But it wasn't Jermaine Dupri or MC Hammer or Michael Jordan who made Magic City into what it is now. It was BMF. You've heard of BMF, right? Yes? No? Well, BMF is the greatest subject of street lore in the history of Atlanta. There are songs, books, documentaries, three-part journalistic investigations of BMF. In the early 2000s, BMF, which stands for Black Mafia Family, was a drug organization. It was, according to the DEA, one of the most notorious drug-trafficking organizations in America, with profits of $270 million over the course of its short life. A man named Big Meech was its mastermind and overlord. And Big Meech did not have a discreet management style. I'm pretty sure BMF is the only major drug-trafficking enterprise ever to rent a giant billboard on a major interstate to advertise itself; if you'd driven into Atlanta in 2004, you would have seen a sign that read the world is bmf's. Big Meech also fancied himself a music mogul and, at the height of its largesse, made BMF into a record label; he was known for his relationship with the rappers Young Jeezy, T.I., and a certain Bleu DaVinci, whom you can still find hanging around Atlanta.

What BMF really was—more than a drug-trafficking concern or a hip-hop label—was the biggest socio-cultural thing to happen to Atlanta since, probably, Gone with the Wind. What BMF really was, was a rap song come to life. You know the world that's depicted in rap videos? The rapper at the wheel of a $300,000 car getting dry-humped by fourteen strippers driven into a kind of involuntary ecstasy simply by his presence? Watching reams of American currency being lit on fire or blown away into the streets while he just smokes a cigar and barely notices because he's somehow achieved a new consciousness of wealth in which there is no dollar figure large enough the loss of which would be of any emotional consequence? That was how BMF lived for real, and they liked to live that way in public, and the principal way to interface with that public was through the strip club.

Everyone speaks of that era kind of wistfully, especially strippers, who are still happy to make $5,000 in a night but know there was a time when that number was more like $20,000.

It was at Magic City where, in the early 2000s, you could experience most fully the world of BMF. At the apogee of their wealth and power, BMF would show up, order $100,000, throw it on the floor, and leave in forty-five minutes. This was the epoch, and the city, in which the concept of making it rain was born. Up until then, people were just putting money in garter belts. But that was not a sufficient expression of how little money meant to BMF. They had to throw it, fertilize the air with it like pollen. "BMF shut the club down," the radio host J-Nicks said to me. "It was strippers driving Bentleys and owning seven-bedroom houses." Just about everyone speaks of that era kind of wistfully, especially strippers, who are still happy to make $5,000 in a night but know there was a time when that number was more like $20,000.

"They was a little brutal back in the BMF," the dancer Aimee told me. "They would have joy slapping the girls in the face with the money. You get sucker punched in the face with a thousand dollars, but you laugh it off because it's so much money."

Big Meech and most of the rest of BMF went to jail seven years ago. But Big Mag still sees his business as one that operates in a world where people like BMF are your clients. It took a long negotiation to get Big Mag to sit down to be interviewed. It is not something he'd ever done before. Big Mag still sees himself as a denizen of what no small number of people described to me as a secret society. Magic City operates as a part of its own economy; as Lil Magic says, "The way some of these people throw money, you know it probably didn't come in check form." And Big Mag, not to mention the strippers and the hustlers, not to mention the doctors and the lawyers and the members of the Atlanta Falcons, all see Magic City belonging to a shadow side of the city.