BMF: The Rise and Fall of Big Meech and the Black Mafia Family (15 page)

J-Rock’s crew called the house where he lived First Base. It was located in a neighborhood called Sherman Oaks, at the crest of a long, climbing driveway. The three-story stucco-and-terra-cotta structure was exposed to the road—but so far away from it that, as with Terry’s Jump, any outside surveillance was all but impossible. J-Rock’s Second Base was a nearby pad where his crew usually stayed, in the same L.A. neighborhood. And Third Base was way out on Ventura Boulevard, in a part of L.A. so far west that even the locals, who had a looser definition of sprawl than most of the rest of world, considered it the distant reaches. That house, on a cheerful, tidy street called Oso Avenue, was home to the largest of J-Rock’s drug shipments—several hundred kilos at a time.

With all that property, there was plenty of room for Scott King. And also plenty of work. While living as a fugitive, Scott stayed deep in the game, and he maintained regular contact with Kiki, who seemed to be better situated in this whole mess. Barron Johnson didn’t know Tremayne “Kiki” Graham. He’d never seen him, never spoken to him. And so while Barron could (and did) contribute to Scott’s undoing, Kiki would prove a harder catch.

The one thing that concerned Kiki was the possibility that Hack
might turn government’s witness. Hack did, in fact, meet with federal investigators. In the early spring of 2004, he agreed to provide a statement. In that statement, he talked, a lot, about the fugitive Scott King. That’s what the feds were expecting to hear. What surprised them, though, was how little Hack was willing to say about Kiki. Even at that point, investigators had enough on Kiki to know that Hack was hiding something. Hack, they believed, was lying to protect him. And so one of Hack’s interrogators, DEA agent Jay Rajaee, let him know that he saw right through the act. “This is over,” Rajaee told him. “I’m not talking to you anymore.”

Hack told Kiki about the meeting—an admission that had the unintended consequence of further fueling Kiki’s paranoia. Kiki was sure that Hack would cooperate against him—if he hadn’t already—and he confided this to Scott. By then, the two friends had begun to refer to Hack as “Stupid,” because of the little white lies Hack was always telling. To Kiki, those white lies were beginning to assume a darker hue. Kiki was convinced: Hack was out to get him, and the only way he could possibly be indicted would be if Stupid were to fold.

Yet despite his growing belief that he was, in fact, fallible, Kiki continued to traffic cocaine. He was more careful about it than ever. He came up with what he thought was a foolproof plan, and to put that plan into motion, he decided to join Scott and J-Rock in California for a while. He was a free man, after all, one who could travel anywhere he pleased. And if he were added to the federal indictment while he was out in L.A.? Well, maybe he’d make the move permanent.

Before Kiki came up with his plan, J-Rock’s primary method for transporting his drugs from California to Georgia (and his drug money in the opposite direction) was by private jet. Of course, you couldn’t send just anyone on a thirty- thousand- dollar flight across
the country with luggage that contained three hundred kilos of uncut cocaine, or $4 million in bundled bills. Such a job called for a professional. In early 2004, J-Rock had learned that a man named Eric “Mookie” Rivera was up to the task, and he quickly brought Mookie on board. As with past couriers, Mookie lived where J-Rock lived, which meant Atlanta at times, alternating with L.A.

J-Rock typically would have his couriers make at least one “clean” cross-country trip. During that flight, neither drugs nor drug proceeds, the latter of which were typically packed in boxes and topped with rap flyers, would be brought on board. The idea was to get a feel for things. But in 2004, Kiki arrived in California to meet with both J-Rock and Mookie—and based on what he proposed, the practice flight would not be necessary. With Kiki’s help, J-Rock was about to change things up.

Kiki’s cocaine-trafficking plan was so impressive that the boss offered to pay him sixty thousand dollars for every load of drugs he shipped. “The Graham Method,” as one associated called it, relied on a friend of Kiki’s, Ernest “E” Watkins. It utilized the well-oiled delivery system of the United Parcel Service. And it was designed in such a way to protect everyone involved. That’s because the only people who could possibly get caught transporting the drugs across the country could claim complete ignorance if they happened to be busted.

The first time they tried out the plan, Kiki met J-Rock at First Base, where they snugly packed bricks of cocaine into large cardboard boxes. Once full, the boxes weighed in at about seventy pounds each. They were addressed to a fictitious address in Atlanta, from a fictitious sender in L.A. One of J-Rock’s associates then met them at the house, having been forewarned by Kiki to dress conservatively. The associate loaded the boxes into a van and drove them to a UPS store just up the street, off Ventura. Once the shipment left the associate’s hands, the rest of the trip was cake. The boxes were unceremoniously pushed, hoisted, and shoved, passing from van to plane
and back to van again, along with countless other large brown boxes. They plodded across the country, indistinguishable from other packages—the difference being that the contents of these particular boxes couldn’t be insured to their actual value. Even wholesale, the cocaine inside was worth well over $500,000. If street value was taken into account, each box would be worth millions.

Once the boxes landed in Atlanta, Kiki’s friend Ernest, who had an inside source at UPS, orchestrated the interception. The insider watched for the boxes bearing the fictitious Atlanta address. Sure enough, he found them. After setting the boxes aside, he then hand-delivered the precious cargo to Ernest.

After seeing the boxes off in L.A., Kiki and Mookie flew to Atlanta a few days later to catch up with the shipment. Ernest met them at the airport with the good news. The plan had gone off without a hitch. And so Kiki and Mookie returned to L.A., to do it all over again—and again. The two went back and forth several times in early 2004.

During one of those trips, however, Kiki received news from back home. The news brought his involvement in the scheme to a screeching halt. His wife Kai called him. The feds were at their house in East Cobb. They had a warrant. And they were digging through everything.

DEA agent Rajaee, the one who’d interviewed Hack a few months earlier, had traveled to Atlanta from Greenville to participate in the search. Fellow DEA agent Jack Harvey, out of the Atlanta office, had drafted the warrant for Kiki’s house, which was located on Hallmark Drive. Harvey was deep in the throes of his investigation into BMF, and several of his subjects had trickled over into Rajaee’s investigation. So the two agents joined forces.

When they first arrived at the house, a handsome, two-story brick traditional with a circular drive, it appeared that no one was home. The agents knocked on the door, sat back, and waited. Finally, Kai Franklin Graham, the mayor’s daughter, answered. The
agents gathered several items as they combed through the house, including a receipt for a storage shed issued to someone named Ernest Watkins. The name meant nothing to them at the time. That would change.

As Kiki soon would learn, the search warrant coincided with his name being tacked onto Scott and Hack’s indictment. Out in California, Kiki and Scott discussed what he should do and, more important, how they were going to climb out of their deepening hole. The next day, Kiki and Scott headed over to First Base to continue the conversation. They needed guidance from J-Rock. As the three men sat and talked, Scott decided he would remain a fugitive. He might as well ride this one out, make the feds sweat him a little more. Kiki, on the other hand, was leaning toward surrendering. After all, he bragged, his mother-in-law was the mayor. He seemed to think she’d pull some strings, and he’d be out of jail in no time.

Two weeks after his indictment, Kiki showed up at the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Atlanta to turn himself in. A few days later, a federal magistrate set a $300,000 bond for Kiki—with the condition that he wear an ankle monitor and remain under house arrest. The bond had nothing to do with the fact that he was the mayor’s son-in-law, though, and everything to do with his clean criminal history. Federal prosecutors didn’t even push to keep Kiki locked up. His wife, Kai, with the help of her younger sister, found a bonding company willing to spring her husband. In the application for the bond, she noted that she earned an $80,000 salary through her father’s airport concessions company—her father being the well-connected ex-husband of the mayor. The woman behind the desk at Free at Last Bail Bonds was impressed with Kai, and the fact that she was driving a Porsche convertible. The bondswoman didn’t require Kai to secure the bond with any asset, such as her and Kiki’s home. It was an unusual move, but it also was an unusual case: the defendant was the son-in-law of the mayor.

Instead of putting up her house, Kai paid thirty thousand dollars
out of pocket, and Free at Last assumed the rest of the debt—with the understanding that in the unlikely event her husband was to flee, she’d be responsible for the $300,000 (though her house wouldn’t be on the line). While Kiki’s bond had plenty to do with the standing of his wife, it had little to do with Mayor Shirley Franklin. The mayor pulled no strings for Kiki. All that talk back in California, about how easy it would be for him to get out of jail, amounted to a bunch of boasting in the company of friends.

Despite having no direct connection to the mayor, Kiki’s arrest pained her on a personal level. “I am saddened to hear of the indictment,” Shirley Franklin told the Associated Press, stressing that she was speaking not as the mayor but as a mother. “I am hopeful that he will be found innocent, but we must let the legal system run its course.

“My heart goes out to all the families who face this type of crisis.”

Those words would be of little consolation to another family that was about to be dragged into the crisis, in a far harsher way.

Rather than use his time under confinement to step back from his situation and take pause, Kiki dived right back into the game. On the outside, he was quiet, repentant even. But beneath that doleful facade, Kiki was plotting. Amazingly, he continued to oversee the UPS scheme, this time from his home on Hallmark Drive—and presumably because he was hurting for money. He stayed in close contact with Ernest “E” Watkins, who handled the shipments on the Atlanta end through his UPS insider, and with Eric “Mookie” Rivera, who’d flown back and forth from L.A. with him. Mookie had grown fond of Kiki. He had sympathy for his situation. The two talked often on the phone (Kiki using a prepaid cell, of course), more like friends than drug associates.

Kiki complained to Mookie that J-Rock wasn’t helping out with his legal expenses as much as Kiki had hoped, and Mookie thought
that was highly unfair. Kiki and Mookie had helped J-Rock make tens of millions of dollars. Yet those directly under J-Rock saw nowhere near that kind of money. Paying some attorney fees was the least J-Rock could do. Fueled by the injustice of it, Kiki hatched another scheme—this time behind J-Rock’s back. Mookie wanted to help, so Kiki asked him to arrange a flight on a private jet from Atlanta to L.A., and to get to Atlanta as soon as possible. It would be hard, Mookie said, because he was still under J-Rock’s command in California, and J-Rock watches everyone and everything so closely. But somehow, he said, he’d swing it.

One night in the summer of 2004, Mookie made good on his promise. He arrived at the house on Hallmark Drive and stayed the night with Kiki. Ernest, the guy with the UPS connection, joined them the following afternoon. The three men sat in the house, counting and packing stacks upon stacks of cash. With that task out of the way, the operation was solely in Mookie’s and Ernest’s hands.

Mookie had arranged for a jet to meet them at a small private airport in Atlanta, and Ernest had called for a car to take them there—along with the suitcases filled with money. They flew the cash to L.A., where Mookie’s work was done. Ernest then took the money, bought a decent-sized cocaine package, and shipped it to Atlanta using the UPS method. He’d done it plenty of times before, but this occasion would be different. This time, the drugs belonged to Kiki, not J-Rock. Kiki would see the bulk of the profit. J-Rock wouldn’t even know about it.

But Kiki did confide in J-Rock about other matters. Chief among them was Kiki’s mounting distrust of Hack. Kiki couldn’t shake the notion that Hack was a threat. And Kiki was beginning to suspect that Hack was a threat to J-Rock, too. Over the years, Hack’s dealings with J-Rock had been minimal. He wasn’t high up enough in the organization to interact with the boss. But once, when Scott and Kiki were out of town, they’d asked Hack to bring J-Rock some drug money they owed him. Hack handed over the cash to J-Rock
himself. That was the extent of the connection between J-Rock and Hack, but it was enough to directly implicate J-Rock in the drug trade. And Kiki kept harping on it. He said that if J-Rock didn’t want his name tacked onto the indictment, something had to give.

To Katie Carter, Hack came across as a very nice young man. She first met him during a trip to Atlanta in 2003. He was clean-cut and clearly crazy about her daughter, Misty. It was easy to see why. Misty was a pretty girl. She had wide, sparkling eyes. A shiny black bob framed her oval-shaped face. And according to her daddy, Misty had a million-dollar smile. She was a little naïve but deeply kind—and, when it came to her boyfriend, deeply in love.

She was spoiled, too, and Katie Carter is quick to admit it. As an only child, Misty consumed all her parents’ attention. When she graduated from Spelman, the Carters bought her a townhome on Atlanta’s trendy Highland Avenue. They paid for her car, her clothes, and whatever else Misty could possibly need. To the Carters, it was worth it. She was a good daughter.