BMF: The Rise and Fall of Big Meech and the Black Mafia Family (2 page)

As for everything else—the two decades in the game, the fast cars and grinding music, the showering cash and fawning respect, the partying that would make Tony Montana blush—well, that made his current situation worth it. The bummer is that he was good at what he did—too good, he thinks, for things to have gone the way they went. It just didn’t seem like his time. If he’d been busted with a hundred keys or had sold to the DEA, that’d be one thing. That would somehow be more understandable. But that’s not what happened. What happened, he believes, was that he became far too fascinating to those who wanted to see him fail.

By the time the Bentleys were rolled out and the billboards went up and the rappers were invoking his name in top-ten hits, he was past the point of return. His only option was to do it big. And if doing it big meant putting on even more of a show for the feds, so be it. It was a matter of necessity. But what about before? Why go down that path in the first place? Why blow it up the way he did, when blowing it up meant blowing it all away? “If I was going to stick with the illegal stuff, I would have sat in and stayed out of sight,” he says. “But what can you do when you’re
expected
to go out, when everybody
wants
to see you?”

In any case, he didn’t really think he’d get caught. He didn’t think there was anything he could get caught for. Now he knows different. Now he knows that no matter how careful he might have been, he overlooked one obvious fact: The very combination that first made him a success—his ability to attract attention and his unwillingness to slow down—was destined to make him a failure. On both sides of
the law, he became all but impossible to resist. People wanted to see him, and the government wanted to see him go down. “As bad as they wanted me,” he says, “there was no winning.”

So, in the end, he’s glad he did it the way he did, because at least he had some fun. At least he flexed a little muscle, bore a little influence. He claims to have boosted the careers of T.I. and Jeezy in Atlanta and Fabolous in New York, which means they all have him to thank. Not that he’s looking for validation, exactly. Just the recognition that back in the beginning, when no one else was paying much attention, he was the one who helped float them. He was the one who helped elevate some of the biggest names in hip-hop (which, at the time, meant some of the biggest names in music, period). He was the one who helped create the fantasy that they’re still living.

Viewed from his exile on the second floor of the St. Clair County Detention and Intervention Center, the past has grown even more distant than twenty-nine months in lockup would have you believe. “Man,” he says, breaking eye contact for a brief moment, as if he could still glimpse that evaporated dream, “I sure do miss it.”

They have a lot of money. They have a lot of drugs.
You don’t know what you’re getting yourself into.

—
MYSTERY 911 CALLER

D
emetrius “Big Meech” Flenory didn’t just walk into the club. He arrived.

He usually arrived under the watch of bodyguards. Every now and then, he arrived with a hundred or so hangers-on. And on those nights when egos were bruised or the wrong woman got involved, he arrived with trouble. It was hard to compete with a presence so huge, not to mention one that could drop fifty thousand dollars on a single bar tab. And so sometimes, his arrival was cause for others in the club to bolt.

The first sign he was coming: the cars. They coasted to the curb like supermodels down a runway. Bentleys and H2s, Lambos and Porsches. And, when the crowd swelled to full ranks, tour buses. Under the marquees of clubs from Midtown Atlanta to South Beach Miami, the streetlights bounced off the million-dollar motorcade, and it was blinding.

Next, the crew. Meech liked to treat all of them as family. “Everybody moves like brothers,” he used to tell them. “Everybody moves as one.” But as with any entourage, there was a definite hierarchy. Pushing into the crowd (if that were possible), you’d first find the guys who hover on the fringes, moving forward with a menacing sway. Go deeper, and the vibe would start to change. Guards would come down. Egos would edge up. Keep going, and you’d encounter a steady calm. The aura was one of undisputed confidence and quiet control. That was when you knew you’d hit Meech.

Tall and broad, with the posture of a prizefighter and the swagger of a big cat, Meech could cause the climate in a room to change. “All Meech did was walk in the spot,” one woman would later recall, “and panties got moist.” His pale bronze skin exaggerated the depth of his ink-black eyes. A movie star’s mole rested just below his left temple, at the tapered edge of an arched eyebrow. The aquiline curve of his nose offset his high, chiseled cheekbones. And a pencil-thick mustache and goatee framed a pout that barely turned up at the corners, giving the impression that, even at his most serious, he was about to break into a grin.

Waxing eloquent in his velvety drawl, bedecked with enough diamonds to stock a jeweler’s counter, Meech was the center of attention at all the best clubs and the biggest parties, and that’s where he intended to stay. He kept the company of rappers and moguls, models and athletes, and, most important, a group of men whom he employed and indulged. He fed the crew six-hundred-dollar bottles of champagne and top-notch ecstasy. He took care of them, lifted them up, behaved as their friend and benefactor. They, in turn, would honor and protect him. He was perhaps more comfortable with the arrangement than he should have been. It was easy for him to forget that there were some things he couldn’t control. And one of those things would take place on November 11, 2003. It proved to be “the big one,” the very event that Meech—as well as the jittery residents
of Atlanta’s swankiest neighborhood—had long feared. Though for different reasons.

With its sparkling glass towers and Italianate architecture, its foie gras–obsessed menus and Versace shopping bags, Buckhead is the epicenter of Atlanta’s wealth, an Upper East Side with an abundance of parking lots. But by dint of its upscale offerings, the neighborhood—situated a few miles north of downtown and split down the middle by the city’s iconic thoroughfare, Peachtree Street—had begun to attract a crowd that made the resident blue bloods cringe: professional sports and music stars, and those who wanted to party with them. And a growing number of that crowd was black. For decades, Atlanta had boasted a thriving African-American middle class. The majority-black city suffered its share of racial tension, but more so than in other places, blacks and whites in Atlanta had benefited from an era of prosperity and, for the most part, the appearance of goodwill. The culture clash in Buckhead was a sharp departure from that.

Historically the provenance of sensible Southern ladies and old-moneyed men, Buckead morphed in the mid 1980s into a debaucherous entertainment district populated by a mostly white, notoriously rowdy crowd. Then, by the late ’90s, Buckhead changed again, earning an identity as the nightlife district of Atlanta’s nationally renowned hip-hop scene. Clubs that formerly catered to frat boys and bachelorette parties switched formats to rap and crunk nights. All too often, the partying got out of hand. And the hip-hop scene was easy to blame. The most notable meltdown was the post–Super Bowl stabbings for which Baltimore Ravens’ linebacker Ray Lewis was arrested for murder—and, after the case against him fell apart midtrial, walked away from with a misdemeanor. (The outcome of the case exemplified a growing trend of witnesses becoming unable to remember who shot or stabbed whom.) That was three years earlier, outside Cobalt Lounge.

About a block away, near the intersection of Peachtree and Paces
Ferry roads in the heart of Buckhead, a nightclub of similar glitz was earning its name. Chaos was one of the “it” clubs. Shaquille O’Neal and Eminem had partied there. And Monday’s hip-hop night was the club’s biggest draw. Hundreds of people would pass through Chaos’s plate-glass doors on what, for other clubs, was the slowest day of the week. At Chaos, the only thing slow about Mondays was the line.

On that particular Monday in November 2003, you couldn’t walk across the club’s lacquered wood floors, you couldn’t lean against its exposed brick walls or grab a seat on its minimalist leather sofas without catching sight of one of Meech’s guys. As usual, Meech’s crew was everywhere. Anthony Jones must have known that. Yet Jones, better known in hip-hop circles as “Wolf”—and more important, as Wolf Who Is Sean “P. Diddy” Combs’s Former Bodyguard—did something that stood a good chance of starting an all-out war.

Wolf was no stranger to conflict, and as a professional bodyguard, he didn’t go out of his way to avoid it, either. He’d been convicted in 1991 for the attempted murder of a New York cop, and he spent two years in prison. Two years after his release, he witnessed an Atlanta club shooting that defined the clash of East and West Coast hip-hop. A crew from L.A., including Death Row Records founder Marion “Suge” Knight, was pouring out of West Peachtree Street’s swanky Platinum club—only to come face-to-face with the arriving entourage of Knight’s biggest rival, Sean (then “Puff Daddy”) Combs, CEO of New York’s Bad Boy Entertainment. In the ensuing brawl, a record exec in Knight’s camp was shot several times. Weeks later, he died. Six years passed before the long-dormant investigation was resuscitated—with Wolf as the prime suspect.

Wolf also was hanging out at a Times Square nightclub in 1999 when, once again, gunshots rang out. This time, the fight started when a club-goer threw a fistful of bills in Combs’s face. After fleeing the scene with Combs, Combs’s then-girlfriend Jennifer Lopez, and his rapper-protégé Jamal “Shyne” Barrow, Wolf was arrested on a weapons charge—which he later beat. Shyne didn’t fare so well. He
was convicted of assault and reckless endangerment and was sentenced to ten years in prison.

Soon thereafter, Wolf relinquished his post as Combs’s most coveted muscle, and he came to Atlanta to start over. He wanted to make a name for himself as a hip-hop promoter. He became well known in the local club scene as a big spender and, on occasion, a big pain in the ass. Wolf, with a build reminiscent of a brick wall and a villain-styled widow’s peak, was a tough guy. He was a tough guy who would talk himself out of bad situation when he could. But when all else failed, he wasn’t exactly quick to back down. The problem was, Big Meech wasn’t the type of guy anyone should stand up to for long.

Among Meech’s distinguishing characteristics was his insistence that every guy in his crew be given his own bottle of Cristal or Perrier-Jouët at the club—even when the numbers grew to fifty or more. It was one of the obvious ways Meech built allegiances, but it wasn’t the only way. People were drawn to him not against their will, exactly, but because his aura of wealth, power, and generosity was impossible to resist. And once inside his circle, his followers rarely left. Sure, there were VIP rooms and beautiful girls and all kinds of money to be spent on whatever luxury you could possibly imagine. But more important, there was Big Meech in the middle of it, his hand resting on your shoulder like the father you never had, the one who let you drive the car your real father could never afford, the one who took you everywhere with him, wherever the business was. This management style served Meech well. His crew’s loyalty was like armor. It very nearly made him invincible. And November 11, 2003, was no exception.

In Meech’s eyes, he and Wolf were friends. A local celebrity photographer had snapped a picture of the two men just a couple of months earlier, each with an arm draped around the other’s neck, wearing glazed-over but friendly smirks. In those early morning hours at Club Chaos, however, any semblance of camaraderie between them vanished. It started when Wolf got rough with his ex-girlfriend. She
wasn’t just any ex-girlfriend. She was an ex-girlfriend hanging out with Meech’s crew. Wolf made it clear he didn’t want her keeping that particular company, and he knew enough about the crew to know his objections, once they turned violent, wouldn’t be tolerated. Still, Wolf wouldn’t let up. Enraged by his ex’s refusal to bow to his demand, and with a rapt audience looking on, Wolf grabbed her by the neck.

Meech didn’t miss a beat. He stepped in and told Wolf to back off. And for a while, he did. Wolf actually retreated. But Meech had a feeling that Wolf was still angry. And he thought it had less to do with the girl than with a theory he’d hatched: that Wolf was jealous of what Meech describes as a close friendship with Combs. Both Meech and his brother claimed to be tight with the New York music magnate. And it seemed to Meech that Wolf didn’t want him on that turf, either.

An hour later, Wolf stepped back into the picture. He went straight for his ex. He started roughing her up again. That time, Meech didn’t even have a chance to react. Club security swooped in, and Wolf was tossed out.

It would seem that with Wolf’s exit, the night’s trouble would have come to a close. Meech and his boys went back to doing what they were known for doing—ingesting an obscene amount of champagne and spending an even more obscene amount of cash. It was only 1:30
A.M
., after all, and the bar wouldn’t close for another two and a half hours.

Wolf, banished from the cozy confines of the club, stepped into the cool November night and headed toward the parking lot behind the building. He hooked up with his friend, Lamont “Riz” Girdy, whom he’d known since they were kids growing up in the Bronx. He found a comfortable place to lean, up against Meech’s Cadillac. And he began to wait.

… … …

For the past two years, since the spring of 2001, agents of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration had been keeping watch on a big white house tucked away in a quiet suburb twenty miles outside Atlanta. Beyond the tall iron gate that kept onlookers at bay—and a front door that admitted select guests into the modern, marble-floored, 4,800-square-foot expanse—agents believed they’d find something they were desperately chasing: evidence to boost their ongoing investigation into Demetrius “Big Meech” Flenory. The problem, however, was getting inside.