BMF: The Rise and Fall of Big Meech and the Black Mafia Family (3 page)

The DEA first identified Meech as a suspected drug trafficker in the early ’90s. But back then, he was only a peripheral figure. He didn’t register as a major player until 1997. That’s when special agent Jack Harvey, out of the DEA’s Atlanta office, picked up on him. Harvey had been with the DEA since 1984, and he was a good fit for any long, tedious, drug detail. With his pale freckled skin and gentle demeanor, he was unassuming as far as DEA agents go. But underneath his placid exterior, Harvey was an intense and passionate investigator. He had the smarts and the patience to build a case that can take down a kingpin. And after he picked up on Meech in the late ’90s, he began to follow him like a shadow.

At the same time that Harvey was tailing Meech in Atlanta, the DEA office in Detroit was developing leads on both Meech and his younger brother, Terry “Southwest T” Flenory. The Flenory brothers had grown up in southwest Detroit, in the downtrodden suburbs of Ecorse and River Rouge, and Michigan investigators had linked the brothers to several Detroit drug traffickers. Many of them belonged to a gang called the Puritan Avenue Boys, or “PA Boys” for short. The PA Boys were a ruthless old-school cocaine crew headquartered along Puritan Avenue in the northwest sector of the Motor City. And with the help of a wiretap investigation and confidential informants, the DEA was closing in on several of its top members. Through that investigation, the agents were beginning to realize that the Flenory brothers, though not members of the PA Boys
themselves, had a drug organization of their own. And that organization would warrant some serious attention.

Harvey kept in regular touch with the agents in Detroit. He also began to track several Detroit-born gangsters who, like Meech, had relocated to Atlanta. He built relationships with more than a half dozen confidential informants who slipped him bits and pieces of Meech’s history (or at least his myth) in both Atlanta and Detroit. And with each of those tips, the picture of Meech grew more formidable.

One story Harvey heard involved the unfortunate fate of a Detroit drug dealer named Dennis Kingsley Walker. In 1994, Walker had been arrested by the DEA in Atlanta on cocaine conspiracy charges. After pleading guilty, he cut a deal with the feds in exchange for providing information on one of his co-defendants, Tony Valentine. As a result, Walker served only three years of his five-year prison sentence. He was released from a federal halfway house on October 30, 1997. And one of his first stops was the bar at the downtown Atlanta Westin, the second tallest hotel in the western hemisphere.

After chatting up several women and downing a few drinks, Walker left the shimmering glass tower. He drove his Nissan Maxima north on Interstate 85, pulling off near Buckhead. On the exit ramp, a car slowed alongside his. One of the car’s windows rolled down. Somebody took aim with a .40-caliber Glock. In a flash, Walker’s Nissan was sprayed with bullets. He was killed instantly.

The following January, confidential informants were helping the DEA gather information on who might have murdered Walker. Agents taped a wire to the chest of one such informant, who managed to capture a key conversation: An acquaintance claimed that a man called Meechie gunned down Walker because Walker had assisted the feds in their case against Valentine. Meech immediately became the prime suspect in the murder. But the DEA’s trail went cold. Despite an intensive investigation, authorities couldn’t come up with enough evidence to make an arrest.

A year later, another confidential informant sat down with the DEA. The first thing he did was pick a picture of Meech out of a lineup. He then shared several things he claimed to know about the man in the photo. The man used fake names, and he’d probably never get a driver’s license with his real one. He often walked around with large wads of cash, but didn’t have a job. He was known to carry a handgun, sometimes two. He was aware that the DEA was following him, and he wasn’t happy about it. Lastly, one of his associates was a notorious Detroit drug dealer and PA Boys enforcer named Thelmon “T-Stuck” Stuckey.

The government already had a thick file on Stuckey. And the more Harvey learned about the flashy old-fashioned gangster, the more parallels could be drawn between him and Meech. For years, Stuckey had split his time between Atlanta and Detroit. Like Meech, Stuckey also had an interest in hip-hop. (He was a producer for the Detroit rap label Puritan Records.) And according to a federal informant, Stuckey had a violent distaste for snitches.

Yet Stuckey was far more audacious than Meech ever was. He once had the audacity to call the police to his Atlanta home after it was burglarized—an unusual move for a drug dealer, even before taking into account the items he reported stolen. Stuckey told police the thieves had made off with a wardrobe that would have made legendary Harlem gangster Frank Lucas proud, including eighteen pairs of five-hundred-dollar alligator shoes and a robust collection of men’s fur coats.

A year after the Atlanta burglary, Stuckey found himself in a dangerous confrontation with several Detroit police officers—a confrontation that culminated in him pulling off an amazing feat. The officers claimed that Stuckey fired at them with an AK-47 assault rifle and that he was wounded by return fire. Stuckey was indicted for attempted murder. But he beat that rap. He then turned around and sued the police department for inflicting his injuries. He walked away with a $150,000 settlement.

But perhaps the most outlandish of all Stuckey’s escapades stemmed from his relationship with Ricardo “Slick” Darbins, a dirty Detroit cop turned drug dealer. Darbins was fired from the police force after he was caught on a wiretap discussing a cocaine purchase. Stuckey, who was one of Darbins’s drug associates, began pressuring the former cop to kill one of the informants in the case. So Stuckey and Darbins drove to a record store where the informant was hanging out. Stuckey hung back in the pickup truck as Darbins went inside and cornered the informant. He fired at him, but missed.

Three days later, Stuckey, who was angry about Darbins’s bad aim, decided Slick was too sloppy to do business with. Stuckey drove Darbins over to a fellow drug dealer’s house. Once Darbins and the dealer got comfortable watching TV, Stuckey stormed into the room and shot Darbins four times with his .40-caliber Glock. For good measure, Stuckey stood over the body and squeezed off four more rounds. He then leaned over the fresh corpse, kissed it on the cheek, and said, “I love you and I’m going to take care of your family, but you talked too much.”

To help dispose of the body, Stuckey had called a “cleanup man,” who arrived with rope, gloves, and a roll of plastic. The men wrapped the body in blankets and plastic, tied it with the rope, and dropped it in the trunk of Stuckey’s ’91 Caprice Classic. They drove to an alley, where Darbins was unceremoniously dumped.

It took six years for authorities to catch up with Stuckey. The DEA got a tip that he was shacking up with a friend in Atlanta, and a team of agents went to the apartment to take him down. It was special agent Harvey who finally managed to arrest him. Amid Stuckey’s possessions, Harvey found a piece of paper scrawled with some rap lyrics—lyrics that a prosecutor later would describe as highly autobiographical: “I expose those who knows; fill they bodys wit holes; rap em up in a blankit; dump they bodys on the rode.”

The drug dealer who lived in the house where Slick Darbins was killed later turned on Stuckey and testified against him in court.
Stuckey was sentenced to life in federal prison for the murder. With that, his association with Meech ended. But Thelmon Stuckey wouldn’t be the last of the Puritan Avenue Boys linked to the Flenory brothers. And the association would come in handy when investigators began building their case against Meech’s crew.

From the time Harvey got the tip that Meech was an associate of Stuckey’s, two more years passed before he got his next major break. In the summer of 2001, an informant told the DEA that a man named Meechie was living in a huge white house off Evans Mill Road in Lithonia, about twenty miles southeast of Atlanta.

A few days later, on August 15, 2001, Harvey went to check out the house. The sleek, minimalist mansion sat at the corner of Evans Mill Road and Belair Lake Drive, the first in a row of massive homes behind an iron gate that read:
BELAIR ESTATES
. Over the next few months, Harvey made a habit of driving by the house. Usually, there were high-end sports cars and SUVs parked in the driveway. But toward the end of 2001, it appeared the occupants had up and left.

A year and a half later, the DEA connected with one of its informants—the one who’d heard that it was Meechie who gunned down Dennis Kingsley Walker. Meech was back in Atlanta, the informant said. In fact, Meech would be throwing himself a birthday party that Sunday at the “White House”—the nickname the Flenory brothers had assigned the Lithonia mansion. Meech was planning the event as an after-party for a more formal affair at Sean “P. Diddy” Combs’s Buckhead restaurant, Justin’s. The grandiose invitations to the Justin’s party were printed on the cases of promo CDs, the front of which read, “MEECH’S Harem! A Birthday Celebration of Mass Proportions!” The inside liner promised a party “Fit for a King.” And the back of the case teased, “You’re invited to indulge in the … Mysterious. A Birthday Celebration for a Unique Man!”

At 1:30
A.M
. on June 23, 2003, agent Harvey drove over to the
White House to check out the event. Cars lined both sides of Evans Mill Road. Guests couldn’t park too close to the house, because the gate at Belair Lake Drive was locked. Partygoers came and went through a small door next to the gate. Surveying the scene from the road, Harvey noticed that groups of people were milling around outside, and the grounds, which included a pool and hot tub, were more lit up than they’d been during past drive-bys. The following afternoon, a confidential informant who’d been at the party gave Harvey a detailed account of the goings-on inside. Meech had surrounded himself with a group of men who were dressed as he was, in knee-length T-shirts printed with the letters
BMF
. The letters also were tattooed on Meech’s left biceps. He wore his hair in braids, huge diamonds in his ears, a large gold ring on his pinkie finger, and a heavy platinum necklace. His ensemble was complete with a hefty blunt, from which he took deep, intoxicating drags.

The guest also told the DEA that in the master bedroom, there was a gun, possibly a .45, lying in plain view.

Investigators jumped at the possibility that there could be drugs and weapons inside the White House. After running a title search on the property, investigators learned the home belonged, at least on paper, to a woman named Tonesa Welch. And DEA files showed that Tonesa was the longtime girlfriend of Meech’s younger brother, Terry Flenory. Terry’s name, incidentally, had shown up in twenty-two DEA case files dating back to 1990. And, like Meech, he was believed to be a major cocaine trafficker with ties to Atlanta, L.A., Detroit, and St. Louis. Records also showed that Tonesa lived not in Atlanta but in L.A., most likely with Terry. It was a fair assumption, then, that Meech resided at the White House. And investigators hoped to make that connection in their application for a search warrant.

The application was filed on June 25, 2003, two days after the birthday party, and it was filled with the information supplied by the informants: Meech’s alleged role in the 1997 highway shooting of
Walker, his reputed association with the Detroit gangster Thelmon Stuckey—even his blinged-out attire at the birthday party two nights before. To top it all off, there was the informant’s description of the blunt and the gun.

But the judge didn’t bite, nor did he give a reason for refusing the search. The warrant was simply denied, and for a while, the deflated investigators gave up on it. Then, six months later, there arose a more pressing reason to get inside the White House.

Sometime after 4
A.M.
on November 11, 2003, club owner Brian Alt was running the night’s totals. Mondays at Chaos were good money. Customers were known to spend big on hip-hop night. But those nights also carried a cost. Mondays had gotten so wild that, unlike other nights of the week, Chaos patrons had to pass through a metal detector.

Still, there’d been only a little bit of trouble at the club that night. Three hours earlier, Alt’s security team had given him a heads-up that Wolf, a club regular, had gotten aggressive with a woman. Alt was surprised. Earlier that night, Wolf had been bragging to him about his kid and acting the perfect gentleman. Contrary to his violent reputation, Wolf came across to Alt as soft-spoken and articulate, so he took it upon himself to settle the commotion Wolf had caused. He told Wolf it would be better if he left. And Wolf left without a fight.

Three hours later, the night appeared to be winding down without a hitch—until one of Alt’s employees came running in shortly after last call, saying something bad had gone down outside. Alt raced out of the club, toward the back parking lot. As he rounded the corner near the club’s rear stairway, he passed Wolf’s ex-girlfriend, who was running away from the parking lot with tears streaming down her face. Alt feared the worst, and when he got to the parking lot, he found it.

One of his bartenders, a security guard, and two off-duty medics were trying to keep the two men on the ground alive. For one of the two, it was too late. Wolf’s friend Riz, who had come to Wolf’s aid, was dead. A gun lay at his side.

Wolf, however, was still alert. He’d been shot in the chest but was holding on. While waiting for the ambulance, Alt stuck by his side, imploring Wolf to stay awake, to stay with him. Because sleep might mean there’s no waking up.

As Wolf lay bleeding on the asphalt, a car was speeding up GA 400, carrying two other men wounded in the gun battle. They were on their way to North Fulton Regional Hospital. One of them would later claim that after the first shots rang out, he turned and ran and didn’t see a thing—a version of events that would be supported, in part, by the fact that he’d been shot in the ass.