Free BMF: The Rise and Fall of Big Meech and the Black Mafia Family by Mara Shalhoup

was taken out of Magic City in handcuffs, having been accused of throwing a bottle at another patron and slicing his neck. And still, Meech was allowed back inside the downtown club.
    The Magic City agg assault charge was dropped a month later. It had been filed under one of Meech’s alias, Ronald Ivory, the name on his Georgia driver’s license, and authorities hadn’t yet caught on to the ruse. Two years later, he was arrested again in Atlanta, during the raid of a suspected drug house; that time he fell back on one of his earlier, Michigan aliases, Rico Seville. After he was charged with felony obstruction and misdemeanor marijuana possession (the raid was pretty much fruitless), he was released. Soon thereafter police discovered a match between Rico Seville’s fingerprints and Ronald Ivory’s, and the DEA helped draw the connection between Rico, Ronald, and Demetrius “Big Meech” Flenory.
    And then, it seemed, Meech disappeared from Atlanta. Over the next few years, some of the few hints that law enforcement gleaned to his whereabouts came from confidential informants and a minor arrest. In 2000, he was charged with DUI in L.A., and he identifiedhimself using a recently issued California driver’s license in the name of Aundrez Carothers. Again, his fingerprints gave him away, but not until after he was released. A year later, an informant told agents in Atlanta that Meech was making regular trips across the country in a white van—loaded with up to two hundred kilos of coke. According to that informant, Meech made the trip from L.A. to Detroit, where he’d typically drop off half the load, and then to Atlanta, where he’d deliver the rest. The following year, a third informant heightened the profile on Meech. He told the DEA that the kingpin from Detroit was a vengeful killer who vowed to “whack” anyone who cooperates in an investigation against him. And in 1997, Meech’s name was mentioned in connection to the Atlanta drive-by killing of the federal informant Dennis Kingsley Walker.
    Meech’s low profile didn’t last. In 2003, he was back in Atlanta, bigger and more visible than ever. He descended on the strip club circuit with newfound rigor, religiously showing up on Monday nights at Magic City—and purportedly finding himself banned from another club, 24-K, after getting into a fight with one of the dancers. This time around, he was almost always in the company of a large crew, and the crew was throwing around fistfuls of cash. The outings were among the first obvious displays of allegiance to Meech and the mysterious organization he’d created. Wads of dough aside, the crew members weren’t exactly difficult to pick out of the crowd. Proof of their affiliation was even less subtle than the blue bandannas favored by Crips, the L.A.-based gang with whom Meech’s crew was loosely affiliated, or the red ones worn by rival Bloods. Meech’s entourage wore black T-shirts printed with three letters, ones that might have puzzled onlookers at first. Yet within months, in circles not only in Atlanta but also in Detroit, L.A., Miami, and New York, the abbreviation BMF would become synonymous with the Black Mafia Family—as well as with a particular brand of partying that bordered on the absurd.
    The letters were not only displayed on members’ shirts (or, in some cases, tattooed on their forearms), but were also spelled out indiamonds hanging from their necks on platinum chains. At first, the medallions were modestly sized, perhaps an inch tall and a couple of inches across. (Referring to the diminutive carat count of one of those early chains, one crew member said in a whisper, “BMF.”) Over time, however, the medallions grew, as if along an arc drawn by BMF’s growing dominance in the cocaine trade. And so Meech and Terry would have to employ a jeweler, one of the world’s best—and that would necessitate an increasing number of trips to New York, to the posh Upper East Side shop of celebrity