The Rise and Fall of BMF

What are you doing here, daddy? Want to give me the money? Take it to the house. I'm gonna call him and get you out. I already got it. I already called him. Oh, oh. I don't know how to tell you, but I got this motherfucking stuff like a motherfucking baked potato. Yeah. What up, down? We really living a life that you niggas is rapping about. That's another thing I'm gonna tell you, nigga. We living this shit for real, nigga. I'm talking about the million dollar Joyce man from state to state, nigga. We really, really doing it. And as a nigga, if you don't believe me, as a nigga that you know that you can respect the word that they give you. The year was 2000, and hip-hop was on the rise, steadily moving to the forefront of American pop culture. Crews and companies were emerging everywhere. Stars were being born every day. No alarm bells rang when an obscure but very well-funded industry was born. entertainment company named Black Mafia Family entered the public eye. They were opulent. They were excessive. Known for arriving in lavish motorcade, congregating in droves, and buying out the bars in elite clubs in every major American city. But that was the culture. That was the business. By 2005, their brand had taken hold. BMF was regularly associated with A-list hip-hop acts such as Young Jeezy, Slim Thug, and Fabulous. At their high-water mark, billboards that read, The World is BMF's could be seen throughout major American cities. Seemingly a testament to their success in the entertainment industry. But by the end of 2005, a sinister shadow was cast. Tonight, two local men are in custody in connection with a major drug investigation. More than 200 pounds of cocaine, 100 pounds of marijuana, and as much as 1.5 million dollars in cash were allegedly found at his home in California. In this whole operation, they seized 6 kilos of cocaine, 80 pounds of marijuana, and seized more than a million dollars in cash and in assets. We expect to learn more about this operation in the coming days. After years of covert law enforcement investigation, it was revealed that BMF was actually a cold calculated criminal enterprise hiding behind a very public disguise. Over the course of 15 years, the crew had made over $270 million in trafficking cocaine around the country. As the investigation unfolded, over 150 members of BMF were indicted and the Black Mafia family was named one of the largest domestic drug distribution organizations in American history. You go out on the streets of Atlanta today, every street corner's got a guy that wants to commit a crime. Every street corner's got a guy that thinks he's the best drug dealer out there. But you do have to ask yourself, was there something interesting or different about these guys? These are the guys that were... were willing to go one step further. They were the guys that were willing to innovate one step more than the next guy was. Incredibly self-confident, strong-willed, and, you know... willing to think outside the box. In order to run a big operation the kind that BMF did, you've got to be a planner, you've got to be a thinker, you've got to be someone who can imagine a future, you know, where your business is growing and where your reach is growing. And most of the guys that you talk to on the streets, they're interested in getting their money today, right then, right there. And these guys, I think, they were willing to think beyond that. They wanted something bigger for themselves. We have these two brothers who came from Detroit. came from nothing and built like literally a $270 million by conservative estimates organization employing 500 people. Everybody who's described it to me, who's worked on it, has called it the biggest case they've ever worked on. The whole idea of a black mafia family, it was like a ghost story. Cops told it like you would tell it to your kids. There was no presence. You didn't see them anywhere. But if you asked people on the street, you mentioned BMF, they wouldn't talk about it. So it was very real. to the people who were selling drugs and doing drugs, but to the rest of us, we had no proof that that existed. Truthfully, a lot of stuff that sounded like urban legend, it sounded like too big and too much to be true, but that they were large-scale cocaine distributors moving hundreds and thousands of kilograms of cocaine in multiple states around the country from coast to coast and essentially living like celebrities or better than celebrities. They were taunting us. You know, it was probably no secret to them that we were after them. They just thought they were untouchable. They were far enough removed that nothing was going to happen to them. One of the investigators said, you know, all cocaine is three generations away from being mad. One part entertainment company, one part street crew, Black Mafia family was an urban dream come true. The combination was so seductive and so lucrative that during their peak, BMF had 400 people on their payroll. Where you from? I'm from the Black Mafia. It's cross-branded, right? You've got the music, and you've got the product, and you've got the women, and you've got the image. All these things are kind of playing off one another. If you're talking about music, if you're talking about the drug trade, in those days, everything was connected with BMF. That name just kept coming up over and over again. The mystique just built over and over again. It took a lot of ability and leadership skills to hold together all the moving parts that they had going on, just like it does in any corporation or business. They structured it like an organization where they had their top level, the CEO, the COO, the CFO. Then you had your middle managers who managed each one of the different cities in the different states. And then you had your logistics, your couriers. They were a very good crew as far as a drug organization. They were really, really organized. They had a lot of people working for them. They had a lot of people eating off them. There's the caricature and the stereotype of what a gang is. leader is or what a drug lord is you know it's New Jack City it's Scarface but the reality of it is you get success through planning through patience I think those guys they had a much more sophisticated view of what this was about they didn't say I'm the drug lord and I'm gonna act like a drug lord they were focused on making money at the top of the organization stood two brothers Demetrius Flannery, or Big Meech, was the face of the organization. the press-friendly CEO. Demetrius tended to be more flamboyant. He was more public. He had a bigger-than-life persona, and he liked portraying that. Terry, Southwest T, was the younger brother and had no interest in the attention. Seldom seen, he was the architect of the operation, the planner, the mastermind. Terry was understated, very protective, and very shrewd. Terry, on the other hand, was a businessman, was every bit as influential. and competent as Demetrius, but tended to like to try to fly under the radar and stay low-key and low-profile a little more. Terry was the quiet one. Terry was the brains behind it. He enjoyed his lifestyle. He ran it more like a business than maybe a family. Hey, happy holiday to y'all, man. What y'all got up for? Hey man, I'm trying to get everything together before next month kick in, man. And I want to get your apartment cleaned out. Take care of that. I was just coming up with a plan, but I need you. I need you. I don't like fucking with Arnold. I'm going to have to go with Arnold. You have no choice. Don't judge. That's who you're fucking with. I don't have a number on him. I'm going to tell the car you. That's who you're fucking with. Okay, then. Now quit doing what you want to do and do what I tell you to do. Yes, sir. Yes, sir. I'm going to have Arnold call you. All right. Everybody move like brothers and everybody from different places. Milwaukee, St. Louis, Detroit, Texas, Atlanta, Cali, you know what I'm saying, Florida. We got people from everywhere in our mind. Everybody move as one. Everybody is prospering in some kind of way, in their own way. Every man plays his own role and everything starts with the leader. I'm a good leader, so I got good people that follow me. You know what I'm saying? It's simple. The Black Mafia family was an ambition 20 years in the making, arising from the hard streets of Detroit. Meech and Terry got into the drug game for one simple reason. They no longer wanted to be poor. By the late 80s, Meech and Terry led a small... drug ring peddling crack cocaine at local high schools. And that's not to say that everyone who lives in these neighborhoods buys into a criminal lifestyle, but in a lot of these neighborhoods where money's scarce, opportunity's scarce, most of those people, if you call them on it, and said, how can you allow this stuff to happen right outside of your home? Most of them would turn around and say to you, well, how can you criticize me for this when I have nothing? Terry and Demetrius Flannery grew up in the hardscrabble area of southwest Detroit, right up against the cities of Ecorse and River Rouge, very blue-collar, tough area. And they grew up on a dead-end street, 1555 South Edsel, a gray, nondescript home at the end of the street. You know, Meech had told me the gas would get turned off in the winter, they'd have no heat, you know, and he watched his parents who worked have to struggle through that. I mean, he told me straight up, he's like, yeah, a job at McDonald's wasn't going to cut it. I learned that. There was another route for me. He's very unapologetic about that. You have reached the Sprint Voice mailbox of 6331. To leave a voice message, press 1, or just wait for the... This white boy, that's so bad, she left me in the jungle, man. It's a jungle out here, man. If you are satisfied with your message, press 1. To listen to your message... The Flannery Brothers were on DEAs and IRSs and... and other law enforcement agencies' radar for quite some time. The Detroit DEA, headed by case agent Bob Bell, had been investigating another drug trafficking crew called the Puritan Avenue Boys. In fact, Demetrius Flannery was arrested along with a Colombian in Detroit back in 1994. However, there wasn't enough evidence to charge him. So there was information out there for years about the legend and the prowess of the Flannery brothers. They had become too big and too prolific, and it needed to be invested. In a complex case like BMF and tracking down the two brothers, there were numerous vital steps that the DEA took that enabled them to put together a case that stands close to 10 years and involve the efforts of numerous branches of the United States. of local and federal law enforcement. And it was a logistical nightmare, and the only way we were successful was by working together with our DEA counterparts, IRS counterparts, and other law enforcement counterparts all over the country. As far as nationwide... investigations, this is the biggest one I've ever been involved with. And we built that relationship up, built up trust, and we shared information seamlessly. You know, my job is putting pieces of a puzzle together. A huge organization that's stretched across the whole United States, you just don't put that together in one day. It takes a lot of time, a lot of manpower, a lot of cooperation with all the federal agencies and local PDs. If at any time anybody wanted to, any law enforcement wanted to take down their part of the case. this case would not have ripened to its fullest extent. With the constant threat of law enforcement, snitching, and violence, Meech and Terry needed unwavering loyalty from their crew. Meech's natural generosity was the greatest reinforcement. It don't make no difference if you the maid or if you the motherfucking bodyguard. Everybody get extras around here, French benefits. I'm driving this tonight. This is going to be that, ooh, who is that? That's Blue with the GT Cool. Anything that you can do to engender loyalty is going to work in your favor. Companies and corporations do it through incentive programs and bonusing. In the criminal underworld, people do it through relationships. Going off dope. Going off dope. Now I'll just call and let you know, man. Pulled over in my truck for about two, three hours now, man. That's crazy, but that's the type of shit they do though. They ain't find nothing in the truck. They ain't saying shit about the tinted windows, but they claim that they smell marijuana in my truck, and I don't even smoke in my truck. That's terrible. That's terrible. But there ain't nothing in there, so they smell like dickhead. No. What I'm saying is they didn't smell no weed in there. I do not smoke in that truck at all, B. It's what I'm saying, period. They just probably want to be all on it because the truck new and the car old, all that shit. I'll rap with you. If you got a robbing-ass ball, then you're gonna be a robbing ass crew. If you got a real boss who know how to sacrifice and take the bad along with the good and show his crew know how to be men, then this what you get. Everybody's shining like new money. Another thing we do is to build loyalty amongst its members by actually putting family members of defendants, organization members on a stipend. In fact, one recorded call Terry was talking to a defendant who was getting ready to go in to serve his sentence. Terry offered to pay Benjamin Johnson. Johnson's wife about $6,000 a month while he was away. $72,000 a year tax-free isn't bad to get by on. They really produced loyalty through reward rather than through the threat of punishment. Their organization gave notoriety to people who felt they were part of something exciting and important. They were very generous with those around them. They provided a lifestyle. A lot of time was spent at clubs. There were a lot of women around. A lot of these guys on the lower level, they were part of this particular group. BMF, they had status when they walked through the door. Hey, shit, where's the bank of your family at in this motherfucker? In BMF, if there wasn't a written code, there was definitely a spoken one. They were all brothers. They all moved together. Meech preached that jealousy, envy, or the distraction of... of women among the crew members was not welcome at all. We don't fall out over no girl. We hit them all. They hit my hoes, I hit they hoes. The ones that don't wanna be shared, then that's your own personal one. Other than that, then we ain't falling out over no hoes. From the onset, Meech and Terry proved to be resourceful business partners capable of capitalizing on every opportunity. When Terry was younger, he was a bystander to a shootout, and his right eye was grazed by a stray bullet. Doctors botched the surgery, and he was awarded a cash settlement, so he used that money to establish a legitimate sedan service in Detroit. The Sedan Service not only provided a legitimate front to wash the drug money, it provided a discreet method to transport large quantities of drugs. But that actually became sort of the skeleton of a much more advanced fleet of vehicles that would eventually move thousands of kilos of cocaine across the country. Yeah. Hey, Bob. Did the black guy get through yet? No, the black car, no, he's not. But the gray one left yesterday. All right, that's good. As we do, do they want to go home or do they want to get in the black car when they get there? He said he'd rather go home. He said he got something he got to take care of. All right. I'll let him go home while I have Papa take care of him. Prior to the PA boys' takedown, law enforcement had perceived the brothers as mid-level traffickers, small-time players in a much larger stage. In the mid-90s, these guys are at times delivering $200,000 to $300,000 to individuals who are sending that money down to St. Louis and on to Colombian sources. That's who they are. But as the DEA started to build... Contacts and sources, an entirely new image was coming to light. What happens is in December of 03, early 04, Bob Bell, the other DEA agents, they start contacting their sources to try and get as much information as they can on the Flannery brothers. Now they start hearing stories about how Terry's got a mansion out in California, Demetrius got places down in Atlanta, they're driving all these high-end vehicles. That's what you're hearing from sources. For years, Terry and Demetrius Flannery attempted to live like ghosts. Going back probably 10 years' worth of income tax return records, there were no records of them ever having filed. Along with that, they each had about at least five or six aliases and had that many different fictitious driver's licenses in several different states. From the mid 90s to early 2000, Meech and Terry went from a 1 million a year business to a 1 million a week business. The only way to achieve that kind of growth in the drug trade is to increase the supply of your product. And that usually means cutting your sales. cutting out middlemen and getting closer to the source. When you look at the industry with the drugs and how the movement of drugs come here in the States, the American blacks don't really control that trade. Demetrius Flannery went out to California. He just went out there looking for sources. He hooked up with one of the co-defendants, Wayne Joyner, a California guy who knew some Mexicans. Meech and Terry may never have risen above middle-class dealers had they not met Wayne Joyner. He became one of the Flannery brothers' key people. Wayne Joyner was a drug trafficker from California who had good connections. He knew guys who could do houses. He knew the car guys. He knew the Mexicans. The Colombians are the world's major producers of cocaine and were back in the 80s and 90s. But when the DEA started to really hammer the cartels' transportation through the United States in the Caribbean and Florida, then the Mexican trafficking routes became... became more important and they started paying the Mexican traffickers to take the cocaine into the United States through Mexico. Eventually the Mexican cartels took over all the transporting of the cocaine and getting it into the United States, about 90% of all the cocaine. Securing the Mexican source provided Meech and Terry with almost an unlimited supply of uncut cocaine for a substantially lower price than they could get from any U.S. distributors. They were purchasing at the time for $15.5 per kilo, and the BMF organization was moving at least 600 kilos a month. This allowed them to literally... ...corner the market. Not every even top-level drug dealer in a major city ever gets to that point. You have to have something special to get the trust of the cartels. They expanded their enterprise, establishing hubs in 11 states to unload their product. Terry moved to California to receive the bulk shipments. and Meech moved to Atlanta, which was an ideal distribution hub for all of eastern America. There's about ten different highway routes that you can take out of the city to get out of here, and that route going from Florida all the way up through to New York, Philadelphia, and Boston, you've got to go through Atlanta to get to those places. It's just physically, it's a great place to be, and also it's a big enough city and already has enough of a drug culture of its own to provide cover for those people who are moving through the city itself. Atlanta was definitely becoming a strategic location for the drug trade, but the culture attracted Meech too. By the late 90s, Atlanta had become a hotbed for activity for the hip-hop industry. Rappers were playing the streets with mixtapes, and famed producers like Jermaine Dupri, Outkast, Goody Mob, and Ludacris were attracting national attention. Hip-hop as a business has two very distinct worlds, the streets and the boardroom. As it became mainstream, hip-hop started generating more money than anyone expected. With the connection to the streets comes the hip-hop. the element of the criminal underworld. There is no secret that hip-hop record labels were being started with drug money. Jay-Z, for example, has always been honest about his previous life and how he left paper bags filled with cash for radio DJs. Meech, too, was captivated with the allure of the music industry, and as he gained more money and power, through his ever-expanding drug empire, he set his sights on conquering a new frontier. When the Detroit DEA decided to investigate the Black Mafia family, they knew the organization was going to be tough to penetrate. It was such a tight-knit group. There was no way to get somebody in. We could make buys from the underlings, but as far as getting somebody into the organization itself, it wasn't going to happen. But early on, Bob Bell and his team got a lucky break. Using confidential informants enabled the investigation. They were able to identify a phone number for a BMF manager named Benjamin Johnson. Shortly after, they successfully got a court-ordered wiretap to listen in on his phone calls. After only a few short weeks, the Detroit DEA struck gold. A couple of weeks into the wiretap, we intercepted a call. We didn't have the person's name, but we immediately knew that it was Terry Flannery. Bye. by his commanding voice and Benjamin Johnson's respect and deference for Terry. What I've done? I need you to fly to Florida and drive this car back to Detroit for me. Okay, when do you need me to do that, sir? As soon as possible. Okay, that's not a... Fly to Hawaii, boy. Yes, sir. You gotta drive this car like you got some sense, because a hurricane gonna come that way. Okay. We immediately knew we had Terry and knew we had an important phone to target for the next wiretap. Getting a wire on Terry's phone was the turning point in the DEA's investigation. They had finally infiltrated the inner sanctum. For Nietzsche and Terry to successfully run a nationwide trafficking organization, they needed to establish a protective infrastructure. They set up stash houses in key hub cities, always in other people's... names and usually in mansions in upper-class neighborhoods. There is something that you get for living in those kinds of neighborhoods and one of them is it's a safe place not just in terms of keeping it away from the police but in terms of keeping away from other offenders. Somebody knows that you got nine million bucks worth of drugs in your house they're gonna come looking for it. The various stash houses had nicknames. There was the elevator, the gate, the White House, and then there was the infamous Space Mountain, a modern multi-million dollar enclave that had a perfect wrapper around driveway for limos to deliver 200 kilograms of cocaine located in the heart of Buckhead, the wealthiest neighborhood in Atlanta. Buckhead residents are snooty. They don't like outsiders, but how a large national black organization managed to, with the flash and the bling and the rims and the cars and the girls, how they managed to do this and nobody complained in a neighborhood where they complain if your dog walks on your curb. Even the day we took everything down, We had more people on our backs about that. And we were making noise. But it was like, yeah, we made noise. But they never complained about him. In charge of the stash house was J-Bo Brown, Meech's second in command. J-Bo was really just kind of being the general manager of BMF. He would be like at the stash houses when the drugs would arrive. Like Meech would never be in the same room. drugs or anything like that. So it's almost like doing some of the dirty work that Meech really couldn't do or wouldn't do. So he was the guy who was really just running the ships for him. Another innovation that the two brothers used, which was not all too uncommon, was sophisticated traps in their vehicles to hide the cocaine and the money as they moved city to city. You have cars like this and they want to build secret compartments. How does that work? You have people that sell jewelry for a living. They need to carry around their products. They need to carry around money. Sometimes they have weapons for their personal protection. It varies according to what you want to put into the vehicle. vehicle. Basically in a vehicle like this, you know, we could take this entire area, we could take that carpet and we can cut it, we can reattach it to a piece of aluminum and bolt that to a welded enclosure under the vehicle. Then we can make that piece pop open, we can make it motorized, eyes up, we can make it airtight, we can make it waterproof, we can make it however you want it and it will look like there's nothing there. You can take this vehicle back to GM and they wouldn't even know it was there. They had a Lincoln limo. They had about a million dollars in a secret compartment and no one was able to find this money until two years later. They can be built that sophisticated? Yeah. Yeah. Every vehicle was a moving trap. They were amazing. I had to admire their ingenuity. They had real strict rules about nobody who's below this level of management can even know how to open the traps they had installed in these cars. cars to access the drugs, which would basically be like, OK, put the car in reverse, turn on defrost, hold a magnet up to the dash, and turn on the windshield wiper. These traps were high-tech, very sophisticated. electronic, hydraulic. Some of them had vacuum pumps in them to try to overcome or thwart drug detecting canines. It would make it difficult. We were able to seize a Hummer limo and notwithstanding the best efforts of law enforcement to find the secret panels, we managed to miss it. I think a year or so later the man who bought the limo managed to find a million dollars in it. trip to la in 1999 mitch's dream of breaking into the music industry became possible when he was introduced to a young aspiring artist named varima mcknight who was rapping under the name blue da vinci they share shared a common vision and Meech took an immediate affection to the young artist. Shortly after, the two founded BMF Entertainment. For the entire lifespan of the record label, Blue Da Vinci was the only artist to sign up. I'm not really focusing on it right now. is Blue DaVinci. I believe that most labels take so much time off and focus on so many artists that you can never get the realness out of the one artist because you're focusing on 10 or 20 artists. That's why all our independent focus is on what Blue DaVinci gonna do. If he take off, then we take off. If he don't take off, then we don't want to take off. Simple. The business that they chose to hide behind, to use as cover, was also an industry that was critical for improving their reputation and providing them with the social capital that they needed. It created loyalty, it created a mystique, it created interest, and it provided a fantastic cover for them. It was totally realistic when you see these guys and say, well, they're part of the music industry. They look the part, they act the part, they understand the culture of the hip-hop lifestyle. It's not like they were trying to open up, you know, a bunch of McDonald's or something like that. That is BMF. It's more than just a record label, production, some niggas doing music or just some street niggas. This is really all about going state to state and linking up motherfuckers from the streets, man, from all over. No matter where you from, no matter what you look like, how fat you are, whatever, niggas that got a little money and a lot of sense, man, we looking for them. We start making some of these black dollars happen. One of Big Meech's biggest self-proclaimed legacies was that he unified gangs from all over the country. Crips, Bloods, GDs, BPs. They all stood together underneath his black mask. Plus. And we got all type of niggas around here. Short niggas, tall niggas, bald niggas, light skin, dark skin, braids, dreads, fat, whatever you want. We do it all. We don't discriminate. Matter of fact, after you leave here, you end up getting your teeth on something and coming up with something better. You know what I'm saying? Like a new car, new house, maybe the kids get to go to school, private school, pay for it, courtesy of the mob. You know what I'm saying? We pay. You know, that's simple. A lot of niggas don't like to spend their money. We love to spend our money. You can't take none of this shit with us. This phenomenon is a testament to how BMF grew. Most guys who want to establish a drug empire, they're going to go off of the stereotype of what you believe you have to do to get there. And part of that is the violence. With daily images of cartel-related bloodshed being broadcast from the southern borders and gang violence running rampant in our own cities, we have an immediate prejudice that the drug trade goes hand-in-hand with violence. Meech and Terry took a different approach to extend their reach. Upon entering new territories, they presented themselves as businessmen, and through diplomacy, they created alliances with existing criminal entities. They kept their eye on the ball because you know you get enough bodies laying around and law enforcement attention is going to come your way probably faster than when there's not that type of activity. In a way that's what made them so successful because they never engaged in a lot of violence so that the attention was never drawn to them in the way that it might be to another group of people. As much as Meach was a natural negotiator, the bottom line was probably the most persuasive element in BMF's success. With their vast supply, the brothers offered kilos of Coke for only $17,000, $2,000 to $3,000 less than their competitors. Uncle Doody, wrong phone. Huh? Wrong phone, what have I done? What up? Hey, did he give you the new chip to the new phone? What's this phone got? My new check. What's one? The last one I got? What the hell? What is it? The new chip. What's the new with the phone that I gave you? Oh, yeah, I still got it. No, he didn't give it to me. He said he couldn't get a hold of Doug or some bullshit, and I had to leave. You got the old phone? Yeah. All right, you got it on you? Yeah, I ain't got no time on it, though. You told me to burn off the time. Often while we were intercepting Terry talking on a particular phone, he would be using push-to-talk phones in the background, having other conversations. So he had multiple phones going at any one time, and then of course had a reserve of phones for him and his organization members. So about the best thing we could do was as Terry would transition from one phone to another was to try to keep pace and spin to the next phone. And we successfully did that with about three of Terry's phones. The DEA sat back and listened for five months as Terry laid out the foundations of their investigation. It is from this monitoring that we're able to find out information about the participants or co-conspirators. We're also able to determine whether or not there is any drug activity taking place. We were able to listen to Terry direct a driver to take some kilograms of coke down to the... to Louisville, Kentucky for distribution. That aided us in conducting a traffic stop and seizing 10 kilos in that particular load vehicle. This case could have ended with the wiretap on Terry's phone. DEA had him directing a guy to take the dopes down south. They intercepted. to that car, got the dope. There was a decision made, DEA, IRS, and with the blessings of the prosecutor's office, you know, we're going to take it as far as we can go. You know, we're going to identify all the members of this organization. We're going to identify all the people who are helping them launder their money. And that's what happened. Over the course of five months, the DEA compiled over 900 pages of transcripts from Terry's phone calls. But there was not one phone call between Terry and Meech. Terry used to like to dilute and reconstitute his kilograms, stretching the number of kilograms to increase his profits, while Meech's theory was, don't sit on it, move it, and he enjoyed a reputation of distributing very pure kilograms. So on the street, Terry's cocaine was referred to as Moet. Not bad champagne, but Meeches is referred to as Cristal top shelf champagne. A couple of months before we initiated our wiretap in April of 2004, while Demetrius was on house arrest down in the Atlanta area, his underboss, Chad Brown, was going around talking to Terry's customers, saying, Terry's dope is no good. He dilutes it, it's poor quality, you should be buying dope from Demetrius and our side. That upset Terry very much. So Terry took a group of individuals and confronted Chad Brown in a house that was full of girls, his friends, and embarrassed him. And was screaming and yelling, waving the gun around, accusing him of attacking Terry's livelihood. Demetrius believed that Terry should have had that conversation with him. Out of loyalty for his side of the organization, he said, Terry may be my brother, but we're done. And it probably was the reason that we were unable to identify a phone for Demetrius and never successfully. intercepted any of his phone calls. We coming in at the top of the game. We got all the cars we want, all the houses we want, all the clothes we want, all the jewelry we want, and all the hoes we want. And we don't need nothing else but to make good music. By 2004, Meech had solidified himself as a public figure. He was actively sponsoring young rappers in and around Atlanta. His father was a musician, surrounded himself with musicians. I think that he had a genuine love of the rap scene in Atlanta in particular, which was blowing up in a big way at the time, in large part thanks to his willingness to sort of sponsor rappers. He really did think that if he could get one big break on his record label, that he might be able to stop with the illegal stuff. Maybe that's not reality, but that's what he said. Meech pumped excessive amounts of money into blues hip-hop career, believing that his financial backing could launch a young rapper into stardom. At a time when most record labels were faltering and budgets for music videos were being trimmed, Meech spent a little over $500,000 on a little-known track, We're Still Here. Instead of getting five artists, get up, put a hundred thousand a piece into each one of those artists, and you're doing everything small. If you put the whole million dollars or five hundred thousand dollars behind Lou DaVinci, now you got a big... project and look big and everything but if you just put 100,000 between these five artists and you got a cheap project, nobody may not recognize none of the five. The hype seemed to have an impact. BMF's image, street credibility, and apparent success attracted many rising artists. Blue Da Vinci was seen in many music videos with Young Jeezy and Fabulous, and he was regularly collaborating with known acts including Jadakiss and Nelly. Real movement going on here. Young Blue, Da Vinci, Young Jeezy, Baby D, and the rest of the motherfuckers that roll with the BMF Entertainment Squadron. There was an intercepted call between Terry Flannery and his sister, and Terry poured his heart out to his sister. He was very frustrated with Demetrius, very angry over their split. He was very concerned that Demetrius' flamboyant lifestyle was going to... It caused law enforcement to identify what they were doing and bring heat on the whole organization and bring them down. The irony of it was that Terry's calls were being intercepted by DEA. What are you doing today son? I still feel like I'm on a tight tack. When you got pulled over, you gave me a real name? I gave him everything. And you know what he gave me a problem about? That can. What can? About over there. About that other situation. That's what they said. They sent the people to the house about that. Yeah, because he went real crazy over that, too. But he was mad because he couldn't find nothing. That's why he did that, too. All right, so I know what to do for that. Okay, thank you, sir. All right. About the same time, the Detroit DEA was developing their investigation on Terry's side of the organization. Bolton County Prosecutor Rand Sahe was overhearing rumors of the mysterious Black Mafia family's presence in Atlanta. The whole idea of a Black Mafia... It was like a ghost story. Cops told it like you would tell it to your kids. There was just no presence. You didn't see them anywhere. But if you asked people on the street, you mentioned BMF, they wouldn't talk about it. So it was very real to the people who were selling drugs and doing drugs, but for the rest of the people, of us. We had no proof that that existed. The Atlanta side of the investigation began on the night of September 7, 2003. Police were alerted to a shooting after an opposing crew targeted a BMF stash house for a robbery. We had a case. It was a shooting, a home invasion, where the people who were in the home actually shot the invaders, moved everything out, dropped the invaders off at the hospital, but they left a key of coke in the process of cleaning out their house. Their house had a large bank type vault in it and they claimed to be BMF, and that's where it started. One of the men arrested at the house was one of Meech and Terry's key financial consultants. It was Doc Marshall and Kenneth Harvey, the two defendants in that case. Doc was very smart with numbers. He was really, like, called the CFO of BMF. He ran all kinds of spreadsheets and reports for both Meech and Terry. Bill Marshall is the kind of guy that drug traffickers need. He knew how to work the financial side of things and obtain loans on cars and homes and to cover up the source and ownership. of those items. Without a guy like Bill Marshall, they cannot enjoy the fruits of their labor. The incident was not the first time Doc Marshall had come up on law enforcement's radar. He first came on our radar during a roundup on the Puritan Avenue investigation. We seized a BMW 760, a $125,000 car. The vehicle had been obtained through Bill Marshall's business called exquisite empire which was based out of atlanta As police searched the crime scene, they found a key notebook that contained obvious drug records of the trafficking organization, including associates' names and phone numbers and straw buyers' identities. The shooting at Doc Marshall's house was Atlanta's first taste of the Black Mafia family, but it was not its last. Meech himself made headlines two months later for his involvement in a high-profile double homicide. On the night of November 12, 2012, In 2004, Big Meech was treated in the ER for a gunshot wound to his buttocks. Earlier that night, there was a shootout outside of Club Chaos, a hot nightclub in Atlanta. One of the men killed at the club was P. Diddy's bodyguard. Anthony Wolf Jones. Wolf was a well-known guy here in New York who was very much a street guy. And Wolf was one of these guys that you really would mess around with. You know, he had a very quick temper. The story goes that Meech was hanging out with Jones' ex-girlfriend, and Jones would not have it. An argument ensued, and then guns got drawn. And then Meech had his guy with him, and Wolf had his guy with him. And ultimately, Wolf and his guy lost. Meech was initially arrested for the double homicide. The Atlanta police department conducted a search on a mansion they believed to be Meech's residence. They hid this Bel Air Lake house, the White House, which is a Flannery house. They go there looking for a gun that they believe Demetrius Flannery may have used in the shooting at the club down there. Although the murder weapon was never found, a notebook similar to the one seized at Doc Marshall's house was recovered. The Atlanta investigation was heating up, but Meech's murder charges would soon be dropped. No witnesses would come forward, and as Jones was shot from behind, there was not enough evidence to maintain the charges. It was a justified shoot. No matter how bad everybody wanted to get Meech, that was one where the evidence pointed to the fact that they were defending themselves. Jones stepped out of line. Over the course of the next three years, the black mafia family's reputation in Atlanta grew more imposing and violent. They were violent. They would walk into clubs and take over the clubs. They wanted your girlfriend, they'd take your... Girlfriend, they wanted your car, they'll take your car. There was not a damn thing you could do about it. The gang's numbers swelled, and their ominous presence loomed throughout the city's nightclubs. There were stories of people getting thrown off balconies at bars, punched in the face, and kicked and stomped. That was the reality of BMF. So for every grandmother whose grocery bill they paid for at Publix, there was three grandsons lying in the hospital somewhere with broken bones. Atlanta had become a battleground, and the violence seemed to swirl around BMF and its associates. Often it was impulsive and senseless, but at times the motives were far more menacing. I got some shit that'll stand you up, and I got some shit that'll take your life in this motherfucker. Nigga, this that .357, nigga, that Trey Pound, nigga, Magum, nigga, with a lot of gunpowder behind each shot. It's that shit that's gonna blow you about four feet back, nigga. I only got six of these shots. I only need one. As more and more attention was being brought upon the organization, Meech became openly defiant in believing his hip-hop company could blur the line between art and reality. Probably no secret to them that we were after them. They thought they were untouchable, and they were taunting us. In 2004, he even commissioned billboards in Atlanta claiming the world was BMFs, a throwback to Scarface's mantra. The billboards was when enough was enough. That billboard was always a bone of contention with the district attorney himself. The fact that they could just be so out there, he was very determined, and so he took the handcuffs off of us. Meech was put under constant surveillance, and an Atlanta-based task force was assigned to topple the family. They used similar strategies of the Detroit Police. and got a wiretap on a low-level dealer. Once the wires were running, they were manned 24-7. I don't believe that we ever came off of them. And then a lot of the agents, Chip Cook, Mike Hannon, these guys would come in when they weren't scheduled. Just to go back through and review, they put the case together. Their diligence paid off, and they were able to spin up several times all the way up to a high-level BMF manager favored by Big Meech himself. They would watch the wire on HBO, and they would talk about it. And we'll be right back. We would sit there white-knuckled the episodes where they would throw all the burners away, and they would talk about, yeah, good thing these idiots down here don't know how to wiretap. Or they'd get paranoid and go, let's just text. Or they'd say, call me on this number. Talk about kilos of cocaine and be like, hey, did you pick up the trees? You know, I got 50 trees sitting in my car. They gave us a blueprint to what they were going to do every time. As the evidence mounted, the Atlanta Task Force conducted a series of takedowns on BMF associates and stash houses. Meech had started to see ghosts. He was seeing cars and cops everywhere he went. The heat was on Meech, and he knew it. He pulled his crew out of Atlanta and headed toward Miami. He had a female assistant yogi. She disappeared first. Once she disappeared, we knew that this was in the wind. So we decided to do it all at once. He was ordering everybody out. People were scrambling. It was almost anticlimactic. There was no arrests. We hit all the houses. and everybody was gone. Nietzsche had adhered to a strict doctrine. Never talk on the phone, never be around the drugs or the money, never put anything in your own name. He thought this code would insulate himself from law enforcement, but now he found himself on the run. A lot of times, the dope never touches the hands of your top-level guys. So sometimes the only way to link them to that dope is to follow the money back to them. The million-dollar joints, man, from state to state, man, we really, really doing it. Large sums of cash. Where's that coming from? Beat them up, nigga! This bitch, nigga! You make us rich, nigga! We caught a break with some of our intelligence and financial records, and that changed people's perception from it's an urban legend to wow these guys are actually making millions and millions of dollars and essentially living better than celebrities i mean flying around in learjets staying in presidential suites living in multi-million dollar homes in multiple states meach was down in Miami, there was a place he was renting there, this gated house, at like 30 grand a month. Every place we stay at, L.A., Atlanta, Detroit, we have homes, our own homes. We don't have to go in and rent shit. We got our own houses, we got our own cars, we got our own hoes, we got our own clothes. It was claimed that the funds were legitimately being generated through the entertainment branch of BMF. You don't know all the money that Demetrius Flannery spent in the clubs, or on clothes, or on girls, but we know from the investigation it was... documented. A million plus in cars purchased, $400,000 in cash for a car, $250,000 in cash for a car, $100,000 in cash for a car. Terry Flannery's house on Mulholland Drive, $600,000 cash through bank accounts to make that purchase. To put a number on it, I mean, millions. They felt that on the business side of things with the music that that scene is so legitimate that it provides cover for all of these expenditures that you're engaging in. Meech had a fleet of luxury cars fit for a sultan. Rolls-Royce Phantoms, Bentley Continentals, Lamborghinis. Apparently he maybe had the only white Maybach in the United States. He had one ship to him Saudi Arabia. It wouldn't take an auditor very long to realize that there was way more money being spent than would be coming in through hip-hop. For Meech's 36th birthday, he threw himself a million-dollar star-studded party at the Atlanta nightclub compound, complete with champagne fountains and live exotic animals. That's the part of him I really like, the Meech of the Jungle birthday party. I think those were the fun days of Meech, him telling Atlanta he was there. And then came the strip clubs. BMF was notorious for their overindulgence in the nightlife. I was in the clubs at the time when the BMF guys were here, in New York, where they were spending tons of money. Girls would just pick them up. They would have a payday when BMF came to town. BMF would go out in droves. Each member would get his own $400 bottle of Cristal champagne. The clubs either alternately loved it or hated it when they came in because they would sell out of champagne on the one hand. They'd have to deal with sort of the threat of violence. Y'all dudes out there talking about y'all making it rain, man, we the originators of making it rain. That's a message to everyone else. I've got so much money, I could literally throw it up in the air and not even care about it. When we go out at night, whatever we spend, $50,000, $100,000 in the motherfucking club, we can afford to do it because we ain't bring it all with us. A lot of niggas don't like to spend they money. We love to spend our money. We can't take none of this shit with us. None. Ain't no armored trucks pulling up at no funerals. The best relationship and partnership in federal drug law enforcement are a group of DEA agents married to a woman. married up with a group of IRS agents. It's a whole other expertise and full-time job to exploit and uncover the layers of laundered money and items purchased secretly by nominees. Typically, these people aren't going to have anything in their their name, which was the case with the Flannery brothers. Absolutely nothing. They don't file tax returns, no assets. So what you have to do is start looking at family members. The house that Terry Flannery had in LA, his girlfriend, Denise O'Elsh, it's in her name. He sets up a company for her out there called Oracle Motorsports. Really doesn't do anything, but he's got all these high-end cars in there, which are his cars, which he's got auto brokers out there that he's feed and money to buying his cars, keeping them in their names. Here's IRS agent Scartosi trace the money back to Meech and Terry, continually uncovering more and more people who helped the two brothers to hide and launder their money. Terry had a girlfriend here in Detroit. He had a house for her in Canton. Started looking at how does this young lady buy this house? Show she put, you know, a hundred and some thousand dollars down on it. Well, how she put that, where'd that money come from? Cashier checks that came out of a credit union. Where'd the money come from to fund those? You know, it's just a matter of, you know, again, you just build and build and piece and piece. One unsuspected accomplice to the two brothers was the famed jeweler to the stars, Jacob Erebon. He essentially, of course, is a businessman and is in business to make money. And Demetrius and Terry Flannery had a lot of money to spend and they liked spending it on besides cars and homes. Nice jewelry, very flamboyant jewelry. One watch that Terry bought was encrusted with diamonds. It was valued at about $100,000, in fact. Jacob, the jeweler, extended a million-dollar line of credit to the brothers. Leave a voice message, press 1, or just wait for the call. Swipe boy. That's no way. She left me. To leave a voice message, press 1, or just wait for the... Swipe boy. That's so well. She left me in the jungle, man. There's a jungle out there, man. If you are satisfied with your message, press 1. To listen to your message... On October 28, 2005, the long-awaited federal indictment for Demetrius and Terry Flannery was unsealed. 25 BMF members were initially charged with a range of felonies, including money laundering, conspiracy to distribute cocaine, and for the brothers, running a continuing criminal enterprise. We had overwhelming information and evidence, and it just kept growing exponentially. In fact, the problem for us really became not was there enough evidence, but it became keeping the evidence organized, trying to determine what evidence to use and what not to use. We had so much. The DEA's case was based on wiretap evidence, both on Terry's and Meech's side of the organization. The IRS had compiled a massive amount of evidence demonstrating that the two brothers had been hiding and laundering huge sums of money, proceeds from illegal drug operations. Together, the DEA and the IRS had coordinated local police departments from all around the country and amassed enough evidence to demonstrate the extraordinary reach of the black mafia family. On initiating the investigation, Frank and myself and other agents went to great pains to try to identify random law enforcement contacts with members of the BMF. And in fact, we were able to identify approximately or more than 500 kilograms worth of seizures from random law enforcement activity and several million dollars worth of money seizures. We knew who the players were as far as when we know somebody got stopped, okay, we know that that guy was associated with BMF. Now let's backtrack and find out exactly how he was tied in. Analysis would be done of the phones they were carrying and the address books would be looked at and there would be a common theme in the names that were stored inside the cell phones. Investigation from there on the vehicles and the titles and the ownership often led to tying those vehicles and those individuals and those seizures back to the BMF. On the lead up to the takedown, tensions were high. Years of hard work had gone into the investigation. They needed to catch Meech and Terry. It was a concern that Terry and Demetrius might get away. They had passports. They were worldly. They had traveled to Europe and elsewhere and had the means to disappear. And if they disappeared, my way of thinking is that the case was a failure. The marshals doing what they do well. They came up with some information about Demetrius's whereabouts. They actually arrested Demetrius in Frisco, Texas on October 20th. Terry was taken into custody in the St. Louis, Missouri area the day of October 26th. And in pretty short order, we had all 25 of our defendants off the Detroit indictment in pocket. Several of the 25 defendants immediately began to cooperate with the DEA, including one of Terry's most trusted managers. This whole death before desire. down or you know that's all good when the money's flowing but when the money dries up and there ain't nobody looking out for you and then you yourself are looking at a pretty long sentence the way i look at it to every man for himself we're just really trying to motivate niggas and let niggas you know know that niggas is really out here getting it like this man it ain't hard to get this shit ain't far away all a nigga gotta do is get on a real serious grind man with a real group of niggas that ain't gonna fucking tell nigga another key defendant that turned was bmf CFO William Doc Marshall. Bill Marshall, not unlike many other defendants in this investigation, began to cooperate, essentially looking for a way to reduce his future prison sentence. He really laid out a lot of the financial stuff of the BMF organization. He really filled in the holes as far as how the straw biters worked, how they moved money from city to city. His information was very useful going forward, and we went from 25 defendants to where we ended up, which was the conviction of 66 defendants in Detroit alone. With the help of Doc Marshall and other cooperating defendants, the DEA was able to effectively dismantle the black mafia family. All in all, 125 members, associates and relatives, were indicted and convicted. Out of the 125 members indicted, only eight went to trial. Just two days before their trial dates, Meach and Terry both pled guilty without cooperation. They were sentenced to 30 years. Both Demetrius and Terry Flannery and almost all the rest of the members of the organization realized that the evidence was absolutely overwhelming. So pleading out to 30 years, I suppose, seemed a little bit better than life. Financial judgment in the indictment and what the Flinders took responsibility for when they pled to 30-year prison terms was $270 million. And if you conservatively convert those dollars into kilos, we're talking about the distribution of between 15 and 18 million dollars. 18,000 kilograms of cocaine was during the life of this conspiracy. And this, one of the largest homegrown domestic distribution organizations in the history of our country. I wish I could be there tonight, but God, God knows I wish I could be here tonight. But one day soon, I'll be there with God's blessing. I just want to thank everybody for coming. Hope they enjoyed it. Don't want to take up no more of your time. Just have the time of your life, and I'll see somebody in the morning.

What are you doing here, daddy? Want to give me the money? Take it to the house. I'm gonna call him and get you out.

I already got it. I already called him. Oh, oh. I don't know how to tell you, but I got this motherfucking stuff like a motherfucking baked potato. Yeah.

What up, down? We really living a life that you niggas is rapping about. That's another thing I'm gonna tell you, nigga. We living this shit for real, nigga.

I'm talking about the million dollar Joyce man from state to state, nigga. We really, really doing it. And as a nigga, if you don't believe me, as a nigga that you know that you can respect the word that they give you. The year was 2000, and hip-hop was on the rise, steadily moving to the forefront of American pop culture.

Crews and companies were emerging everywhere. Stars were being born every day. No alarm bells rang when an obscure but very well-funded industry was born. entertainment company named Black Mafia Family entered the public eye.

They were opulent. They were excessive. Known for arriving in lavish motorcade, congregating in droves, and buying out the bars in elite clubs in every major American city.

But that was the culture. That was the business. By 2005, their brand had taken hold. BMF was regularly associated with A-list hip-hop acts such as Young Jeezy, Slim Thug, and Fabulous. At their high-water mark, billboards that read, The World is BMF's could be seen throughout major American cities.

Seemingly a testament to their success in the entertainment industry. But by the end of 2005, a sinister shadow was cast. Tonight, two local men are in custody in connection with a major drug investigation.

More than 200 pounds of cocaine, 100 pounds of marijuana, and as much as 1.5 million dollars in cash were allegedly found at his home in California. In this whole operation, they seized 6 kilos of cocaine, 80 pounds of marijuana, and seized more than a million dollars in cash and in assets. We expect to learn more about this operation in the coming days. After years of covert law enforcement investigation, it was revealed that BMF was actually a cold calculated criminal enterprise hiding behind a very public disguise.

Over the course of 15 years, the crew had made over $270 million in trafficking cocaine around the country. As the investigation unfolded, over 150 members of BMF were indicted and the Black Mafia family was named one of the largest domestic drug distribution organizations in American history. You go out on the streets of Atlanta today, every street corner's got a guy that wants to commit a crime. Every street corner's got a guy that thinks he's the best drug dealer out there. But you do have to ask yourself, was there something interesting or different about these guys?

These are the guys that were... were willing to go one step further. They were the guys that were willing to innovate one step more than the next guy was. Incredibly self-confident, strong-willed, and, you know...

willing to think outside the box. In order to run a big operation the kind that BMF did, you've got to be a planner, you've got to be a thinker, you've got to be someone who can imagine a future, you know, where your business is growing and where your reach is growing. And most of the guys that you talk to on the streets, they're interested in getting their money today, right then, right there.

And these guys, I think, they were willing to think beyond that. They wanted something bigger for themselves. We have these two brothers who came from Detroit. came from nothing and built like literally a $270 million by conservative estimates organization employing 500 people.

Everybody who's described it to me, who's worked on it, has called it the biggest case they've ever worked on. The whole idea of a black mafia family, it was like a ghost story. Cops told it like you would tell it to your kids. There was no presence. You didn't see them anywhere.

But if you asked people on the street, you mentioned BMF, they wouldn't talk about it. So it was very real. to the people who were selling drugs and doing drugs, but to the rest of us, we had no proof that that existed.

Truthfully, a lot of stuff that sounded like urban legend, it sounded like too big and too much to be true, but that they were large-scale cocaine distributors moving hundreds and thousands of kilograms of cocaine in multiple states around the country from coast to coast and essentially living like celebrities or better than celebrities. They were taunting us. You know, it was probably no secret to them that we were after them. They just thought they were untouchable.

They were far enough removed that nothing was going to happen to them. One of the investigators said, you know, all cocaine is three generations away from being mad. One part entertainment company, one part street crew, Black Mafia family was an urban dream come true.

The combination was so seductive and so lucrative that during their peak, BMF had 400 people on their payroll. Where you from? I'm from the Black Mafia. It's cross-branded, right? You've got the music, and you've got the product, and you've got the women, and you've got the image.

All these things are kind of playing off one another. If you're talking about music, if you're talking about the drug trade, in those days, everything was connected with BMF. That name just kept coming up over and over again. The mystique just built over and over again.

It took a lot of ability and leadership skills to hold together all the moving parts that they had going on, just like it does in any corporation or business. They structured it like an organization where they had their top level, the CEO, the COO, the CFO. Then you had your middle managers who managed each one of the different cities in the different states. And then you had your logistics, your couriers. They were a very good crew as far as a drug organization.

They were really, really organized. They had a lot of people working for them. They had a lot of people eating off them.

There's the caricature and the stereotype of what a gang is. leader is or what a drug lord is you know it's New Jack City it's Scarface but the reality of it is you get success through planning through patience I think those guys they had a much more sophisticated view of what this was about they didn't say I'm the drug lord and I'm gonna act like a drug lord they were focused on making money at the top of the organization stood two brothers Demetrius Flannery, or Big Meech, was the face of the organization. the press-friendly CEO. Demetrius tended to be more flamboyant. He was more public.

He had a bigger-than-life persona, and he liked portraying that. Terry, Southwest T, was the younger brother and had no interest in the attention. Seldom seen, he was the architect of the operation, the planner, the mastermind.

Terry was understated, very protective, and very shrewd. Terry, on the other hand, was a businessman, was every bit as influential. and competent as Demetrius, but tended to like to try to fly under the radar and stay low-key and low-profile a little more. Terry was the quiet one.

Terry was the brains behind it. He enjoyed his lifestyle. He ran it more like a business than maybe a family.

Hey, happy holiday to y'all, man. What y'all got up for? Hey man, I'm trying to get everything together before next month kick in, man.

And I want to get your apartment cleaned out. Take care of that. I was just coming up with a plan, but I need you. I need you. I don't like fucking with Arnold.

I'm going to have to go with Arnold. You have no choice. Don't judge.

That's who you're fucking with. I don't have a number on him. I'm going to tell the car you. That's who you're fucking with. Okay, then.

Now quit doing what you want to do and do what I tell you to do. Yes, sir. Yes, sir. I'm going to have Arnold call you.

All right. Everybody move like brothers and everybody from different places. Milwaukee, St. Louis, Detroit, Texas, Atlanta, Cali, you know what I'm saying, Florida.

We got people from everywhere in our mind. Everybody move as one. Everybody is prospering in some kind of way, in their own way. Every man plays his own role and everything starts with the leader. I'm a good leader, so I got good people that follow me.

You know what I'm saying? It's simple. The Black Mafia family was an ambition 20 years in the making, arising from the hard streets of Detroit.

Meech and Terry got into the drug game for one simple reason. They no longer wanted to be poor. By the late 80s, Meech and Terry led a small...

drug ring peddling crack cocaine at local high schools. And that's not to say that everyone who lives in these neighborhoods buys into a criminal lifestyle, but in a lot of these neighborhoods where money's scarce, opportunity's scarce, most of those people, if you call them on it, and said, how can you allow this stuff to happen right outside of your home? Most of them would turn around and say to you, well, how can you criticize me for this when I have nothing?

Terry and Demetrius Flannery grew up in the hardscrabble area of southwest Detroit, right up against the cities of Ecorse and River Rouge, very blue-collar, tough area. And they grew up on a dead-end street, 1555 South Edsel, a gray, nondescript home at the end of the street. You know, Meech had told me the gas would get turned off in the winter, they'd have no heat, you know, and he watched his parents who worked have to struggle through that. I mean, he told me straight up, he's like, yeah, a job at McDonald's wasn't going to cut it.

I learned that. There was another route for me. He's very unapologetic about that.

You have reached the Sprint Voice mailbox of 6331. To leave a voice message, press 1, or just wait for the... This white boy, that's so bad, she left me in the jungle, man. It's a jungle out here, man. If you are satisfied with your message, press 1. To listen to your message...

The Flannery Brothers were on DEAs and IRSs and... and other law enforcement agencies' radar for quite some time. The Detroit DEA, headed by case agent Bob Bell, had been investigating another drug trafficking crew called the Puritan Avenue Boys.

In fact, Demetrius Flannery was arrested along with a Colombian in Detroit back in 1994. However, there wasn't enough evidence to charge him. So there was information out there for years about the legend and the prowess of the Flannery brothers. They had become too big and too prolific, and it needed to be invested.

In a complex case like BMF and tracking down the two brothers, there were numerous vital steps that the DEA took that enabled them to put together a case that stands close to 10 years and involve the efforts of numerous branches of the United States. of local and federal law enforcement. And it was a logistical nightmare, and the only way we were successful was by working together with our DEA counterparts, IRS counterparts, and other law enforcement counterparts all over the country. As far as nationwide...

investigations, this is the biggest one I've ever been involved with. And we built that relationship up, built up trust, and we shared information seamlessly. You know, my job is putting pieces of a puzzle together.

A huge organization that's stretched across the whole United States, you just don't put that together in one day. It takes a lot of time, a lot of manpower, a lot of cooperation with all the federal agencies and local PDs. If at any time anybody wanted to, any law enforcement wanted to take down their part of the case. this case would not have ripened to its fullest extent.

With the constant threat of law enforcement, snitching, and violence, Meech and Terry needed unwavering loyalty from their crew. Meech's natural generosity was the greatest reinforcement. It don't make no difference if you the maid or if you the motherfucking bodyguard. Everybody get extras around here, French benefits.

I'm driving this tonight. This is going to be that, ooh, who is that? That's Blue with the GT Cool.

Anything that you can do to engender loyalty is going to work in your favor. Companies and corporations do it through incentive programs and bonusing. In the criminal underworld, people do it through relationships. Going off dope. Going off dope.

Now I'll just call and let you know, man. Pulled over in my truck for about two, three hours now, man. That's crazy, but that's the type of shit they do though. They ain't find nothing in the truck. They ain't saying shit about the tinted windows, but they claim that they smell marijuana in my truck, and I don't even smoke in my truck.

That's terrible. That's terrible. But there ain't nothing in there, so they smell like dickhead. No. What I'm saying is they didn't smell no weed in there.

I do not smoke in that truck at all, B. It's what I'm saying, period. They just probably want to be all on it because the truck new and the car old, all that shit. I'll rap with you. If you got a robbing-ass ball, then you're gonna be a robbing ass crew.

If you got a real boss who know how to sacrifice and take the bad along with the good and show his crew know how to be men, then this what you get. Everybody's shining like new money. Another thing we do is to build loyalty amongst its members by actually putting family members of defendants, organization members on a stipend.

In fact, one recorded call Terry was talking to a defendant who was getting ready to go in to serve his sentence. Terry offered to pay Benjamin Johnson. Johnson's wife about $6,000 a month while he was away. $72,000 a year tax-free isn't bad to get by on. They really produced loyalty through reward rather than through the threat of punishment.

Their organization gave notoriety to people who felt they were part of something exciting and important. They were very generous with those around them. They provided a lifestyle.

A lot of time was spent at clubs. There were a lot of women around. A lot of these guys on the lower level, they were part of this particular group. BMF, they had status when they walked through the door.

Hey, shit, where's the bank of your family at in this motherfucker? In BMF, if there wasn't a written code, there was definitely a spoken one. They were all brothers.

They all moved together. Meech preached that jealousy, envy, or the distraction of... of women among the crew members was not welcome at all.

We don't fall out over no girl. We hit them all. They hit my hoes, I hit they hoes. The ones that don't wanna be shared, then that's your own personal one. Other than that, then we ain't falling out over no hoes.

From the onset, Meech and Terry proved to be resourceful business partners capable of capitalizing on every opportunity. When Terry was younger, he was a bystander to a shootout, and his right eye was grazed by a stray bullet. Doctors botched the surgery, and he was awarded a cash settlement, so he used that money to establish a legitimate sedan service in Detroit. The Sedan Service not only provided a legitimate front to wash the drug money, it provided a discreet method to transport large quantities of drugs.

But that actually became sort of the skeleton of a much more advanced fleet of vehicles that would eventually move thousands of kilos of cocaine across the country. Yeah. Hey, Bob.

Did the black guy get through yet? No, the black car, no, he's not. But the gray one left yesterday.

All right, that's good. As we do, do they want to go home or do they want to get in the black car when they get there? He said he'd rather go home. He said he got something he got to take care of.

All right. I'll let him go home while I have Papa take care of him. Prior to the PA boys' takedown, law enforcement had perceived the brothers as mid-level traffickers, small-time players in a much larger stage. In the mid-90s, these guys are at times delivering $200,000 to $300,000 to individuals who are sending that money down to St. Louis and on to Colombian sources. That's who they are.

But as the DEA started to build... Contacts and sources, an entirely new image was coming to light. What happens is in December of 03, early 04, Bob Bell, the other DEA agents, they start contacting their sources to try and get as much information as they can on the Flannery brothers. Now they start hearing stories about how Terry's got a mansion out in California, Demetrius got places down in Atlanta, they're driving all these high-end vehicles. That's what you're hearing from sources.

For years, Terry and Demetrius Flannery attempted to live like ghosts. Going back probably 10 years' worth of income tax return records, there were no records of them ever having filed. Along with that, they each had about at least five or six aliases and had that many different fictitious driver's licenses in several different states.

From the mid 90s to early 2000, Meech and Terry went from a 1 million a year business to a 1 million a week business. The only way to achieve that kind of growth in the drug trade is to increase the supply of your product. And that usually means cutting your sales. cutting out middlemen and getting closer to the source. When you look at the industry with the drugs and how the movement of drugs come here in the States, the American blacks don't really control that trade.

Demetrius Flannery went out to California. He just went out there looking for sources. He hooked up with one of the co-defendants, Wayne Joyner, a California guy who knew some Mexicans. Meech and Terry may never have risen above middle-class dealers had they not met Wayne Joyner.

He became one of the Flannery brothers' key people. Wayne Joyner was a drug trafficker from California who had good connections. He knew guys who could do houses. He knew the car guys. He knew the Mexicans.

The Colombians are the world's major producers of cocaine and were back in the 80s and 90s. But when the DEA started to really hammer the cartels' transportation through the United States in the Caribbean and Florida, then the Mexican trafficking routes became... became more important and they started paying the Mexican traffickers to take the cocaine into the United States through Mexico.

Eventually the Mexican cartels took over all the transporting of the cocaine and getting it into the United States, about 90% of all the cocaine. Securing the Mexican source provided Meech and Terry with almost an unlimited supply of uncut cocaine for a substantially lower price than they could get from any U.S. distributors. They were purchasing at the time for $15.5 per kilo, and the BMF organization was moving at least 600 kilos a month.

This allowed them to literally... ...corner the market. Not every even top-level drug dealer in a major city ever gets to that point.

You have to have something special to get the trust of the cartels. They expanded their enterprise, establishing hubs in 11 states to unload their product. Terry moved to California to receive the bulk shipments. and Meech moved to Atlanta, which was an ideal distribution hub for all of eastern America.

There's about ten different highway routes that you can take out of the city to get out of here, and that route going from Florida all the way up through to New York, Philadelphia, and Boston, you've got to go through Atlanta to get to those places. It's just physically, it's a great place to be, and also it's a big enough city and already has enough of a drug culture of its own to provide cover for those people who are moving through the city itself. Atlanta was definitely becoming a strategic location for the drug trade, but the culture attracted Meech too.

By the late 90s, Atlanta had become a hotbed for activity for the hip-hop industry. Rappers were playing the streets with mixtapes, and famed producers like Jermaine Dupri, Outkast, Goody Mob, and Ludacris were attracting national attention. Hip-hop as a business has two very distinct worlds, the streets and the boardroom. As it became mainstream, hip-hop started generating more money than anyone expected. With the connection to the streets comes the hip-hop.

the element of the criminal underworld. There is no secret that hip-hop record labels were being started with drug money. Jay-Z, for example, has always been honest about his previous life and how he left paper bags filled with cash for radio DJs.

Meech, too, was captivated with the allure of the music industry, and as he gained more money and power, through his ever-expanding drug empire, he set his sights on conquering a new frontier. When the Detroit DEA decided to investigate the Black Mafia family, they knew the organization was going to be tough to penetrate. It was such a tight-knit group.

There was no way to get somebody in. We could make buys from the underlings, but as far as getting somebody into the organization itself, it wasn't going to happen. But early on, Bob Bell and his team got a lucky break. Using confidential informants enabled the investigation. They were able to identify a phone number for a BMF manager named Benjamin Johnson.

Shortly after, they successfully got a court-ordered wiretap to listen in on his phone calls. After only a few short weeks, the Detroit DEA struck gold. A couple of weeks into the wiretap, we intercepted a call.

We didn't have the person's name, but we immediately knew that it was Terry Flannery. Bye. by his commanding voice and Benjamin Johnson's respect and deference for Terry.

What I've done? I need you to fly to Florida and drive this car back to Detroit for me. Okay, when do you need me to do that, sir? As soon as possible. Okay, that's not a...

Fly to Hawaii, boy. Yes, sir. You gotta drive this car like you got some sense, because a hurricane gonna come that way. Okay. We immediately knew we had Terry and knew we had an important phone to target for the next wiretap.

Getting a wire on Terry's phone was the turning point in the DEA's investigation. They had finally infiltrated the inner sanctum. For Nietzsche and Terry to successfully run a nationwide trafficking organization, they needed to establish a protective infrastructure.

They set up stash houses in key hub cities, always in other people's... names and usually in mansions in upper-class neighborhoods. There is something that you get for living in those kinds of neighborhoods and one of them is it's a safe place not just in terms of keeping it away from the police but in terms of keeping away from other offenders. Somebody knows that you got nine million bucks worth of drugs in your house they're gonna come looking for it. The various stash houses had nicknames.

There was the elevator, the gate, the White House, and then there was the infamous Space Mountain, a modern multi-million dollar enclave that had a perfect wrapper around driveway for limos to deliver 200 kilograms of cocaine located in the heart of Buckhead, the wealthiest neighborhood in Atlanta. Buckhead residents are snooty. They don't like outsiders, but how a large national black organization managed to, with the flash and the bling and the rims and the cars and the girls, how they managed to do this and nobody complained in a neighborhood where they complain if your dog walks on your curb.

Even the day we took everything down, We had more people on our backs about that. And we were making noise. But it was like, yeah, we made noise. But they never complained about him. In charge of the stash house was J-Bo Brown, Meech's second in command.

J-Bo was really just kind of being the general manager of BMF. He would be like at the stash houses when the drugs would arrive. Like Meech would never be in the same room. drugs or anything like that.

So it's almost like doing some of the dirty work that Meech really couldn't do or wouldn't do. So he was the guy who was really just running the ships for him. Another innovation that the two brothers used, which was not all too uncommon, was sophisticated traps in their vehicles to hide the cocaine and the money as they moved city to city.

You have cars like this and they want to build secret compartments. How does that work? You have people that sell jewelry for a living. They need to carry around their products.

They need to carry around money. Sometimes they have weapons for their personal protection. It varies according to what you want to put into the vehicle. vehicle. Basically in a vehicle like this, you know, we could take this entire area, we could take that carpet and we can cut it, we can reattach it to a piece of aluminum and bolt that to a welded enclosure under the vehicle.

Then we can make that piece pop open, we can make it motorized, eyes up, we can make it airtight, we can make it waterproof, we can make it however you want it and it will look like there's nothing there. You can take this vehicle back to GM and they wouldn't even know it was there. They had a Lincoln limo.

They had about a million dollars in a secret compartment and no one was able to find this money until two years later. They can be built that sophisticated? Yeah.

Yeah. Every vehicle was a moving trap. They were amazing. I had to admire their ingenuity. They had real strict rules about nobody who's below this level of management can even know how to open the traps they had installed in these cars.

cars to access the drugs, which would basically be like, OK, put the car in reverse, turn on defrost, hold a magnet up to the dash, and turn on the windshield wiper. These traps were high-tech, very sophisticated. electronic, hydraulic.

Some of them had vacuum pumps in them to try to overcome or thwart drug detecting canines. It would make it difficult. We were able to seize a Hummer limo and notwithstanding the best efforts of law enforcement to find the secret panels, we managed to miss it.

I think a year or so later the man who bought the limo managed to find a million dollars in it. trip to la in 1999 mitch's dream of breaking into the music industry became possible when he was introduced to a young aspiring artist named varima mcknight who was rapping under the name blue da vinci they share shared a common vision and Meech took an immediate affection to the young artist. Shortly after, the two founded BMF Entertainment.

For the entire lifespan of the record label, Blue Da Vinci was the only artist to sign up. I'm not really focusing on it right now. is Blue DaVinci. I believe that most labels take so much time off and focus on so many artists that you can never get the realness out of the one artist because you're focusing on 10 or 20 artists.

That's why all our independent focus is on what Blue DaVinci gonna do. If he take off, then we take off. If he don't take off, then we don't want to take off.

Simple. The business that they chose to hide behind, to use as cover, was also an industry that was critical for improving their reputation and providing them with the social capital that they needed. It created loyalty, it created a mystique, it created interest, and it provided a fantastic cover for them.

It was totally realistic when you see these guys and say, well, they're part of the music industry. They look the part, they act the part, they understand the culture of the hip-hop lifestyle. It's not like they were trying to open up, you know, a bunch of McDonald's or something like that. That is BMF.

It's more than just a record label, production, some niggas doing music or just some street niggas. This is really all about going state to state and linking up motherfuckers from the streets, man, from all over. No matter where you from, no matter what you look like, how fat you are, whatever, niggas that got a little money and a lot of sense, man, we looking for them.

We start making some of these black dollars happen. One of Big Meech's biggest self-proclaimed legacies was that he unified gangs from all over the country. Crips, Bloods, GDs, BPs. They all stood together underneath his black mask. Plus.

And we got all type of niggas around here. Short niggas, tall niggas, bald niggas, light skin, dark skin, braids, dreads, fat, whatever you want. We do it all. We don't discriminate.

Matter of fact, after you leave here, you end up getting your teeth on something and coming up with something better. You know what I'm saying? Like a new car, new house, maybe the kids get to go to school, private school, pay for it, courtesy of the mob. You know what I'm saying?

We pay. You know, that's simple. A lot of niggas don't like to spend their money. We love to spend our money. You can't take none of this shit with us.

This phenomenon is a testament to how BMF grew. Most guys who want to establish a drug empire, they're going to go off of the stereotype of what you believe you have to do to get there. And part of that is the violence.

With daily images of cartel-related bloodshed being broadcast from the southern borders and gang violence running rampant in our own cities, we have an immediate prejudice that the drug trade goes hand-in-hand with violence. Meech and Terry took a different approach to extend their reach. Upon entering new territories, they presented themselves as businessmen, and through diplomacy, they created alliances with existing criminal entities.

They kept their eye on the ball because you know you get enough bodies laying around and law enforcement attention is going to come your way probably faster than when there's not that type of activity. In a way that's what made them so successful because they never engaged in a lot of violence so that the attention was never drawn to them in the way that it might be to another group of people. As much as Meach was a natural negotiator, the bottom line was probably the most persuasive element in BMF's success.

With their vast supply, the brothers offered kilos of Coke for only $17,000, $2,000 to $3,000 less than their competitors. Uncle Doody, wrong phone. Huh? Wrong phone, what have I done?

What up? Hey, did he give you the new chip to the new phone? What's this phone got? My new check. What's one?

The last one I got? What the hell? What is it? The new chip. What's the new with the phone that I gave you?

Oh, yeah, I still got it. No, he didn't give it to me. He said he couldn't get a hold of Doug or some bullshit, and I had to leave.

You got the old phone? Yeah. All right, you got it on you? Yeah, I ain't got no time on it, though. You told me to burn off the time.

Often while we were intercepting Terry talking on a particular phone, he would be using push-to-talk phones in the background, having other conversations. So he had multiple phones going at any one time, and then of course had a reserve of phones for him and his organization members. So about the best thing we could do was as Terry would transition from one phone to another was to try to keep pace and spin to the next phone. And we successfully did that with about three of Terry's phones.

The DEA sat back and listened for five months as Terry laid out the foundations of their investigation. It is from this monitoring that we're able to find out information about the participants or co-conspirators. We're also able to determine whether or not there is any drug activity taking place. We were able to listen to Terry direct a driver to take some kilograms of coke down to the...

to Louisville, Kentucky for distribution. That aided us in conducting a traffic stop and seizing 10 kilos in that particular load vehicle. This case could have ended with the wiretap on Terry's phone.

DEA had him directing a guy to take the dopes down south. They intercepted. to that car, got the dope. There was a decision made, DEA, IRS, and with the blessings of the prosecutor's office, you know, we're going to take it as far as we can go. You know, we're going to identify all the members of this organization.

We're going to identify all the people who are helping them launder their money. And that's what happened. Over the course of five months, the DEA compiled over 900 pages of transcripts from Terry's phone calls.

But there was not one phone call between Terry and Meech. Terry used to like to dilute and reconstitute his kilograms, stretching the number of kilograms to increase his profits, while Meech's theory was, don't sit on it, move it, and he enjoyed a reputation of distributing very pure kilograms. So on the street, Terry's cocaine was referred to as Moet.

Not bad champagne, but Meeches is referred to as Cristal top shelf champagne. A couple of months before we initiated our wiretap in April of 2004, while Demetrius was on house arrest down in the Atlanta area, his underboss, Chad Brown, was going around talking to Terry's customers, saying, Terry's dope is no good. He dilutes it, it's poor quality, you should be buying dope from Demetrius and our side.

That upset Terry very much. So Terry took a group of individuals and confronted Chad Brown in a house that was full of girls, his friends, and embarrassed him. And was screaming and yelling, waving the gun around, accusing him of attacking Terry's livelihood. Demetrius believed that Terry should have had that conversation with him.

Out of loyalty for his side of the organization, he said, Terry may be my brother, but we're done. And it probably was the reason that we were unable to identify a phone for Demetrius and never successfully. intercepted any of his phone calls. We coming in at the top of the game.

We got all the cars we want, all the houses we want, all the clothes we want, all the jewelry we want, and all the hoes we want. And we don't need nothing else but to make good music. By 2004, Meech had solidified himself as a public figure. He was actively sponsoring young rappers in and around Atlanta. His father was a musician, surrounded himself with musicians.

I think that he had a genuine love of the rap scene in Atlanta in particular, which was blowing up in a big way at the time, in large part thanks to his willingness to sort of sponsor rappers. He really did think that if he could get one big break on his record label, that he might be able to stop with the illegal stuff. Maybe that's not reality, but that's what he said.

Meech pumped excessive amounts of money into blues hip-hop career, believing that his financial backing could launch a young rapper into stardom. At a time when most record labels were faltering and budgets for music videos were being trimmed, Meech spent a little over $500,000 on a little-known track, We're Still Here. Instead of getting five artists, get up, put a hundred thousand a piece into each one of those artists, and you're doing everything small. If you put the whole million dollars or five hundred thousand dollars behind Lou DaVinci, now you got a big... project and look big and everything but if you just put 100,000 between these five artists and you got a cheap project, nobody may not recognize none of the five.

The hype seemed to have an impact. BMF's image, street credibility, and apparent success attracted many rising artists. Blue Da Vinci was seen in many music videos with Young Jeezy and Fabulous, and he was regularly collaborating with known acts including Jadakiss and Nelly.

Real movement going on here. Young Blue, Da Vinci, Young Jeezy, Baby D, and the rest of the motherfuckers that roll with the BMF Entertainment Squadron. There was an intercepted call between Terry Flannery and his sister, and Terry poured his heart out to his sister.

He was very frustrated with Demetrius, very angry over their split. He was very concerned that Demetrius' flamboyant lifestyle was going to... It caused law enforcement to identify what they were doing and bring heat on the whole organization and bring them down. The irony of it was that Terry's calls were being intercepted by DEA. What are you doing today son?

I still feel like I'm on a tight tack. When you got pulled over, you gave me a real name? I gave him everything.

And you know what he gave me a problem about? That can. What can? About over there. About that other situation.

That's what they said. They sent the people to the house about that. Yeah, because he went real crazy over that, too.

But he was mad because he couldn't find nothing. That's why he did that, too. All right, so I know what to do for that. Okay, thank you, sir. All right.

About the same time, the Detroit DEA was developing their investigation on Terry's side of the organization. Bolton County Prosecutor Rand Sahe was overhearing rumors of the mysterious Black Mafia family's presence in Atlanta. The whole idea of a Black Mafia...

It was like a ghost story. Cops told it like you would tell it to your kids. There was just no presence.

You didn't see them anywhere. But if you asked people on the street, you mentioned BMF, they wouldn't talk about it. So it was very real to the people who were selling drugs and doing drugs, but for the rest of the people, of us.

We had no proof that that existed. The Atlanta side of the investigation began on the night of September 7, 2003. Police were alerted to a shooting after an opposing crew targeted a BMF stash house for a robbery. We had a case.

It was a shooting, a home invasion, where the people who were in the home actually shot the invaders, moved everything out, dropped the invaders off at the hospital, but they left a key of coke in the process of cleaning out their house. Their house had a large bank type vault in it and they claimed to be BMF, and that's where it started. One of the men arrested at the house was one of Meech and Terry's key financial consultants.

It was Doc Marshall and Kenneth Harvey, the two defendants in that case. Doc was very smart with numbers. He was really, like, called the CFO of BMF.

He ran all kinds of spreadsheets and reports for both Meech and Terry. Bill Marshall is the kind of guy that drug traffickers need. He knew how to work the financial side of things and obtain loans on cars and homes and to cover up the source and ownership. of those items. Without a guy like Bill Marshall, they cannot enjoy the fruits of their labor.

The incident was not the first time Doc Marshall had come up on law enforcement's radar. He first came on our radar during a roundup on the Puritan Avenue investigation. We seized a BMW 760, a $125,000 car. The vehicle had been obtained through Bill Marshall's business called exquisite empire which was based out of atlanta As police searched the crime scene, they found a key notebook that contained obvious drug records of the trafficking organization, including associates' names and phone numbers and straw buyers' identities. The shooting at Doc Marshall's house was Atlanta's first taste of the Black Mafia family, but it was not its last.

Meech himself made headlines two months later for his involvement in a high-profile double homicide. On the night of November 12, 2012, In 2004, Big Meech was treated in the ER for a gunshot wound to his buttocks. Earlier that night, there was a shootout outside of Club Chaos, a hot nightclub in Atlanta.

One of the men killed at the club was P. Diddy's bodyguard. Anthony Wolf Jones. Wolf was a well-known guy here in New York who was very much a street guy. And Wolf was one of these guys that you really would mess around with.

You know, he had a very quick temper. The story goes that Meech was hanging out with Jones' ex-girlfriend, and Jones would not have it. An argument ensued, and then guns got drawn. And then Meech had his guy with him, and Wolf had his guy with him.

And ultimately, Wolf and his guy lost. Meech was initially arrested for the double homicide. The Atlanta police department conducted a search on a mansion they believed to be Meech's residence. They hid this Bel Air Lake house, the White House, which is a Flannery house. They go there looking for a gun that they believe Demetrius Flannery may have used in the shooting at the club down there.

Although the murder weapon was never found, a notebook similar to the one seized at Doc Marshall's house was recovered. The Atlanta investigation was heating up, but Meech's murder charges would soon be dropped. No witnesses would come forward, and as Jones was shot from behind, there was not enough evidence to maintain the charges.

It was a justified shoot. No matter how bad everybody wanted to get Meech, that was one where the evidence pointed to the fact that they were defending themselves. Jones stepped out of line.

Over the course of the next three years, the black mafia family's reputation in Atlanta grew more imposing and violent. They were violent. They would walk into clubs and take over the clubs.

They wanted your girlfriend, they'd take your... Girlfriend, they wanted your car, they'll take your car. There was not a damn thing you could do about it. The gang's numbers swelled, and their ominous presence loomed throughout the city's nightclubs.

There were stories of people getting thrown off balconies at bars, punched in the face, and kicked and stomped. That was the reality of BMF. So for every grandmother whose grocery bill they paid for at Publix, there was three grandsons lying in the hospital somewhere with broken bones. Atlanta had become a battleground, and the violence seemed to swirl around BMF and its associates. Often it was impulsive and senseless, but at times the motives were far more menacing.

I got some shit that'll stand you up, and I got some shit that'll take your life in this motherfucker. Nigga, this that .357, nigga, that Trey Pound, nigga, Magum, nigga, with a lot of gunpowder behind each shot. It's that shit that's gonna blow you about four feet back, nigga.

I only got six of these shots. I only need one. As more and more attention was being brought upon the organization, Meech became openly defiant in believing his hip-hop company could blur the line between art and reality.

Probably no secret to them that we were after them. They thought they were untouchable, and they were taunting us. In 2004, he even commissioned billboards in Atlanta claiming the world was BMFs, a throwback to Scarface's mantra. The billboards was when enough was enough. That billboard was always a bone of contention with the district attorney himself.

The fact that they could just be so out there, he was very determined, and so he took the handcuffs off of us. Meech was put under constant surveillance, and an Atlanta-based task force was assigned to topple the family. They used similar strategies of the Detroit Police.

and got a wiretap on a low-level dealer. Once the wires were running, they were manned 24-7. I don't believe that we ever came off of them. And then a lot of the agents, Chip Cook, Mike Hannon, these guys would come in when they weren't scheduled.

Just to go back through and review, they put the case together. Their diligence paid off, and they were able to spin up several times all the way up to a high-level BMF manager favored by Big Meech himself. They would watch the wire on HBO, and they would talk about it.

And we'll be right back. We would sit there white-knuckled the episodes where they would throw all the burners away, and they would talk about, yeah, good thing these idiots down here don't know how to wiretap. Or they'd get paranoid and go, let's just text.

Or they'd say, call me on this number. Talk about kilos of cocaine and be like, hey, did you pick up the trees? You know, I got 50 trees sitting in my car.

They gave us a blueprint to what they were going to do every time. As the evidence mounted, the Atlanta Task Force conducted a series of takedowns on BMF associates and stash houses. Meech had started to see ghosts. He was seeing cars and cops everywhere he went. The heat was on Meech, and he knew it.

He pulled his crew out of Atlanta and headed toward Miami. He had a female assistant yogi. She disappeared first.

Once she disappeared, we knew that this was in the wind. So we decided to do it all at once. He was ordering everybody out.

People were scrambling. It was almost anticlimactic. There was no arrests. We hit all the houses.

and everybody was gone. Nietzsche had adhered to a strict doctrine. Never talk on the phone, never be around the drugs or the money, never put anything in your own name.

He thought this code would insulate himself from law enforcement, but now he found himself on the run. A lot of times, the dope never touches the hands of your top-level guys. So sometimes the only way to link them to that dope is to follow the money back to them.

The million-dollar joints, man, from state to state, man, we really, really doing it. Large sums of cash. Where's that coming from? Beat them up, nigga! This bitch, nigga!

You make us rich, nigga! We caught a break with some of our intelligence and financial records, and that changed people's perception from it's an urban legend to wow these guys are actually making millions and millions of dollars and essentially living better than celebrities i mean flying around in learjets staying in presidential suites living in multi-million dollar homes in multiple states meach was down in Miami, there was a place he was renting there, this gated house, at like 30 grand a month. Every place we stay at, L.A., Atlanta, Detroit, we have homes, our own homes.

We don't have to go in and rent shit. We got our own houses, we got our own cars, we got our own hoes, we got our own clothes. It was claimed that the funds were legitimately being generated through the entertainment branch of BMF. You don't know all the money that Demetrius Flannery spent in the clubs, or on clothes, or on girls, but we know from the investigation it was...

documented. A million plus in cars purchased, $400,000 in cash for a car, $250,000 in cash for a car, $100,000 in cash for a car. Terry Flannery's house on Mulholland Drive, $600,000 cash through bank accounts to make that purchase. To put a number on it, I mean, millions. They felt that on the business side of things with the music that that scene is so legitimate that it provides cover for all of these expenditures that you're engaging in.

Meech had a fleet of luxury cars fit for a sultan. Rolls-Royce Phantoms, Bentley Continentals, Lamborghinis. Apparently he maybe had the only white Maybach in the United States.

He had one ship to him Saudi Arabia. It wouldn't take an auditor very long to realize that there was way more money being spent than would be coming in through hip-hop. For Meech's 36th birthday, he threw himself a million-dollar star-studded party at the Atlanta nightclub compound, complete with champagne fountains and live exotic animals.

That's the part of him I really like, the Meech of the Jungle birthday party. I think those were the fun days of Meech, him telling Atlanta he was there. And then came the strip clubs.

BMF was notorious for their overindulgence in the nightlife. I was in the clubs at the time when the BMF guys were here, in New York, where they were spending tons of money. Girls would just pick them up.

They would have a payday when BMF came to town. BMF would go out in droves. Each member would get his own $400 bottle of Cristal champagne. The clubs either alternately loved it or hated it when they came in because they would sell out of champagne on the one hand.

They'd have to deal with sort of the threat of violence. Y'all dudes out there talking about y'all making it rain, man, we the originators of making it rain. That's a message to everyone else. I've got so much money, I could literally throw it up in the air and not even care about it. When we go out at night, whatever we spend, $50,000, $100,000 in the motherfucking club, we can afford to do it because we ain't bring it all with us.

A lot of niggas don't like to spend they money. We love to spend our money. We can't take none of this shit with us. None.

Ain't no armored trucks pulling up at no funerals. The best relationship and partnership in federal drug law enforcement are a group of DEA agents married to a woman. married up with a group of IRS agents.

It's a whole other expertise and full-time job to exploit and uncover the layers of laundered money and items purchased secretly by nominees. Typically, these people aren't going to have anything in their their name, which was the case with the Flannery brothers. Absolutely nothing.

They don't file tax returns, no assets. So what you have to do is start looking at family members. The house that Terry Flannery had in LA, his girlfriend, Denise O'Elsh, it's in her name. He sets up a company for her out there called Oracle Motorsports.

Really doesn't do anything, but he's got all these high-end cars in there, which are his cars, which he's got auto brokers out there that he's feed and money to buying his cars, keeping them in their names. Here's IRS agent Scartosi trace the money back to Meech and Terry, continually uncovering more and more people who helped the two brothers to hide and launder their money. Terry had a girlfriend here in Detroit. He had a house for her in Canton.

Started looking at how does this young lady buy this house? Show she put, you know, a hundred and some thousand dollars down on it. Well, how she put that, where'd that money come from?

Cashier checks that came out of a credit union. Where'd the money come from to fund those? You know, it's just a matter of, you know, again, you just build and build and piece and piece.

One unsuspected accomplice to the two brothers was the famed jeweler to the stars, Jacob Erebon. He essentially, of course, is a businessman and is in business to make money. And Demetrius and Terry Flannery had a lot of money to spend and they liked spending it on besides cars and homes.

Nice jewelry, very flamboyant jewelry. One watch that Terry bought was encrusted with diamonds. It was valued at about $100,000, in fact.

Jacob, the jeweler, extended a million-dollar line of credit to the brothers. Leave a voice message, press 1, or just wait for the call. Swipe boy.

That's no way. She left me. To leave a voice message, press 1, or just wait for the... Swipe boy. That's so well.

She left me in the jungle, man. There's a jungle out there, man. If you are satisfied with your message, press 1. To listen to your message...

On October 28, 2005, the long-awaited federal indictment for Demetrius and Terry Flannery was unsealed. 25 BMF members were initially charged with a range of felonies, including money laundering, conspiracy to distribute cocaine, and for the brothers, running a continuing criminal enterprise. We had overwhelming information and evidence, and it just kept growing exponentially. In fact, the problem for us really became not was there enough evidence, but it became keeping the evidence organized, trying to determine what evidence to use and what not to use.

We had so much. The DEA's case was based on wiretap evidence, both on Terry's and Meech's side of the organization. The IRS had compiled a massive amount of evidence demonstrating that the two brothers had been hiding and laundering huge sums of money, proceeds from illegal drug operations. Together, the DEA and the IRS had coordinated local police departments from all around the country and amassed enough evidence to demonstrate the extraordinary reach of the black mafia family. On initiating the investigation, Frank and myself and other agents went to great pains to try to identify random law enforcement contacts with members of the BMF.

And in fact, we were able to identify approximately or more than 500 kilograms worth of seizures from random law enforcement activity and several million dollars worth of money seizures. We knew who the players were as far as when we know somebody got stopped, okay, we know that that guy was associated with BMF. Now let's backtrack and find out exactly how he was tied in.

Analysis would be done of the phones they were carrying and the address books would be looked at and there would be a common theme in the names that were stored inside the cell phones. Investigation from there on the vehicles and the titles and the ownership often led to tying those vehicles and those individuals and those seizures back to the BMF. On the lead up to the takedown, tensions were high.

Years of hard work had gone into the investigation. They needed to catch Meech and Terry. It was a concern that Terry and Demetrius might get away.

They had passports. They were worldly. They had traveled to Europe and elsewhere and had the means to disappear. And if they disappeared, my way of thinking is that the case was a failure.

The marshals doing what they do well. They came up with some information about Demetrius's whereabouts. They actually arrested Demetrius in Frisco, Texas on October 20th.

Terry was taken into custody in the St. Louis, Missouri area the day of October 26th. And in pretty short order, we had all 25 of our defendants off the Detroit indictment in pocket. Several of the 25 defendants immediately began to cooperate with the DEA, including one of Terry's most trusted managers.

This whole death before desire. down or you know that's all good when the money's flowing but when the money dries up and there ain't nobody looking out for you and then you yourself are looking at a pretty long sentence the way i look at it to every man for himself we're just really trying to motivate niggas and let niggas you know know that niggas is really out here getting it like this man it ain't hard to get this shit ain't far away all a nigga gotta do is get on a real serious grind man with a real group of niggas that ain't gonna fucking tell nigga another key defendant that turned was bmf CFO William Doc Marshall. Bill Marshall, not unlike many other defendants in this investigation, began to cooperate, essentially looking for a way to reduce his future prison sentence. He really laid out a lot of the financial stuff of the BMF organization. He really filled in the holes as far as how the straw biters worked, how they moved money from city to city.

His information was very useful going forward, and we went from 25 defendants to where we ended up, which was the conviction of 66 defendants in Detroit alone. With the help of Doc Marshall and other cooperating defendants, the DEA was able to effectively dismantle the black mafia family. All in all, 125 members, associates and relatives, were indicted and convicted. Out of the 125 members indicted, only eight went to trial. Just two days before their trial dates, Meach and Terry both pled guilty without cooperation.

They were sentenced to 30 years. Both Demetrius and Terry Flannery and almost all the rest of the members of the organization realized that the evidence was absolutely overwhelming. So pleading out to 30 years, I suppose, seemed a little bit better than life.

Financial judgment in the indictment and what the Flinders took responsibility for when they pled to 30-year prison terms was $270 million. And if you conservatively convert those dollars into kilos, we're talking about the distribution of between 15 and 18 million dollars. 18,000 kilograms of cocaine was during the life of this conspiracy. And this, one of the largest homegrown domestic distribution organizations in the history of our country. I wish I could be there tonight, but God, God knows I wish I could be here tonight.

But one day soon, I'll be there with God's blessing. I just want to thank everybody for coming. Hope they enjoyed it.

Don't want to take up no more of your time. Just have the time of your life, and I'll see somebody in the morning.

Transcript for:The Rise and Fall of BMF

Transcript for:
The Rise and Fall of BMF