BMF: The Rise and Fall of Big Meech and the Black Mafia Family (5 page)

Given the conditions of the road, it was predictable that the vehicle would at some point drift across the fog line that hugs the highway
shoulder. The infraction was small enough, but it was sufficient cause for a Phelps County deputy to flash his patrol lights and pull the RV over. Sitting in the motorhome’s cab awaiting the deputy’s approach, Jabari had reason to believe this was no random traffic stop. Was he being followed by the feds? He couldn’t have known for sure. But he was clearly nervous.

The deputy told Jabari to step down from the vehicle and take a seat in the back of his patrol car. He then ran a check on Jabari’s license—a license that didn’t identify him as Jabari Hayes from Atlanta. Instead, it listed a Nashville address, one that had been chosen for Jabari at random, and a fake name, Kenneth Tory Collins. Jabari had been issued the license just two weeks before, shortly after he’d been pulled over while driving another vehicle. He couldn’t risk getting nabbed again, not after he played dumb the last time. So one of his associates had hooked him up with an inside source at the Tennessee driver’s license bureau. The woman helped Jabari obtain the seemingly legit ID, just as she had done for his associates countless times before. After he received it, he was told to memorize all its details. He needed to be ready, just in case.

Now the license was being put to the test. The deputy ran a check on it. It came back clean, just as the woman had promised. Then the deputy started asking questions.

“Where are you from?” he asked.

“Tennessee,” Jabari called out from the backseat.

“Where are you going?”

“To visit family in St. Louis, for Easter.”

“Did you make any stops along the way?”

“Yeah, one in Georgia and another in Texas, to see my cousins.”

Having noticed that the motorhome had neither Georgia nor Texas nor Tennessee plates, the deputy asked, “Where did the RV come from?”

“I rented it in Orlando,” Jabari said. “But I left the paperwork at home.”

“How much did it cost?”

“About four thousand dollars for the month.”

“And how are you employed?”

“I own a valet company.”

“Okay,” the deputy said, switching topics. “Can you tell me why you have three cell phones?”

Drug dealers are often armed with multiple phones, a fact of which Jabari was well aware. And he was as prepared for this question as the others. His response was quick—and under less tense circumstances, might have gotten a chuckle out of his interrogator. “I like to separate my business calls from my personal ones,” Jabari said. “Plus, it helps keep my girlfriends from flipping through my call history and finding out about each other.”

His attempt to inject humor into the situation appeared not to be working. Soon after, the deputy dropped a loaded question: “Are you transporting any contraband?”

Jabari tried to maintain his cool, but he couldn’t help himself. His reaction to the question was physical. Glancing in the rearview mirror, the deputy noticed that Jabari’s hands were trembling. Upon closer inspection, he saw a vein in Jabari’s neck, beating faster and faster.

“No,” Jabari answered.

Three weeks earlier, Jabari had been stopped on the very same highway, heading west from St. Louis. On that occasion, he was behind the wheel of a Lincoln limousine—a limo whose paperwork the DEA had discovered four months prior, in the office of the White House. The name Jabari Hayes also cropped up in paperwork pulled from the house (hence the need for the fake ID). On that occasion, Jabari had been pulled over not by a St. Louis County deputy or a Michigan State Patrol officer, but by the DEA. The agents brought in a dog to sniff the limo. The dog alerted them to the likelihood of something suspicious. And in a secret compartment behind the backseat,
agents discovered stacks upon rubber-banded stacks of hundred-dollar bills—totaling more than half a million dollars.

Yet that traffic stop appeared not to dissuade Jabari, who claimed he was delivering the limo to a friend and had no idea where the cash came from. Nor did it dampen the enthusiasm of other couriers who had similar missions to carry out. In the time that elapsed between that past I-44 stop and this one, Missouri cops busted two other men, Christopher “Pig” Triplett and Calvin “Playboy” Sparks, in yet another car, a Volvo C70, whose paperwork had been found in the White House office. What’s more, Pig and Playboy were among the thirty-four nicknames listed in the pages of a red spiral-bound notebook discovered in a White House guest bedroom.

Unlike Jabari’s earlier bust, Pig and Playboy didn’t walk away from theirs. Inside the Volvo, authorities found nine kilos of cocaine. Pig and Playboy—regardless of whether they even knew the coke was in the car—were facing the risk of major drug felony charges.

Now, however, as Jabari sat in the backseat of the deputy’s patrol car, hands trembling and heart pounding, his situation went from bad to worse. Another police vehicle arrived. A drug dog was trotted out. The dog circled the RV, promptly sat down, and started to bark. With probable cause established, the deputy climbed inside the hulking motorhome and, a few minutes later, emerged with three suitcases pulled from the master bedroom. Opening them, he discovered the source of Jabari’s dread. The suitcases held bundle after bundle of neatly packed, plastic-wrapped bricks of cocaine. In all, there were more than one hundred kilos—or 220 pounds. On the street, that’s about $10 million worth of coke.

Once in custody, Jabari was prodded for information by the DEA. He didn’t budge, but agents were able to connect the RV to a Florida luxury car dealership, Orlando Exotic Car Rentals, whose owner, Marc “Swift” Whaley, was believed to have supplied BMF with at least ten vehicles—including Meech’s silver Lamborghini.

Those three highway busts in the spring of 2004 were not the Black Mafia Family’s first. But for them to come in such close succession was alarming. And if BMF’s top brass was confident about Jabari’s ability to keep his mouth shut, there was less reason to think Christopher “Pig” Triplett would hold his tongue. Perhaps it was just paranoia, but the smaller shipment discovered in the car with Pig and Playboy shook BMF’s nerves all the way to the top, to Meech’s younger brother and the organization’s West Coast boss: Terry “Southwest T” Flenory.

If Meech was BMF’s charismatic face, Terry was its quiet genius, a mastermind who maintained a low profile while overseeing the import of thousands of kilos of cocaine from Mexico to Southern California. Terry was cautious, and he was the antithesis of his brother. Overweight and bespectacled, with a lazy eye that drifted off to the periphery, he had a slightly off-putting, discomforting presence. In matters of business, he was direct to the point of being blunt. He also was understated where Meech was over the top, a shrewd and controlling businessman who kept his followers in check by instilling a sense of apprehension and indebtedness. His leadership style was nothing like the brotherly, egalitarian approach that Meech often took.

In the foothills of L.A.’s San Fernando Valley, Terry owned several suburban properties, including a handsome home for him and his longtime girlfriend, Tonesa Welch, and a couple of stash houses for receiving shipments of cocaine. Like Meech, Terry claimed to hobnob with music producers and NFLers, rappers and entertainment moguls, including Baltimore Raven Corey Fuller and Bad Boy Records’ P. Diddy. But unlike his brother, Terry managed to live the high life while staying out of the spotlight. Terry’s desire for self-preservation stood in direct contrast to Meech’s ambition to be
known
. Meech wanted nothing more than to be a credible force in hip-hop, to see his name join the ranks of such luminaries as Death Row Records founder Suge Knight and Def Jam CEO Russell Simmons.
Terry, on the other hand, was more concerned with survival. Above all else, he wanted to protect the world he built.

And so when Pig and Playboy got nabbed on that Missouri highway, and when Playboy’s relatives began to suspect that Pig might in fact be a rat, Terry was quick to offer advice—and create the illusion that all was well with the Family. Speaking on the phone to Playboy’s brother, Melvin, Terry did some damage control. But first, he lent Melvin his ear. And Melvin apparently needed it. Because he thought for sure that Pig was going to turn on Playboy.

“I just got through talking to Play about five minutes ago,” Melvin told Terry. “He said you might not know what’s going on. They went to court, and that nigga Pig can’t even look him in his face. He said he don’t know if the nigga is trying to turn state’s evidence or what, but it’s not looking right.”

Terry was quick to defuse the situation, starting with a disclaimer about the lawyer he’d hired to defend Pig—a lawyer who, Terry claimed, was held to certain standards. “One thing about this attorney that we got,” Terry said, “is that if Pig was doing anything wrong, he would have dropped his case. He don’t defend government witnesses.” Then, as if to validate his claim that everything was in fact fine, Terry told Melvin he was handing the phone over to his brother, Big Meech. What followed, in true Meech fashion, was an honest attempt to assuage Melvin with a healthy dose of pep talk. Meech had a knack for smoothing wrinkles with his even smoother talk, and this occasion was no departure—except that the voice on the line wasn’t his. It was an imposter, a close associate of Terry’s named Eric “Slim” Bivens.

Terry wanted to give the appearance that he and Meech were in control, jointly and unequivocally. And so Slim put on his best Meech, and he laid it on thick—starting with, “How you doing, sir?”

“I’m doing okay,” Melvin said.

“This is, um, Demetrius.”

Melvin then reiterated his concern: “Okay, well, let me say just
one thing. I talked to Playboy; he just called me. He said something is not right.”

Slim knew just what Meech would say. Or at least he hoped he did. “Listen,” he said, reasoning with Melvin, “I know—I can guarantee this one hundred percent—that your brother is just going through a process. It’s called patience. He’s not going to do no more time. I promise you, your brother is going to be acquitted and be home. I know for sure that the guy that he was with is gonna hold up his responsibility.”

“But why can’t he look him in his face?”

“Let me tell you something, brother,” Slim said, slipping deeper into the voice of a seasoned hypnotist. “I’m gonna be real honest. Your brother is sitting up there, a victim of some wasted time. His mind is playing tricks on him. But I know for sure what Pig is going to do in court, because he already told his lawyer that he’s gonna hold up one hundred percent to all responsibility. This comin’ from the lawyer’s mouth.” Then he sugared the situation, as Meech surely would have done. “I just put a thousand dollars on your brother’s book,” he continued. “Probably in the next couple of days, he gonna see a receipt with a thousand dollars. He don’t have to eat that jail food. He can call y’all as much as he want to call y’all.”

Finally, Slim offered a Meech-worthy explanation of why things might not be going as well as they should: “It’s just been a slow process, ’cause of that town that he’s in. It’s a hick town. It’s a prejudiced town. And they fucking with your brother.”

“Okay,” Melvin said.

“It’s just a mind game. Just tell him, it’s a mind game.”

Melvin’s next question was dangled like bait, and Slim bit. “Well, um, how much will it cost if I go fly down there and see him?”

“Look, to get there wouldn’t be no more than two hundred dollars,” Slim replied. “But what I’ll do is, I’m gonna take that out of my own personal money to fly you there, get you a room. You and your mother can go down and see him.”

“I don’t want Mom to see him.”

“Okay, then, whoever wants to go,” Slim offered. “ ’Cause he needs moral support, and we can’t go in there ourselves.”

Before ending the conversation, Slim threw in one last gracious note in his attempt to capture Meech’s congeniality: “You know what?” he said. “Tell your mom we sorry.”

Slim knew what he was doing. The velvet-voiced Meech had such a strong reputation for preaching the gospel of family that anyone mimicking him would know to offer the requisite apology to Playboy’s mother. Family was important to the Flenorys. And despite Meech and Terry’s growing differences, there was no denying that the empire they’d built was a family affair—one that dated back to the years during which they came of age in southwest Detroit.

Charles and Lucille Flenory were twenty-one years old in the spring of 1969, the year they left Cleveland for what they hoped would be a better life. They’d married two years earlier, not long after graduating high school, and the following summer their son Demetrius had been born. Before the arrival of their second son, however, the young couple set their sights on a new home: Detroit. There was bigger industry in the Motor City, with more jobs to offer and better opportunities for Charles. Plus, Detroit in the late ’60s was an exciting place, especially if you were young and black. Motown Records and its aptly named Hitsville USA were churning out top-ten records at breakneck speed, from Diana Ross & the Supremes to Stevie Wonder to Marvin Gaye. For Charles, whose love of music bordered on obsession, Detroit was a better fit than Cleveland.

From the time he was thirteen, back in the early ’60s, Charles Flenory had prayed he’d one day become a professional musician. But there was no room in his parents’ minuscule budget for music lessons, and Charles would be called upon for other, more pressing tasks. His father, a World War II veteran and ware house worker, had fallen ill
when Charles was a teenager. To help support his ailing father, Charles found work in a Cleveland steel factory, and he handed over each of his paychecks to his parents. In his spare time, though—what little he had—he taught himself guitar. He built up his skills until he was good enough to perform in his church’s gospel band. And his dream of making and recording music followed him throughout his adult life.