January 13th, 2024. 4:15 in the afternoon, a restaurant parking lot on Winchester Road in Memphis, Tennessee. A Memphis police officer in the area heard gunshots. He moved toward the sound and found two men outside Perignon Restaurant and Event Center with multiple gunshot wounds. One of them was Anthony Mims, known as Big Juke, 47 years old, older brother of Yo Gotti, key figure in CMG, one of the most powerful rap labels in the country.
He was transported to the hospital and pronounced dead. The people inside that restaurant had gathered for a repast. They were there to eat and remember a man who had died on New Year’s Eve 13 days earlier. The man they were honoring had been at the peak of his power, the head of the drug organization thought to be the largest in Memphis history.
He had commissioned a gold pendant the size of a breastplate bordered by 84 rubies, studded with 229 diamonds, and those diamonds spelled out his name, Las Vegas Eric. He had been gone from the game for over 30 years when he died, and his funeral still got someone killed. That is the whole story compressed into three sentences.
If you want the version with everything in it, the version that makes sense of how a kid from the south side of Memphis ended up with his name spelled in diamonds, how the government sold that name at auction while he was in federal prison, how his organization connected to a California cocaine pipeline that moved hundreds of kilos through a Memphis nightclub, how his family’s world shaped the early childhood of one of the biggest artists in hip-hop, and how a repast for a man that 30 years later became the occasion for the next murder in a city
that does not easily finish the stories it starts. That story is longer. That story starts in 1960 and it does not end until January 13th, 2024 in a parking lot on Winchester Road. Crystal City, Virginia, August 1st, 1992, a hotel ballroom, a government auction. 2,000 pieces of jewelry laid out across tables, watches, rings, gold chains, all of it stripped from drug dealers across 133 cases in 16 states.
Most of it flashy, some of it beautiful, and then one piece that stopped the whole room cold. A gold pendant the size of a breastplate bordered by 84 rubies, studded with 229 diamonds, and those diamonds spelled something out across the face of it. Las Vegas Eric. The auctioneer shook his head. A Miami wholesaler leaned over to the person next to him and said it could never be resold except to someone named Eric or to someone willing to break it apart for the stones alone.
The man who commissioned that pendant was already doing 10 years without parole in a federal facility somewhere in the United States. The government owned his name now. They were selling it by the diamond. The auctioneer looked at it and offered the most honest assessment the moment deserved. Some of it, he said, is horribly ugly.
The whole auction brought in about a million dollars split between the Marshal Service and the local law enforcement agencies that had helped build the underlying cases. Las Vegas Eric was somewhere in a federal correctional facility while strangers in a hotel ballroom argued over what his name was worth in carats.
That pendant is the beginning and the end of the Eric Boone story told quickly. If you want the version with everything in it, the version that actually makes sense of how a kid from the south side of Memphis ended up with his name spelled in diamonds and his organization named in federal court documents and his funeral serving as the occasion for the next generation’s most public murder, that story is longer.
That story starts in 1960 and it does not end until January 12th, 2024 in a parking lot on Winchester Road. Memphis, Tennessee, June 30th, 1960. The same year a Memphis attorney named Benjamin Hooks was fighting segregation cases in courtrooms across the city. The same city where a garbage strike eight years later would bring Martin Luther King Jr. to his final days.
Memphis had that kind of weight to it. Beautiful and brutal in equal measure. A city that could inspire a movement and break a man in the same breath, sometimes at the same time, sometimes in the same building. Eric Eugene Boone was born into the south side of that city. And the south side of Memphis in the 1960s and into the 1970s was not a place that handed you options.
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The racial geography of the city was locked in tight in ways that were not accidental and not incidental. They were designed. Redlining had determined which neighborhoods black families could buy into >> >> and which they could not. White flight was already beginning its long arc outward from the city center toward the suburbs, taking the tax base with it and leaving behind neighborhoods that the city’s power structure had already decided it was not going to invest in.
Good schools, good streets, good jobs, those were on the other side of an invisible line that most people in Eric Boone’s neighborhood never crossed. Not because they lacked the will to cross it, but because the line was maintained by systems that predated them and that they had no power to dismantle.
Memphis as a whole was a city built on its position as a distribution hub. Its location at the intersection of major rail lines and river traffic had made it a commercial center for the mid-south for over a century. But the industrial base that had briefly provided decent wages for black workers in Memphis during the unionization drives of the 1940s and 1950s was already beginning to thin by the time Boone was born.
Deindustrialization hit Memphis in the 1970s and 1980s in the same wave that hit the Midwest, hollowing out the manufacturing sector that had provided the closest thing to economic mobility available to working-class black families. By the time Boone was a teenager, the legitimate economic landscape available to a young man from the south side of Memphis was narrow and getting narrower.
What you had was the block. What you had was family. What you had was your own eyes watching everything. Calculating everything. Looking for the angle that the system was not going to provide for you. By his mid-20s, Eric Boone had calculated his move and the move he made was one of the most sophisticated that Memphis had ever seen from someone who had come up with nothing.
Here’s the thing about timing. And timing is everything in this story. The Bone organization was built on powder cocaine, not crack. That distinction matters more than most people who were not living through that era understand. Crack did not explode across American cities until 1984. By 1987, it was available in all but four states in the country.
The epidemic hit hardest between 1984 and 1990, reshaping entire communities, flooding streets, and triggering the most aggressive federal sentencing laws in a generation. The Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986 created the 100-to-1 sentencing disparity between crack and powder cocaine that would imprison a generation of black men for quantities that would have resulted in minimal sentences for powder offenses.
But Bo Rhone was already moving before all of that. He built his operation in the narrow window just before crack changed everything. The last era when powder was still king. When a man who controlled a direct pipeline from Los Angeles all the way to Memphis could sit at the top of an entire city’s drug economy without the federal government’s crack era sentencing machinery fully bearing down on him.
He built something in that window. And what he built was, by every measure the federal record offers, frankly impressive in the most uncomfortable way possible. He did not just build a drug organization, he built a family. And that word is not used loosely here. Some of the people who came into his circle did not just work for Eric Boone. They took his name.
They called themselves Bones. Not because they were born into it, but because they chose it. Because in that world, the name meant something. It meant you were connected to something real, something organized, something that was moving weight while everybody else was moving corners. The Bowen family, part blood, part chosen, all in.
>> >> At the center of it, a kid from the south side of Memphis who grew up watching a city that had no plans for him and decided to make his own. Every serious drug operation needs three things: a product, a pipeline, and a front. Eric Bowen had all three. And the way he assembled them from the south side of Memphis in his mid-20s was a demonstration of organizational intelligence that his own attorney would later describe in terms more suitable to a business school case study than a federal sentencing hearing. The product
was powder cocaine, high quality, coming directly from Los Angeles, California. Not from a middle man in Nashville, not from some connect two cities over. From Los Angeles direct. Bowen went to the source, built the relationship, and locked it in. The California supplier was a woman named Sheron Knox.
The arrangement was simple and efficient. Memphis money went west, Los Angeles cocaine came east, clean, profitable. Federal court records document exactly how it worked, and the testimony in subsequent trials is as precise as any business ledger. The pipeline ran like clockwork. Couriers carried cash, hundreds of thousands of dollars at a time, from Memphis out to Los Angeles.
One documented run, >> >> confirmed in the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals record, involved $140,000 in cash being exchanged for 8 kg of cocaine. 8 kg in a single run. And that was not the ceiling. That was one trip the feds managed to document with the specificity required to survive a pellet review.
By the time FBI surveillance cameras were catching the operation, the amount of money moving through a single meeting on a single afternoon was somewhere between a hundred thousand and a hundred and seventy thousand dollars. The front was a Memphis nightclub called Mr. B’s. The Bone family owned it.
It was a real business. >> >> People went there, music played, drinks were poured, and somewhere behind all of that, the clearinghouse for a cocaine empire was running his books. The nightclub gave the money somewhere legitimate to flow into and flow out of. It gave the organization a public face.
A reason for people to come and go. A social hub that made the network of relationships around it look, to anyone not paying careful attention, like the ordinary social geography of a Memphis club owner and his family and friends. Bowen was very specific to his attorneys and to anyone who ever asked about his own role in all of this.
He said >> >> he never touched the cocaine, not once. He positioned himself as the architect, the man who built the structure, managed the relationships, and gave the orders. The product moved through other hands, always. And that distance was not accidental. It was by design. It was the same principle that every serious organized crime figure who has ever operated above the street level >> >> has tried to apply.
The further you are from the physical product, the harder the government’s job becomes. At one point, federal agents placed a tracking device on Bowens car. Standard surveillance tactic, the kind of move the FBI used constantly in that era. >> >> They parked down the street and watched, and then someone walked out of Bowens house, found the tracker, pulled it off the car and went back inside.
No panic, no confrontation, no running. Somebody just walked out, handled it, and walked back in. Bowen kept operating. The feds kept watching. The cocaine kept moving. Over 100 kg of it by the time the courts finally tallied the numbers. 100 kg through a nightclub, through a woman in Los Angeles, through couriers carrying suitcases of cash across state lines, through a man who, by every account he ever gave, never once put his hands on the product.
September 17th, 1987, FBI surveillance cameras are rolling on a house on Monet Street in Memphis. Who walks through the door? Eric Bowen. And beside him, Janet Bowen. They’re carrying a briefcase. Inside that briefcase, money. The kind that does not have a pay stub attached to it. They sit down with the woman who lives there, and by the time they leave, between 100,000 and 170,000 dollars has been counted, sorted, and handed off.
That is one afternoon, one house, one camera the family did not know was there. Janet was not just present that day. On a separate occasion documented in federal court proceedings, she personally took delivery of 7 kg of cocaine from a co-conspirator. 7 kilos handed directly to her. She told the man who delivered it she was taking it to another location.
No hesitation, no drama, just business. Then there was Tony Anthony Bowen who would later flip and testify for the government. But before he was a witness, he was a participant walking into that same Monette Street house and walking out with somewhere between 75,000 and 100,000 dollars in a single visit.
>> >> He knew exactly where the money was and exactly where it was going. He was inside the machine. And then there was Linda Faye Mims, Bowen’s sister-in-law. Her house on Monette Street was not just a family home. It was a node, a collection point, a place where product and money changed hands with enough regularity that the FBI set up a camera outside and just let it run.
When agents finally executed their search warrant, they found a loaded .38 caliber revolver and trace amounts of cocaine. Linda Faye Mims was convicted and sentenced to 84 months in federal prison. Seven years for a woman whose brother-in-law insisted he never touched the product. Here is the point where the story stops being just another 1980s drug case and turns into something that connects across decades in ways that Memphis has never fully stopped living.
The Mims family, that name specifically cuz Eric Bowen was not just connected to his own bloodline. He was a former business partner of the aunt of two boys growing up in Memphis at the exact same time his organization was running at full power. Those two boys were Anthony Mims, known as Big Juke, and his younger brother Mario Mims, who the world would come to know as Yo Gotti.
Yo Gotti >> >> was born May 19th, 1981, which means during the peak years of the Bowen organization, 1985 through 1987, he was 4, 5, and 6 years old. A child, but not a child who was insulated from any of it. >> >> He has spoken publicly about what his household looked like growing up. His mother, his aunts.
He described it plainly in multiple interviews over the years. Everybody in my family hustled in some kind of way. He talked about going to the kitchen as a small child and finding bags of money in the deep freezer >> >> when he was looking for a Popsicle. You go looking for something cold to eat, you find a hundred thousand dollars instead. That is the environment.
That is the normalization. The Bowden organization was not just moving cocaine through Memphis. It was building an environment, an infrastructure, a culture, a normalized understanding of what a certain kind of life looked like and what it could produce. Whether that is legacy or damage depends entirely on who got hurt and who got paid.
In Memphis, the answer to that question has rarely been clean. >> >> Every organization has a weak point, and nine times out of ten, that weak point is not a bad deal, or a failed shipment, or even a surveillance camera on Monet Street. It is a person. His name was Earl Woods, and before you picture some scared corner boy looking for a way out, understand what Earl Woods actually was.
He was not peripheral, >> >> he was not some low-level runner who caught a minor charge and panicked. He was inside the machine, he stored the drugs, he transported the money, he made the deliveries, he rode in the vehicles going to Los Angeles and back. He was the kind of man who knew where everything was because he had personally carried most of it, which made him the most dangerous kind of informant there is.
The kind who does not need to speculate or reconstruct from the outside, The kind who was there. When Earl Woods started talking to the FBI, he did not just give them names. >> >> He gave them the whole architecture. Dates, dollar amounts, addresses, the specific mechanics of how cocaine moved west to east and how money moved east to west.
He gave them Sheran Nocks in Los Angeles. He gave them the Monet Street House. He gave them the meetings, the handoffs, the counting sessions. He handed the federal government a complete picture of an organization that had been running for years without a single federal charge because Bowan had been careful, because the insulation had held, because the structure was designed exactly to prevent what Earl Woods was now doing.
The thread got pulled. The whole thing came down. November 29th, 1989, a federal grand jury handed down an indictment. Eric Bowan plus more than 20 co-defendants. The whole network charged under 21 United States Code sections 841 and 846 conspiracy to possess cocaine with intent to distribute. The case carried the name of the man who built it. The Bowan organization.
Official, on the record, federal. Here’s the part that surprised anyone who expected a different ending to the courtroom chapter. Eric Bowan pleaded guilty early. He did not fight it in court. Did not put his co-defendants on the stand to tear each other apart. Did not drag the case out for years the way a lot of kingpins do, cycling through lawyers, filing delay after delay, hoping somewhere along the line the jury starts to doubt the whole thing.
He took his deal and then, as the Memphis Daily News later put it, he quickly faded into obscurity while his co-defendants went to trial one by one, each conviction a new chapter in the federal record of what he had built. Each appeal adding more pages to a paper trail that would still be sitting in law libraries decades later.
>> >> His sentence, 10 years without parole. And while he was inside the US Marshals were in a hotel ballroom in Crystal City, Virginia putting his life on a table for strangers to bid on. The watches, the chains, the rings, and yes, that pendant. 229 diamonds spelling Las Vegas Eric bordered by 84 rubies the size of a breastplate sitting under auction house lights while a Miami wholesaler told anyone who would listen that it was essentially worthless unless you knew someone named Eric or
were willing to dismantle it stone by stone. The whole auction brought in about a million dollars. Las Vegas. Eric was somewhere in a federal facility while strangers argued over what his name was worth. He got out and then the Memphis Daily News described what followed with a phrase that lands harder than any indictment language in the entire record.
He quickly faded into obscurity. >> >> That is the sentence. The man who built the largest drug organization in Memphis history, who moved over 100 kg of cocaine through a direct pipeline from Los Angeles, who commissioned a gold pendant the size of a breastplate with his name spelled out in 229 diamonds, faded into obscurity picking up smaller charges, moving through the system quietly, nobody watching anymore.
But what that phrase does not tell you is what was happening to his body during those years. His own attorney standing in front of a federal judge in a later proceeding laid it out plainly. Boone had been using cocaine regularly for years, >> >> the same product he swore he had never touched, the same product he had built his empire around and maintained his careful distance from.
It had been going into his body for most of his adult life. By the time a second case caught up with him, he had already suffered multiple strokes. His health was serious. His world had shrunk to almost nothing. October 2009, DEA agents are watching a doctor’s office in Memphis. The doctor’s name is Daniel Farrino.
He is the primary target of a long-running investigation into prescription drug trafficking. He has been writing prescriptions through the back door of his office, Xanax, Lortab, hydrocodone, to people who fill them and resell them on the street. And one of the people walking out of that office on an October afternoon in 2009 is Eric Boone.
Agents stop him. They search him. They find 25 prescriptions in 10 different names. Not his name, 10 different names. He had been buying them from the doctor for $45 each, filling them at pharmacies across Memphis, >> >> and reselling them at a markup to street-level dealers. Let that number sit for a second.
>> >> $45. This is the man who once coordinated the exchange of $140,000 in cash for 8 kg of cocaine in Los Angeles. >> >> Now he is running a $45 prescription flip out of a doctor’s back door. The distance between that pendant and that parking lot is one of the steepest arcs in the entire history of Memphis organized crime.
And it says nothing about character and and about what cocaine does to a body over the course of a life built around it. He cooperated with investigators immediately. His attorney told the court that getting caught had probably saved his life. And 1 month after his arrest, >> >> 1 month, he had another stroke.
Federal Judge Thomas Anderson sentenced him to 3 years in federal prison. Before he did, he looked at Eric Bowan and said the line that closes that chapter >> >> better than anything else in the record, “Stay away from people like Dr. Farranow.” That is a federal judge talking to the man who once had an entire city’s drug economy >> >> running through his family’s nightclub.
3 years for $45 pill prescriptions, cooperating fully, body already breaking down. This is what the end of that kind of life actually looks like, not a shootout, not a dramatic courtroom verdict. A DEA agent in a parking lot, 25 prescriptions, >> >> 10 fake names, and a judge telling you to stay away from bad doctors.
The crown was long gone. The diamonds had been sold. The pipeline had been dismantled for two decades. All that was left was a man trying to hold himself together with whatever was available. There is a detail buried in the Memphis Daily News coverage of Bowan’s prescription sentencing that most people skipped right past, but that, once you see it, you cannot unsee.
The day of Bowan’s sentencing hearing in the same federal courthouse, two floors up, pre-trial proceedings were underway in the case against Craig Petties and the Lewis cousins. Two floors, same building, same day, one courtroom closing the final chapter on the man who built the first serious modern cocaine empire in Memphis history.
>> >> Two floors above it, a courtroom beginning the process of dismantling the organization >> >> that had come after him. Craig Petties was born in 1976, 16 years after Eric Boone. He grew up in South Memphis’s Riverside neighborhood in a tiny brick house his mother bought for $17,000. >> >> She made a little over $15,000 annually working as a foster parent and in some capacity for the school system.
He came of age in the 1980s and 1990s right as crack was reshaping every inner city in America and by his mid-20s he had built a drug empire operating across eight states with a direct alliance with the Beltran Leyva cartel in Mexico. Federal authorities documented his organization as the first black American drug group to be accepted as a peer partner rather than a subordinate by any Mexican cartel.
>> >> He was eventually sentenced to nine life sentences in 2013. The judge said Petties had committed more serious crimes than anyone he had ever sentenced in the Western District of Tennessee. His half-brother by the same father and born 32 days after him is DJ Paul of Three 6 Mafia, the group that put Memphis’s street sound on the map globally and won an Academy Award in 2006 for the song It’s Hard Out Here for a Pimp.
The line between the streets of South Memphis and its stages is in this city, more than most, not really a line at all. That was generation two. Generation three, you already know. Mario Mims, born May 19th, 1981 in Memphis, raised in the Ridgecrest Apartments by his mother and three aunts in a household he has described publicly as one where everybody hustled in some kind of way.
>> >> He went to the kitchen looking for a Popsicle and found bags of money in the deep freezer instead. His aunt was Eric Boone’s business partner during the years that Gotti was too young to understand what that meant. He named his mixtape series Cocaine Music. His second album was called from the dope game to the rap game.
The distance between biography and branding in that catalog is essentially zero. Three generations. Boone to Petties to CMG. All documented, all connected, all Memphis, all flowing out of the same Southside geography, the same structural poverty, the same invisible line between the neighborhoods the city invested in >> >> and the ones it did not.
Lineages like this one do not announce themselves. They do not hold press conferences. They just keep moving generation after generation. >> >> Each one building on what the previous one left behind. The money, the connections, the culture, the normalized understanding of a certain kind of life as the most visible path available.
Eric Boone did not recruit Craig Petties. He did not mentor Yo Gotti, but he built something, a model, a proof of concept, a standard that the city absorbed and that the next generation built on top of whether they knew they were doing it or not. December 31st, 2023. Eric Eugene Boone died on the last day of the year. He was 63 years old.
>> >> He had survived two federal cases, multiple strokes, decades of obscurity, and a body that his own habit had been quietly dismantling for years. >> >> He made it to 63 and that world, in that life, that is not nothing. That is actually something considerable. Memphis came out for the funeral.
The old heads, the family, and among them a man in a black suit who walked up to the open casket and stood there visibly emotional. Anthony Mims, known as Big Jook, 47 years old, older brother of Yo Gotti, key figure in CMG, one of the most powerful rap labels in the country. He posted a photo from the service that morning.
The caption read, “Las Vegas Eric, >> >> legendary kingpin. Legendary kingpin.” From a man who grew up in a household that had been directly connected to this very organization, who was old enough during the boom years to carry some memory of what that world looked like and what it produced. Full circle does not begin to cover it.
This was the weight of three generations of Memphis criminal and musical history concentrated into a single Instagram caption at a funeral in early January. The repast moved to Perignon Restaurant and Event Center at 63A5 Winchester Road in Memphis. Saturday afternoon, January 13th, 2024.
At 4:15 in the afternoon, a Memphis police officer in the area heard gunshots. He moved toward the sound and found two men outside the restaurant with multiple gunshot wounds. >> >> Anthony Mims, Big Jook, 47 years old, was transported to the hospital and pronounced dead. The second victim survived.
The day before he was killed, Big Jook had posted on Instagram. The caption read, “They don’t want to face you. >> >> They want to snake you. Stay alert to stay alive. Watch your back at all times.” He posted that the day before he died at a repast for the man his family had just called a legend. >> >> Surveillance footage released by Memphis police showed a white Ford Explorer with black wheels and dark tinted windows believed to be connected to the shooting.
As of January 2025, no suspects had been publicly identified. The investigation remains open. What prosecutors would later reveal in open court made the whole thing heavier in ways that are still being absorbed. During the trial of Justin Johnson, charged in the 2021 murder of rapper Young Dolph, Shelby County prosecutors alleged that Big Jook had put a $100,000 contract on Young Dolph’s life.
A retired Memphis police detective, the lead investigator on the Young Dolph case, testified that Big Jook would have become a suspect in that murder had he not been killed first. Johnson was ultimately convicted of the Dolph killing and sentenced to life in prison. The web of connections that radiates outward from Eric Boone’s death is at this point almost too dense to trace cleanly.
The man who built Memphis’s first major modern cocaine empire dies on New Year’s Eve. His relative’s funeral becomes the occasion for the murder of the older brother of one of Memphis’s biggest music moguls. That older brother was himself allegedly connected to the most consequential rap murder in Memphis since Boone’s era.
And the rapper who was killed, Young Dolph, was himself a South Memphis figure who had grown up inside the same geography that produced Boone, Petties, and the Mims family in the first place. Memphis is still writing the story he started. That is not metaphor. That is the literal truth of what happened in a restaurant parking lot on Winchester Road on a January afternoon >> >> at a meal held for a man who had been gone from the game for over 30 years, but whose name still meant something in the city he had helped
define. The Memphis Daily News once called Eric Bowan, the head of the drug organization thought to be the largest in the city. 20 years after the indictments, he was buying pills off a doctor’s back door for $45 each. 35 years after the indictments, his funeral was the occasion for another killing.
He built a pendant with 229 diamonds spelling out his name. The government sold it at auction. A jeweler said it was worthless to anyone who did not share his name or his taste. He was born in 1960. He died in 2023. He spent 63 years in a city that had given him very little at the start and that he had decided to take from on his own terms.
That is the Las Vegas Eric story. Not the pendant, though the pendant is his perfect symbol. Not the federal indictment, though the indictment is his fullest official documentation. It is a story about what South Memphis produces when the city decides that certain neighborhoods do not warrant the same investment as other ones.
About what a generation of young men does >> >> when the legitimate path is narrow and the illegitimate path is visible and organized and backed by people who have demonstrated that it works. About what happens to a body and a name and a legacy when you build something from nothing and then spend the rest of your life in the shadow of what it was.
Dependent is gone. The organization is gone. The man is gone. But in Memphis, on the last day of 2023, people still showed up. And on the 13th day of 2024, in a parking lot at a repast for the man they called the legend, the city showed once more that the stories it starts, it does not easily finish. Big Jook posted a warning the day before he died.
Stay alert to stay alive. Watch your back at all times. He was at a funeral repast. He was in a restaurant parking lot. He was surrounded by people who had known Eric Boone for decades. He did not make it out of that afternoon. >> >> Las Vegas, Eric started something in Memphis in the early 1980s in the narrow window before crack changed everything.
With a direct pipeline to Los Angeles and a nightclub and a family willing to hold the whole thing together. He swore he never touched the product. The product eventually touched him anyway. That is the oldest rule in the game and it does not make exceptions for architects, for men who insulated themselves carefully, or for anyone carrying 229 diamonds with their name in them. The city keeps writing.
The story is not done.
Disclaimer : This content may be created by AI for entertainment purposes. Any resemblance to real persons, events, or places is coincidental.
