Atlanta's Black Mafia Family

After hearing an interview with the author on NPR this morning, I decided to spend some time this evening reading Creative Loafing’s three part peice on the Black Mafia Family, which is pretty much what it sounds like. Wikipedia tells us:

The Black Mafia Family, or BMF, is a drug trafficking organization originally from Detroit, with major hubs in Atlanta and Los Angeles, that in 2000 delved into the world of hip-hop music and entertainment, successfully promoting not only Young Jeezy but also BMF Entertainment’s sole artist, Bleu DaVinci.

The Creative Loafing piece is fun for a few reasons. There is the writing, which seems to be the product of a farm team reporter with an ambitious approach to narrative. The story is told in vignettes that jump back and forward in time. Occasionally these leaps left me grasping for the thread of the story, but more often than not the author (Mara Shalhoup) makes it work.

There is the tale itself, an archetypal journey through success (“federal prosecutors would estimate that BMF pulled in tens of millions of dollars annually — at least $270 million since the organization got its start”) to excess (“BMF members have credited themselves with inventing a phenomenon called ‘making it rain.’ They would toss fistfuls of money in the air. The bills would descend like droplets. And the crowd would go wild.”) and, eventually, to downfall. In this city, you gotta make the money first. Then when you get the money, you get the power. Then when you get the power, then you get the women. Then, apparently, you get investigated by a number of local, state and federal authorities and, eventually, indicted. (Did I mention the murders? There are murders.)

But story and storytelling aside, my favorite thing about the Creative Loafing story is the backdrop. When I read about “a crew selling large quantities of coke up and down Boulevard”, I'm thinking “oh, yeah, it’s so totally all like ‘the Wire’ down there on a Friday night”. When I read that “Jeffery gunned it through a red light at Spring Street and North Avenue, and agents lost him”, I think “hey, I’m at that intersection like 5 times a week!” (I also thought “hey, that’s good to know if I ever need to ditch the feds”. But then I thought “that light is photo enforced now, perhaps limiting its utility as a getaway device”. Oh well.) My Atlanta now includes a new and fascinating layer; my day-to-day mise en scène is a little more interesting. Good stuff.

The video above is the product of the record label arm of BMF, and it is partly a love letter to Atlanta. I’m not qualified to judge its merits from a hip-hop perspective (though I do enjoy the 8-bit “pong” sound in the first half of the video), but I enjoy it because it is shot through with an affection for this town that is not unlike my own. ‘Cept I don’t run a flamboyant record label cum drug smuggling ring. Yet!

(One caveat—the story of BMF as told in the Creative Loafing piece seems too good to be true. And indeed, there is a lot of inference that could either point to a vast underground crime organization with a ruthless code of silence or point to a bunch of thugs who hang out together but do thuggish things more or less on their own. If the story is as good as it appears, then there is a pretty good book in it.)