Tim "Gotti" Baukman (left) and Alton "Ace Capone" Coles in "New Jack City: The Next Generation." In 2005, ATF agents and police were building a case against Coles, a hip-hop promoter who they believed ran a huge drug operation. When they tapped his cell phone, they found he made or received an average of 280 calls a day.
Ace Capone: Second of two parts
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Tapped Out
With surveillance and arrests, authorities close in.
Later that day, Coles appeared to abandon his usually cautious phone demeanor while talking with a woman in Baltimore. Coles complained to her that Creek had stayed in the parking lot too long and was unfamiliar with "those narc cars."
Then he asked the woman whether any of the others - in particular, the female driver of the red Honda - might have been undercover police.
"My man thought she was a cop," Coles said. "She never ordered nothing to eat."
Later, Coles was heard saying that Creek should have been more aware of his surroundings.
"Hov didn't play his mirrors," Coles said. "If he had, he would have been cool."
Instead, he was in jail.
Time running out
Early in August, about a month after the KFC bust, Alton Coles and his girlfriend, Aysa Richardson, moved into their new home in South Jersey.The two-story mini-mansion was one of about a dozen built in an upscale residential community that abutted cow pastures and cornfields a two-mile drive from the quaint antique shops and restaurants of Mullica Hill.
As Coles moved in, his time was running out.
ATF agents Michael Ricko and Anthony Tropea, who had spearheaded the investigation, had obtained search warrants and had set up 24-hour surveillance on Coles.
"They knew where he was day and night," said agent John Hageman, a spokesman for the Philadelphia ATF office.
The plan was to launch a series of coordinated "no knock" raids at dawn on Aug. 10.
More than 200 law enforcement personnel - local and county police, state police, and ATF and Drug Enforcement Administration agents - would simultaneously descend on homes and apartments in Southwest and North Philadelphia, East Falls, Chester, West Chester and South Jersey.
Many of the suspects were considered armed and potentially violent, so investigators got court approval to bust in the doors without announcing their presence.
Three hours before the raids were to begin, agents monitoring Coles' phones overheard the first of eight calls he would make that morning to Monique Pullins, a girlfriend living in North Philadelphia. The calls went out between 3:07 a.m. and 3:50 a.m. Most lasted less than a minute.
Agents heard the always cautious and now apparently concerned Coles tell her to get rid of the "black thing" he had left at her apartment - a gun, agents believed. First he told her to put it in a bag and drop it down the building's trash chute.
After she'd done that, he told her to retrieve it in the morning and "take it to work" or "leave it over somebody else house."
"Why you telling me all this?" Pullins asked.
"Evidently it a little bit of drama, but you cool. Just do what I ask you to do. . . . Nothing to get upset over. . . . All right?"
Guns and lots of cash
At 6 a.m., agents - some armed with assault rifles - launched their raids.
