BMF: The Rise and Fall of Big Meech and the Black Mafia Family (18 page)

Of course, there was a way for Decarlo to keep her out of this—and even a way for her to keep their home, which would have been subject to forfeiture had the government been able to show it was purchased with drug proceeds. The thing was, Decarlo would have to talk—both now and, if necessary, in court. He’d have to give up the names of the people supplying him with his dope. If he did that, the judge would be made aware of Decarlo’s assistance during his sentencing, and he might end up serving a lighter sentence, too.

Decarlo folded. Two days after his arrest, he and his lawyer sat down with Csehy and a couple of HIDTA agents. Decarlo told them he got his packages from two dealers he’d known since the three were kids growing up on Boulevard. Usually, the coke was given to him as a front, meaning he didn’t have to pay them for it until he sold it. In fact, those two dealers were the ones who fronted him with the dope that he in turn sold to the three men busted near the Dome. He
said they belonged to a drug crew, BMF, that didn’t deal out of one particular location, per se. Instead, BMF delivered—and only to people they knew and trusted.

Decarlo said he’d be willing to let agents listen as he called and tried to arrange a deal. He knew the suppliers only by their first names: Jeffery and Omari.

Agents immediately told Decarlo to make the call. Sitting in the HIDTA office, Decarlo dialed Omari. But it was a dead end. Omari’s phone had been turned off. Decarlo then called Jeff to ask him for Omari’s new number. (Omari likely had ditched the old one after suspecting it was hot.) The agents watched as Decarlo jotted down the digits. He then tried Omari again. This time, Omari answered.

Decarlo asked Omari if he was “on deck”—meaning holding cocaine. “If you have anything,” Decarlo continued, “I want to get two blocks.” Omari’s reply was succinct: He wasn’t talking on the phone anymore.

But that wasn’t exactly true. In the weeks to come, Omari would continue to talk on the phone—just not to Decarlo. Because he had suspected, correctly, that Decarlo had been busted.

The weekend after Decarlo’s call, Omari wasn’t doing the best job of avoiding trouble. He and his friend Jeffery Leahr were hanging out at the Atrium when somebody opened fire on the club-goers. Police suspected Omari and Jeff were behind the shootings, but after the two men were questioned, police let them go.

A week later, the judge granted the agents yet another wiretap, this time for the phones of Jeffery Leahr and Omari McCree. And on that first day up on the wire, just after 4
P.M
. on October 22, 2004, agents knew they’d hit it big. They heard Omari talking on Jeff’s phone to a security guard from the Atrium. The two were discussing, in terms as vague as possible, the shooting that had gone down at the club.

On Omari’s phone, the chatter was even better. The agents heard several conversations referring to the Family’s efforts to bond Big Meech out of jail.

First, agents heard the warnings about the cars: Watch your flash. Then, there were hints that Omari and Jeff would be called to a meeting later that night. “You and Jeff stay available,” Yogi told Omari—and with that, four agents set out for Omari’s town house on the outskirts of Buckhead. From a safe distance and from several vantage points, they would watch the comings and goings from Omari’s half-million-dollar residence, and hopefully be ready to lay chase when the call came from Yogi to mobilize BMF’s ranks.

Finally, seven hours later and shortly after midnight, Meech was out of jail. And BMF was on the move. Omari got the call at 12:45
A.M
. In a voice weary but still upbeat, Yogi gave as many details as she could. “He fillin’ out paperwork right now,” she said. “He ain’t talkin’ on no phones. He said he want to
see
everybody at the Elevator spot.”

“All right, well, just call me when y’all almost there so I can come on,” Omari said. “We ain’t but down the street.”

Five minutes later, an unidentified man walked out of Omari’s front door and drove off in a black Land Rover. One of the agents told another agent, camped out up the street, to note which way the Land Rover headed. That agent watched as the Land Rover turned right out of Omari’s subdivision onto North Druid Hills Road, and he radioed a third agent, who was even farther up the street, with the instructions to follow the vehicle. That agent tailed the Range Rover from North Druid Hills to Roxboro Road to Wieuca Road and, finally, onto Peachtree, in the heart of Buckhead Village. By then, however, Omari was walking out his front door, and the agent pulled off in order to help the others keep up with their primary target.

After disappearing into his garage, Omari sped off in a silver Porsche SUV. One of the surveillance cars took off after him, onto North Druid Hills Road, then onto Roxboro and from there to
Wieuca. The other agents didn’t even have a chance to join the pursuit. Omari was driving so fast and taking so many sudden turns that nobody could keep up. They lost him.

The following evening, Yogi called Omari to chat. It quickly became obvious to the agents that she and Omari were close confidants—and that she was a confidante to Big Meech as well. Yogi spoke at length with Omari. She said that Meech tells her “more and more” every day. She said she has the “inside scoop” on what the boss is thinking and doing. She described J-Bo—Meech’s hawk eyed second-in-command—as her boss as well (though not nearly so likeable a boss as Meech). Those two, she told Omari, “are the biggest tricks out there.” She also mentioned that Meech, Baby Bleu, and Ill currently were out of town on business.

An hour later, Omari got a call from Jeffery. The news wasn’t good. Jeffery said the security guard, the one from the Atrium, had been fired—presumably because someone found out the guard had been covering for them.

The day after, the agents again staked out Omari at his house. This time, though, they had a bigger team—eleven guys to the four who took part in the prior effort. They didn’t want Omari to get away again, but they also needed to be sure they followed him to a destination that mattered. They were hoping he’d lead them to the mysterious Elevator, which the chatter over the wire revealed to be a headquarters for BMF’s crew. Of course, they’d settle for a traffic stop—as long as he was in possession of enough dope to maybe, somehow, convince him to talk.

When Omari called Jeff late that afternoon, moments before he pulled into the driveway, his language suggested he might be arriving with a drug shipment.

“When you hear the doorbell thing, come help me get the stuff.”

“Say what?” Jeff asked.

“I’m fixin’ to pull in. Just come help me get this shit out the car.” An hour after Omari’s Porsche pulled into the garage, he took off
again. Agents followed him as he made several stops. He picked up Yogi at a house in the posh Atlanta neighborhood of Brookhaven. From there, Omari and Yogi stopped by a CompUSA and a Sprint cell phone store, then drove to a gated subdivision in north Atlanta. Agents waited just beyond the iron gate, and the Porsche reemerged minutes later. The next stop was a gas station, where agents watched as Omari, Yogi, and a young woman (whom they must have just picked up) dipped inside the store. Finally, after the Porsche made a ten-minute pit stop at Omari’s home, the occupants started on a longer trip—and the agents took that to be a sign that there might be something valuable in the car. The surveillance team followed the Porsche along several surface roads before finally hitting the highway. When the Porsche topped out at 85 mph, the agents radioed local deputies to request a traffic stop.

Obliging the flashing lights, the Porsche pulled to shoulder on the ramp between I-285 south and I-20 east, about twenty miles from Omari’s home. The young woman who’d been spotted at the gas station was now driving, and Omari was a passenger. Pointing at Omari, the woman told the officer, “Everything in it belong to him.” When officers asked if they could search the car, the woman consented. But the search was in vain. They found zilch.

Thirty minutes later, Jeff called Omari.

“We just got pulled over by the police,” Omari told him.

“For real?”

“Yeah.”

“They searched it?”

Omari didn’t want to get into all that. “Um, I’ll call you back, man.”

The next day, agents listening to the wire perked up at what sounded like not-so-well-guarded drug talk. Yogi had called Omari for help in figuring out how to tally different piles of bills.

“Hey, um, listen,” she said. “One rubber band of, uh, twenties is what?”

“Um, a stack.”

There is a difference, however, between a stack, which totals $2,500, and a double stack, which is worth twice as much. Omari sensed that Yogi wasn’t too sure about how to differentiate between them. “It’s not double is it?” he asked.

“One stack,” she said, “but it’s got two rubber bands.”

“Both tied?”

“Yeah.

“That’s five.”

“Ooh, well, I was about to fuck up. That’s why I asked. Thank you very much.”

In another call, Yogi used an unusual euphemism for what the agents believed to be a dope shipment. And the term she used later would come in handy for the investigators.

“Look,” Yogi said to Omari, “if Ralphie got somethin’ on the back of the truck, would he leave it there all night?”

“If he got somethin’ on the back of the truck?”

“He, um, put all his ‘dry cleaning’ on the back of the truck. You don’t think he should leave them clothes on the back of the truck like that, should he?”

“I don’t know. Where he takin’ ’em to?”

“He was takin’ them from the, uh, from the Elevator.”

“Uh, I don’t know. Whatever man, just tell him it’s whether he want to or he don’t.”

“I mean, it’s just a call,” she said. “What would you do?”

“Umm, I wouldn’t go back, I tell you that.”

“Oh, leave it where it is?”

“Yeah.”

Two days later, Yogi had some interesting gossip to share. She brought Omari up to speed on matters involving the rapper Young Jeezy. She claimed that Jeezy was behind on some payments for his Lamborghini, which he’d gotten from a dealership in Orlando that regularly secured cars—Lambos, Ferraris, and the like—for BMF.
The owner of the shop was Eric “Swift” Whaley, a 350-pound man with a heart condition that rendered him a far cry from the image his nickname conjured.

Yogi was clearly getting a kick out of the situation. “Jeezy called me talkin’ ’bout, ‘Let me tell you what that punk-ass Swift did.’ I said, ‘I know—took your car.’”

“He took it?” Omari asked, incredulous.

“Yep. He runnin’ round here tellin’ everybody his paperwork wasn’t straight,” Yogi said. The car, she claimed, had been impounded. “Jeezy just ain’t made a motherfuckin’ payment on the car in five months,” Yogi continued. “Swift told me if I get Jeezy to pay a car payment, he’ll pay
my
car payment.”

“What the hell is wrong with that boy?”

“Swift told him the only way he can get it back is if he pay it all the way off. He said that’s fucked up. He said, ‘No, I’m gonna get the Medina.’ I said, ‘Okay, Hollywood.’”

“I ain’t never heard no shit like that.”

“Isn’t that crazy? Niggas be frontin’ one way and shit. Mmm, mmm, mmm … rappers.”

As for Yogi and Omari, both were having some self-restraint problems with their new rides—she with her Benz and he with his Porsche. Meech, whom she and Omari often referred to as “Dude,” had noticed their dilemma. “Dude said, ‘Yogi don’t drive the motherfuckin’ car,’” she told Omari a few minutes after the Jeezy story. “I need to just stop bein’ hardheaded, but when you know you ain’t got no transportation, sometimes you just gotta do what you gotta do. I know it’s especially hard on you, ’cause you hate bein’ in the house.”

From that, and from what Omari said next, it appeared to the agents that Meech’s crew was under a sort of self-imposed house arrest.

“Not really,” Omari said. “I ain’t got no problem with it. It’s just, I wanna get out like one time. But I see that’s not possible.”

“That’s for sure. You know these motherfuckers are actually for real laying in wait for a nigga to leave the motherfuckin’ club.”

Omari was getting a little stir crazy. Yogi, too. And the fact that they fell back on talking on the phone as opposed to going out—that they let their guards down on their cells and that, likely out of boredom, their lips got looser and looser—well, that turned out to be better for investigators than had the two of them been hanging out all over town. Their chatter was the foundation of the HIDTA case.

Three hours later, Yogi and Omari were on the phone again. During this call, Omari’s mood had taken a turn for the worse. Yogi, who was constantly trying to lift his spirits, did her best to combat his fatalistic mumblings. She reminded him of his rather fortunate standing with her—and with Meech.

“Half the shit that I tell you, I break confidence in my boss to tell you,” she admitted. “I know I shouldn’t be tellin you. But it’s because I just see you in a totally different light. I think sometimes I see more than you see yourself. And I have conversations with Dude, and I know certain things that he think of you.”

Omari wasn’t having it. As Yogi’s tone shifted from admonishing to nurturing and back again, he remained morose. He was worried about the Atrium shootings—and Decarlo’s bust, too. He also mentioned that he thought he was being watched.