BMF: The Rise and Fall of Big Meech and the Black Mafia Family (14 page)

Which was why, when Campbell’s two-term limit was nearing its conclusion, the machine was urging her to take aim at the mayor’s seat. “To have Shirley Franklin running for mayor is just so delicious, because it’s the first true draft I’ve ever seen,” her ex-husband told the press shortly after she launched her campaign. (The two had remained close friends.)

Yet the rest of her family was surprised that her name was being batted around. She was a private person. She reveled in behind-the-scenes policy and strategy. She’d never been the type to seek the spotlight. Still, she was highly qualified and immensely likeable. Most important, she could win. And the machine was persuasive. Despite having never run for public office, and never before having seemed interested in such a thing, Shirley Franklin was game.

As Atlanta’s 2001 mayoral campaign was heating up, it became clear to Kiki that he needed to legitimize his earnings. That’s because he intended to make Shirley Franklin’s eldest daughter his wife.

In his foray into legitimacy, as with his illegal endeavors, Kiki
formed a partnership with Scott King. The two men decided to open a car dealership and customization shop on the outskirts of Buckhead, one that would offer $2,000 rims and $350,000 Bentleys. Kiki and Scott incorporated their business in September 2001, and they called it 404 Motorsports—so-named for Atlanta’s intown area code. The dealership had a clublike setting, and it catered to the type of customers who might qualify for an AmEx black card. The walls of 404 Motorsports were graced with autographed jerseys of clients such as Atlanta Brave Andruw Jones and Cleveland Brown Corey Fuller. Graham’s business would be a portal to celebrities, with whom he had an easy rapport. And his fiancée would be a liaison to Atlanta’s political elite.

That year, both Scott and Kiki sat down for Christmas dinner with the Franklin family. There was much to celebrate: Shirley’s recent victory and her upcoming inauguration (she’d taken the race by a seventeen-percentage-point lead), Scott and Kiki’s new business, and, right around the corner, wedding bells. Kai and Kiki were married December 29, 2001. Kiki now had all the more reason to keep up appearances. Fortunately for him, he possessed an uncanny ability to come across as legit. There was a pleasantness about Kiki, an understated ambition that made people believe in him, to convince themselves he was someone he wasn’t. He dressed in three-piece suits and smart ties. He hobnobbed with superstars. And his wife was the daughter of a wildly popular mayor—the first African-American woman to hold that post in any major Southern city. If he was careful enough, Kiki would be guaranteed a charmed life.

He and Scott ran into a snag, though. As 2002 wore into 2003, their business wasn’t making money. Even with the two men continuing to move cocaine, they couldn’t keep 404 Motorsports afloat without outside help. For that, they turned to Kiki’s father-in-law, David Franklin. For over a decade, David had run a successful—and, some say, controversial—concessions business at Atlanta’s Hartsfield International Airport. With his business partner Ed Wilson, Franklin
headed Franklin & Wilson Concessions, which operated three stores on two airport concourses. Two of them were called Bijoux-Terner and specialized in luxury travel items; the other was called Bagmania. David Franklin had to obtain lucrative, city-approved contracts to do business at Hartsfield—contracts that Shirley Franklin didn’t approve and didn’t benefit from, the city’s ethics board later would rule. But two of her three children did benefit. Her twenty-eight-year-old son, Cabral, served as vice president of budget and planning for Franklin & Wilson, as well as a financial analyst and board member. And her daughter Kai, a year older than Cabral, was director of national brands.

Sometime after she got married, though, Kai and her husband ran into money trouble. The problem was that, on paper at least, the couple wasn’t making enough money to support their lifestyle, which included a $600,000 home in the snooty Atlanta suburb East Cobb and Kai’s expensive furs and jewels. In order to become more convincing, Scott and Kiki were hoping that 404 Motorsports could somehow show more income. And income from a company as entrenched as David Franklin’s would be all the better. According to Scott, he and Kiki invested $150,000 in Franklin & Wilson Concessions—with the expectation that David would write a check every month to 404 Motorsports, which would help create more IRS-friendly revenue. But, as Scott recalled, David Franklin didn’t write any checks to 404. According to Scott, David Franklin instead made out the check to his daughter Kai—even after she quit working for him. Unfortunately, Kai drawing an income, even one she shared with her husband, wasn’t equivalent to 404 Motorsports doing so. As a result, Scott would claim, the investment turned out not to be what the company needed.

Another business deal, one that Kiki arranged, had more substantial benefits for the company. A powerful drug associate of J-Rock’s wanted to sink $250,000 of his own cash into Kiki and Scott’s car shop. Kiki was thrilled. Early in 2003, he stopped by the White
House to pick up the money from his new investor, Terry Flenory, whose top-level associate, A.R., loaded the bundles of cash into secret compartments in Kiki’s car. The contribution was enough to qualify Terry as a silent owner, and though the money did nothing to help 404 Motorsports show legitamite income, it did offer a quick infusion for the bleeding business.

The remission was short-lived. By April of 2003, Terry wasn’t seeing enough of a return on his investment, and he expected some payback. Kiki couldn’t give him money, so to stave him off, he offered up a pair of $100,000 Porsches. Kiki put the cars in his wife’s name, who signed off on the paperwork and financing, and then presented them to Terry. Kai never even saw them.

Kiki and Scott’s veneer of legitimacy was wearing thin. And as they were struggling to maintain the illusion, their boss, J-Rock, was busy creating one of his own. Like his friend Meech, J-Rock was hoping to make inroads in the music biz. At around the same time that 404 Motorsports was incorporated, J-Rock began building a studio, Platinum Recording, on Atlanta’s West Side, an area that already was home to the renowned Dallas Austin Recording Projects (DARP) and Patchwerk Recording Studios. Platinum was comparable to those ventures in cost and equipment, if not prestige. It boasted a $360,000 soundboard, a $315,000 tour bus, and an in-house label, Dep Wudz Records, named after a rap group J-Rock had signed. J-Rock even hired Meech and Terry’s dad, Charles, who had experience putting together more humble recording studios, to do the renovations on the state-of-the-art space.

Unlike the other studios in the neighborhood, however, Platinum was not pulling in any significant business. In its early days at least, Platinum never earned more than two thousand dollars in a given recording session—a paltry sum compared with the tens of thousands of dollars that competing studios collected per day. In fact, it was J-Rock’s drug business, and not any paying clients, that covered the studio’s expenses. J-Rock pulled in far more money than Scott and
Kiki, and so he did a better job supporting his studio than they did their car dealership. J-Rock sank thirty thousand dollars a month into Platinum Recordings between the studio’s equipment, bills, and salaried employees, one of whom was paid to make sure members of Dep Wudz made it to their shows and stayed out of trouble. Another Platinum employee, hired to do accounting work, began to suspect that the studio was a front, but continued to work there for fear that J-Rock wouldn’t accept a resignation without retribution.

Looking to expand his roster, J-Rock assumed the role of manager in 2002 to an aspiring teenage rapper out of North Carolina. Born Walter Tucker, Oowee was a promising addition to J-Rock’s label, which he renamed Bogard Records in early 2003. Oowee also was tight with BMF. Meech had made a habit of befriending young rappers, even those who had other representation and pending record deals, and he was particularly fond of the tough-but-pretty lyricist (fond enough to feature him prominently in Bleu’s video, “Still Here”). As for Meech and J-Rock, they were cool, both in matters lawful and otherwise. J-Rock had one crew and Meech had another, but the two bosses looked out for each other.

In fact, in many ways, Meech and BMF Entertainment took after J-Rock and Bogard. Both bosses had a genuine passion for the industry, and the industry, in turn, valued their street smarts. Meech and J-Rock also possessed the bravado, if not the acumen, of more traditional music moguls. But there were some notable differences between the two bosses. For starters, J-Rock was a silent partner in his label and recording studio, presenting himself as a freelance artist’s rep rather than the money and leadership behind the venture. (He went so far in his charade as to meet Bogard’s accountant in random parking lots, usually behind the wheel of a Ferrari or Lamborghini, to clandestinely hand off any cash the studio might need.) Meech, on the other hand, put himself out there. He was the very public face of BMF Entertainment, which, even as record labels go, was a highly noticeable organization. The fact that BMF, like Bogard, was financed
with drug money appeared not to dissuade Meech from flooding the market with excessive displays of exorbitant wealth—money that had no verifiable, legal origin. J-Rock was more understated.

Yet no matter how careful he was in separating himself from Bogard, J-Rock remained inextricable from the Sin City Mafia. J-Rock
was
Sin City Mafia. And once investigators started sniffing around J-Rock’s crew, the boss had reason to worry—but only to a point. That’s because J-Rock, like Meech, considered himself fairly impenetrable. He was near the top of his game, after all. Only further down the food chain, or so the logic goes, does one become vulnerable.

Barron Johnson existed somewhere along the middle of that food chain. The Greenville coke dealer had a few street-level guys working for him, and he was buying about ten kilos at a time from his supplier. Vice detectives at the local police department stumbled onto him in 2002, after orchestrating a few undercover, street-corner buys from West Greenville dealers, whom Barron was supplying. From there, the detectives landed a wiretap on one of Barron’s phones. Based on what they heard, it appeared he was getting his drug shipments from Atlanta. One of his Atlanta suppliers, they learned, was a man named Scott King. And one of Scott’s associates, Ulysses “Hack” Hackett, was driving the coke up to Barron on a regular basis.

After nailing down Scott as Barron’s supplier, the local investigators went to the Greenville office of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration in the summer of 2003 to see if the federal agents might be interested in the case. The DEA
was
interested, as was the criminal division of the IRS. The two agencies immediately launched a full-scale investigation into Scott King’s drug ring and assets.

In December 2003, Barron Johnson, Scott King, and Ulysses Hackett were indicted under seal in federal court in Greenville. The indictment charged them with conspiracy to distribute cocaine and to launder drug money. Barron was quickly apprehended, and it
didn’t take long for investigators to convince him to talk. He went so far as to arrange a four-kilo shipment from Scott, who knew nothing of Barron’s arrest or his own pending charges. And so Scott sent Hack to Greenville with the package, as he’d done countless times before. Hack planned to meet Barron at the stash house on Singing Pines Drive, the one Kiki had leased.

But he didn’t make it that far. On the afternoon of January 21, 2004, a highway patrol trooper acting on DEA orders pulled over Hack’s SUV on I–85, a few miles shy of his destination. In the backseat, investigators found four neatly wrapped and barely disguised kilos of cocaine. That same day, a federal judge signed off on a search warrant for the house on Singing Pines Drive. During the search, investigators found another ten keys inside the stash house. The drugs, along with eighty thousand dollars, were tucked away in five underground safes.

Later that afternoon, Scott was hanging out at his town house when Hack’s girlfriend, Misty Carter, knocked on his door. She’d heard about Hack’s arrest, and she wanted to help. Misty was twenty-four years old, a graduate of Atlanta’s historically black, all-female Spelman College, and a salesgirl at an upscale Atlanta boutique. Not that she needed to work. As the daughter of a well-to-do physician in the idyllic town of Fayetteville, North Carolina, Misty was still pampered by her parents. She had little experience with the ins and outs of the drug game, or the workings of the legal system. But she did have access to cash. She broke a savings bond in order to free Hack from jail, and Scott promised to pay her back.

Immediately after she left, he called Kiki. The two made arrangements to pay for Hack’s lawyer, a move they mistakenly believed would give them access to the sealed evidence filed in the case—which in turn would allow them to see how close the government might be to nabbing them, too. Scott, however, didn’t have to wait long to find out what the feds had in store for him. Days after Hack’s arrest, the full indictment was unsealed—and Scott learned that he
(though not Kiki) had been charged. Scott wasn’t going to wait around for authorities to find him. Using a fake ID, he caught a flight to California, where he intended to start over.

The move across country was an easy one. J-Rock had just relocated to L.A., too, along with his new wife. The couple had taken up residence in one of three houses where J-Rock stored his fresh-to-the-U.S. drug shipments. The $2 million home was still in the L.A. hills, technically, but close to the belly of the Valley—and even closer to Terry Flenory’s primary stash house, the Jump. You could walk from one home to the other in less than five minutes. Like Terry, J-Rock had little choice but to maintain several L.A. properties to keep up with the drugs he purchased—allegedly from their supplier-in-common, the one with a direct Mexican connection.