September 15, 2019 — From his federal prison cell in Portland, former drug kingpin Demetrius (Big Meech) Flenory organized a back-to-school giveaway for kids in his hometown of Detroit over the weekend, packing a local clothing store parking lot with hundreds of elementary and junior high school children and providing them thousands dollars of free school supplies. Several members of Flenory’s family were in attendance at an event sponsored by local fashion designer Bassem (Al Wissam) Souwaidan and held at his suburban Dearborn showroom property that featured food stands, basketball hoops and an exotic animal petting zoo. “Lil’ Meech,” Big Meech’s aspiring rapper son, made an appearance and thanked those present on behalf of his father. There are rumors floating around Hollywood that Lil Meech will soon be cast as Big Meech in the upcoming Starz Network television show based on his dad’s rise and fall being produced by rapper and actor 50 Cent. Flenory, 51, and his baby bro Terry (aka “Southwest T”) founded and ran the historic Black Mafia Family or “BMF,” a narcotics empire that began in Motown in the 1990s and by the dawning of the New Millennium had grown to dominate cocaine trafficking across the country, establishing a stronghold in drug markets in two dozen strategically placed states. BMF was the biggest urban criminal organization America had ever witnessed and Big Meech himself became underworld royalty and an instant pop-culture icon, shouted out on literally hundreds of rap tracks over the years and known in hip hop circles and elsewhere as an modern-day African-American version of a Al Capone, Lucky Luciano or John Gotti. Old-school Jewish mob whiz kid Meyer Lansky is probably a more apt comparison. Flenory redefined the dope game in terms of scope, vision implementation, infrastructure and the way overall business was conducted on the wholesale level. Lansky maintained heavy ties to the state of Michigan during his day and made a post Prohibition fortune in the state’s 1930s oil boom near Mt. Pleasant with his partners in Detroit’s infamous Purple Gang led by the Burnstein brothers. The entire BMF crew was toppled by Operation Motor City Mafia in 2005. The feds estimated the organization had a net worth of $300,000,000. The organization’s nerve centers resided in Detroit, Atlanta and Los Angeles. Both Flenory brothers took 30-year plea deals on the eve of a 2007 trial that never happened. Neither was implicated in any acts of violence in the case. Big Meech currently still has 13 years to serve on his prison sentence. Terry Flenory, 48, recently got five years shaved off his term as a result of a sentence reduction and now has a listed out date of 2026.
