BMF: The Rise and Fall of Big Meech and the Black Mafia Family (10 page)

“We can do all kinds of things if we start from Bleu DaVinci.”

Meech anticipated that Bleu’s track “We Still Here” would be the break-out hit for BMF Entertainment, and he spared no expense when the time came to produce and promote Bleu. As the label’s CEO and sole financier, Meech could throw as much support as he wanted to at Bleu, his lone artist. “We Still Here” was recorded, along with a handful of other tracks, at Atlanta’s Patchwerk studio, whose vocal booths have been graced by Whitney Houston, Cher, Britney Spears, and Snoop Dogg. But according to Patchwerk chief operating officer Curtis Daniels, Bleu booked more time at the studio than any other artist.

In addition to the pricey studio time and glitzy video, Meech lavished other luxuries on Bleu: fancy cars, diamond-studded chains, and parties, parties, parties. The label hosted a listening party for “We Still Here” at Patchwerk, attended by such guests as Goodie Mob front man Big Gipp. Then there was the after-party at the Westin in Buckhead, followed by the after-after-party at a ware house space downtown.

When it came time to perform—be it for an audience or in front of a camera—Bleu easily fell into the role of the rap superstar he wasn’t. In one documentary-style video, he brandished a .357 Magnum that he casually claimed could “blow you back about four feet.”
On another occasion, he talked about getting in shape so that he could fire an AK-47 with one hand. On film, he often spoke of himself in the third person, waxing philosophical about “who is Bleu DaVinci?” Basically, he ate it up. He was a goofy showman, one who overacted the part of the sinister gangster with a lighthearted side.

While performing live, it was the same drill. Bleu hammed it up for the camera, and the rest of the BMF crew quickly fell into place. As hundreds of guests thronged the stage at Bleu’s after-after-party, he spat his lyrics into the mic while swaying in a mass of VIPs including BMF honchos J-Bo and Fleming “Ill” Daniels, rappers Oowee and Young Jeezy, and, at Jeezy’s side, an upper-level BMF distributor named Omari “O-Dog” McCree.

The only one missing was Meech. He was still under house arrest for the Chaos killings, as evidenced by the
FREE MEECH
shirts that J-Bo and Ill wore on stage. But the boss did make a cameo, of sorts, with the help of a film crew that visited an Atlanta high-rise where he was holed up.

He was dressed in all white—white T-shirt topped by a baggy white tracksuit. He was sporting a huge diamond cross. And because the film was shot in grainy black-and-white, with the camerawork slightly out of focus, the result was a vision of Meech as an ethereal, thuggish angel. “Even though I’m not there,” he told the camera, as if speaking from the grave, “I’m not the focus. Bleu DaVinci is the focus. That’s what y’all are here for tonight. I wish I could be there tonight—God knows I wish I could be there tonight. But one day soon, I’ll be there, with God’s blessing.”

And so Bleu became the center of attention—the attention of the film crews paid by Meech to follow him, of the club-goers who aspired to BMF’s style of partying, and, most important, of the CEO himself. As Meech said from his exile, “All our independent focus is on what Bleu DaVinci gonna do and how he’s gonna make it. If he take off, then we take off. If he don’t take off, then we don’t want to take off. Simple.”

Meech’s explanation as to why he put everything behind Bleu doubled as a wider, inspirational message to anyone who might be listening. Meech didn’t intend merely to lift BMF Entertainment up to the level of “Universal, or Interscope or DreamWorks or Def Jam.” He wanted Bleu’s ascent to serve as a ghetto Cinderella story. “We want Bleu in the best of everything,” Meech told the camera, “show him the best of everything, show him that a person can come from nothing to something and step in this game and keep going. He have everything that he could want right now, and he’s still trying to do something to bring other people up with him.”

The problem was that in the summer of 2004, it wasn’t Bleu who was taking off. All the sparkly bling and fancy cars and state-of-the-art studios in the world couldn’t compensate for the one thing Bleu DaVinci lacked: raw talent. Bleu’s rhymes were straight gangster rap, and he delivered them with an appropriate dose of animosity: “You can’t catch me on no corner pushin’ nickels and dimes / I got the bricks flying right out of Buckhead.” But despite his air of credibility, Bleu was not coming up with the kind of lyrics that would raise the genre to art—let alone generate any serious radio play. It was as if Bleu were the caricature of another rapper who actually did possess that rare combination of gritty authenticity and transcendent poetry. That rapper was Jeezy.

Jay “Young Jeezy” Jenkins grew up on the outskirts of the history-rich, have-and-have-not middle Georgia city of Macon. Rooted in the rock ’n’ roll and R&B sensibilities of the Allman Brothers Band, Otis Redding, and Little Richard, Macon had grown into a hip-hop hub, a farm team to Atlanta’s booming rap industry. Like Atlanta, Macon had a strong mixtape culture and some heavyweight hip-hop clubs, allowing young rappers to find fame on the streets before approaching the big leagues. Jeezy, who was known as ‘Lil’ J’ when he first started rapping, quickly established himself in those venues. In his early twenties, he relocated seventy-five miles north to Atlanta, where he fell in with the crowd that hung out along Boulevard. He
befriended one of the resident drug dealers, O-Dog, and both the dealer and his hood proved fertile material for the rapper. Jeezy gives shout-outs to O-Dog in several tracks, including his early hit “Air Forces,” and the neighborhood serves as a backdrop for a number of other songs. The streets around Boulevard—characterized by brick low-rises sequestered by iron gates and crowds of boys squatting on the lawless corners—were as real to Jeezy as any he’d known in Macon. And he’d known a few.

Meech, who was O-Dog’s boss, grew well acquainted with Jeezy—though perhaps a tad too late. Meech was generous with the rapper, paying Atlanta club DJs to play his yet-unheard tracks and lending him cars and jewelry for various video shoots. But Jeezy did not join BMF Entertainment’s roster. By the time the label was incorporated in early 2004, Jeezy, who was twenty-six at the time, was running his own company, Corporate Thugz Entertainment, which sold tens of thousands of his mixtapes. He’d also hooked up with Atlanta mixtape gurus DJ Drama and DJ Cannon, who ran the production team Gangsta Grillz and would soon release Jeezy’s wildly popular street album,
Trap or Die
. (
Trap
being a synonym for the drug game.) Jeezy also had buy-in from two major labels. Jeezy, along with three other rappers, was part of the collective Boyz N Da Hood, which had inked a deal with P. Diddy’s Bad Boy Entertainment. And as a solo artist, Jeezy had just signed with Def Jam.

But as far as Meech and the rest of BMF were concerned, Jeezy was one of them. Jeezy wasn’t resisting. Outside the Westin on the night of Bleu’s listening party, Jeezy draped an arm around Bleu and declared, “This is my mutherfuckin’ homeboy, Bleu DaVinci. It’s love, man. It’s family, dog.”

Meech placed his bets on Bleu because he had to, but it was Jeezy who supplied the soundtrack for BMF’s ascent. When Meech and his crew rolled around Atlanta in their Bentleys and Lambos and Ferraris and Maybachs, Jeezy’s tracks were pumping through their speakers. That was back when few outsiders would’ve recognized the rapper’s
shrewd and disillusioned rasp. But soon—a full year before his major-label debut in the summer of 2005—Jeezy’s verse began floating from the rolled-down windows of other, more modest rides, not just in Atlanta but in Miami, New York, and L.A., too. His sound, a heady mix of dark cinema, guttural grunts, and world-weary observations, was catching on. Jeezy was making it. And Meech (and J-Bo and Ill and Bleu and O-Dog) were along for the ride.

All five of them appear as characters in the video for Jeezy’s first major-label single, “Over Here,” filmed in Miami at the South Beach mega-strip-club, Teasers. In one scene, Meech lets a handful of bills cascade over the cleavage of a beautiful dancer. In another, dozens of models lounge around a rooftop pool where it’s raining money, and several onlookers wear T-shirts printed with the title of Bleu’s single, “We Still Here.” The video for “We Still Here,” incidentally, was more polished than Jeezy’s. The camera work was more sophisticated, the choreography more professional. But there also were telling similarities. Both videos make abrupt transitions from colorful scenery and an upbeat tempo to a darker, slower vibe. And after the transition, both videos cut to shots of a silver Bentley and silver Rolls-Royce, with Meech hovering in the background.

BMF’s influence extended beyond Jeezy’s video and into the clubs where he performed. The act of “making it rain” cash—a practice that BMF claims to have originated—helped build crowds into a frenzy during Jeezy’s shows. Sometimes those performances would take place at the strip clubs BMF frequented, and the raining bills would have the added effect of energizing a mass of naked, clamoring girls. And as with Bleu, Meech and his crew often would stake out a place of authority. They would position themselves onstage alongside Jeezy. Meech occupied a spot in the middle, either next to or just behind the rapper, and J-Bo, Ill, O-Dog, and Bleu formed the periphery. (O-Dog would receive a special nod from those onstage when his name cropped up in one verse or another.)

Dressed in matching black, often reeling from the euphoric high
of top-notch ecstasy, Meech and his crew basked in the glow of their mini-kingdom. They were brothers in wealth, prosperity, and power, and they held court over one of the hottest scenes in hip-hop. Joining the hundreds of people spread before them in the audience, they chanted Jeezy’s lyrics in unison with the rising star:

Two record deals, the radio still won’t play me,
But I don’t give a fuck, ’cause it’s the streets that made me.

Though Jeezy’s all-but-certain success would do nothing to legitimize BMF Entertainment, it was no small consolation that the rapper, by mere association with Meech, was raising BMF’s profile. But there was something else about Jeezy, something more intangible, that made him invaluable to Meech. Jeezy delivered a high that no amount of pure cocaine could match. Looking back at his decade-long run as a drug kingpin, Meech says that nothing—not the money, not the respect, not the notoriety—was more exhilarating than one thing: “pushing Jeezy.”

Within weeks of the parties that Meech threw for Bleu (but couldn’t attend), the boss was back on the scene. Six months had passed since he was charged with the murders of Wolf and Riz, and the conditions of his bond—both the house arrest and the ankle monitor—were finally lifted. There was little for which authorities could continue to hold him. The evidence was slim, an indictment nonexistent.

One of Meech’s first orders of business as an unfettered man was to celebrate his thirty-sixth birthday. It was not an intimate affair. In June of 2004, he rented an entire mega-club, Compound, on Atlanta’s industrial West Side. The twenty-five-thousand-square-foot space included two ultramodern buildings, one with a dance floor ringed by plasma TVs, the other featuring a VIP loft with an elevated
bed and movie projector. The club’s sprawling courtyard, which could accommodate nearly one thousand people on its own, was anchored by a forty-foot reflecting pool and Zen rock garden. Compound was the epitome of posh, Atlanta’s destination for celebrity birthdays and parties thrown by the likes of Porsche and
GQ.
But Meech’s birthday party blew those others away.

The courtyard was adorned with six-foot-tall white neon letters that spelled
M-E-E-C-H
. BMF Entertainment’s insignia was carved in a massive block of ice. Half-naked models wore painted-on bikini tops—and might have been the focal point, if not for the $100,000 in rented wildlife. (The party’s theme, according to printed invitations, was “Meech of the Jungle.”) The club’s patio was graced by an elephant, an ostrich, a few zebras, and a pair of lions. Revelers gawked as the big cats paced restlessly in their cages.

Meech was making up for lost time, and he was promoting his label hard. In his brother’s eyes, however, a lifestyle like that was sure to attract the attention of the feds, and he was right. In a van parked outside Compound, two men kept as close a watch on the party as they dared. One of them, DEA agent Harvey, knew more about BMF than any law enforcement officer in Atlanta. The other, the Atlanta Police Department’s detective Burns, was doing his best to catch up with Harvey’s knowledge of the crew.

Had Meech been aware of his uninvited guests, his likely response would have been,
Bring it on.
Meech felt safe from harm—protected by a crew that he believed would never turn on him, and insulated by a business acumen that hadn’t failed him yet. He figured he’d discovered the recipe for invincibility: Don’t keep the company of snitches, don’t sell to the feds, don’t talk on the phone, and don’t put anything in your name. Simple.

But to Terry, it wasn’t so straightforward as that. Terry’s crew was separate and distinct from Meech’s, and by the time Meech’s birthday rolled around, neither boss had much of a say in what the other did. It wasn’t as if Terry could come in and squash the partying
and the flaunting and the lifestyle geared toward grabbing attention. The people doing the partying were answering only to Meech, and Meech was encouraging the debauchery. All Terry could do was sit back and hope that the partying didn’t spiral too far out of control. In the meantime, he kept the reins tight on his own crew.

While Meech was planning his birthday blowout, Terry was busy handing out orders to his trusty managers, distributors, and drivers. Unlike Meech, Terry did issue orders over the phone, but he tried to keep the language vague. Speaking to one driver in June of 2004, Terry said to go ahead and deliver the “pants” (cocaine). Later, the driver asked whether he was supposed to hand over a “dime” (ten kilos), to which Terry answered yes. As for the destination, Terry said not to take the pants to “A-World” (Atlanta), but to go there and pick up some “mail” (drug money). Of course, the team of federal agents cycling through the calls could clearly see that something was up—and, as a result, Terry was drawing at least as much unwanted attention to BMF as Meech was.