BMF: The Rise and Fall of Big Meech and the Black Mafia Family (12 page)

Back in the parking lot, Prince’s friend Jameel was still sitting in his Mitsubishi, nodding to the music, when he glanced out the rear window and saw that Prince had finally left the club. He was shuffling down the hill toward the parking lot, Jahmar at his side. The cousins cut similar images as they made their way down. They both sported baggy jeans and Nikes. Jahmar wore a striped blue shirt, his dreadlocks tucked behind a blue Bullets cap, while Prince wore a gray T-shirt and let his shorter dreads hang loose. They were alike in stature, too. Both about five-eight, maybe five-nine, definitely under 150 pounds.

The security guards were still working crowd control in front of the club when Prince and Jahmar met up with Marc and Black. Those two were working the crowd out back—or at least trying to. They were vying for the attention of some girls when the motorcade of high-end cars that had been idling in the parking lot began to roll out. It was a slow process. The cars had to be lined up in the correct
order by the crew’s bodyguards and lower-rung members before gliding one-by-one to their next destination, which some of its members decided would be Club 112, one of Atlanta’s few after-hours venues.

As the cars fell into their customary formation, the last one in line, the black Porsche SUV, nearly backed into Prince. Prince tapped the side of the Porsche. “Yo homeboy,” he called out. “You hittin’ me.”

The driver, a chubby guy with a goatee, jumped out. At least four other members of his crew were close behind. Two of them were still clutching their Cristal bottles.

“What do you think you’re doing?” the driver said, bowing up at Prince. “Y’all motherfuckers don’t ever touch my car again.”

One of the guys in Prince’s camp, most likely Prince, turned to the driver and smarted off: “You aren’t running nothing.”

Marc, the youngest of Prince’s friends, noticed that the crew began to form up, as if part of a single entity. He started backing away, explaining that they didn’t want any trouble. His friends agreed, but there was little they could do. The crew jumped all four of them.

Marc and Black tried to defend themselves as best they could, but in the flurry of fists and feet and glass, they both had a hard time seeing what was going on. Jameel, still in his Mitsubishi, quickly realized there was trouble. He was parked about ten feet away from the fight and couldn’t see his four friends—just bottles flying and fists swinging. But he was worried. He grabbed his .40-caliber Glock from the glove box and jumped out of the car.

The first thing he saw was Jahmar on the ground. Several men were stomping on his head. He didn’t see Prince or the others, but he knew the odds were stacked way against them.

Jameel did the only thing he thought would help. He dared not fire into the crowd. Instead, he pointed his gun in the air and squeezed off two rounds.

Seconds later, two more shots rang out.

When Marc heard the gunshots, he hit the ground and rolled
toward the bumper of Jameel’s car. Glancing up, he watched as the crew that had attacked him scattered. He chased after one of them, who ducked into a car and sped off. The entire motorcade was peeling out of the parking lot.

Tires were screeching. Jameel was screaming. Dozens of onlookers were running in every direction. And when Marc saw what Jameel had seen—their friend Jahmar on the ground, bleeding like crazy—he started running, too. He was desperate to make sure Jahmar hadn’t been shot.

Crouching close to Jahmar’s face, Marc realized that no, he hadn’t been. But he’d been beaten, badly. Both his eyes were swollen shut. His left eyelid and cheek had been sliced open. Blood was pooling under his head. He was moving, but barely. He was totally incoherent.

Where were the rest of them? Marc looked up, scanning the parking lot. All he saw, a few feet off in the distance, was Prince.

He started running again, but before he got to Prince, someone grabbed him from behind—club security.

When the two security guards in front of the club had heard the initial shots, followed seconds later by a couple more, they rushed toward the parking lot. The first thing they noticed was a bunch of fancy cars speeding off. Then, they saw people running—scattering in so many directions that the guards couldn’t tell where the trouble was. But when the crowd parted a little, the security guards found five men huddled on the ground: Prince and Jahmar, who were bad off but still breathing, and Marc, Jameel, and Black, who were pretty much fine. Except for Jameel’s screams.

The three friends were whisked away so that the guards and the arriving Atlanta officers could secure the scene. Jameel, frantic to know what was going on, kept asking the security guard if Prince and Jahmar were going to be all right.

“Why do you want to know?” the security guard asked. “Were you involved?”

“Yeah, I was right here.”

“What happened?”

Jameel explained to the guard that he’d been sitting in his car when he noticed a fight had broken out—and that his friends had been jumped. He told the officer that he grabbed his gun and fired in the air to get the fighting to stop. After that, he said, he heard more shots. He said he stashed the gun under the seat of the car before rushing to his friends’ side.

The guard told Jameel to remain silent. He cuffed him and placed him in the back of one of the officers’ patrol cars.

Marc, meanwhile, was yelling over and over for an ambulance. To quiet him, the other security guard placed him in a patrol car, too—but not before Marc reached for his cell phone and dialed a number he hated to call. When Tattoo answered, Marc told him what had happened to his brother:

“Prince got hit,” he said.

Tattoo whipped his car around and headed back toward the club. Still in the patrol car, Marc watched and waited. When the ambulance finally arrived, Jahmar awoke from his battered daze—and started swinging at the paramedics who were trying to help him. He wouldn’t remember any of it, but he would fight them all the way to Grady Memorial Hospital, and once there, he’d turn combative toward the hospital’s staff, too. After that, he would slip into a coma. He would stay there for twenty-eight days.

As Jahmar’s ambulance pulled away, Marc continued to keep an eye on the scene from the back of the patrol car. He was still holding out hope. He believed Prince had a chance.

He didn’t. One of the two bullets that hit Prince penetrated his right forearm, fragmenting beneath his skin. The other bullet struck him in the middle of his back. It traveled slightly upward, grazing his liver and causing a serious internal rupture. The force of the bullet also bruised his right lung before continuing on through the right ventricle of his heart. It exited just under his left nipple, leaving a small metal remnant behind.

The paramedics didn’t even try to help Prince. They just laid a sheet over him.

Atlanta homicide detective Marc Cooper sped west on Eleventh Street toward the north end of the Velvet Room parking lot, responding to the call of shots fired. He arrived at 4:22
A.M
., seventeen minutes after the security guards heard the gunfire. By the time Cooper rolled up, the men who attacked Prince and his friends were long gone. But they did leave behind a few clues—clues that were eerily similar to another scene Cooper had investigated eight months earlier and a few miles up Peachtree.

Like the men killed in the other incident, at Club Chaos, the two Velvet Room victims were attacked in the club’s parking lot. (Fortunately, this time one of them would live.) Like before, a stream of high-end cars had fled the scene. And again, there was a strange silence blanketing the witnesses.

But this time the assailants were sloppier. A few yards from where Cooper discovered the two shell casings from Jameel’s Glock—as well as the two other casings discharged from the 10 mm that shot Prince—he came across a pair of champagne bottles. He asked the crime scene technician to take swabs from the mouths of the bottles. One of the men involved in the attack might have left behind some DNA.

A second officer discovered another significant clue: two phones. One of them, a Nextel BlackBerry, bore the greeting, “Bleu, BMF Entertainment.” The other was later traced to Deron “D-Shot” Hall, who was listed in DEA files as a known associate of the Black Mafia Family.

But what Cooper really needed were the same two things that had eluded him in the Chaos investigation: a murder weapon and a witness. None of Prince’s friends wanted to give statements to the police. Jameel had to give one, because he’d fired a weapon. But the statement
was brief, and it was consistent with other evidence. Jameel didn’t see the fight break out, because he was sitting in his car. He did fire his gun, but only in an attempt to break up the fight. And though he heard gunshots shortly thereafter, he didn’t see who shot Prince. “I can’t describe anybody,” he said.

Cooper let Jameel go. He was not charged with a crime.

For weeks after the incident, while Prince’s cousin Jahmar was still in a coma, Cooper tried to convince Marc, Black, and Tattoo to provide written statements of what they saw that night. Though Tattoo wasn’t in the parking lot during the fight, he returned to the scene shortly thereafter, and Cooper suspected he might have an idea about who shot his brother. But the young men refused. Marc finally agreed to meet the detective, then failed to show up for the interview. When Cooper called to find out why, Marc said he didn’t trust the police and didn’t want to meet with him after all. He hung up.

Finally, Cooper reached someone who could help. He got in touch with Prince’s mother.

After she got the news about her son, Debbie lay in bed for weeks. Through the haze of grief, bits and pieces of what had happened seeped in. Then they cascaded. Debbie quickly became familiar with something called the Black Mafia Family. And she told the detective what she knew: The boys had little faith in the police—and a lot of fear of the suspects. She said BMF was a powerful organized crime family—so organized that they had sent word to her, via the street, that they didn’t intend for her son to die. If she would handle this the street way, and bypass the police, she was told she’d be rewarded. She said the offer, which she refused, was extended more than once.

She then told Cooper that she’d do her best to convince the boys to talk. On the evening of September 15, 2004, more than six weeks after Prince was killed, Marc, Tattoo, and Jahmar arrived at the Atlanta homicide office to give their statements. (Black did not join them.) Each of the three spoke for less than thirty minutes. Marc went first. He said he didn’t see who shot Prince, because he’d dropped to
the ground as soon as he heard the first shots ring out. “Can you further describe the driver that exited the vehicle?” Cooper asked. Marc said he didn’t want to talk anymore.

Jahmar, barely two weeks out of the hospital, was up next. Because he was in a coma for so long, the news about Prince was still fresh in his mind. “I didn’t even know that my cousin was dead,” he told the detective. He talked about leaving the club with Tattoo, then going back to grab Prince. He vaguely recalled one of the attackers drawing a gun, but other than that, he remembered little about the fight.

“Would you be willing to testify in court?” Cooper asked.

“No,” Jahmar said. “I’ve been through trauma. I have fear for myself and my family. I don’t want to testify against this person.”

Tattoo went last. Cooper quickly got to the point.

“Are you familiar with BMF Entertainment?” the detective asked.

“Yes.”

“To your knowledge, were they involved in this incident?”

“Yes.”

“How do you know they were involved?”

“That’s what I’ve heard from people on the streets.”

The information wasn’t exactly going to hold up in court, and Cooper knew it.

“Why have you been reluctant to provide a statement?” he asked.

“I’ve just been mourning.”

None of the young men was the witness Cooper needed. But the right witness did exist—a man who was close enough to the fight to see what happened, yet far enough removed not to have committed a major felony. Whether he would talk was another matter.

The day after the Velvet Room shooting, BMF chief financial officer William “Doc” Marshall got an angry phone call from California. Terry was on the line, and he wanted Doc to tell him what had happened the night before.

Doc told Terry that normally, when there’s a fight like that, the whole crew will jump in, and it might drag on for a bit. But this time, it was a half dozen of their guys on four smaller ones. He said the smaller guys got banged up pretty quick.

That’s what was so perplexing to Doc, and what he tried to explain to Terry. It just didn’t make any sense. The guys on the ground were done for. Doc said there’d been warning shots from the other camp, but everyone knew they were just that: a warning. The shots were too far away for anyone to truly believe that a gun had been aimed at them. In fact, the crew already was back in their cars when one of them, for reasons unknown, grabbed his gun out of the Porsche. According to Doc, the gunman was a high-ranking member, a guy who didn’t need to bother with shit like that, yet he decided to run back to the scene, to stand over the guy who was lying defenseless on the pavement, and to pump two rounds into him.

The guy on the ground shouldn’t have been killed, Doc said. He wasn’t sure why that trigger was pulled.

Terry was livid. He told Doc they were all out of control. And even though Doc said Meech wasn’t involved (he’d been whisked away from the scene as soon as the fight broke out, Doc said), Terry still blamed him. “Man, my brother down there’s still up to that stuff?” Terry vented. “Listen, I don’t know what they
think
they got away with.” But he said one thing was clear: Meech’s guys hadn’t learned their lesson. Their behavior in the clubs was endangering everyone.