DETROIT — If the new Starz drama "BMF" is a hit, it will have decades of material to cover from the true saga of Detroit brothers Demetrius and Terry Flenory.
"BMF," which has a disclaimer stating that it's loosely based on the truth, focuses on Big Meech and Southwest T, as they were known, as young men who are becoming immersed in dealing drugs and growing their business.
Through flashbacks, they also are depicted as children growing up amidst poverty in southwest Detroit.
In real life, the Flenorys and their Black Mafia Family organization eventually built a huge cocaine-trafficking network in the United States that stretched to nearly a dozen cities.
"They socialized with music mogul Sean (Diddy) Combs, did business with New York's king of bling Jacob (the Jeweler) Arabo and built allegiances with rap superstars Young Jeezy and Fabolous. Yet even as BMF was attracting celebrity attention, its crew members struck fear in a city," reads the Amazon description for the 2010 nonfiction book "The Rise and Fall of Big Meech and the Black Mafia Family."
According to a 2010 Miami New Times interview with its author, Mara Shalhoup, Demetrius Flenory "really had genuine hope that he could transition out of the drug game into a legitimate enterprise" with his music company, BMF Entertainment. Numerous rap recordings contain references to BMF, including the Rick Ross song "B.M.F. (Blowing Money Fast)" from his "Teflon Don" album.
The Flenory brothers moved from Detroit reportedly in the 1990s. Demetrius relocated to Atlanta, while Terry made his home in Los Angeles. As a 2010 Atlanta Journal-Constitution review of Shalhoup's book put it, "Already savvy entrepreneurs as 20-somethings, the brothers understood that operating their illegal empires from geographically separate headquarters would make detection and arrest tougher for law enforcement agencies."
BMF — and Demetrius in particular — became notorious for high-profile displays of wealth. According to a 2008 story from the same Atlanta newspaper, BMF members drove European sports cars and threw lavish parties (one featuring zebras, lions and an elephant), ran five-figure bar tabs and would "walk into a nightclub and toss $20 bills into the air for patrons to fight over."
There were billboards on I-75 in downtown Atlanta that said: "The World is BMF's."
The Drug Enforcement Administration and other law-enforcement agencies worked diligently to bring down BMF. The brothers were arrested in the mid-2000s, as were some 100 of their associates. Millions of dollars, multiple homes and nearly 40 vehicles were seized by the government in the process.
In September 2008, Demetrius and Terry were sentenced to 30 years in prison in federal court in Detroit. They already had "pleaded guilty to operating a continuing criminal enterprise involving high volume distribution of cocaine throughout the United States from 1990 through 2005," according to the Free Press.
In June, a federal judge reduced the sentence of Demetrius, who's in his early 50s now, by three years because of changes in sentencing guidelines, according to the Detroit News. That should put his release date at 2028.
Terry Flenory was released from prison in 2020 to serve his sentence in home confinement because of COVID-19's spread in federal prisons.
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