BMF: The Rise and Fall of Big Meech and the Black Mafia Family (28 page)

At 12:30
P.M.
, they watched as the Volvo pulled out of the garage. Rolando and a few of the marshals kept a tail on it, maintaining a safe distance while the rest of the team continued to watch the house. The Volvo meandered along several surface streets, rising up over the crests and dipping into the valleys of Woodland Hills. A few minutes later, it pulled to a stop in a parking lot. Rolando and the marshals watched as the driver of the Volvo stepped out of the car and ducked
into a Subway sandwich shop. Rolando followed him inside and stood watch as the man ordered a sandwich. Rolando then gave the takedown signal to the marshals outside.

Once the man stepped back into the parking lot, he was quickly surrounded. The marshals asked for his identification. He handed over a very real-looking California driver’s license. But he wasn’t fooling anyone. His slender six-foot-five frame, his narrowed eyes and crooked grin, a style of dress more suggestive of a bank executive than of a cocaine kingpin—all of it was hard to deny. Rolando had his man. The search for Tremayne “Kiki” Graham was over.

As the marshals read Kiki his rights, he refused to acknowledge what he heard. He even sat mute when the authorities booking him into the county jail asked the usual questions: name, address, date of birth, social. Kiki wasn’t talking, not at all.

Meanwhile, there was still work to be done on Oso Avenue. Though Rolando’s job was finished, the marshals were holding out hope of finding Kiki’s fellow fugitive, Scott King. Other law enforcement agencies had become interested in the house, too. If what Rolando had said was true—if Kiki and Scott had access to far more drugs than their associate, Mookie—then authorities were more than ready for an even bigger bust. The local drug task force that had arrested Mookie at the airport quickly filed for a search warrant for the Oso Avenue address, and they arrived at the house to join the marshals in their surveillance.

Two hours after the task force arrived, its agents were still waiting on the warrant when one of them noticed a silver Infiniti drive past the house several times. Finally, it pulled up to the curb a few houses down. One of the agents radioed the rest of the team and told them to keep an eye on the Infiniti. A few minutes later, the door to the house opened, and a man dressed in dark clothing walked out. He strode toward the Infiniti and was about to reach for its door when five task force agents jumped out of their cars, guns drawn. “Get on the ground!” they yelled.

The man did as he was told. He was cuffed, and the agents pulled his wallet and keys from his pocket. His Michigan driver’s license identified him as Kevin Miller. The agents stuck him in a surveillance van and told him he’d have to stay there while they searched the house for a fugitive.

“Is there anybody else inside the residence?” one of task force agents asked him.

“Yes,” he answered.

“How many?”

He wouldn’t say.

At about that time, the surveillance team spotted another man walking away from the house in another direction, carrying a backpack. They stopped him and asked his name. “Richard Garrett,” he told them, which was the truth—though he was known in BMF and Sin City Mafia circles as Baa, a former high-ranking lieutenant under the Flenory brothers who had jumped ship to become J-Rock’s right-hand man. Baa told the agents he was walking to his girlfriend’s place around the corner. The agents said they’d have to hold him while they searched the house he’d just left.

“Man, I didn’t come from that house,” Baa said. “I was just walking to my girlfriend’s house.”

“Which house is your girlfriend’s?” one of the agents said.

“You can talk to my lawyer,” he answered. “I know you guys try to get people to say things.”

“If you give me the name of your girlfriend and where she lives,” the agent offered, “I will contact her to verify your story.”

“I know how you guys do things,” Baa shot back. “I don’t want you to raid her house.”

He refused to say any more—except to tell the agents, who asked if he had any weapons or contraband in his backpack, “I just have some weed, man.”

By then, a Los Angeles County Superior Court judge had signed off on the search warrant for the house on Oso Avenue. The agents
marched the man in the van, the one with the Michigan ID, through the front door. They sat him down on the sofa and stood guard over him. One of the agents prodded the man for his real name.

“My name is Kevin Miller,” the man said.

“If you’re arrested, you’ll be fingerprinted,” the agent told him. “Your identity will be revealed.”

The man looked down at his lap. “My name is Jerry Davis,” he said.

As the agents combed through the house, they found that one of the bedroom doors was locked. Among the keys taken from Jerry “J-Rock” Davis’s pocket, they found one that opened the door. Up to that point, the agents had come across a few things of interest strewn about the house. They’d discovered four handguns, three of which had their serial numbers scratched off, as well as a .223-caliber assault rifle. The agents also found mail addressed to Eric Rivera, which meant they had a more-than-direct link between him (and the coke they pulled off him at the airport) and the house on Oso Avenue. But the link was about to get stronger.

Inside the locked room, the agents came face-to-face with their prize: stacks and stacks and stacks of bricks—250 kilos of cocaine, to be exact, with a street value of approximately $25 million. Even at wholesale prices, a big-time distributor could expect to rake in $5 million on the haul. Also, like the coke at the airport, the bricks in the house were pressed with the word
HUMMER
.

It quickly became apparent to the agents that the house on Oso Avenue—better known to its inhabitants as Third Base—was a stash house. And whoever was running it had broken one of the major rules of the game. Usually, a drug trafficker keeps his product separate from his proceeds, because that makes it harder for authorities to prove he was selling the drugs. But behind the locked door, the agents found not only 250 keys, but also a large pile of money—totaling $1.8 million.

The marshals still didn’t have Scott King. But thanks in large part
to the bounty hunter, they had Kiki. They also seized a massive amount of cocaine, and an impressive amount of cash. And as an unexpected bonus, they had Scott and Kiki’s boss, J-Rock.

Unlike the incident five weeks earlier in Atlanta—when J-Rock allegedly helped his friend Deron “Wonnie” Gatling place a hit on federal marshals who’d cornered him after he climbed into the attic of his girlfriend’s house—the Sin City leader wouldn’t be getting off so easy this time. Two months after his arrest in L.A., J-Rock’s name was added to the indictment that had charged Scott King, Tremayne “Kiki” Graham, and the late Ulysses “Hack” Hackett with trafficking cocaine. J-Rock was facing twenty years to life. And he was no longer untouchable.

With the arrest of Kiki, Rolando was ready to head home. But there was one more favor he was willing to do. A few hours after the day-long showdown on Oso Avenue, one of the L.A. detectives called the bounty hunter. Since Rolando had been so thorough in his investigation of Kiki, the detective was wondering if he might be willing to offer any insight into their fresh catch, J-Rock. The Infiniti, for instance, the one in which J-Rock almost fled the scene. Did Rolando have any clue to whom it might belong? Obviously, considering the volume of the drugs and cash discovered in the house on Oso, the government would be interested in seizing any cars or property that could be linked to the suspected kingpin.

Rolando told the officer that he’d seen the Infiniti before. It was pulling out of the driveway of a three-story home at the other end of the Valley, in a far more posh neighborhood south of Ventura Boulevard. That house, in fact, had seemed to be a hub for Kiki and his associates. Rolando gave the detective the address of the home on Libbit Avenue.

The detective assembled a small team to scope out the house. They climbed up its long, steep driveway and peered through its glass
doors. Inside, the detective saw several empty duffle bags, similar to ones that were inside the locked room on Oso. He also noticed boxes and packing materials, multiple security cameras, a monitor in the kitchen into which the cameras fed, and food left sitting out, as if the occupants had up and left in a hurry. The detective knocked on the door. No answer. He and the rest of the team dipped inside.

All over the house, the detectives found family photos of J-Rock and his children. There was a checkbook in his wife’s name, and her name was on a bill from the Communion Christian Academy of Arts & Sciences, too. In the master bedroom, the detectives checked out the drawers of both nightstands. In one, there was a .40-caliber Glock, with ammo. In the other, there was a book:
The Power of a Praying Wife.

Just like that, the detectives had found First Base, too.

Before the month of June 2005 was up, another of J-Rock’s associates was picked up, this time by authorities in New Jersey. The arrest would have broad implications. Though the suspect was nabbed on a three-year-old drug-trafficking warrant, his capture was a small but reassuring step in an unrelated homicide investigation nine hundred miles away.

Back in 2002, Jamad “Soup” Ali was indicted in Florida on federal drug-trafficking charges, and he’d been a fugitive ever since. Authorities considered him dangerous. He’d been convicted of manslaughter in the early ’90s and had served nearly four years in prison. And in 2001, he was connected to another violent crime. Soup was questioned in a fatal shooting that rocked the streets of D.C. the weekend of the NBA All-Star game. After the interrogation, authorities let Soup go and arrested one of his friends, Michael “Playboy” Harris. But the case remained unsolved. Playboy’s murder charge was dismissed that summer for lack of evidence.

The night of the D.C. shooting, Soup, Playboy, and several of
their friends had been riding around in a limo. But after someone in the limo fired at a pedestrian who’d crossed the limo’s path, two of Soup’s friends hopped out—just in time to avoid getting pulled over and hauled in for questioning. Scott King had abandoned the limo first, and when Kiki called him moments later, Scott advised that he do the same. Had Scott stuck around for questioning, though, authorities would’ve been interested to hear his side of the story. According to Scott King, it was Soup, not Playboy, who shot the man dead in the street.

In the years following the D.C. shooting, Soup had maintained a low profile. Even after the Florida indictment, he stayed off of the feds’ radar. But in June of 2005, the feds had a pretty good idea of where he was. And by then, catching Soup had become more urgent.

The information the feds had pieced together on Soup led to a ritzy neighborhood in Livingston, New Jersey, called Chestnut Hill. Soup supposedly was hiding out in a big white modern house with a three-car garage and a teardrop-shaped driveway. On the evening of June 29, 2005, a team of twenty U.S. marshals, DEA agents, and local police officers set up surveillance outside the home. They watched as several cars came and went, and several men walked in and out of the house with duffle bags slung over their shoulders—a likely sign that drugs and money were changing hands inside.

At 9
P.M.
, the agents saw Soup pull up in a Cadillac Escalade and disappear behind the set of double doors that opened into the foyer. The agents then spread out to form a perimeter around the property. Two sides of the house were flanked by broad balconies, which could offer an easy escape route. Several agents kept an eye on them. Some of the other agents knocked on the front door to announce their presence.

Almost immediately, the sliding-glass door to one of the balconies opened, and two men started to climb over the railing. As soon as they noticed the agents, though, they scampered back inside. On the other side of the house, Soup opened an upstairs window and was
about to jump when he, too, noticed the agents. He dipped back into the house. Seconds later, the lights on that side of the house switched off. Throughout the house, in fact, lights began clicking off.

The federal warrant for Soup’s arrest allowed the agents to enter the house, if necessary. And at that point, the agents determined that Soup wasn’t going to give up willingly. The agents stationed at the front of the home tried the front door. It was unlocked. As they stepped inside, they saw Soup and one of his associates walking out of the upstairs master bedroom. The agents told the two men to show their hands and walk down the stairs. They complied. When they reached the bottom of the steps, the agents cuffed them.

As the agents made their way from room to room, they detained another of Soup’s associates in the kitchen, where a loaded handgun was sitting on the counter. A fourth man was handcuffed in the dining room, and two more in the garage (they were hiding between the cars). The last man to be found in the house was hiding out in the laundry room closet. Upstairs, the agents discovered two more guns: a .40-caliber semiautomatic in the master bedroom, and a loaded 9 mm machine gun in the bedroom’s closet. Since Soup was spotted walking out of that room, authorities in New Jersey were able to press gun charges against him—possession of a firearm by a convicted felon.

The agents also found a single kilo of cocaine—and a far more impressive amount of cash. Bundles of shrink-wrapped bills were stacked throughout the house and were secreted away in hidden compartments built into two of the cars parked in the driveway. Between the cash in the house and the vehicles, the search team turned up more than $1 million.