Original subtitles

[Scott] By the late 1980s, you had a pretty big void

that needed to be filled in the Detroit drug game.

This provides Demetrius and Terry an opportunity

to take over.

I knew this time was coming sooner or later.

[Meech] We just kind of outgrew him,

and, shit, we took off.

We buying more than he was getting.

The more money you get,

the more problems you're gonna have.

[Roland] Me and Demetrius was at the Coney Island.

Layton was tearing Demetrius up.

I'm hearing... [mimics grunting]

He end up pushing me out the truck and took off.

[Scott] The only way to put an end to this

was to leave town.

[dramatic hip-hop music plays]

[Meech] E-everybody move like brothers.

[echoing] Like brothers. Like brothers.

♪ ♪

Everybody's shining like new money.

[echoing] New money. New money. New money.

♪ ♪

It ain't no other crew like this in the world,

and never will be another.

[echoing] Never will be another.

Never will be another.

♪ ♪

[Scott] Demetrius leaves Detroit in the summer of 1989

and went down to Atlanta.

Terry, on the other hand, stayed in Detroit

on a full-time basis, running day-to-day

business operations.

[siren wailing]

[dramatic music plays]

Meech wanted to be bigger than Detroit.

Even though Detroit raised him

and Detroit taught him the game,

his aspirations were bigger

than just controlling the city.

I mean, he wanted to control the whole--

the whole country.

[Scott] It seemed only natural that Meech would

gravitate to the Atlanta area.

And at the time, it was this wide-open territory

where anyone could come in and make money

working with the Colombian cartels.

Demetrius sees this fertile ground to build upon.

[indistinct chatter and laughter]

[funky electronic music plays]

Atlanta was also known

for a giant party called FreakNik.

[reporter] No one knows for sure how many visitors

traveled here for this year's Black College Spring Break,

but the FreakNik tradition of cruising

is alive and well in downtown Atlanta.

[tires squealing, engines revving]

[Troy] I was down in Atlanta first,

and I told him how it was, and it was crazy.

I'm like, "Dawg, you got to come see this in Atlanta.

You gotta come down here."

♪ ♪

We walking out the club 8:30, nine in the morning,

the sun up, people going to work.

And still, and they had club anytime, open 24 hours.

We could go in there, and we just had a ball.

We used to eat, you know,

smoke weed, play the games.

Then he met 'Tarra.

So a lot of the stuff we did, he didn't do no more

'cause he was kind of chilling with her a lot.

[dreamy music plays]

[Latarra] I met Demetrius at a car wash,

believe it or not.

We were introduced to one another by my friend Troy

and was just flirting back and forth and...

...went on a date, I think, that night.

[Latarra] He would frequent that nightclub.

And I was a champagne girl,

so he would come and buy bottles of champagne.

So of course, that made me happy.

He's a very fun-loving guy,

just full of energy, sense of humor.

And that just caught my attention and kept it.

We discussed how Detroit,

it was just very crime-infested,

and just being poor

and struggling like crabs in a bucket, you know?

It was just very difficult.

[upbeat music plays]

So Atlanta was a breath of fresh air for Demetrius.

♪ ♪

[Jocelyn] Atlanta was a Black mecca.

In Atlanta, the Black agenda is the most inclusive agenda

on the planet, quite honestly.

So that's why people come here.

This is why companies come here.

This aspirational tone

was very much a part of the community.

Meech picked Atlanta quite deliberately.

He understood what was happening here.

He had a sense for what it was

that he needed to give him a necessary cover

for what it was he's intending to do.

[Troy] Young Black people were in nice cars,

living in nice homes.

It was beautiful.

Atlanta was beautiful.

[applause]

[person] The International Olympic Committee has awarded

the 1996 Olympic Games

to the city of Atlanta.

[cheers and applause]

In 1990, Atlanta won the Olympic bid.

And in six years, Atlanta had to get the city ready

for the world to come here.

[dramatic music plays]

[crowd clamoring]

And Atlanta has its challenges,

because this is all happening

at the same time when cocaine is wreaking havoc

on the community.

Atlanta's to the point where...

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

[gunshot]

[tires screeching]

Red Dog unit was in place.

The Red Dog unit stands for

Run Every Drug Dealer Out of Georgia.

You're in the projects, man. This ain't Buckhead.

[Jocelyn] They instilled a level of fear

in any drug dealer, small or big.

[Scott] So at the same time

that this was happening in Atlanta,

the Caribbean cocaine route had been completely dried up.

[reporter] More money than ever before in history

is pouring into the hands of a single group of people,

drug smugglers.

[Scott] The federal government had choked off the supply line

coming from Colombia, Peru, Bolivia through Miami.

So most people in the drug game

look to Mexico as the next big supply hub.

Meech and Terry needed to pivot from the Colombians

to avoid going down with the ship.

[gunfire]

[hip-hop music plays]

♪ ♪

[Wayne] In 1996, I met Meech in L.A.

We had a car wash up in Fox Hills area.

We had a mutual friend who used to come up here all the time.

He was like, "Aye, man, I-- dude trying to meet you."

I'm like, "Dude trying to meet me?"

He's like, "Yeah, man. He needs your help."

He brought Meech in.

"Aye, man. I'm Meech, man, you know?"

He's like, "I've been a millionaire a couple times

already, but right now, I'm fucked up."

I was like, "Well, shit, what's-what's going on?

What you need?"

He's like, "Man, I just need a plug, you know."

You must have a-a substantial plug.

Without that, you-you ain't got shit.

But I told him no at first.

At the time, I was under investigation myself.

I had basically retired at that point.

I was f--a forced retirement,

you know, out of--out of fear.

And about three weeks later, I was going through a divorce,

transmission went out in my car,

roof was leaking in the house.

I made a decision. I was like, "Fuck it.

I gotta get some money."

♪ ♪

[Wayne] I was fortunate enough

to meet, uh, Green Eyes in 1997,

just buying some weed one day.

Green Eyes knew people who got more dope

than they know what to do with.

[Wayne] Green Eyes started bringing in from Mexico.

It was always good.

You didn't have to test nothing or nothing.

He brought me 1,500 kilos in one day.

[dreamy electronic music plays]

♪ ♪

That was it. The dam broke.

[laughs] The dam broke,

and the floodgates were open.

[laughs]

At that--from that point on,

he was the plug, 1,000%.

[Wayne] Meech had-had a dream

of being a Costco or something like that.

He wanted to be a warehouse.

His objective was to have that many drugs

where people could just come see him,

ain't had to go nowhere else.

♪ ♪

[Scott] As he was getting bigger in the drug game,

Demetrius is studying all of the pioneers

of organized crime in America.

He's learning what to do from this mix

of real-life figures and fictional figures.

[Latarra] Meech is a huge movie buff.

At home, we would watch,

you know, The Godfather,

Al Pacino, Joe Pesci...

[gunshots]

...all of those movies.

[Scott] Take a little bit of Tony Montana.

Take a little bit of Alejandro Sosa.

Take a little bit of Vito Corleone.

He had kind of had this gangland stew

to mold his reputation in the shape of

and build his organization in the shape of.

Never rat on your friends,

and always keep your mouth shut.

[Scott] He's starting to envision an infrastructure

for this drug empire that he's building.

[Wayne] T was in Detroit,

holding Detroit down, running shit.

And Meech was in the field, you know what I mean?

Meech was out there in the field

trying to make it happen.

[Scott] Going from city to city,

making and building contacts

and relationships for years.

[Wayne] Memphis, Kansas City,

Detroit, Arkansas,

Alabama, St. Louis.

He brought all the players.

He's offering a vision of avoiding some of the problems

that he had had in terms of supply

and the speed of that supply and the amount of that supply.

So he's going into these cities being like,

"I'm gonna consolidate,

"gonna streamline the entire country's

"wholesale cocaine business,

"and you're either gonna be a part of it,

or you're gonna be on the outside looking in."

[Wayne] They had dreams, man,

but the priorities are different.

Terry's a gentleman--

fine dining, travel, good jewelry.

[laughs]

Demetrius is a gentleman party animal.

[laughs] He gonna party.

He gonna have a--he gon'--

if you can't party, you don't want to be with Meech.

Meech gonna party.

[mellow music plays]

[Wayne] We would go to the club,

and-and I'd say, "What the"--

You know, he's buying two or three bottles of champagne.

He's trying to draw all

the hustlers and the players to him.

Like, "Man, who is that over there?

"Man, this dude popping bottles and,

you know, wearing Versace and, you know, smoking real good."

And, shit, he got a lot of good people that way.

[Wayne] Meech was, you know, baiting people in like that.

And the shit worked.

It worked to perfection.

The next step is Meech told T,

"You need to come to L.A."

[Scott] The plan was, Terry would establish

a base for himself out of San Fernando Valley,

where he would oversee the drugs

that were coming up from Mexico and the cartel

in semitrucks,

thousands of kilos at a time,

on their way to a number of stash houses,

where they would cut up the drugs.

And like the Italian Mafia,

Meech had assigned crew bosses

for each state and each city.

That city's crew boss would get it packaged into retail

and then spread out into the street corners

of that particular city.

[exciting music plays]

Terry was working hard to get the rotation right.

You want money coming, dope going.

Money coming, dope going.

T was meticulous.

Money gotta be counted a certain way.

You press the money by hand,

everything in $5,000 stacks.

Ten across and ten down, that's $1 million.

[Scott] The business model was working.

And they structured the organization

like a Fortune 500 company.

The Flenory brothers were at the very top;

then lieutenants, capos, governors

of different states and cities;

and then beneath them would be soldiers,

guys that were responsible

for doing the-the boots-on-the-ground work.

♪ ♪

[indistinct chatter]

[Chad] I'm from St. Louis, Missouri.

It's the Wild, Wild Midwest.

[Chad] Because I was a loyal person

and I was a great hustler,

I took on the role of junior boss.

That's how I got the name J-BO.

At the time, it was going crazy.

Four hundred kilos of coke would move a month.

[interviewer] And what kind of money

does that generate in a month?

I couldn't really add it up.

I'ma just say millions,

you know, millions.

[Yolanda] I was cleaning houses for J-BO.

And Meech came in, and he's like,

"Who cleaned the spot?"

I said, "By the way, I'm Yogi."

He's like, "Oh."

He's like, "Well, what do you do?"

I said, "I clean."

"What are you doing tomorrow?"

"Nothing."

"Be here at eight."

It was like that.

Then I took a bigger role then,

just day-to-day, "What do you need me to do?"

I'm the best personal assistant that he ever had, you know?

[mellow music plays]

[Raheem] I'm from Compton, California.

When I met Meech, he taught us how to bring

everybody together and get some money,

you know what I mean?

Your job was your job, no matter what you do,

as long as you was doing it for the Mob.

I'm talking about stacking the product.

I'm talking about packing the product.

I'm talking about counting money.

Our whole thing is built on loyalty.

It's loyalty before anything.

[Stephen] I'm the White Boy, the one and only Firecracker.

Don't call me the Firecracker for nothing.

I'ma make it pop.

My role was the muscle.

If shit went down, like, there's gotta be people there

to damn handle shit and do shit.

There was a time we was in the club,

and I had a conversation with Meech.

He was like, "White Boy, what do you want out of this?"

I was like, "I want to be a millionaire."

He said, "I like that."

Meech brought the best out of everybody, man.

I mean, you put your focus and everything

towards that bond and that brotherhood,

it's-it's something you can't explain or replace.

[Clifford] This was the first group of men

that became brothers,

that didn't fight over money, didn't fight over women.

It was a melting pot

of different personalities and cultures.

Everybody is from somewhere else different.

You don't get nothing like this nowhere.

Everybody move like brothers.

Everybody is prospering in some kind of way in they own way.

Every man plays his own role.

They said that if niggas like this is shining all together,

being together, doing shit every day,

then they gonna fall out over some money,

or somebody gonna rob, steal, and kill.

I have yet to see that. All of us get along.

And ain't no other crew like this in the world,

and never will be another.

[dramatic music plays]

♪ ♪

[Chad] We had a good, like, ten cities

that we was dealing with.

The money just was coming from everywhere, man--

millions.

[Wayne] Georgia,

Alabama,

Memphis,

St. Louis,

Kansas City.

♪ ♪

[Chad] It was like a revolving door.

Two weeks here, bam.

Go down to Atlanta.

Do two weeks there.

Shoot over to Birmingham.

Drop a bag over there,

or we'll pick up in a week or two weeks.

[singer] ♪ Ooh, baby, I'm gone ♪

♪ Gone, gone ♪

♪ ♪

♪ Gone, gone, gone ♪

♪ Ooh, baby I'm gone ♪

♪ ♪

♪ I'm gone ♪

[Raheem] I'm trying to hurry up and get the stuff in here

and out of here, get it wrapped up properly.

You know, make sure we get the dog repellent

so the police dog ain't gonna smell it.

We was putting dope in the floor of cars at first.

[Chad] We ran the cars so much,

they was breaking down,

or the driver would get pulled over.

And that's when the limos came into play.

[Scott] They turned hiding drugs in vehicles

into an art form.

They had mechanic specialists

that would retrofit brand-new limos

for a number of secret compartments.

[Wayne] You had to have the combination

that would make the spot open up.

Climate control gotta be at 68.

The emergency brake gotta be on.

The power antenna gotta be down.

You gotta use the window button

on the right-hand side,

and then you gotta blow the horn three times.

See, if you do any of that shit out of sequence,

it ain't gonna open up.

We had to have people in there

that knew exactly what to do.

[Raheem] Everybody got they job.

If you fucked up, you fucked up the whole rotation,

you understand, not just what you doing

but what the next ten people down the line gotta do.

[Wayne] That's the name of the game right there.

It's a trust business.

That shit is just some dope

until somebody can turn it into some money.

[gunshots]

[siren wailing]

[somber music plays]

[Scott] You know, every Italian Mob leader,

every major drug organization in the history of America

took power by violence,

took power by force.

And Demetrius took power via a vision,

via his-his words,

uh, via a pitch.

[Wayne] At this point,

Demetrius was living in Atlanta,

and Terry had a good foothold

into Los Angeles.

The vision is kind of perfected.

The operation is in full swing

and is running like a well-oiled machine.

They were making a lot of money.

[Chad] Meech would always say,

"You know what, ole J-Beezy?

"One thing we gonna be able to do is buy

one of everything in the world."

[Raheem] I'm not used to being

in no mansions or none of that.

When I roll up, I'm-- "Damn, he in a mansion."

When I walk in the house, they-they--

everybody in there playing, um, video games

and introducing theyselves.

[Cavario] Meech had a open-door policy

like none I've ever seen.

You know, "Come on, come on, come on."

Like, "Who's that? Where'd they come from?"

[laughs]

Like, "Oh, that's the homey's homey," or whatever.

And he was made to feel welcomed instantly.

[Yolanda] It's hard to explain, but to see the effect,

you know, the love, the respect.

He would often tell me

he's always had the weight of the world on his shoulders.

He's always been that protective,

"I'm gonna take care of everybody."

I was given-- dude, like, there's no telling

how many people he put through school or,

like, did stuff for and stuff like that.

Like, I had my disabled brother,

had cerebral palsy.

Nobody got in the club, nobody.

Meech put Gabe before everybody.

You know, Meech had my brother come with us,

and he traveled everywhere.

[indistinct chatter]

It says a lot to me.

[indistinct chatter]

[Cavario] You got guys who come from homes

that have been devastated by, you know,

economics or narcotics, what have you.

What Meech and Terry were selling,

essentially, was family.

And that was more of a commodity

than anything else.

At a point, any of the guys,

they would have given up the money.

That's our family. It's my family.

[indistinct chatter]

-[person] Hey, cuz. -What up, cuz?

-[person] Tell 'em what it is. -Compton Crip.

Man, he taught us how to do it for the family.

Everybody eat. Everybody get some money.

We love to spend our money.

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

None--ain't no armored trucks pulling up at no funerals.

It don't make no difference if you

the-the maid or if you the motherfuckin' bodyguard.

Everybody get extras around here, fringe benefits.

Everybody travel from place to place

and kick it with each other, and every place is like home.

They got Russian Mafias, Bulgarian Mafias.

They got Jewish Mafias.

Man, what--but what about us?

Man said, "We Black Mafia Family."

Fuck it, let's go. We BMF.

[laughs] You know what I mean?

And that's how he came up with it.

And we rolled with it.

[Wayne] Sure enough, it just took off from there, man.

BMF Mafia Family right here!

[indistinct chatter]

[Wayne] But then when you put the letters with it,

now the police want to know, who the fuck is that?

[indistinct rapping]

[DJ] Ay!

[rapper] ♪ I'm the, I'm the I'm the realest nigga in it ♪

-[DJ] BMF! -[rapper] ♪ You already know ♪

[DJ] The realest niggas you'll ever know!

[indistinct rapping]

[Wayne] Now you got a title.

And that's where it kind of, like, started,

you know what I mean?

That's where some of the problems were.

Shit, I didn't-- still didn't realize

the-the severity of it at that point.

[club music playing]

♪ ♪

[Chad] One night, we was at the club,

you know, drinking my drink.

I look down, and in the crowd,

I see, like, five guys, different races:

white, Asian, Black, all of them.

They all doing the same thing:

drinking their beer,

looking at us like this.

Law enforcers, they always drink beer.

They was on a job, bro.

From that point on,

I knew it was problems.

[upbeat hip-hop music plays]

♪ ♪