There’s no sign out front, and the gray, two-story cinder-block building, tucked between a body shop and a Jacuzzi dealer, looks more like a low-rent insurance office than the home of an organization that grossed close to $70 million last year. If not for the luxury cars parked three deep in the lot it would be hard to guess you’ve arrived at the headquarters of one of the most successful labels in rap music today. They’ve got a great mall down there, good clubs, and the women - wait until you see the women in Houston.” We got a lot of love there we can lay back and have some fun. Blige’s “Sexy” - before shutting off the engine. “A lot of times if we just sitting around and we don’t got shit to do, we be like - Houston!” explains Fresh, sinking low into the soft tan leather driver’s seat as he waits for the end of a song - Mary J. The Cash Money crew arrived home from a Las Vegas awards show less than twenty-four hours ago now they’re itching to hit the road again for a pleasure ride to Houston, 350 miles away. “We was up at Justin’s” - Puffy’s New York restaurant - “and those guys be like, ‘Man, what the fuck wrong with y’all? You don’t do that to no Bentley.’ I was like, ‘Fuck that - I bought it, I gonna put some rims on it, some TVs in that bitch.’ I had to tear that motherfucker down.” “We fucked up everybody by puttin’ rims on these Bentleys,” says Fresh, the label’s producer and musical mastermind, with a defiant chuckle. Puffy may have made the stuffy British car a rap status symbol, but Cash Money gave the Bentley its first ghetto makeover - mounting DVD screens to the wood-panel interior, replacing factory speakers with booming subwoofers, jacking up the suspension on twenty-inch custom rims. The label’s owners recently bought seven Bentleys as gifts for their rappers, including one $375,000 deluxe model, with a convertible top and blue mink carpeting, for themselves.

This story was originally published in the June 8th, 2000 issue of Rolling Stone.Īt 7 o’clock on a foggy night in New Orleans, Mannie Fresh rolls his brand-new, just-washed, platinum-colored Bentley up alongside a pair of identical cars in the parking lot outside Cash Money Records.

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