- 5 days ago
Category
📺
TVTranscript
00:00Demetrius and Terry Flannery were very close growing up.
00:18Terry was the boss.
00:20He was the Don.
00:22Just like in any business, you gotta climb the ladder.
00:25Terry had to have the business part.
00:27I had the street part.
00:28Demetrius had all the crews in check.
00:31They were getting rich and getting rich quick.
00:34Naturally, this breeds rivalries.
00:37The first couple chapters of the BMF story,
00:40the number one villain is Leighton Simon.
00:43Leighton, at the time, we looked up to.
00:46Leighton Simon saw his brother murdered in cold blood.
00:50Sometime retaliation is a must.
00:53One night, someone ran up on me with the pistol
00:56and tried to place it to my temple.
01:02Everybody move like brothers.
01:05Everybody move like brothers.
01:07Everybody's shining like new money.
01:21There ain't no mother fool like this in the world.
01:27There ain't no mother fool like this in the world.
01:29There never will be.
01:30Never will be.
01:31Never will be.
01:32Never will be.
01:33Never will be.
01:34I was getting into my Mercedes, and the guy was laying in the bushes across the street
01:51by the church.
01:51The guy had the pistol pointed here, so I slapped the pistol away from me.
02:06As the pistol was leaving, he shot me here, right up under my eye.
02:13I heard gunshots, and I'm still in the door looking.
02:26All kind of things run into my head.
02:28I was praying he wasn't dead, and I'm worried about having to follow this child.
02:36The nudging of the gun was clear.
02:39He was nudging me in my side, checking to see if I was dead.
02:42And when I jumped up, I wrestled for the gun, and he panicked and ran back and just started
02:48shooting the car.
02:51I think I shocked him still being alive.
02:54Eventually, Thierry got up.
02:56There was a sight of relief, and he ran up to the house.
03:00Obviously, my heart's racing.
03:02The adrenaline's going.
03:04I'm still alive.
03:05I'm blessed to still be alive.
03:07Ran to the bathroom, started throwing water on my face, rinsing the blood, thinking that
03:11I was going to stop the blood.
03:12When he went into the restroom, I realized he was shot in his eye.
03:16That's when an adrenaline started running and racing, and blood started shooting out.
03:20She kept saying, you got to go to the hospital.
03:22She's pregnant.
03:23You got to go to the hospital.
03:24I said, I'm not going to the hospital until my brother get there.
03:26I called Rich, tell him he had been shot and wanted to meet him at the hospital.
03:32Back then, you felt a person could get you to the hospital.
03:36You're not safe even in the hospital.
03:38The talk of the town at that time was when Maserati and Rick got killed at the hospital.
03:44Maserati was famous in Detroit for hustling drugs.
03:48Maserati was taken to the hospital and was alive and well.
03:54Someone entered the hospital and executed Maserati.
03:58This is the first time in the hospital's 50-year history there has been a shooting inside.
04:04So I wasn't going to the hospital tonight.
04:06I got shot until my brother came.
04:08Rhonda says, me just go meet us at the hospital.
04:11We got to go.
04:12We got to go.
04:13I didn't even think about a gunman outside that just shot my kid's father.
04:17And we jump in the car and pull it off.
04:20I put him in the car and I rushed him to the hospital.
04:24I ran every stop sign.
04:27When we got to the hospital, the police was pulling up and me just pulling up with Mac 11s in the car.
04:33It's crazy.
04:35Trying to walk into the hospital with machine guns.
04:39I was kinda getting the phone calls as a buffer for my mom.
04:47It was quite a shock to the family because you're traumatized each and every time.
04:52No parent wants to go through that.
04:54You know, that's a nightmare no parent wants to experience.
04:59When he got to the hospital, we rushed him into surgery.
05:02This doctor's looking into my eye and he's going, hmm, hmm, hmm.
05:08And I'm seeing the weariness and the look on his face.
05:12And I'm saying, what's wrong, doc?
05:14And he's not telling me.
05:15And he says, I'm gonna tell you the truth.
05:21He has glass still in his eye.
05:23And the gunshot wound left his retina permanently damaged.
05:27Terry lost vision due to the retina detached.
05:33Now, my mind's racing.
05:35I'm thinking, who could have did this?
05:39We only had one beef at that time.
05:41So, automatically, it points to Mr. Seidman.
05:48So now you're thinking, revenge.
05:53I had a saying, police men get shot.
05:55Fire men get burned.
05:57And gangsters go to prison or get killed.
06:01So, I knew what I signed up for.
06:03With the streets, comes the violence.
06:07It wasn't never a thought to lead a game.
06:09It was more, we gotta do more to protect ourselves.
06:18It's really a tough thing to deal with permanent damage
06:23and deformity to your body.
06:25I started always trying to keep a pair of glass on,
06:28just walking with my head down.
06:31You become self-conscious, in a sense.
06:34Just overall, it changed everything for him.
06:38I really, really had low self-esteem issues from the incident.
06:42I went back in the mindset, I was back in my younger days,
06:47when my parents used to argue,
06:49and I tried to not be seen from being a nervous child.
06:54I can look at old pictures and then look at the difference.
06:58People always compare you to your brother,
07:01to where, you know, I once looked a certain way.
07:04I guess that's why during the course of our journey of hustling,
07:08I kind of stayed more out the way.
07:12Out of the lamplight.
07:14That probably definitely played a role.
07:19I think trying to continue to provide for his family,
07:22his self, and then you have a child.
07:26So, I think it was a lot of different factors
07:29that played a part in him standing the game.
07:31After Terry was shot,
07:36things were falling apart pretty quickly in Detroit
07:40in terms of stability.
07:43Detroit once was called the city beautiful.
07:47It is now called the murder capital of the United States.
07:51Law enforcement was going after low-level street dealing.
07:54So, for the 50 boys,
07:55there was an inevitable meeting of the minds
07:58about where do they go from here.
08:00They decided to go from retail to wholesale
08:03because when you're wholesale, you make more money
08:06and there are buffers between you and the street
08:09and that makes things safer for you.
08:12Our motivation was to break away from Bedrick,
08:15but a lot of guys back then didn't sell weight to younger guys.
08:19They kind of just wanted them as workers.
08:21This call is fine.
08:22Deletrious plenary.
08:24An inmate at a federal prison.
08:26We was trying to get it.
08:28We weren't trying to stay down there
08:30just selling no fucking rocks.
08:33Terry, Meach, and Derrick wanted to leave.
08:36They wanted me to give them weight.
08:39Okay?
08:40I wasn't ready to give them weight.
08:41We started saving our money and we started to buy.
08:44You know, let me get a half a brick.
08:46Let me get one brick.
08:47Let me get two bricks.
08:48Let me get three bricks.
08:49Then it started being a problem.
08:52Meach said, you have a problem with us.
08:54We want to do our own thing.
08:55I said, man, go for it, man.
08:57Because, you know, we still cool.
08:59By us, fine.
09:00Now we're able to run around to whoever got it.
09:05At this point, they aligned with a single wholesaler
09:09in Detroit by the name of Harold Mills.
09:12Harold was a cool guy.
09:14He ran his operation from early in the morning
09:16to five o'clock.
09:18He taught Meach and I, action is in the weight game.
09:22You need to just save your money and work for yourself.
09:26Harold Mills was a mentor in the drug world
09:29in terms of really teaching them
09:31the wholesale drug game in Detroit.
09:33The ins and outs.
09:35A graduate course on wholesale drug dealing.
09:40First met Cherry and Meach through Harold.
09:42So we got to talking.
09:44Name ringing in the streets.
09:45My name ringing in the streets.
09:47So Harold was the supplier.
09:49Harold knew the game really good.
09:52Always had a plug.
09:54Always had the best stuff.
09:55Now they were big time players in a big time game.
10:00Making a lot of money.
10:01But this put both Terry and Demetrius
10:04on the radar of law enforcement.
10:10I studied criminal justice science in college
10:13and planned to go into law enforcement.
10:16Went to Quantico to the academy
10:18and then was assigned to the Detroit division
10:22as a first assignment.
10:23I'm going to tell you that it wasn't very long
10:26after I arrived in Detroit.
10:27Southwest T, Terry Flinnery, Meach or Big Meach, Demetrius Flinnery.
10:33Their names came up and came up a little bit like mythological figures,
10:38almost like ghosts.
10:39So this is one of those cases, there were no smoking guns.
10:43There were no well-placed informants that could go talk to Terry Flinnery,
10:48get recordings or buy drugs.
10:50This was an investigation that was going to take time.
10:52Persistence, methodical approach.
10:55So there was a lot of work to be done.
11:03At this point, Harold takes a liking to Meach and I,
11:07but Harold wasn't a tough guy at all.
11:10He had a situation where some guys had robbed him
11:14that worked for him.
11:15He called for assistance to try to get his drugs back.
11:19Meach and I took a couple guys from the neighborhood
11:21and we went to deal with the situation.
11:23We had some guys with us that was going to run in the house
11:27with guns, drag the guy out,
11:29and throw him in the truck and car with us.
11:32But Harold, he was scared.
11:35He didn't want to go through with it.
11:37So the guys that Meach and I had with us,
11:40they were mad because he didn't want to go through with it.
11:44So they filled up pop bottles with gasoline
11:47and they just burnt up the new car the guy bought
11:50with some of the money that he stole the drugs with.
11:52And we had the car that was on fire in front of the house.
11:58Harold said,
11:59y'all crazy, y'all crazy.
12:01And we took off.
12:03Harold drops the two guys with us off,
12:06and he takes us to his girlfriend's on the west side.
12:11That's when I first see Tony.
12:16We get over there, I see this brown-skinned lady running out the house,
12:19nice looking and lively.
12:22Harold comes to the car, and he's panicking, telling her what we did.
12:26And she's joking with us, saying we crazy.
12:30I said to Meach, man, I'm gonna get his girl when he's soft.
12:35That was the first time Meach really heard me react about a woman.
12:39And he said, man, you know, this is the fastest girl.
12:47Tony Montana.
12:48It was kind of like a scar face.
12:50Tony Montana told his right-hand man about Frank.
12:54He's soft.
12:55Man, that's the boss of the lady, okay?
12:57He's gonna get his kid.
12:58Fuck.
12:59The boss of the lady.
13:01That guy's soft.
13:02He said, man, he's soft.
13:04He can't even defend her.
13:05He's scared we're gonna blow up the car.
13:07He's just talking too loud.
13:09That was the first time I seen it.
13:15When I first met Terry and Meach, he probably was about 17, 18,
13:19and Meach probably about 19.
13:21At this point, I'm already a mature woman with children,
13:26with a home, credit cards, bills, responsibilities.
13:31Before that, I grew up middle class from Detroit, Michigan,
13:35on the west side.
13:37That was my mom's only daughter, and she kind of sheltered me.
13:42But then one day, I go to this beautiful party.
13:45This big club.
13:47It's called the Rooster Tell.
13:49And it just turned my whole life around.
13:52I had never had champagne.
13:54And they had champagne.
13:56And the colors, and the big ball.
14:00Everybody looked so fly.
14:02It was all the players in there.
14:04You know, the pimps, the drug dealers.
14:06And I'm like, this is the life I want to be.
14:09It was like I went in that door and came out,
14:11and I was a whole different person.
14:13This is where I first met Hero.
14:17Hero, he was like a mid-level drug dealer.
14:20I wanted to be a part of his life, whatever he was doing.
14:23But then the more power he had, the more money he had,
14:26he changed.
14:28He's getting paranoid.
14:29Every little thing would set him off.
14:31It really got physical.
14:32I'm feeling like, almost like his property.
14:36Tony and I got close.
14:38And I knew Hero was abusive.
14:40Her and I just would talk all innocent.
14:43She never probably really knew at that time that I was trying to pursue her.
14:48She would tell me a lot of her personal controversial things.
14:53Some things I didn't want to share with my friends or my family
14:56because I still was selling drugs with Hero.
15:00So, Terry was always a great listener.
15:02And I guess I was always venting about something.
15:05So, he was like, he just became somebody that I could trust
15:08and I could talk to, not knowing that he's infatuated with me.
15:13But I'm still looking at him like a little young kid,
15:17not anybody that I would date.
15:19Then, Hero was arrested when he was sentenced to seven years
15:29in state prison at that time.
15:32Hero goes to prison and he's out of the way.
15:38So, Tony and I would hang out.
15:41I started going out with her and the kids.
15:44Sometimes, I just take the kids to the arcade with my son
15:49and give her a break.
15:51Eventually, we become a couple.
15:54When I decided to be with Terry, I really set my boys down
15:57and asked them, are they okay with it?
16:00And it was like, yeah.
16:01Terry was smart by taking my cousin, Tony, and being with her.
16:06She became a prize to him.
16:09Because she knew the streets.
16:11She see things that you don't see.
16:13I'm quite sure they had pillow talk at night,
16:16how stuff is running.
16:19She's raising her son and it's kind of her and mine's thing,
16:23but I'm still going back and forth with Rhonda.
16:27I knew she was interested in him because, you know,
16:30he had that women intuition, the way she was acting.
16:33When I'm sneaking, using the phone and calling Rhonda,
16:36and, hey, yo, how's the kids? How you doing?
16:40It was heartbreaking, you know.
16:42I took it in my own hands and told Terry
16:44he can go ahead and live his life.
16:47Because I'm not going to be disrespected
16:48and women come with the gang.
16:50In the early 90s, Harold Mills takes a big federal bust
17:00and has to go to prison.
17:02Their go-to wholesaler is now locked up
17:05and they have to then go cultivate other supply lines.
17:10Demetrius left to go find supply sources
17:13in other parts of the country.
17:16You know, we used to just be so thirsty,
17:19thirsty just to make as much money as possible.
17:22When it came time to leave Detroit,
17:24that was just, that was more of my decision
17:27to take my show on the road.
17:29As Demetrius is going around the country,
17:31Terry's minding the shot back in Detroit,
17:34financing Demetrius' travels.
17:37At this point, I had a nice group of guys already,
17:41and I was actually moving things around the city myself in Detroit.
17:46He was pushing the change. He wanted to change.
17:48He didn't no longer want to be Little Terry anymore.
17:51He wanted to evolve.
17:53When Demetrius leaves Detroit
17:56and kind of lives a nomadic existence,
18:00jumping between Atlanta, Cleveland, L.A., St. Louis, New York,
18:05throughout his travels, he's networking,
18:09and he's starting to envision an infrastructure
18:14for this colossal drug empire.
18:19But he didn't have the supply line to actually do that.
18:23Demetrius had the intuition to understand
18:26that the new drug game in the 90s was coming out of Mexico
18:31and took a trip to L.A. to try to sniff out a new source
18:37and ended up meeting Wayne Joyner, a.k.a. The Wayneiac.
18:45They had a plug back in the day,
18:47and he always told them,
18:48if there was ever a drought on the East Coast,
18:51always go west.
18:52It was just like the gold mining days.
18:53Go west, young man. Go west.
18:55And they kept that in the forefront of their heads,
18:57and they did it.
18:58At the time, Terry was sending money from Detroit.
19:03We didn't have no nothing, man.
19:05I think we had six pieces of Popeyes
19:08for about three days between both of us.
19:10Shit, my roof was leaking.
19:12Transmission went out in my car.
19:13I was going through a divorce.
19:14No air condition, you know, so it was rough.
19:17By the time we buy a little weed,
19:19get some gas in the car, pay for the rental car,
19:21get something to eat, that money was gone.
19:24Terry was like, I can't keep sending money.
19:26Just got to come back, you know.
19:29They were both at a low point.
19:31Just a few here and a few there,
19:33you know, just trying to get what they get their teeth on
19:35at that time.
19:40Harold called me on a three-way from prison,
19:43and he said he don't like the idea
19:45that Tony and I was friends while he's awake.
19:49I hung up on him.
19:51When Harold became aware that Terry and Tony were together
19:56and it was public, he became incensed
19:59and wanted to try to undermine his protégés
20:03as much as possible.
20:05Through some sources, we learned that a former husband
20:10of Tenisa Welch was incarcerated.
20:13He had been caught with several kilos of cocaine.
20:15He was charged, convicted, sentenced.
20:18And while he was incarcerated, I went to interview this person
20:21hoping that maybe we could garner some information
20:23that would help us.
20:24What we learned was that Tenisa and Terry
20:27started a romantic relationship.
20:29The former husband was extremely jealous, scornful.
20:37Part of the information we gathered also was that
20:40this person used to be a supplier of multi-kilos of cocaine
20:44to Terry Flinnery,
20:46which gave us, the investigators, the opportunity
20:49to try to crack the surface,
20:52try to build a case around Meech and Terry.
20:55The last few years before Harold came home,
21:01the buzz was around that I was with Terry.
21:04And as time went on throughout his sentence,
21:07I told him, like, you know, when you come home,
21:10I don't want to be with you.
21:11I'm thinking, okay, this man is okay with it.
21:14I know we got other women coming to see him on his visits.
21:17I didn't think the punch would be that hard.
21:19Eventually, when he comes home,
21:21Harold is telling me we don't have any issues,
21:25life goes on, and he's moved on.
21:28But in the back of his mind, he has another plan.
21:31One night, my girlfriend called me.
21:35We had this brief conversation,
21:38not knowing that Harold and her, they are dating.
21:42He's only dating her to get back at me
21:45and to find out information about me
21:48and what I'm doing and my whereabouts.
21:52She asked me to meet her at a bar.
21:56Get to the bar.
21:58And something told me in my spirit,
22:01don't go in.
22:03I drove off.
22:05He must have seen me.
22:07He beat me back to my street.
22:10He came one way and I came the other way,
22:13and he took his car and ran dead into me.
22:23He pulled me out the car and was beating me with a gun.
22:26His intent was to probably kill me that day.
22:29Somebody told him, stop, don't do it.
22:32And then he just walked away and left me there.
22:35I was out of town and I flew back in town the next day
22:40after I found out that it was an argument and a fight.
22:44I was trying to be reasonable about the situation,
22:47but when I go see how she's all beat up, we got an issue.
22:52I was really messed up.
22:54My arm was broken.
22:55My nose just really beat up.
22:58My stepdad came in, my mother, and my stepdad cried.
23:02That's when I knew it was bad.
23:05Terry was very upset and they were getting into this squabble
23:09of, we gonna do this and that.
23:11And I'm like, you can't do that
23:13because that's still my kid's father.
23:18How do it look like you're gonna kill their father
23:22or their father's gonna kill you?
23:24Her being more mature,
23:26she was trying to assess the situation.
23:29I never talked about that incident when nobody,
23:34and even if Terry tried to bring it up,
23:36didn't wanna talk about it.
23:37I wanted it to go away like it never happened.
23:41You know, everyone thinks surveillance is easy,
23:54and it's not.
24:01You're following a car and you're looking at the guy.
24:04He looks up and he looks in that rearview mirror,
24:06and you know you gotta take the next turn.
24:08You wanna get intel on these guys.
24:10You gotta know who these guys are,
24:12who they're connected with, where they go.
24:16Then you start watching their players.
24:19One day, I started seeing some funny things going on
24:24with, like, surveillance.
24:26We paid close attention to our surroundings.
24:31But at the time, I didn't know Peril
24:33was working with the government,
24:35trying to help them build a case against us.
24:37I ended up going to the jury store one day.
24:40I see the agents
24:42in the parking lot of the jury store.
24:44When I leave out,
24:46I drive to Tony's house,
24:48and I tell her, listen,
24:50I seen some things I don't like.
24:52And she looks out the window and says,
24:53yo, and now they outside my house.
24:55Meech is in L.A.
24:58I call Meech, and I said, yo, I see some things
25:03I really don't like.
25:04Surveillance on various cribs.
25:07So Meech says, hey, it's sunny out here, man.
25:10Every day I don't see nothing.
25:11So the next day, I tell Tony to come get me,
25:16and we're going to go to dinner.
25:19We were going to this restaurant to eat.
25:22And I'm telling Terry, like, we're being watched.
25:25We're being followed.
25:26And he's like, you sure?
25:27I'm like, yeah, I'm sure.
25:28We're being followed.
25:29So I said, what are we going to do?
25:30We're going to eat.
25:31We're going to act really normal.
25:33And I said, what you're going to do is,
25:35you're going to get up and go to the bathroom
25:37and go out the back door.
25:39I'm going to stay here because they're going to think,
25:42you're going to come back and join me.
25:45But you leave.
25:48I slide out the back door and I disappear.
25:54Let's just leave and never look back.
26:09I'll see you.
Comments