The New Yorker:

Since the Young Thug trial, Brian Steel has modelled for the rapper’s fashion brand and had a Drake song named after him. Sean Combs took note.

By Charles Bethea

On the afternoon of May 9, 2022, Atlanta police surrounded a mansion owned by Jeffery Williams, the rapper better known as Young Thug. More than a dozen friends were with Williams at his home, on a quiet street in Buckhead, an area of Atlanta where new money mixes awkwardly with old. A neighbor saw three armored swattrucks and “a lot of cops on foot, and they came in fast with lights and megaphones.” By the look of the scene inside—red Solo cups arrayed on a table in a large kitchen area—the authorities had broken up a game of beer pong. There were also some THC-infused drinks. “It was like the parents had left town for the weekend,” Doug Weinstein, a lawyer for one of the men at the house, told me. The mansion contained an Icee machine, paintings of musical icons (Prince, Kurt Cobain, Janelle Monáe), and a large glass wall that allowed Williams to, as he put it on social media, “just look at clouds and, you know, trees.” He was wearing a white Harley-Davidson tank top and an unfazed expression as he was taken away in cuffs. He left behind a pink Lamborghini, among other exotic cars, and a large quantity of jewelry, including a $1.7 million Richard Mille watch, which some would claim later appeared on the wrist of a cop who testified for the prosecution at Williams’s trial. (The Atlanta police denied stealing anything from the home.)

Williams grew up twelve miles to the south, in an Atlanta housing project that has since been razed. He had ten siblings, one of whom was shot and killed in front of the family home when Williams was nine years old; another has since been incarcerated. Williams, the second youngest, broke a teacher’s arm in eighth grade during an argument. He was sent to juvenile detention, where he experimented with music and, as he later put it to Rolling Stone, liked to “gamble, smoke and fuck.” He released his first mixtape, “I Came from Nothing,” in 2011, when he was nineteen. The rapper Gucci Mane signed him, and he was soon collaborating with Justin Bieber and Kanye West. By his late twenties, Williams had become a chart-topping and Grammy-winning artist whom the BBC breathlessly described as “the 21st Century’s most influential rapper.” He helped pioneer “mumble rap,” a slurred and melodic type of trap music, and styled himself androgynously. He sometimes wore little girl’s clothing, painted his nails, and called male friends “babe.” On the cover of an album from 2016, he donned a billowing periwinkle dress from the Italian designer Alessandro Trincone which, he said, reminded him of a character from Mortal Kombat. He later rapped, “Had to wear the dress ’cause I had a stick,” by which he presumably meant a gun. Before 2022, Williams had never been convicted of a crime as an adult, but his songs often referenced illegal acts, along with guns and drugs, both of which were found in his Buckhead home.

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