BMF: The Rise and Fall of Big Meech and the Black Mafia Family

by Shalhoup, Mara

  “Miami appreciates you,” the man said, a trace of Kennedy-era Massachusetts in his ambassador’s voice, though he stumbled slightly over his words. “Thirty years ago, it was rhythm and blues, soul, all of that. It was what it was.” Motioning to Meech, Ill, J-Bo and Bleu, he continued, “This is what it is. The dichotomy, the community, the people, the culture, the variation—it’s a big event, with this group here. Unparalleled as far as peace.”

  Meech turned to face the man, stretching his grin even wider until he beamed. The glee of the smile rivaled the sparkle of his trademark diamond cross. He shook the man’s hand. “That’s what’s up,” he said, a low, friendly grumble.

  In the next scene, the “J-Bo” chapter, a large crew of BMF members arrived at South Beach strip club Teasers to celebrate J-Bo’s birthday. By then, the crew had switched outfits. This time, the four main players, as well as their followers, wore matching white jerseys printed with BMF.

  “This is one of the greatest men alive right here,” Meech said to the camera, arm slung around J-Bo’s shoulder as they walked inside the club. “It don’t get no better than this.”

  “It can’t get no better than this,” J-Bo responded.

  Meech had just set up a six-month deal with one of South Beach’s wildest nightclubs, Crobar. BMF Entertainment would host a party there every Sunday, and depending on the size of the crowd Meech pulled in, he’d get a decent cut of the money earned at the door. Crobar boasted three VIP areas, including a three-story, glassed-in, club-within-a-club, and it could accommodate 1,600 people who often paid upward of fifty dollars each. It was legitimate money earned on street cred, and Meech was ecstatic.

  On the night of J-Bo’s birthday, as with most nights that BMF was out partying in South Beach, the VIP area of Teasers was BMF’s exclusive stomping ground. For much of the night, Meech and J-Bo sat on the highest ledge within the all-red room, and rappers and BMF members pushed through the mass of bodies to pay their respects.

  “J-Bo!” a voice called out from the crowd. It belonged to the pint-sized, tomboyish rapper Da Brat. “Happy birthday, brother!” Seeing who it was, J-Bo extended an arm to pull her up, as if reaching down from a throne.

  Moments later, Meech descended from his seat alongside J-Bo to join Bleu, who was rapping in synch with one of his songs. It was playing over the club’s sound system. The VIP crowd bounced and swayed to the track, a sweaty mass to which Meech had arrived fully prepared. In one hand, he gripped a bottle of Cristal, dancing gingerly enough so as not to spill the precious champagne. In the other, he clutched a bottle of water and a hand towel, rehydration tools for his intense level of partying.

  In the DVD’s next-to-last scene, Bleu offered the camera crew a tour of the cars parked on the grounds of the South Beach house where the crew was staying. There, in matching silver, were the Lamborghini Gallardo, Rolls-Royce Phantom, and Bentley GT coupe. Opening the door of the Phantom, Bleu spoke in mock British refinement and acted out a drug transaction during which the passenger of the Rolls seeks some high-grade marijuana.

  “Do you have any Grey ‘Chronic’ Poupon blunts?” he giggled.

  “As a matter of fact, Bleu,” he said, answering his own question in the same ridiculous voice, “we have some kush.”

  “It’ll be a pleasant day, sir.”

  The DVD concluded with a soliloquy from Meech. The sun was setting, and in the breezy Miami dusk Meech stood, illuminated by a dim spotlight, in the courtyard of the lemon-tinted, Spanish-tiled home. Walled in by eight-foot hedges and a stucco privacy wall, dressed in a crisp oversized white T-shirt and staring dead-on into the camera, Meech spoke with the calm authority of a seasoned prophet, his diamond cross flickering in the cool, bluish light. He spoke plainly, offering an in-depth description of his crew’s rare camaraderie. Yet his intended audience wasn’t immediately clear. His words didn’t have the luster or substance of a business pitch. Rather, he seemed to be delivering an anti-pitch, an assertion of his independence and a testament to his prowess—not as a CEO, but as a mob boss. If Meech hoped to win over a music mogul—one who was willing to boost BMF Entertainment’s legitimacy with a distribution deal establishing the company as a major-label subsidiary—the mogul would have had to be sold on Meech’s street cred alone.

  “You don’t get nothing like this nowhere,” Meech told the camera, motioning to the group of men who, one by one, whether by stepping into the frame or by the camera zooming out, begin to fill the shadows behind him. “Everybody move like brothers, and everybody is from different places: St. Louis, Detroit, Texas, Atlanta, Cali, Florida. We got people from everywhere in our mob. Everybody move as one. Everybody is prospering in some kind of way, in their own way. Every man plays his own role. And everything starts with the leader.”

  The men in the background nodded.

  “I’m a good leader,” Meech continued, his voice rising and falling in a gravelly cadence, “so I got good people that follow. It’s simple. You can only be like the nigga that’s running your crew. If you’ve got a robbin’-ass boss, then you’re gonna be a robbin’-ass crew. If you got a real boss, who knows how to sacrifice and take the bad along with the good and show his crew how to be men, then that’s what you get. Everybody’s shinin’ like new money.”

  As he continued to speak, his movements became more hypnotic. He stepped forward and back, forward and back, giving a gentle, steady sway to his broad shoulders. He moved in time to a deep instrumental hip-hop beat, and the motion mimicked a charmer trying to tame a snake. But considering it was a camera, not a cobra, into whose eye Meech stared, there was a hint of self-consciousness to his words, a trace of him trying to convince the outside world that the hardships that have plagued other crews won’t spread to his:

  There ain’t no other crew like this in the world, and there never will be another one—not black. If niggas like this are shinin’ all together, doing shit every day, then they’re going to fall out over some money, or somebody’s going to rob, steal, or kill. I have yet to see that. All of us get along, with money. We’ve had money. Money ain’t nothing without us being together.

  And we can’t be stopped. I don’t see nobody stopping us. I don’t see no one to come after us, either. None. Nobody will ever do this again, because this many niggas and this much money can’t get along and stay together. They gonna fall out over girls or something.

  From there, he crossed into offensive territory, straying from the style of an old-fashioned sexist preacher into that of a stereotyped hip-hop player. “We don’t fall out over no girls,” Meech told the camera. “We hit ’em all. They hit my hos, I hit they hos. The ones that don’t want to be shared, then that’s your own personal one. Other than that, we ain’t fallin’ out over no hos.”

  In summation, Meech assigned a purpose to the partying and excess that filled the preceding thirty minutes of video. He might have stretched the numbers a tad, for effect, but the point was clear. Meech was answering a calling. He felt he had a responsibility to spend as much cash as possible, and he had to do it fast. Because you never know when someone might burst in and put an end to all that overkill.

  A lot of niggas don’t like to spend their money. We love to spend money. We can’t take none of this shit with us. None. Ain’t no armored trucks pulling up at no funerals. So you better enjoy this shit. Just a fool and his money won’t part. When we go out at night, whatever we spend, $50,000, $100,000 in the muthafuckin’ club, we can afford to do it, because we can’t bring it all with us. Simple.

  At about the time that the Smack DVD dropped, so did Jeezy’s street video, “Trap or Die.” It was packaged along with his album-length mixtape of the same name, which had been for sale, in various incarnations, for months. Jeezy’s DVD, which eclipsed Smack in sales, did far more to boost his career than Meech’s would. And though similar to the Smack video, down to a fatalistic mini-soliloquy from Jeezy toward the conclusion of his disc, Trap or Die felt more authentic, more like a genuine documentary compar
ed with BMF Entertainment’s stagier antics—which revolved around the label’s sole artist, Bleu. By the spring of 2005, Trap or Die sold a reported 250,000 copies. And the buzz surrounding Jeezy was bubbling up from the streets and into the mainstream.

  Daily newspapers and national magazines were building huge momentum for Jeezy’s first major-label album, Let’s Get It: Thug Motivation 101, which was scheduled for release later that year. In the months leading up to the album, Vibe called Jeezy “Atlanta’s next big thing.” He was described by the Montgomery Advertiser as “arguably the hottest rapper in the South right now.” And the New York Times christened Jeezy’s new DVD as “charming” and lauded his delivery of “tightly packed lyrics in an appealing rasp.”

  Jeezy also piggybacked off BMF’s Miami blitzkrieg. He and Bleu hosted a party at club SoBe Live with then–Philadelphia 76er Allen Iverson, and he performed at several of Meech’s Sunday night events at Crobar, along with the equal parts raunchy and sultry rapper Trina, known as “the Diamond Princess.” Even as early as March of 2005, Jeezy was a pretty big draw. His performances were attracting crowds one-thousand-people strong, all of them willing to pay twenty dollars a pop.

  Jeezy also was as skillful a self-promoter as he was a rapper. In interviews, he answered questions with the same eloquence that characterized his lyrics. And his promises, though big, were genuine.

  “When my album comes out, all the dots will connect,” Jeezy told Billboard in March 2005, four months before the album was released.

  You’re going to feel sad with me, you’re going to go through the struggle with me, you’re going to hang out with me, you’re going to hit the trap with me. You’re going to see the ’hood through a young man’s eyes who has really seen it, really felt it, really touched it, really tasted it.

  Basically, Jeezy was guaranteeing that he was the real thing.

  At the end of his Trap or Die DVD, he described, with similar authenticity, what life had been like for him thus far, a twenty-seven-year-old native of the streets who’d seen “fifty or sixty” friends fall to the game. “I ain’t had a good night sleep in ten years, because I don’t know if my motherfuckin’ door’s gonna fly open, you know what I’m saying? I still don’t know. I’m just here, my nigga. At the end of the day, I just wanna be heard, dog. However it go, if it go for good or it go for bad, I was here, and I made it this far.”

  Soon, his words became more chilling than even he could have imagined.

  A few months earlier, in the fall of 2004, Jeezy had brushed shoulders with a younger, lesser-known rapper at the downtown Atlanta shoe store Walter’s. Against the backdrop of Walter’s rainbow of Adidas and Nikes, Radric Davis, aka “Gucci Mane,” was passing out promo CDs. He offered one to Jeezy, who was “iced out” with diamonds and buying what looked to Gucci like ten or fifteen pairs of shoes. Jeezy took the CD and complimented Gucci on his skills; he’d already heard some of the up-and-comer’s tracks.

  Though they came from different territories—Gucci from Atlanta’s East Side and Jeezy, by way of Macon, from Boulevard’s Old Fourth Ward—the two rappers claimed similar backgrounds. They both professed to have lived the ghetto life. And they both had been effective in channeling their street experiences into more professional ones.

  The two rappers hit it off, and they agreed that they ought to get together in the studio. Jeezy thought a collaboration track between the two of them might work, and Gucci was game. Gucci, who had recently signed with Atlanta-based Big Cat records, was in the midst of cutting an album, and he hoped that Jeezy would contribute a few verses to one of his singles. Gucci wanted to attach some of Jeezy’s star power to one song in particular, a lighthearted track (at least compared with Jeezy’s fare) called “Icy,” which touched on rappers’ and groupies’ fascination with bling.

  When Gucci and Jeezy met in the studio, Gucci explained what he was going for with “Icy.” But Jeezy didn’t seem all that interested. That kind of stuff wasn’t really his style. The concept was too singsongy, almost cheerful held up against Jeezy’s darker repertoire. Jeezy tried to steer Gucci toward other material, but Gucci kept bringing them back to “Icy.” At the very least, Gucci wanted to pay the better-known rapper to lay down a couple of rhymes. It would be a coup for the more underexposed artist to have a guy like Jeezy on the track. Then they could move on to something else, something more Jeezy’s speed.

  Jeezy complied, rattling off his distinctive brand of poetry: “In my hood they call me Jeezy da Snowman … I’m iced out, plus I got snow, man.”

  To everyone’s surprise, including Gucci’s, “Icy” became an underground hit. In December 2004, it got heavy play on Atlanta’s influential urban radio station, V-103. Its video later earned a regular-rotation spot on BET. And when Gucci or Jeezy—or, on occasion, the two of them together—would perform the song live, the crowd would go wild, screaming the chorus.

  In the winter of 2004, Gucci and Jeezy took the stage together at Macon’s career-making hip-hop club, Money’s. Club owner George “G. Money” Willis, the fatherly benefactor of Macon’s rap scene, remembered Jeezy from years earlier, in the late ’90s. Back then, he was still Lil J and hadn’t yet left Macon for Atlanta. Even so, the young man, not yet a rapper, had big aspirations. He and his close friend, Demetrius “Kinky B” Ellerbee, were pushing a mixtape label they’d launched, called Young Gunz Entertainment. Jeezy and Kinky B were so close, they considered themselves brothers. They’d met as teenagers, at a boot camp for wayward boys, and as soon as they were out, they hit the streets with a singular purpose: succeed in the hip-hop biz. The goal was a common one in Macon’s down-and-out neighborhoods, but Jeezy and Kinky B’s combination of street smarts and business sense was not.

  G. Money had appreciated the young man’s hustle. He noticed something in Jeezy, a quality that distinguished him from other young men with similar dreams. To G. Money, Jeezy was a born star. And now, with Jeezy filling his club with hundreds of adoring fans, he watched as his early premonition came true.

  After Young Gunz had dissolved, Kinky B convinced Jeezy that he had the skills to be a great rapper, and Kinky B’s hunch paid off in a huge way. He and Jeezy formed Corporate Thugz Entertainment to promote and package Jeezy’s talent. And while the label started as an underground mixtape venture, by 2005 it had grown as much in stature as Jeezy’s rap career.

  Like Jeezy himself, his and Kinky B’s label forged a deal with Def Jam. A seven-figure infusion of Def Jam funds would allow Corporate Thugz Entertainment (or CTE, as everyone called it) to cultivate new talent—perhaps so that Jeezy could do for another rapper what

  Def Jam had done for him. CTE built a stable of artists, including the rapper Slick Pulla and the group Blood Raw, with the hope of turning them into eventual stars. Jeezy and Kinky B also were on the hunt for new talent. And in the spring of 2005, they’d set their sights on another act, a rap trio from Macon called Loccish Lifestyle.

  No doubt about it, Jeezy and Kinky B had hit it big. Jeezy’s stardom as a rapper was all but guaranteed. And CTE possessed both street sensibilities and major-label backing. Those two things were a sure recipe for record sales—and, some claimed, bullying rights.

  In what came to be construed as a case of big label versus little one, Jeezy’s camp had approached Gucci’s label in the spring of 2005 with an unwelcome proposition. “Icy” had gotten so hot—Jeezy hot—that Def Jam wanted to acquire the track from Big Cat Records. The problem was, neither Big Cat nor Gucci was interested in selling it. “Icy” was Gucci’s biggest hit to date. He birthed the song. And so he and Big Cat felt it belonged on Gucci’s soon-to-drop album, not Jeezy’s. In fact, Gucci and Big Cat already were battling the perception that the song belonged to Jeezy. In one newspaper article about Jeezy’s rise, “Icy” was described as, “His song (along with Gucci Mane).” Gucci had been reduced to a parenthetical.

  And yet even after negotiations over the rights to “Icy” broke down, Gucci tried to get Jeezy to appear in the vi
deo for the track. Despite a few near-concessions, that didn’t work out, either. By the time it came time to shoot the video, in April 2005, two things were indisputable. The first was that, on the set, Gucci was just as “icy” as Jeezy had been the day they met at Walter’s. The young rapper was decked out in a fifty-thousand-dollar yellow-diamond-studded watch designed by New York’s Jacob “the Jeweler” Arabo, and a 37-carat pendant that spelled so ICY in forty thousand dollars’ worth of diamonds. The other certainty was that by the time the cameras were rolling, the term icy also applied to the relationship between the once-friendly rappers. The tug-of-war over the track had gotten personal. And the personal was about to get public.

  To make his feelings on the matter abundantly clear, Jeezy released a “dis” song aimed at Gucci. The practice was common in hip-hop. For reasons ranging from disrespect to attempted murder, feuding rappers would dishonor the other party in rhyme, and would record the ensuing put-down for all the world to consider. The Biggie–Tupac imbroglio in the mid-’90s was the most significant of all such battles, ending in both rappers’ deaths and the loss of two of rap’s most talented artists. Back then, dis songs mostly were released on traditional albums, ones that took months, at least, to drop—elongating the pace of the feud to a frustrating trickle and dampening its ferocity. By the time Jeezy and Gucci found reason to loathe each other, though, the art of dissing had grown more sophisticated. Thanks to the mixtape phenomenon, dis songs could be released to the street within the week.

  As a result, neither Jeezy’s verbal assault of Gucci nor Gucci’s razor-tongued response was served cold. Jeezy’s track took several well-aimed swipes at Gucci. And it placed a steep bounty on his forty-thousand-dollar necklace: