BMF: The Rise and Fall of Big Meech and the Black Mafia Family (6 page)

By the time Charles, Lucille, and baby Demetrius had settled in Detroit, a second son, Terry, was on the way. He was followed several years later by a daughter, Nicole. To keep up with his growing family, Charles typically held down two jobs at a time. He forged metal in a foundry, worked maintenance jobs at several local hospitals, was hired on at three of Detroit’s auto factories, and took countless odd carpentry jobs, most of them at local churches. Of all the work he did, the carpentry was most rewarding. That’s because those jobs brought Charles closer to two of his most consuming passions: god and the sacred steel guitar.

Usually, the strings of the sacred steel guitar are plied and plucked to mimic the wailing voices that belt out the Sunday hymns. It is a soulful, ethereal instrument. In Charles’s hands, though, it was slightly different. Charles had a bluesier, more rocking style than the genre typically permits. When Charles played the sacred steel, the sound was gospel meets Hendrix.

While Lucille pressed upon her children the importance of going to church, Charles imparted to them his love of music. He was able to set up a little music studio in the basement of his family’s modest home, in a working-class suburb not far from where the majestic Detroit River swallows the puny River Rouge, and the studio fascinated Charles’s elder son. Meech wanted to be a part of the music, so Charles encouraged him to learn an instrument. Eventually, father and son began performing together in the church band, Charles on guitar and Meech on drums.

Charles did his best to keep his family afloat, but try as he might,
he couldn’t lift them out of poverty. Nor could he and Lucille shelter them from the streets. At one point, when Charles had been laid off from one of his jobs, holes slowly began to wear through the bottom of the children’s sneakers. There were days when the kids came home from school to find the gas and power turned off. In the worst of the Michigan winters, Meech recalls his father treading out to the power line, secretly restoring the electricity himself. Watching their parents struggle made the Flenory boys want more. And a job at McDonald’s, Meech told himself, wasn’t going to cut it. He and his brother had other ideas.

To those who knew Meech and Terry, particularly the neighborhood kids who wanted in on what would soon be a bustling cocaine trade, Charles and Lucille seemed especially supportive of their children. Poverty was a way of life in their neighborhood, but devoted parents were more of an anomaly. Even after Charles and Lucille divorced in 1986, after nineteen years of marriage, they remained close to each other and their teenaged children. In fact, the only thing that appeared dubious about the Flenory clan was that the two sons, starting in the late ’80s, began running a neighborhood cocaine ring out of their parents’ home. The brothers quickly graduated from slinging fifty-dollars bags of crack on the corner to moving as much as two kilos per week.

Benjamin “Blank” Johnson, who met Meech and Terry when he was eight years old and would go on to become a trusted manager in their organization, witnessed the brothers’ early years up close. As a teenager, Blank would walk the few blocks from his house on Patricia Street to the Flenorys’ home on Edsel several times a week to pick up an eightball—or about an eighth of an ounce—of cocaine. The coke was a front, lent out to him on consignment. He’d turn it around on the street—where it would break down into seven half-gram bags, worth about thirty dollars each—then would pay the Flenorys back, pocketing the profit.

Throughout the years (in Blank’s eyes, at least) it was common to
see cocaine lying around the Edsel Street house, a blockish two-story structure at the end of a dead-end street, bounded by an I-75 on-ramp and a pollution-cleanup plant. Blank also recalls that Charles Flenory often would be hanging out when Blank picked up his drug order from Terry, and the transactions did not occur behind closed doors. On occasion, Blank would be let in the house, would drop off as much as three thousand dollars for Terry, and would help himself to his biweekly cocaine supply. He knew just where to find it. The brothers’ stash was always in the same place: a hole in the wall above the linen closet door, the one between the living room and kitchen.

The brothers were smart about their business, but they weren’t untouchable. The game caught up with Meech early, and from then on he managed to make a hobby of getting into—and, more important, out of—trouble. In 1988, at the age of nineteen and about three years after dropping out of tenth grade, Meech was arrested for possession of a bag of weed and carrying a concealed weapon. He was sentenced to high-intensity probation, but he didn’t do any time. In fact, over the next two decades, despite being arrested on a dozen occasions on charges ranging from felony firearm possession to murder, he avoided prison altogether. Part of his ability to stay ahead of the law was his veritable menu of aliases, complete with social security numbers and driver’s licenses: a Michigan license in the name of Rico Seville (Terry, in a show of brotherly solidarity, had a fake Michigan license in the name of Randy Seville), a Georgia one with the name Ronald Ivory, a California one with the name of Aundrez Carothers, and one from Tennessee identifying him as Ricardo Santos. Meech also went by Roland West—the name he gave when, five months after that marijuana charge at age nineteen, he was arrested again. Like so many times to come, he used the alias to elude detection and avoid violating his parole.

That same year marked another milestone for Meech. In 1988, the first of his two daughters was born. She was called Demetria, after her father. A year later, Meech fathered a second daughter. He wasn’t
exactly a regular presence in their lives. Before the girls were out of diapers, their father’s work would carry him away from Detroit—and into the big leagues.

When Meech left Detroit in 1989 at age nineteen, he already was respected on the streets. Even then, his name meant something. But he needed a change, so he decided to scope out the scene in Atlanta. Geographically, Atlanta was a good choice. The city originally called “Terminus” was once the last stop for four converging railroad lines. A hundred years later, Atlanta had morphed from a railway hub to a highway town, a place where commuters would travel more miles on average than anywhere in the world. The three major highways extending from Atlanta easily led to the Carolinas and, by extension, the rest of the eastern seaboard; to all of Florida, including one of Meech’s favorite cities, Miami; and to Texas and, ultimately, California, the two locations where the majority of the country’s cocaine arrived from Mexico. Along the way were drug markets in Alabama, Tennessee, Kentucky, and Missouri—places where the cocaine trade wasn’t so saturated that the Flenorys couldn’t stake a claim.

The brothers were born hustlers, and they each had a distinct style. Meech was restless. He wanted to leave Detroit as soon as he could, to strike out and find exciting new territory. Terry, on the other hand, sat back and plotted his course. He had a slight advantage over his brother: money. In his younger years, a bullet grazed his right eye, and it was common knowledge in the neighborhood that he received a settlement as a result of the shooting. Word on the street was that the doctors messed up his eye even worse while operating on it. As a result, his eye drifted slightly, so that it often was fixed, disconcertedly, on whoever approached him from the right side. Later, Terry used the settlement money to start a sedan service. He recruited friends from the neighborhood as drivers. And his experience in mapping out routes and directing the drivers came in handy for another, more profitable enterprise.

In the early ’90s, when he was still in Detroit, Terry began moving
larger quantities of dope, and he started cooking the cocaine into crack with the help of hired hands, including his childhood friend, Blank. Eventually, he and Blank were cooking up two kilos per week, the conversion of powder into crack equaling a windfall on the streets; whereas a brick of powder cocaine can net around $100,000 in street sales, the same brick converted to crack can rake in twice as much. By then, Terry was in his early twenties and was still operating out of his parents’ home. He was a solid midlevel distributor, with a fleet of vehicles at his disposal. And the mood and scale of the operation were about to change.

Investigators would later believe that, thanks to an older associate by the name of Wayne “Wayniac” Joyner, Terry and Meech were hooked up with a California cocaine source in the mid-1990s, a source who could supply them with Colombian dope delivered straight from Mexico. Through the source, the brothers would import more kilos than they could’ve possibly dreamed while working the grind of an average inner-city distributor. Thanks to Wayniac and the Mexican connection, the Flenory brothers began to move hundreds—and occasionally over one thousand—bricks of cocaine per month. To keep up with the flow of drugs and cash, the Flenory brothers would have to employ a network of several hundred couriers, distributors, and money-launderers in nearly a dozen states. The brothers, in turn, had the smarts and stamina to manage a network of that size. At least for a while.

There were two prices that the brothers paid for their cocaine, depending on how they worked the payment. When they bought the kilos outright, the brothers paid fourteen thousand dollars apiece. That was called, simply, a
buy
. When they bought the bricks on consignment, a pick-up-now-pay-later arrangement, the price was upped to sixteen thousand dollars. That kind of deal was called a
push
. Regardless of the payment plan, the deal was for pure, uncut cocaine.
And so the next stop for all the bricks was one of several labs that the brothers operated in Detroit and Atlanta.

The labs were set up in inconspicuous locations: a house in the upscale Detroit suburb of Farmington Hills, a nondescript apartment in nearby Southfield, a half-million-dollar town house on the outskirts of Atlanta’s Buckhead, and another swanky home across town: the White House. In each of the residences, the room used for the lab would be outfitted with an air-filtration system, to make sure the workers didn’t get too much of a contact high. The workers themselves would wear rubber gloves, goggles, and surgical masks. Their task was to break apart each brick of pure cocaine and remove 125 grams (an eighth of its total weight). The weight was then replaced, or “cut,” with a filler, or “comeback.” Both the cocaine and the filler, typically a liquid additive called Pro Scent, were thrown into a food processor and thoroughly blended. The workers then used spatulas to spoon the mixture into a mold. Finally, a five-ton hydraulic jack pressed the kilo back together. For every seven kilos that were cut, blended, and repressed, a new kilo would be formed out of the grams that had been removed. And all the cut kilos would be nearly 90 percent pure.

It sounds like a lot of work for a little payoff, until you consider that hundreds of kilos were processed every month—at
each
lab. For every one thousand kilos that were cut, an additional 150 kilos were created. And with each kilo selling at a three-thousand-dollar profit (not to mention the pure profit off the 150 newly created kilos), the Flenory brothers cleared roughly $5 million on every one thousand kilos they purchased.

As far as hauling the cocaine shipments from California to the labs, and from the labs to the distributors, that would be a relatively easy, if risky, task. The kilos were transported in cars, vans, and limos that were outfitted with secret deoxygenated compartments, called
traps
. Some of the vehicles had names. Two Lincoln Navigator limos, one black and one gray, were known as “the Tank” and “the Gray
Lady.” Depending on the size of the haul and the length of the ride, the drivers of the vehicles were paid between eight thousand and twenty-five thousand dollars per trip. The most lucrative drive was the one from California to either Detroit or Atlanta, particularly if you were driving one of the Navigator limos. The limos could carry up to two hundred kilos, more than any other vehicle, and only the most trusted drivers knew how to access the traps in which the cocaine was secreted away. New drivers, on the other hand, would have to rely on a manager, who’d be waiting on the shipment at the destination. With the Navigator limos, the trick was to simultaneously pull the emergency brake, hit the rear defrost button, and open the moon-roof. That would disengage the lock on either the right-hand or left-hand compartment. Other combinations, in other vehicles, required the use of a magnet, which was held up to the dashboard, or the depression of a secret button under the floor mat.

In addition to carrying shipments of pure cocaine from California to the labs, the shipments of “cut” cocaine would have to be picked up at the labs and delivered to distributors not just in Atlanta and Detroit, but also in New York, D.C., Missouri, Florida, the Carolinas, Kentucky, Alabama, and Tennessee. The drivers then collected cash from those distributors and hauled the money back to the labs in Atlanta and Detroit, where it would be counted and paid out to the drivers, distributors, and managers. Finally, what was left of the proceeds would be driven back to California, to purchase the next shipment of cocaine. The drivers would carry as much as $9 million in cash at a time. For hauling cash, they’d be paid considerably less—as little as one thousand dollars—because the risk wasn’t nearly so great.

To maintain such an intricate and sophisticated web, the Flenory brothers needed an overarching structure to govern their organization, and a guiding philosophy to steer it. They opted for something a little different from many of their predecessors. Meech and Terry chose not to model their Black Mafia Family after ’80s-era drug empires
such as the Supreme Team, led by Queens native Kennith “Preme” McGriff, which ruled the streets by instilling fear and creating chaos. Instead, they assumed a more corporate model, with Meech and Terry as semi-benevolent CEOs. And while their organization did resemble an actual Mafia in more than just name, the brothers held to some rather standard business practices, starting with the hierarchy of their staff.