Original subtitles

[Scott] Meech wanted to be bigger than Detroit.

He wanted to control the whole country.

[gunshot]

[person] Atlanta's to the point

where the S-H-I-T is about to hit the fan.

[Scott] So, at the same time,

the Caribbean cocaine route had been completely dried up.

Meech and Terry needed to find new supply lines really fast.

Green Eyes--he brought me 1,500 kilos in one day.

The dam broke. [laughs]

And the floodgates are open.

[Chad] Money just was coming from everywhere.

We love to spend our money.

We can't take none of this shit with us.

Meech is like, "Man, we Black Mafia Family."

[person] Now you got a title.

Police want to know, who the fuck is that?

[Chad] We was at the club. I look down.

I see, like, five guys drinking they beer,

looking at us like this.

From that point on, I knew it was problems.

[chill music plays]

[person, echoing] Ev-everybody move like brothers.

♪ ♪

[echoing] Everybody shining like new money.

♪ ♪

[echoing] It ain't nobody cool like this in the world

and never will be.

♪ ♪

[Scott] By the early 2000s, there were 23 branches

of BMF operating around the country.

And each one of those cities had stash houses,

cut houses, packaging houses

that were headquartered in Atlanta.

At the height of the BMF movement,

well over 400-plus members.

And that's just the ones that I saw.

We were everywhere-- in California,

St. Louis, Detroit,

Miami, Texas.

There were members everywhere.

When these guys started to come together

from these different cities, it was all about

that opportunity that Meech was making available to them.

And then you go out, and you can see

the greatest show on Earth.

[all] Coming to a camera near you,

death before dishonor,

the greatest show on Earth!

[bass-heavy beat plays]

♪ ♪

BMF!

BMF!

[Cavario] It was definitely bringing a level of opulence

that was only fantasized about prior.

[Curtis] What I have experienced

during that time period from hustling

and coming up the way I came up is,

like, page three in the drug dealer pamphlet

tells you not to show everybody

how much money you actually have.

And they did it exactly the opposite.

They did it way bigger than everybody else.

[Chad] We going out six days out of seven.

Ten-plus cars pulling up,

bottles everywhere, girls everywhere.

And we spending people's salaries for a year

in one night.

It just was-- it was unbelievable.

[Meech] When we go out at night, whatever we spend,

50,000, 100,000 in the motherfucking club,

we can afford to do it,

'cause we ain't bring it all with us.

[Kialana] Everybody was eating off of them.

Every business, every hairdresser,

every restaurant, every club.

Everybody was eating, every stripper.

♪ ♪

[T.I.] BMF galvanized the strip club industry

here in the city

and made Atlanta a destination

for strip clubs.

Man, I seen Meech throw a half a million

in the club one time...

just 'cause.

This shit is stupid, really, but, man, it's--

it's a part of our culture.

It's what we do. You know what I'm saying?

[crowd shouting indistinctly]

[Kialana] BMF guys, they were lit, okay?

Fun. They were lit.

I mean, I was seeing them with all the foreign cars--

Ferraris, Lambos.

They had a oversized T-shirt with a chain that say "BMF."

[Maurice] In any other hustling community

where you were doing any kind of illegal activities,

you would remain somewhat with your head down,

because you didn't want to attract attention.

But that's not the case in Atlanta with BMF.

[T.I.] I could tell that bro had a vision,

and he had definite intentions

on making a mark in a world

that would have otherwise ignored him.

You dig?

[Scott] Meech had become

the biggest cocaine dealer in America,

but to his own detriment,

he wants the spotlight,

wants all the glory.

And this put him on the radar of law enforcement.

[Jack] I'd pretty much always focused on cocaine,

in the Atlanta area.

I never left Atlanta.

I worked for about 27 years

as a DEA agent in Atlanta.

I grew up as the son of an FBI agent.

I wasn't intending to be involved in law enforcement,

but I just found that I liked the challenge of the job.

I first heard of an individual

who was being called Meechie

back in the late '90s.

It was a few years later when I started hearing

more stuff about his drug business.

They were calling themselves uh, the BMF.

[Rand] I always wanted to be a lawyer.

[dramatic music plays]

I started my first year as a DUI defense attorney.

Eventually, in Fulton County,

I was part of the Major Narcotics unit.

I was a senior assistant district attorney.

I'd started to get to know agents,

and they knew that, you know, I would--

I had a reputation of not being able to say no to anything.

When we first heard about BMF back in the early 2000s,

we'd hear about some cop in South Carolina

pulls over a guy,

and he has a kilo of cocaine.

And the guy said, "I can give you BMF."

We're like, "Who? Who?"

You know, "BMF? Who?"

Names may be getting dropped, but nobody knows what it is,

we couldn't get any information.

It was all rumor.

I had U.S. attorneys passing on it.

DEA was passing on it. The FBI was passing on it.

Nobody wanted to touch it.

But this was Jack's white whale at the time.

[tense music plays]

♪ ♪

[Bryant] I became an Atlanta police officer

because I wanted to make a difference,

because I saw that my community needed that.

They needed more people that look like me.

♪ ♪

My father, his ultimate goal was to be a police officer

in the city of Atlanta.

[indistinct shouting, whistle blowing]

But during that time, Blacks could not join

the Atlanta Police Department.

So, by the time Blacks could join

the Atlanta Police Department,

he had already found gainful employment,

and he had had a family.

So, one day, at the age of six years old--

I will never forget it--

he sat me down and said, "Hey, you have to do this for me.

"I wanted to be an Atlanta police officer all of my life,

and you have to do it."

I just took that and ran with it,

and at six years old,

I began to mold myself into whatever it took

to become an Atlanta police officer.

Seeing these guys in Atlanta

in all these highline cars, with the jewelry on,

the hair on the back of your neck stands up,

and I just knew that the city of Atlanta

is not ready for this.

[Jack] I liked Bryant right from the get-go,

'cause he was a worker,

and I was always looking for guys

who would work crazy hours.

[muffled dance music playing]

[Bryant] There were countless nights that I spent

in Magic City doing surveillance.

Meech, I pictured him being this huge guy,

maybe bald, uh, just look like he would just--

just choke you to death,

but when I started to see this guy,

he was a small-frame guy,

tall, but not the typical hit man type of guy

that I would visualize.

Just kind of sit back and watch these guys

just tossing money up

and how everybody was basically kissing their behind

when they came in,

because it's time for the BMF.

♪ ♪

[smooth music plays]

♪ ♪

[Latarra] At that point,

Meech and I had been together a while.

I didn't mind him going out, doing his thing.

He would just come to my place afterwards.

I mean, I would go every once in a while,

but that was something that I never really enjoyed doing.

♪ ♪

I just wanted to leave that lifestyle of Atlanta,

so I moved down to Miami.

And then, of course, that's when I find out I'm pregnant.

[intriguing music plays]

♪ ♪

Meech was overjoyed, very happy.

So I had a wonderful pregnancy.

I didn't see him very much,

but just being surrounded by my family was enough for me.

♪ ♪

Demetrius was born April 22, 2000.

[Nicole] Demetrius Jr.,

was just, like, the light of his life.

That was, like, the biggest joy,

Meech having a son, a junior.

It just gave Demetrius

a different perspective on life.

[chuckles]

[Latarra] When it was time to take our son home,

we strapped the baby in...

[rap music playing] ♪ We show up to show out ♪

...and Demetrius blasts rap music.

♪ ♪

And I'm looking. I said, "Are you crazy?"

And he goes, "He has to get used to this."

♪ ♪

So I just turned, like, my face to the window.

And, like, tears rolling down, like,

"My baby, poor baby."

♪ ♪

I was like, "I can't believe this guy,"

but that was just how much music was in his soul.

And he--he said, "He has to get used to this,

so we're gonna start it day one."

[piano music plays]

♪ ♪

[Scott] Demetrius and Terry

were enamored with the music industry.

You know, they had music in their blood from early on

that had been kind of instilled in them

from their father.

They weren't just fans.

They wanted to be a part of it.

When they finally had the money

that they could throw around,

they wanted to throw a lot of that money towards music.

And they became financiers.

[hip-hop beat playing]

♪ ♪

[Cavario] Hip-hop has been tied

to the streets from the beginning.

This wasn't a new model.

Guys in the street with the finances

providing those finances to talented young people

so that they could have a opportunity to produce music.

And then, of course, the music itself

was very, very profitable.

Meech is running around

with some of the biggest hip-hop label heads

in the game...

[crowd clamoring]

...Puffy, Suge Knight,

Jermaine Dupri.

It's right in front of him-- the way that these guys

are building these hip-hop empires.

That was his real passion.

He just really wanted to tap in and be, like, a music mogul.

[chuckles]

[Maurice] And, of course,

Atlanta's booming as a place for music,

and it's just ripe with really talented artists.

[Kid] And the winner is...

[all] Outkast.

[Maurice] In 1995, Outkast, from Atlanta,

win Newcomers of the Year.

And the tensions were so high

between East Coast and West Coast...

they're being booed on the stage,

because it's like, well, you know,

you all really aren't in the game.

I'm tired of folks, you know what I'm saying?

Closed-minded folks, you know what I'm saying?

It's like we got a demo tape, and don't nobody want

to hear it, but it's like this, the South got something to say.

-That's all I got to say. -[crowd booing]

[Maurice] And what he's actually saying is that like,

"You all forget where most of you all come from.

We got our own style and our rights right here, too."

[2 Chainz] That was a pivotal moment where André, Big Boi,

they were fighting to create a name

for what we were doing down here in the South.

When André said what he said,

he caught a lot of people's attention

and also installed confidence

in the artists that were coming up under him.

When he said that, I just felt like,

"Hell, yeah, it's about time somebody said something."

You know what I mean?

I knew how they thought about cats from the South.

They called it country.

It turned a page in Atlanta

and for Sou- for Southern music, I think, all around.

[Maurice] And by 2000,

Atlanta is the new Motown of the South.

It becomes a hip-hop capital of the world.

[2 Chainz] This is a no-hate zone.

You see artists rubbing elbows,

you know, eating together, breaking bread together,

building together.

Legacies being built.

[Scott] Jeezy was making the music.

Meech would promote the music.

And Jeezy was rapping about Meech.

So it was- it was art imitating life imitating art,

all in real time.

[Curtis] Selling drugs was his whole theme,

and that made whatever he was saying real

to the audience at that point.

[2 Chainz] Meech was so respected,

and he also paid like he weighs.

When he came to the club,

he used to create his own playlist

to whatever he wanted to hear for the night.

[2 Chainz] And I do remember hearing,

"We Getting Money Over Here" by Jeezy and Bun B.

I heard it seven times in a row in Magic City one night.

[hip-hop music playing]

Yeah! BMF in the building, nigga.

[Latarra] Jeezy's career, I think, was catapulted

to another level because of Big Meech.

A lot of musicians were interested in working with him.

You know, let's call a spade a spade.

They had more money than a lot of artists at the time.

I think that's what attracted artists around that.

[Scott] Gucci Mane, Nelly...

these were the guys that they were partying with.

The lifestyle and the music are tethered together.

If you were to look at a drug dealer back then

and you were to look at a rapper,

I don't think you'd be able to tell much of a difference.

[Yolanda] So Meech started BMF Entertainment

and Juicemagazine--

two legitimate businesses.

But he saw where his record label can lead

to a lifestyle that would still accommodate him

to remain at the same plateau that he was at

and not have to downgrade, you know.

[Curtis] They was hiding in plain sight

because they had a hip-hop aura,

who you would see with that kind of jewelry.

If you looked up and you- and you saw, oh, it's a label,

then you go, "Oh, okay, so this is a hip-hop artist."

Like, if you're not culturally in tune with hip-hop,

then how do you know it's not a successful brand

that you're not aware of?

I believe that more- most labels take so much time out

and focus on so many artists

that you can never get the realness

out of the one artist.

We all here for my man, Bleu Davinci.

[Yolanda] Meech could've very well signed more artists,

but he wanted to focus in on the one artist that he had.

♪ Yeah... ♪

[Meech] If he take off, then we take off.

Make this a major label,

like Universal or Interscope or Def Jam.

[all] ♪ Mad-rich niggas ♪

♪ Big trucks, little hoops Nigga, that's my life ♪

♪ If I pull up to the club... ♪

[Chad] Meech really believed in Bleu,

and Bleu was the one that would be in Meech's ear

to get him to do things that he really wanted to do

as far as music.

♪ I got some info that'll leave Your whole career dead ♪

But, uh, Bleu Davinci was terrible.

Uh, just--just horrible.

You'd listen to it, and you'd be like,

"Nobody was getting paid from this music.

There has to be something wrong here."

[Jack] No one could figure out quite, you know,

are they really making any money?

Maybe Meech was thinking, "They'll never figure out

"how I'm making money through drugs

"if I go legit somehow

"with these rappers and BMF Entertainment.

"So I'm gonna make the transition

but still be making money with drugs."

[Rand] Here's what I knew.

There was two brothers.

Demetrius Flenory was in Atlanta at the time,

and then Terry Flenory, who was out on the West Coast.

As far as we knew, Terry was running the finances.

Big Meech was running the day-to-day operations.

But there was no cracks in their organization.

Nobody was talking.

[Jack] It's hard. It's frustrating.

The drug dealing was very secretive.

I conducted this same interview

probably 50 times, with people saying,

"Oh, you know, they're selling drugs."

I'm listening, I'm going, "That's all very interesting,

but I still need evidence of that."

All we see is the partying,

the extravagance, the flamboyance.

BMF in here with a couple mill, you know what I mean?

[Cavario] And if a person watched and they observed,

they would be like,

"I don't see 'em doing anything but spending money.

Like, what the-- what's going on?"

Every day, you could watch it every day.

All you gonna do is see spending money.

You're not gonna see anything else.

[Rand] All day long, a cop or an agent could tell me,

"I know X, Y, and Z."

But it didn't matter without any evidence.

So we needed Jack to bring us some evidence.

[soft music plays]

♪ ♪

[Jack] The first domino to fall was in September of '03.

[reporter] The story involves high-dollar vehicles,

a high-end house, and a homicide.

[Scott] All drug dealers eventually come up

to this conundrum that making money is the easy part.

The biggest issue is gonna be what to do with that money,

how to hide it.

For BMF,

that's when Doc Marshall enters the picture.

Doc Marshall did not look like a gangster.

He had a luxury-car dealership

that he used for money laundering.

And he was brilliant when it came to hiding money.

They called him "Doc" because he could doctor the books.

[reporter] Sergeant Louis Torres

says he suspects a home invasion

led to a shooting at 409 Angier Court.

[Scott] Doc Marshall kept a lot of money in his safe.

Someone got tipped off, and during a home invasion,

trying to get a hold of that money in that safe,

Doc Marshall killed the intruder,

which was legitimate, and it was self-defense.

But when the task force showed up,

they saw bits and pieces of some larger conspiracy.

[reporter] Atlanta police found about a kilo

of suspected cocaine in the house,

but Major James Sellers says police also discovered

evidence of a complex fraud operation

involving hiding the true owners of high-end cars.

[Jack] They didn't arrest anyone,

but they seized a bunch of records.

The BMF were arranging for straw purchases of vehicles

through a car-brokering outfit known as Exquisite Empire.

[reporter] Last night police executed a search warrant

on the 15th floor of a Buckhead building

in the offices of Exquisite Empire.

We found documents that had cars,

and they had the straw purchaser,

and then they would have "BMF-M" as the end user.

BMF-T.

These documents would be huge to the DEA.

I get a call from Jack Harvey.

He said, "Hey, this search was invaluable."

He says, "Let me call the U.S. Attorney's office

and tell 'em what we have."

Next morning, I think I got to my office at six o'clock,

and they were sitting there, you know,

and they were all excited.

Brian connected Doc to BMF using, like,

little pieces of information that were out there.

Now we started to have these connections

to a home invasion.

We found guns and cocaine

with a rumored connection or link to BMF.

Now you put a name with a face.

So it started making more sense.

[Cavario] But at that point,

Meech had this sense of invincibility,

so he did the opposite

of what anybody else would have done--

keeping this very, very high profile.

He thought that he was beyond approach.

He's just always been the type of person,

he just got what he wanted,

and he would do anything to get it.

[Scott] Demetrius reached a point

where he wanted to be iconic,

putting out, you know, DVD mixtapes...

Bleu, man, this man is interfering with my business.

You need to get down here and talk to this man.

I don't know what's going on. I'm trying to cop this--

I don't know why somebody let him in the room

to see what's going on anyway, man.

[Scott] That would portray

Demetrius playing Big Meech.

And then you had the billboards.

[tense music plays]

♪ ♪

[Yolanda] It was definitely a--

"Man, are you serious? Billboards?"

He had, like, four or five billboards up, I think.

And I was like, "Bro, that's gonna bring us

some problems, man."

"Dude, do you think that's a good idea," you know?

He's like, "Nah, Yogi, it's for the brand."

[Jack] In the movieScarface,

there's that scene where it said, "The world is yours."

So BMF puts on their billboards,

"The world is BMF's."

"The world is BMF"?

Bro, we rubbing it in they face, you know what I'm saying?

Like, you know, his--his response, like, "Fuck them."

[Rand] BMF's modus operandi

actually fed into my disbelief that--that they existed.

I didn't think anybody could be this well put together

or this well organized

and this stupid at the same time.

They actually had a billboard right outside of our office.

Um, that's how arrogant they were.

[Scott] The putting up of the billboards sent Terry

through the roof.

He didn't want this kind of publicity

and demanded those billboards be taken down immediately.

They weren't.

He's in L.A. telling everyone that,

"My brother in Atlanta's gone crazy.

"He thinks that he can give

a big middle finger to the DEA and not get a response."

[Bryant] He put himself on a fucking billboard.

We--we can't have that.

They were like, "Man, we got to get these motherfuckers now,

"because it might be too late

if they get on the mainstream."

And that's when shit really start happening.

They start following motherfuckers and...

everything, you know.

[Yolanda] It was drawing attention.

You know, the bigger the crowd,

the more "white guys" taking pictures, you know?

[Jack] Honestly, I didn't have any extra motivation

to take them down because of the billboards,

um, 'cause I-I had all the motivation I needed,

especially after what happened at Club Chaos.

[gunshots, crowd screaming]

That was a major incident

that did lead to something.

So I guess the second domino to fall

would be what happened at Club Chaos.

[siren wailing]

[dramatic music plays]

♪ ♪