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Black Mafia Family - Mo' Money, Mo' Problems
by: Ethan Brown
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Just after 9 p.m. on a hot and muggy night in late July 2005, a pair of chartered tour buses pulled up to Vision Nightclub & Lounge on Atlanta’s Peachtree Street for a party celebrating the release of Young Jeezy’s major label solo debut, Let’s Get It: Thug Motivation 101. Yet when the bus doors opened, it was not Jeezy who emerged but members of the storied ATL street crew Black Mafia Family (BMF).
Dressed in head-to-toe black, the hundreds-strong posse strode toward the megaclub in almost choreographed unison. “They moved like one mass, one organism,” remembers one of the party promoters. “I had never seen anything like that.” The club had expected BMF in force—they were even comped on the guest list as “+100”—but it was not prepared for an army. Panicked promoters hustled BMF through a special side entrance, VIP treatment that even Jay-Z, Ludacris, Fabolous, and Slim Thug did not receive.
Once inside, BMF awed partiers by tossing fistfuls of cash as they awaited Jeezy, who, though not officially a crew member, was considered “family.” And by the time he arrived, just after 1:30 a.m., the crowd was stoked and ready to receive him as A-town royalty. Jeezy took the stage surrounded by BMF members and employees of his Corporate Thugz Entertainment label and tore through songs like “And Then What” and “Go Crazy” with such swagger that the success of Let’s Get It seemed all but assured. Indeed, the 25-year-old rapper would move an impressive 172,000 copies of the album in its first week.
For BMF, such displays of extravagance were nothing new. Everything the group did fulfilled a fantasy of hip hop excess to the point of parody. Though BMF had established itself in Atlanta only four years earlier, it was only the latest beachhead of what the feds have called one of the most extensive illegal drug networks in America—riches that BMF’s leader, Demetrius “Meech” Flenory, 37, was only too happy to lavish on his crew.
Whenever BMF arrived at a nightclub, Meech paid everyone’s cov- er and insisted that each member have a bottle of champagne. With the group often numbering in the dozens, this sometimes meant buying out a club’s entire stock of Cristal. When the revelry pushed past dawn, Meech would invite everyone back to the presidential suite at the Swissôtel (now the Westin Buckhead Atlanta), where he would order room service for everyone, washed down with more Cris. His free-spending ways swelled the crew’s membership. “You’ve got guys coming from St. Louis, Detroit, Los Angeles, Georgia, Brooklyn, the Bronx,” said one former BMF member, who rolled with the crew in Atlanta from 2002 to 2003 and requested anonymity. “Any movement like this is gonna draw people.”
Young Jeezy was a key to their future plans. Though the rapper signed with Def Jam, his solo career would have stalled without the help of BMF’s over-the-top promotion. In 2004, Jeezy scored a deal ith Diddy’s Bad Boy label as a member of Boyz N Da Hood but struggled to get noticed in Atlanta’s mixtape scene. His independently released CD, Come Shop Wit Me, had sold a respectable 50,000 copies.
