BMF: The Rise and Fall of Big Meech and the Black Mafia Family (36 page)

Despite Scott’s extensive cooperation, his punishment was severe. Judge Herlong gave him twenty-four years.

Neither Mookie’s nor Scott’s sentence was all that unexpected. The real barometer of the government’s success would be Kiki’s prison term. Right away, the judge hinted that he was impressed with the evidence the government laid out—and with the broader investigation. “I have handled some very serious drug cases,” Herlong said. “This is the biggest one I have ever seen.”

Then, it was Kiki’s turn to speak. He tried to strike a conciliatory tone, perhaps with a poor choice of analogies. “I assure you, I have many, many regrets,” he told the judge. “And if I could take them back, I would in a heartbeat. But unfortunately, life is not like golf, so you can’t take a mullet.”

He, too, asked for mercy and forgiveness. He also tried to diminish the testimonies of Scott and Mookie. “I learned that as long as you’ve got life, you have a chance to turn your life around, Your Honor,” Kiki said. “That’s what I’ve been trying to do. And I feel I’ve been truthful, Your Honor. And I’m sorry that my story wasn’t embellished or sensationalized enough to the agents’ liking. But my plea agreement didn’t require that. All it required was for me to be truthful, Your Honor, and I was truthful.”

Last of all, he denied ever threatening anyone tied to the case—let alone wanting them dead: “I just want it on the record that there was no way I would threaten a witness or anyone in the courtroom,” Kiki said. “I mean, it just don’t make sense. And for the record, me and Rivera was very close. Actually, it broke my heart to see him get on the stand and testify against me, Your Honor, because I have never did anything wrong to Rivera. I wouldn’t want him dead or anyone dead. And I played no part in Misty Carter or Ulysses Hackett’s murder. And that’s all I want to say.”

It would seem, based on what happened next, that the judge was not moved to sympathy.

“I am familiar with life sentences that have been imposed in this district,” Judge Herlong said. “And there certainly have been life sentences imposed for crimes of this nature and less than this nature. And as far as being compared to other major drug dealers, he ranks right up there at the top.

“It is therefore the sentence of the court that the defendant, Tremayne K. Graham, is hereby committed to the custody of the Bureau of Prisons to be imprisoned for a term of life.”

If Kiki wasn’t officially a suspect in the murders of Misty and Hack before he was sentenced on cocaine charges, his status became official afterwards. But prosecutors still had a long way to go before they’d be ready to indict him for the killings—if they were ever to make such a move. By the summer of 2009, no charges had been filed in the five-year-old double-homicide. Still, in the year-and-a-half following Scott and Mookie’s testimony, the government began lining up several potential witnesses. The idea, as with the Detroit-based case against the Flenory brothers, was to bring charges against potential witnesses, then offer them plea deals in exchange for their cooperation. And there were two witnesses in particular whom federal prosecutors were eyeing.

On the surface, it might have seemed pointless to investigate Kiki on a murder charge when he’d just been sentenced to life in federal prison. But in addition to holding someone accountable for the deaths, there was another reason the government might be inclined to prosecute. Killing a federal witness is a capital offense.

Even before the feds tracked down the two witnesses they’d been circling, one person central to the investigation already had landed in federal custody: Jamad “Soup” Ali. Soup had been snared in a sting
operation at an upscale home in New Jersey suburb. He almost escaped through the window of the huge modern house, but a team of agents quickly surrounded the property. After storming the house, task force agents found a loaded machine gun in the closet of the master bedroom. As a result, Soup was charged with felony firearm possession. Two months after Kiki’s sentencing, Soup was sentenced to nearly seven years in prison—giving the feds plenty of time to focus on the double-homicide investigation without having to worry that the suspected hit man would slip away.

With Soup behind bars, investigators turned their attention to the man who was believed to have supplied the murder weapon: Ernest Watkins. At first, Ernest had been hesitant to cooperate with the feds. He was cagey in initial interviews, and the investigators believed that when he was called to testify in front of a grand jury, he misled jurors, too. Scott King had an explanation for Ernest’s behavior. He said Ernest had been kidnapped and tortured by drug-dealing acquaintances of Kiki—and that Ernest had the scars to prove it.

In the fall of 2007, Ernest was indicted for cocaine trafficking, obstruction, and giving false statements to a grand jury. Months later, the government hired a specialist to examine the scarring on his back, which he claimed was the result of a motorcycle accident. On the second day of his trial in federal court, he cut the testimony short and entered a belated guilty plea. He signed an agreement to cooperate with the government. He later received the same sentence that Scott King did: twenty-four years.

By then, the feds had another potential witness in the bag. In December 2007, Kai Franklin Graham struck a deal with the government and agreed to plead guilty to “structuring financial payments.” The feds decided not to seek the more serious charge of money-laundering. Her crime: Visiting seven post offices and buying fourteen postal money orders, totaling one thousand dollars each. She admitted that she bought the money orders in smaller increments to avoid drawing the attention of the IRS.

The government had collected additional evidence that showed Kai Franklin Graham had been handling lots of cash. The feds claimed to have tracked down not just those fourteen, but
sixty
money orders that she’d bought while her husband was on the run. A prosecutor alleged that she used the money orders—all of which were just shy of the three-thousand-dollar minimum that draws the IRS’s attention—to pay her credit card bills and mortgage. It appeared to investigators that Kai wanted to keep the government from finding out where that cash was coming from. However, Kai denied that the money came from Kiki—or that she was trying to evade the IRS in order to throw the feds off her then-husband’s trail. She claimed the money came from her father. That also had been her defense when the bonding company that sprang Kiki, Free at Last, sued her.

The company accused Kai of misleading the government about both her financial situation and the whereabouts of her husband. Free at Last was still hoping to recover $185,000 it had lost—a debt that Kai, who’d filed for bankruptcy, was trying to avoid. In a signed affidavit, Kai repeated her claims that she’d had no contact with Kiki after he fled, and that he’d left her destitute. (Kai eventually prevailed in the lawsuit; Free at Last settled the case for a paltry five thousand dollars.)

At her plea hearing, held in the same courtroom where her exhusband received a life sentence eight months earlier, assistant U.S. Attorney Moore contradicted her affidavit: “The government could show, if required to at trial, that she assisted her husband in structuring other transactions on other dates, and that on a couple of occasions she received drug money from her husband’s associates while he was fleeing.” The government recommended that Kai serve thirty months of probation, in exchange for her full cooperation in the U.S. Attorney’s ongoing investigation.

After Kai entered her plea and returned to her seat, her mother greeted her with a warm smile. Atlanta mayor Shirley Franklin had traveled to South Carolina as a testament of her love and support for
her daughter. She was a protective mother, and she was incensed that the case would later see a flurry of media attention. The scrutiny placed on the Franklin family was more than its matriarch was willing to endure. Months later, in an interview with National Public Radio, Franklin said the publicity surrounding her daughter had turned her off to politics altogether.

“When you run for public life, you fully expect your own life to be evaluated,” the mayor said during the interview. “I did not expect that my children’s lives would make the front page or NPR. And I’m not sure I would have run if I had known that. The truth of the matter is, I won’t run again for that reason. I will not put my children, my grandchildren, or any of my family members in the spotlight again. The public can decide whether that’s good or bad. It’s great for me.”

Yet it wasn’t Kai’s case—or the break in the three-year-old investigation into Hack and Misty’s murders—that got the lion’s share of public attention in 2007. Instead, the fallout from the death of a ninety-two-year-old woman named Kathryn Johnston mesmerized Atlanta that year. The case brought much criticism to Franklin’s administration and the Atlanta Police Department—and drove a wedge between two local law enforcement agents who’d once been consumed by the investigation of the Black Mafia Family. The bond that the lawmen had enjoyed while working on the BMF case was destroyed by what happened in the Johnston one.

When three Atlanta police officers showed up at Johnston’s house, on the fringe of the open-air drug zone called the Bluff, they believed they were serving a no-knock warrant on a drug dealer. The problem was, they’d lied to obtain the warrant. And it turned out that by cutting corners, they were targeting the home of an elderly woman who had nothing to do with the drug trade. Two of the officers, Gregg Junnier and Jason Smith, pried open Johnston’s burglary bars and took a ram to her front door. Johnston heard them trying to break in. Scared for her life in the sketchy neighborhood, she grabbed
her rusty revolver. As the officers barged in, she fired and missed. Junnier and Smith returned fire, squeezing off thirty-nine rounds and striking her a half dozen times. She was cuffed and left to die in her front hallway. Minutes later, Junnier and Smith realized that there were no drugs, or drug dealers, in the house.

One of the officers tried to cover up their mistake by planting a few baggies of weed in the basement. But in the days to come, officer Junnier caved. He told the FBI the whole story of the ill-fated day, from cutting corners on the warrant to planting drugs to cover up the killing of an innocent woman. But that wasn’t all. Junnier also described the allegedly unethical and illegal practices he’d witnessed at the Atlanta Police Department. He said that officers routinely lied under oath to obtain warrants, and that supervisors turned a blind eye to the practice so long as officers hit their arrest numbers. Junnier shifted the blame away from his own actions and toward a more pervasive climate of corruption. He did so in order to serve the least possible sentence. And to represent him in his plea deal with the feds, he hired a tough former prosecutor and longtime friend to many of the officers who staffed the APD’s now-disgraced narcotics unit, a guy who’d always bonded more easily with cops than with his fellow lawyers. He hired Rand Csehy.

The same month that Kiki was sentenced to life in prison, Junnier—with Csehy at his side—pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter. The fallen cop didn’t wish to address the court, so Csehy spoke for him. He ripped into the police department, blaming the top brass for the corruption that had trickled to the rank and file. “It’s a case where the fish rotted from the head down,” Csehy told the judge. “Hopefully, this will reverberate through the police department.”

The plea did reverberate, in more ways than he anticipated. The officers with whom he’d worked so closely now considered him an outsider. His close friend, detective Bryant “Bubba” Burns—who’d served as Csehy’s best man when he married his third wife (a gutsy
fellow prosecutor) the year before—was stunned by the position Csehy had taken. In some ways, it wasn’t all that different from Junnier’s decision to turn against his former cohorts, or, for that matter, Doc Marhsall’s or Scott King’s or Mookie Rivera’s. Tradition was tradition. Honor was honor. Rules were rules. Csehy, like the others, had broken the code.

Most of the witnesses are specifically aimed at either one
brother or the other. Very few are aimed at both
.

—
ATTORNEYS JAMES FEINBERG AND DREW FINDLING,
IN A SEPTEMBER 2007 COURT FILING

O
n an early August morning in 2007, a fleet of bulldozers rolled through the desolate streets that once encompassed the rowdiest nightlife district Atlanta had ever known—and the most poorly placed. The two dozen bars in Buckhead Village had long been at odds with the blue bloods who wielded the real power in the neighborhood. In the end, the blue bloods won. A mall developer from the suburbs swooped in and bought every last property in Buckhead Village’s eight-block radius. The once-legendary nightclubs Tongue & Groove, World Bar, Mako’s, and Chaos were reduced to a pile of bricks. And Atlanta, a city tirelessly committed to reinventing itself, was smitten with what the seven-acre plot would one day become. A Rodeo Drive–styled shopping mecca would rise from the rubble. The raucous celebrity playground would fade from memory. And the crime scene where Big Meech unwittingly stepped into the public spotlight would disappear forever.

Buckhead had been Meech’s primary stomping ground. It was the neighborhood where a billboard for his record label proclaimed:
THE WORLD IS BMF’S
. It was home to his swanky town house, the Elevator; his two stately stash houses, the Gate and Space Mountain; and the clubs and high-end boutiques where he easily dropped fifty grand in a single visit. It was where he took a bullet during a gun battle behind Club Chaos, setting into motion a sputtering police investigation and cementing Buckhead’s reputation as a destination as dangerous as it was glamorous. At one time, the existence of the Black Mafia Family in Atlanta had seemed as entrenched as those Buckhead nightclubs. Then, suddenly, everything changed.