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

Author:Shalhoup, Mara [Shalhoup, Mara]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780312383930
Publisher: Macmillan
Published: 2010-02-26T23:00:00+00:00

For the past eight months, a federal manhunt had been under way for a St. Louis fugitive named Deron “Wonnie” Gatling. Wonnie (or “Magic,” as he also was known) was the leader of a midsized BMF hub in Missouri, and thanks to an aggressive investigation in that city, several midlevel BMF members, Wonnie included, had been indicted in federal court back in September. (The indictment had brought much grief to Yogi, who had complained about it to Omari during one of their many wiretapped conversations.)

Finally, on May 11, 2005, U.S. marshals got a tip that Wonnie was hiding out at his girlfriend’s house in a northeast Atlanta suburb called Chamblee. Shortly after 2 P.M. that afternoon, a team of marshals pulled up to the house, on Anastasia Lane, and knocked on the door. The man who answered wouldn’t let the marshals inside. Instead, he said he’d speak with the homeowner, and he turned around and headed upstairs. He didn’t return, despite the marshals’ repeated knocking.

The team then split up. A few of them walked around back, to see what they might find. Behind the house, they peeked through a window and saw four men in the basement. The marshals called for the men to come outside. They did, and as they opened the door, a strong scent of marijuana followed them. The men then insisted to the marshals that they were the only people in the house.

At that point, the team out front decided to head inside the home. At the top of the stairs, the man who’d answered the door reappeared—and contradicted the men who’d just emerged from the basement. From the landing, he told the marshals that the homeowner (Wonnie’s girlfriend) was the only other person inside. Investigators called for her, and she, too, appeared at the top of the stairway.

“There’s no one else here,” she claimed.

The marshals decided to check it out for themselves. As they headed up the stairs and down the hallway, they noticed a .45 lying in the master bedroom. From there, they climbed into the attic—where they noticed footprints in the insulation, and noises coming from the far corner.

Behind the wall paneling, hidden beneath a layer of insulation, the marshals found their fugitive. Wonnie was finally in custody. But the sting didn’t end there. After discovering Wonnie, the marshals called DeKalb County police for backup. Several units pulled up to Anastasia Lane—and as the DeKalb officers walked around back, to meet the other team of marshals that was still gathered there, bullets starting whizzing by.

At least seven rounds were fired, from somewhere beyond the fence at the edge of the property. The bullets struck the house within feet of where the officers and the marshals were standing.

After pulling Wonnie from behind the insulation—and then hearing the shots outside—the marshals grabbed his phone. They saw that he had dialed a number while he was hidden back there, not long before the shooting started. The marshals asked him whom he called.

“An uncle in St. Louis,” Wonnie said.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.