BMF is inspired by the true story of two brothers who rose from the streets of southwest Detroit in the late 1980's and gave birth to one of the most influential crime families in this country.
Demetrius “Big Meech” Flenory’s charismatic leadership, Terry “Southwest T” Flenory’s business acumen, and their vision beyond the drug trade and into the world of hip-hop. They entered the music business as BMF Entertainment, serving as a promoter for several high profile hip-hop artists. However, BMF Entertainment was also a front organization to help launder drug money.
Their unwavering belief in family loyalty was the cornerstone of their partnership and the crux of their eventual estrangement. The series is about love, kinship, and capitalism in the pursuit of the American dream. Series will have a Gritty/Real/ Documentary feel while still a premium drama. Season 1 will focus on the origin story in 1980s Detroit.
The Black Mafia Family was always closely associated with hip-hop. In the organization's heyday, Demetrius “Big Meech” Flenory ran the rap label and promotions company BMF Entertainment—partially as a way to launder money. Meech and his brother Terry “Southwest T” Flenory were also known to hang around with hip-hop stars like Jeezy, Fabolous, Trina, and JAY-Z. So it was only fitting that rappers started shouting out BMF in the mid-’00s, as the drug empire’s exploits became the stuff of legend. What follows are some of the most notable Black Mafia Family references in rap history.
Think I'm Big Meech (Ugh), Larry Hoover
Whippin' work, hallelujah
One nation under God
Rick Ross has always portrayed himself as a high-rolling, larger-than-life drug-kingpin character. He even took his stage name from “Freeway” Rick Ross, an infamous L.A. drug lord who was sentenced to life in 1996 but released in 2009. In the opening verse of 2009’s “B.M.F. (Blowin’ Money Fast),” Ross compares himself not only to Black Mafia Family boss Demetrius “Big Meech” Flenory—another template for his persona—but also to Larry Hoover, the imprisoned founder of Chicago’s Street Disciples street gang.
Rocky, where you been? I been tryna make my ends meet
So I can cop that Bathing Ape or Jeremy Scott or 10 Deep
Bottles full of Rose, riding in the Benz jeep
Blowing money fast, now I'm finna think I'm Big Meech
NYC rapper A$AP Rocky nods to Rick Ross’ 2009 song “B.M.F. (Blowin’ Money Fast)” on his 2011 track “Houston Old Head.” Both songs reference Black Mafia Family head Demetrius “Big Meech” Flenory and the lavish lifestyle—designer clothes, fancy cars, expensive booze—he enjoyed prior to being busted. “Houston Old Head” appears on A$AP Rocky’s acclaimed 2011 debut mixtape, Live. Love. ASAP.
A bitch out in Atlanta eating them peaches
A bitch got more bars than where Big Meech is
In 2008, Big Meech and his brother Terry “Southwest T” Flenory were sentenced to 30 years in federal prison for running the Black Mafia Family. Nicki Minaj makes a sly reference to Meech’s prison cell at Pennsylvania’s Lewisburg U.S. Penitentiary—and her own lyrical prowess—on her 2017 track “Changed It,” a team-up with Lil Wayne.
“Changed It” arrived on the same day as two other Nicki songs, and when all three made Billboard’s Hot 100, Minaj surpassed Aretha Franklin to become the female artist with the most appearances on that chart.
Where were you when Big Meech brought the tigers in?
'Cause I was busy earnin' stripes like a tiger's skin
In 2018, “If You Know, You Know” opened Pusha T’s highly anticipated third studio album, DAYTONA. The song references Big Meech’s star-studded 36th birthday party in Atlanta, where the notoriously opulent drug kingpin spent over $100,000 on exotic animals alone. Pusha, who similarly grew up selling drugs with his brother Gene before turning to music, also shouts out the famous Flenory on the album’s lead single, “What Would Meech Do?”
Produced by Kanye West as part of his high-profile Wyoming sessions, DAYTONA scored Pusha T his highest placement on the Billboard 200 to date—climbing to #3 in 2018—and earned the Virginia-raised artist a 2019 Grammy nomination for Best Rap Album.
Big stepper like Big Meech, mhm
I was taught to go and get it straight up out the mud, lil' nigga, ayy
On the hook of “Big Stepper,” Roddy Ricch compares his impervious drive to succeed to that of the great Demetrius “Big Meech” Flenory. The song was the lead single off Ricch’s 2019 breakthrough debut album, Please Excuse Me For Being Antisocial.
Debuting at #1 on the Billboard 200, Please Excuse Me proved Ricch wasn’t playing around on “Big Stepper,” either. In 2020, the LP became the longest-running #1 debut rap album in the U.S. since 2003, when 50 Cent topped the charts with Get Rich or Die Tryin'. It also spawned the TikTok-boosted smash, “The Box,” which spent 10 weeks atop the Hot 100 that same year.
Made a half million dollars, then fell asleep on a jet
Fuck the club up, Atlanta ain’t seen this since BMF
Told my accountant, "Reinvest," gotta pound of weed for stress
I might drop two platinum albums in a year like DMX
On 2020’s “Momentum,” Russ boasts that his life of luxury rivals the extravagance of the Black Mafia Family. Elsewhere on his verse, the Atlanta-raised rapper compares the magnitude of his riches and influence to that of legendary names like JAY-Z, The Beatles, and Barack Obama.
Featuring Black Thought and Benny the Butcher and produced by 9th Wonder, “Momentum” comes off Russ’ 2020 EP CHOMP. The star-studded affair also included collaborations with major names like Busta Rhymes, Ab-Soul, and DJ Premier.
The teacher asked me what I wanted to be when I grow up,
I stood up and told her "Big Meech"
My mama ain't have much, and I wasn't good at no sports,
so you know, I had fell to the streets
It should come as no surprise that Lil Baby would rap about idolizing the legendary Big Meech on the Lil Durk-assisted “Who I Want.” The rapper, who hails from the Black Mafia Family’s native Atlanta, was charged on possession with intent to sell twice before beginning his impressive rap career in 2016. Since then, the Quality Control artist has solidified himself as one of the kingpins of hip-hop, boasting seven Top 10 hits, two #1 albums, and three Grammy nominations.
“Who I Want” comes off Lil Baby and Lil Durks’ 2021 joint album, The Voice of the Heroes. The LP marked Lil Baby’s second time claiming the top spot on the Billboard 200—his 2020 sophomore solo effort, My Turn, was the first to accomplish the feat.
$270 million. That is the reported amount of money that drug trafficking cartel Black Mafia Family (BMF) generated from the time brothers Demetrius "Big Meech" Flenory and Terry "Southwest T" Flenory started their enterprise selling $50 bags of cocaine in Detroit in 1990, up until 2005 when DEA agents raided multiple stash houses spread throughout the United States where they were selling kilos for as much as $20,000 apiece.
For a bit of context, fellow Detroiter and founder of legendary Motown Records Berry Gordy sold the label he founded in 1959 for $61 million in 1988 and then over the next 16 years sold parts of its publishing to EMI for a sum of around $322 million.
Apples and oranges? Yes. But considering that both of these operations were assembled in the “motor city,” with one cranking out an assembly line of classic records by icons named Marvin, Smokey, and Stevie, it’s a wonder that BMF made almost as much money in half the time, illegally.
And still, it can be said that even that number isn’t accurate.
“I feel like that's a conservative estimate,” says Mara Shalhoup, journalist and author of BMF: The Rise and Fall of Big Meech & the Black Mafia Family. Topping that, Meech himself is on record saying that made and enjoyed “billions” during his run.
This run included Meech giving into the temptations of relocating from the original Motown to the “Motown of the South” to launch BMF Entertainment in Atlanta in 2004. An obvious front for Meech’s trafficking empire that came in the form of a record label/club promotions company, the music the label put out didn’t make much noise, but the image they portrayed did. Whether it was the all black outfits with matching diamond jewelry they wore in photos, music videos and street DVDs or “making it rain” in the club (a phenomenon that Meech takes credit for creating), BMF’s presence was definitely seen and felt, if not heard.
Their unwavering belief in family loyalty was the cornerstone of their partnership and the crux of their eventual estrangement. The series is about love, kinship and capitalism in the pursuit of the American dream. Series will have a Gritty/Real/ Documentary feel while still a premium drama. Season 1 will focus on the origin story in 1980s Detroit.
“Terry is the one who got caught on a wiretap,” says Shalhoup about how BMFs empire started to crack. “Meech was much more careful about not talking on the phone. I think what interestingly happened enough is that if you just had Meech being Meech and being flashy in the clubs, you might not have had enough to take them down. If you just had Terry and some of Terry's stuff, you might not have had enough to take them down. I think that the two of them together, Terry on the phone, Meech in the club, was enough for the feds to really go in hard when they did and something else might've happened had those two things not co-existed at that time. In a weird way the brothers worked together to build something massive and in a weird way they worked together to implode it.”
On September 26, STARZ is bringing the story of the Flenory brothers’ beginning, rise and fall in the drug game with the aptly-titled series, “BMF.” Ahead of the premier episode, GENIUS spoke with Shalhoup and Shaw to get more insight on BMF’s impact on hip-hop culture and how they altered the idea of the “American dream.”
So for people who are not familiar with BMF, what were they and how did they come into prominence?
The BMF is one of the largest homegrown drug enterprises in America. And by home grown, I mean it wasn't Mexican cartels or outsiders coming in. They were the two brothers who founded it, born in Detroit, raised it up from scratch into a virtual, literal empire. But it was also something else. BMF was a cultural force that changed, really the face of hip-hop as a result of its efforts at an extremely pivotal time. In certain circles that's well known, but I don't think it's as widely credited as it should be.
I think the interesting thing was that Atlanta was transitioning, right? You talk about that early 2000s era, we’re just coming off of OutKast, Goodie Mob, that whole Dungeon Family crew. And now Atlanta is transitioning musically when it comes to offering different genres. Now you’re coming into the Crunk era. Now you're coming into the Snap music era.
BMF gave you a motion picture feel of what it was like to be in a club in Atlanta during that time period. Where you had these guys coming up to Club Visions in Porsche’s, Lamborghini's, the Escalades with the TVs and the back, the spinning rims. You had all this wealth from young Black men and you saw that. You saw the videos that you would see on TV, this was what was happening in real life.
When BMF decided to enter the music industry it made sense at the time, being that they were in Atlanta. But how seriously were they actually taken as a record label?
I mean, the rappers hanging out with Meech on the stage at Visions or Chaos or Velvet Room, wherever they were partying, were like the big, huge stars. You've got Jeezy, Gucci who was warring with Jeezy so they weren't up on stage together at that point in time. But they were all kind of in this crew. Fabolous too. There were all kinds of rappers in the orbit of BMF.
But Bleu DaVinci, who was the sole person signed to Meech's label, BMF Entertainment. He didn't sell records the way these other guys sold records. He wasn't considered a star, the way those other guys were considered stars.
Meech, who I had the pleasure of getting to talk to him at one point, mentioned that the high point of his entire run was, "pushing Jeezy." He helped bankroll a lot of rappers in ways that weren't formerly on his label, but he was helping to give infusions of money when some major labels wouldn't have touched them.
Bleu had a music video for his song “We Still Here” where they were riding around in the Porsche’s around the city of Atlanta. E-40 and Fabolous, were featured on the track. It shows you the lifestyle of BMF. It doesn't really sound good, but you can actually see what they were actually doing, going to the clubs, spending a lot of money, a lot of women. A lot of the cars that were in the video, I'm sure they owned all the cars.
I don't think people really kind of caught onto Bleu musically because he wasn't really from Atlanta. So you didn't really have that Atlanta swag when it came to music. But as far as the lifestyle is concerned, visually people still respected the lifestyle that they were living, even though the music really wasn't being taken seriously.
Around that same time, Jeezy was starting to make a name for himself as a new artist but his profile seemed to rise even more through his affiliation with BMF. What kind of role did BMF play early-on in his career?
[Jeezy] had great music that he was offering but, from a street sense [Meech] definitely legitimized what Jeezy was doing. I remember it was a video shoot that Jeezy had and Jay-Z was there. That was during Jay-Z's reign at Def Jam. Meech pulls up to the video shoot with two Maybachs. Jay-Z only had one. So it was like Meech was like, “Yo that's Jay-Z, I got more.” It was kind of a showmanship type thing where it's like Meech is that dude who could stand in the room with Jay-Z and outshine Jay-Z. So that was a help for Jeezy, for a young artist who's coming up, being able to have that affiliation with somebody who was respected by the streets, kind of counterpoint to him and what he was doing musically.
GENIUS: For people that did not catch that connection as it was happening, they definitely got more familiar with Meech and BMF through Rick Ross’ song “BMF (Blowin Money Fast).” How much of a role do you think that particular song played in popularizing those three letters and Big Meech’s name itself?
It's almost like Jeezy sort of laid the foundation for the popularization of BMF and then people like Rick Ross and others sort of built the house on that foundation and made it so clear what Meech’s myth was going to be. At that point he was already in federal prison when that song came out, but it catapulted him to further fame for sure.
I think down south we knew what Meech was about. I think people in the Midwest knew what Meech was about, but from a national standpoint, I think that kind of almost took the brand to another level. He had Styles P on it, so he’s pretty much covering all regions with this song and it was a branding tool that kind of added to the legend of what BMF was and what Big Meech stood for. So it definitely took the brand to another level also to the point where you saw people who weren't even affiliated with BMF were in BMF shirts.
People definitely stopped wearing those shirts when the indictments started coming. 16 years after the hammer came down on the operation, how do you think BMF’s legacy is viewed?
I think it's so interesting that there was a time when the legendary crime bosses were the Gotti’s and the Gambinos and you had the Scarface posters up, right? That's who you looked to, if you were looking for the myth of the crime boss and Meech was able to supplant that for people. You don't have to have Scarface up on your wall if you want to sort of glorify or glamorize that lifestyle. You've got Meech as the poster boy for that.
Now I'm not saying that's good or it's bad, but he kind of moved over these other iconic people and then took their place. Terry too, and I don't want to downplay his significance in BMF. He was not flashy or as outwardly seen as his brother, but he was a mastermind and has a good deal of respect on the street and in the hip-hop community too.
Now I'm not saying that's good or it's bad, but he kind of moved over these other iconic people and then took their place. Terry too, and I don't want to downplay his significance in BMF. He was not flashy or as outwardly seen as his brother, but he was a mastermind and has a good deal of respect on the street and in the hip-hop community too.
I got a chance to see two episodes of the BMF series and I think what's going to happen is it's going to introduce this story to an entirely different new generation, these millennials and Gen Zers who were probably kids when all of this was happening. So it's going to add to the allure and I think once the show actually premiers in September, I think you're going to start seeing those BMF shirts more. You're going to start seeing people gravitate towards this logo or this brand more. I think you're going to see this, almost new branding of BMF and I think the legend is going to grow now.
Even though they went down for drug trafficking, and even had homicides connected to their reign, they are looked at more as champions than criminals, when compared to other cases. Why is that?
They didn't run their business in a way that was fear-based. They wanted a brotherhood. They wanted everybody to kind of be part of this thing that they could make money off of and that they didn't want competition. They wanted everybody up under them on their team. It worked pretty well as a business model actually.
I don't want to dismiss the fact that there are people who were killed. There are several homicide investigations either directly or otherwise tied to BMF. But the majority of those are cases of partying out of control, the parking lot at the club, and stupid stuff that happens when people drink a ton and have guns and they're waving them around. It was not like a vicious drug operation, like so many that we've seen the violence attached to. It was different in nature.
It's a large wealth gap between Black families and white families and so to even the playing field, even get close to the playing field, you almost have to do something out of the park, because working 9-to-5, just doesn't get it. So Meech and Terry at an early age saw their parents, hardworking people from Detroit, working in the factories. They saw that wasn't going to be the key to getting them out of the situation that they were in.
I think if you gave Meech and Terry the opportunities to run McDonald's franchises or their own franchises, they would have been the biggest restaurateurs in America. They could have actually run a legitimate business because this was a national thing. It wasn't just some guys on the street corner selling, they had national distribution. So if you took that same mind and that same knowledge and put it in a constructive place, they would have been great in anything that they did. They just didn't have the necessary tools that most families have where they can take on a business.
There's a lot of kids who get a chance to run a family business, you think about the Hiltons and this generational wealth some families just can't get rid of. So how do black families find generational wealth? How do we get to that point? Actually, if you think about most families, a lot of families, they actually rose to prominence through crime in some type of way.
You can look at the Kennedys and bootlegging. NASCAR started because these guys were actually trying to have faster cars than the police because they were running their criminal operations. Unfortunately for the Black community, using crime to build generational wealth, it just doesn't work. So for me, and I'm just looking at it from the perspective of the Black community, they may look at Meech as a figure of someone who made it out of no way.
You think about it like, the bank will turn you down for a mortgage, the bank will turn you down for a loan, right? Meech became the bank for people when a bank wouldn't loan, when a bank wouldn't care about you. It's profound on many levels and I think you're so right that in a system in which you cannot get ahead if your skin is a certain color, Meech helped bust up open that world and break those boundaries for a lot of people and that's a big deal.
There's this myth going around that Meech once had a party where there were tigers on the premises. Pusha T even rapped “Where were you when Big Meech brought the tigers in?” on “IYKYK.” Can either of you confirm this actually happened?
The invitation said “Meech of the Jungle,” and it was a whole jungle themed party. I think it was his 36th birthday. He was coming right out of house arrest, from my understanding, so it was a big deal. There were actual investigators undercover at the party who were documenting it. But yeah, there were multiple accounts of the animals at that party. I don't mean the party animals, I mean the exotic animals.
So you're saying the investigators that were there were the ones that was like, "Yo man, this dude got tigers up in his party."
They and others. I mean, there's been a lot of documentation of this party. You have to remember, this is a time when there was not even Instagram. Right now, oh my God, that party would be all over your feeds, right? But it was different back then. These guys managed to make an impression when you couldn't just show off to your friends in your follower list. This was a different time.
It definitely went down and Hannah Kang was the producer. So if anyone knows, if anyone's ever been to a party thrown by Hannah, she goes all out and she's great at creating these memorable events in Atlanta. That was probably one of her first ones that people kind of said, “Oh, wow. This is crazy.” But yeah, it definitely actually happened.
Terry was released to house arrest last May after asking to be let out early due to his health and risk of dying from COVID spreading in the prisons. Meech had three years shaved off his 30-year sentence this past summer. How do you think Meech would be received if he were let out right now?
It seems like the party would pick right back up where it dropped off. Maybe I'm wrong, but I think there'd be a sort of massive celebration of the man getting released. I don't know that there's any indication that's going to happen much earlier. I know they've shaved a few years off of his sentence, but I think that there'd be a tremendous outpouring of support for him and a lot of people excited to see him no longer behind bars.
Yeah, I definitely think that people would embrace him if he came out today or this week or whatever. If it happens 10 or 15 years from now? I don't know because that's almost an entirely different generation and sometimes as time goes on, people kind of forget.
I think if he gets out soon, I think he has a great opportunity to really go legit now because he has a brand, he has a name. I think if he puts himself in the right position, he can really be a successful person outside of the criminal aspect of what he did in the past. If he gets out, hopefully he can use his brand for good. Once the show comes out, it's definitely going to add to his legacy. Hopefully he can turn things around and actually do something positive with his name recognition.
BMF debuts on STARZ on September 26th. Watch it on STARZ and the STARZ app.
