real heart of the BMF investigation. His disenchantment over the case led to him leaving the DA’s office for private practice—but not before Omari was sentenced to fifteen years in state prison.

Following the sentencing, the feds swooped into the DA’s office to pull Omari’s file. Omari already had given a statement that implicated Meech. Now, the feds were hoping he’d be willing to make the same claim on the witness stand. In the statement, which Omari delivered to detective Burns and a fellow investigator, he laid out in no uncertain terms that he was part of Big Meech’s cocaine ring. He said he regularly picked up kilos from Meech’s right-hand man, J-Bo, at two locations: the Gate and the Elevator. But at that point in the interview, he got spooked. He refused to say anything else, and he soon
would try to distance himself from what he did say. Omari didn’t want to be known as a snitch. His attorney worked, unsuccessfully, to have the statement stricken from the court record. But even though the document was ruled fair game, Omari was hesitant to cooperate further. For that and other reasons, the case against Meech wasn’t shaping up as well as prosecutors had hoped.

As for Terry’s side of the organization, at least one high-ranking crew member quickly turned. In November 2005, Terry’s trusted Detroit manager Arnold “A.R.” Boyd was the first to flip. A.R. had grown up a block away from the Flenory brothers in southwest Detroit and got his start in the organization as Terry’s personal driver. He later assumed the top post in Detroit after his older brother, Benjamin “Blank” Johnson (who’d been a part of the Flenorys’ drug ring since it operated out of their childhood home on Edsel Street), was busted with a kilo of coke. A.R. was part of Terry’s innermost circle. He’d been exposed to many of the most intimate details of Terry’s side of the organization, and he was extremely familiar with his boss’s manipulative managerial style. It appeared to have left A.R. somewhat bitter. He didn’t need much time to decide what he should do. He made a deal with the feds a month after he, the Flenory brothers, and twenty of their associates were indicted. For his cooperation, he’d have four years shaved off his eight to twelve-year sentence.

A.R. gave the feds a rundown of how he helped Terry shuttle cash and cocaine across the country, in the secret compartments of BMF’s vans and limos. He illustrated how the kilos were processed in the Detroit lab. He described how Terry circumvented the IRS to buy millions of dollars in diamonds from Jacob “the Jeweler” Arabo. He mentioned how, during a trip to Atlanta, he visited the White House—and saw Terry and his top-ranking associates Slim Bivens, Chipped Tooth Peguese, Lil Dog Welch, and Texas Cuz Short, hanging out in the basement where stacks and stacks of kilos were secreted. He described how, during another White House visit, he helped Terry load $250,000 in drug money into the vehicle of Terry’s
business partner, Tremayne “Kiki” Graham. The money, A.R. said, was an investment in Kiki’s high-end car dealership, 404 Motorsports.

Basically, A.R. had a lot to say about Terry. But he hardly had anything to say about Meech. Because he’d been on Terry’s side of the organization, A.R.’s knowledge of Meech’s business was minimal. He was familiar with the basics: that Meech ran the rap label BMF Entertainment; that he oversaw the organization’s Atlanta headquarters; that J-Bo was his second-in-command; and that his close friend, the rapper Bleu DaVinci, had helped out in his cocaine ring. But A.R. didn’t have any firsthand knowledge of those things. As with the majority of witnesses to come, A.R. had plenty of info to share about the quieter, more reserved Flenory brother—and hardly a thing to say about the flashier, more flamboyant one.