There is a corner in East Atlanta where four roads meet. Stand on it long enough and you can see the whole story laid out in front of you. One corner takes you to the studio, another takes you to the trap. The third runs straight to the county courthouse and the last one ends at the cemetery. For about 15 years, the men and women who came up through one record label kept ending up on one of those four corners.
Same label, same chain around the neck, four very different endings. Then, one morning, a rapper that half of them grew up watching walked into a federal courtroom, raised his right hand, and started naming his own. He was never signed to this label, but what he did that day told you exactly how the game had changed.
Loyalty had become evidence and the men who used to run the block were finding out the system had built a brand new way to take it all back. This is the story of 1017, the label Gucci Mane built with his own name. And it is the one question nobody standing on those four corners wants to answer out loud. Why did almost everybody he signed end up dead or end up in a cell? To understand what happened to 1017, you have to understand a law most people have never read. It was written in 1970.
Back then, the United States government had a problem it could not solve, the Italian Mafia. Every time prosecutors took a shooter to trial, the boss who gave the order walked free because he never touched the gun. So, Congress wrote something new. They called it the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act.
Everybody just calls it RICO. Here is what RICO does in plain English. It lets the government charge a whole group as one criminal body. If the law can prove the group exists and prove that two or more members committed crimes to keep it running, then everybody connected can be charged for the entire operation.
The boss who never held the gun goes down with the man who fired it. That was the point. It was built to reach the people at the top. For decades, that law did exactly what it was designed to do. It took apart the five families in New York. It put bosses in prison who thought they were untouchable. But somewhere along the way, the same law built to protect black and immigrant neighborhoods from organized crime got turned around and aimed at the neighborhoods themselves.
The same tool that brought down the mafia is now the tool of choice against rap labels and the young men who run them. And there is a second twist. And this one is the cruel one. The thing that made these artists famous is the exact thing that convicted them. They documented everything. The money, the guns, the rivalries, the bodies, they put it in the songs.
They put it on the timeline. The more real it looked, the bigger they got. And every post, every lyric, every video became a piece of evidence the state could read back to a jury. Visibility was the whole career. Visibility was also the whole case. Keep that in your head because it is going to come back around for every single name on this list.
Gucci Mane was born Radric Davis in Bessemer, Alabama in 1980. His family moved to East Atlanta when he was a kid. And he grew up in Zone 6 around Bouldercrest Road in the same blocks that would later fill his songs. He started selling music out of the trunk the same way he started selling everything else.
Hand to hand. By 2010, he had turned his hustle into a company and stamped it with the area code of his old neighborhood. 1017. He signed shooters and singers and street legends. Some had real deals on paper. Some, by Gucci’s own admission years later, were never officially signed at all. It was loose. It was loyal.
And it was dangerous. Then in 2014, the boss went down himself. Gucci pleaded guilty to a federal firearm charge. A judge gave him 39 months. He served his time in a federal prison in Terre Haute, Indiana. And he walked out on May 26th, 2016, sober, in shape, and free. And that is the first piece of irony in this whole story. So, hold on to it.
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The man at the top of 1017 is the one person in this entire documentary who went into the federal system and came back out clean. He did his bid. He came home. He built an empire. Almost nobody he signed would get to say the same thing. In 2020, fresh off the comeback, Gucci relaunched the label through a deal with Atlantic Records and called it the new 1017.
And here is the decision that everything after this turns on. He went looking for the hungriest, realest, most dangerous young talent in the South. Memphis, Atlanta, small towns in Georgia and Arkansas. He found exactly what he was looking for. That was the problem. So, let’s go through the list, all of it.
Start with the ones who are not here to tell it themselves. Slim Dunkin, born Mario Hamilton in Detroit, raised in Atlanta, a first-generation Brick Squad artist. On December 16th, 2011, he was shot once in the chest inside an East Atlanta recording studio while getting ready to shoot a video. He was 24 years old.
The argument that started it, according to testimony, was over a piece of candy. The man who killed him, Vincent Hardiman, was acquitted of murder but convicted of aggravated assault and got the maximum 25 years. KO Redd, born KO Scott, was the younger brother of Waka Flocka and part of the Brick Squad family.
He died by suicide in December 2013 at 27 years old. He had released a new project just hours before. There is not much more to say about that one, except that it was the second time in 2 years the label buried one of its own. Big Scarr, we will come back to him. Enchanting, born Channing Nicole Larry, raised between Atlanta and Fort Worth, Texas, was one of the brightest young talents Gucci ever signed and one of the only women on the roster.
She had actually left the new 1017 earlier in 2024 for a new deal. On June 11th, 2024, she died in a Dallas hospital. The medical examiner ruled it an accidental overdose. She was 26. Young Scooter, born Kenneth Bailey, came up in Kirkwood in East Atlanta and rode with the 1017 family through Waka Flocka’s Brick Squad Monopoly.
And I want to be careful with this one because the internet got it wrong. On March 28th, 2025, his 39th birthday, Atlanta police responded to a call at a home he was at. Scooter ran and he tried to jump two fences. The Fulton County Medical Examiner ruled his death an accident. He suffered a deep leg injury from the wooden fencing and lost too much blood.
The officers never fired a shot. The person who made the false call that brought police there was the one who got arrested. He died on the day he born. That detail alone is the kind of thing that makes you put the phone down for a second. Now, the ones who are still behind the wall as we speak Frenchie, an original Brick Squad member and Walker’s cousin.
In 2023, a New York court sentenced him to 12 years in state prison for a home invasion in which an autistic teenager was pistol-whipped. He will not see daylight as a free man until the next decade. Hotboy Wes out of Waco, Texas signed to the New 1017 in 2021. In January 2024, he pleaded guilty to a stack of charges that included family violence, aggravated assault, robbery, and child endangerment and a Texas judge sentenced him to 15 years.
He is to serve at least 7 and 1/2 before he can even ask for parole. Mac Critter, born Daniel Bates out of North Memphis, got signed in October 2022. By the end of that December, he was charged with first-degree murder. He has not been convicted, the case is still pending, and he is sitting in a Shelby County jail waiting on it.
He was on the label for about 2 months before his life turned into a murder case. PeeWee Longway out of the Jonesboro South Projects on the Atlanta South side. He is one of the most important names in this whole story, and most casual fans do not even know why. Pee Wee is the man who brought Young Thug to Gucci.
We will get there. In September 2024, Pee Wee got swept up in a $280 million federal drug case. On April 2026, he pleaded guilty. He is in federal custody right now waiting on a sentence that is expected to run into double-digit years. Ralo, born Terrell Davis, came up in the Bluff in West Atlanta and signed to Gucci’s 1017 Eskimo imprint back in 2017.
In 2018, federal agents caught him at a private airport with 444 lb of marijuana on a plane. He got 97 months. That is just over 8 years. He came home in late 2023 and went right back to work. Hoodrich Pablo Juan, another 10 um 17 Eskimo artist, became a walking symbol of how dangerous the chain itself was.
Rivals robbed him more than once, and at one point a rival crew was posting his stolen 1017 chain on social media to taunt him. Then in 2020, he got pulled into a massive Georgia gang racketeering case, the Rolling 20s Bloods sweep. He took a plea, did about 3 years, and came home in late 2025. And here is the part the cameras never lingered on.
Only the people closest to all of this ever saw the pattern forming. Everybody else just kept streaming the music and buying the merch. The body count and the prison count were public the whole time. Nobody was adding it up. Now, we stack the cases because four of them side by side tell you more than any one of them could alone.
Exhibit one, Big Scarr, born Alexander Woods in the Magnolia section of South Memphis in the year 2000. Gucci signed him to the new 1017 in 2020 and he hit almost immediately. His mixtape, Big Grim Reaper, landed in the top 25 of the Billboard 200. He made the 2022 XXL freshman class. By 22, he was one of the most promising young rappers in the country.
But the kid had already been through more than most people survived. He got shot in the hip in 2020 and the bullet traveled up toward his spine. He had survived a brutal car crash as a teenager. That crash is where the name Big Scarr even came from. And after his grandmother passed, the people around him said the depression got heavy.
Now, think about what that visibility really is because he told you he put the pain in the music. He wrapped about the pills. He wrapped about the hurt. He wrapped about being tired. We treated it like content. We treated it like a vibe. It was a young man telling you out loud in song after song that he was struggling and the algorithm just kept serving it up as entertainment.
On December 22nd, 2022, Big Scarr died at his girlfriend’s home in Memphis. His family said it was an accidental overdose of prescription medication. He was 22 years old. Gucci posted that it hurt and that he was going to miss him. Somebody should have said something. The truth is, in his own way, he did.
Nobody heard it as a warning. Everybody heard it as a hit. Exhibit two, Foogiano, born Kwame Brown in Greensboro, Georgia, a small town in Greene County, not the big city. Gucci signed him in early 2020, right as the relaunch was taking off, and Foogiano had a real hit on his hands almost right away. But, Foogiano had a prior felony, which meant he could not legally carry a gun.
In December 2020, police in Barrow County, Georgia, arrested him for exactly that, a felon in possession of a firearm. He got out on bond. The condition was simple, wear an ankle monitor and stay where the court can see you. And this is the fork in the road. This is the moment the whole thing turn. Foogiano had a path.
Stay still, wear the monitor, fight the case from the outside. Instead, he cut the monitor off and ran. US Marshals chased him for 3 months and finally caught him at a house in Memphis on March 2021. When you run from the monitor, you are not just facing the gun charge anymore. You are telling the court everything it needs to know.
He pleaded out and a Georgia judge gave him 5 years. Here’s the thing I’m not going to tell you how to feel about Some people look at Foogiano and see a young man the system was always going to catch one way or another. Some people look at him and see a man who had his freedom in his own hands and threw it away over decision he made in one night.
Both of those people are at the same cookout arguing about it right now. I’m just going to give you the facts and let you take your side. He served his time and came home in April 2026. And when Gucci cleaned house and dropped almost the entire roster in late 2024, Foogiano was one of only two artists he kept. Exhibit three.
And this is the one that turns the whole story inside out. Pooh Shiesty, born Lontrell Williams Jr. in Memphis. His father was a Memphis rapper, too. So, he came from the music and the streets at the same time. Gucci signed him in April 2020 and he became the face of the new 1017 almost overnight. He was the flagship, the one who proved [snorts] the relaunch was real.
Then, in October 2020 in Bay Harbor Islands, Florida, a sneaker and marijuana deal turned into a shooting. The federal government charged him. In January 2022, Pooh Shiesty pleaded guilty to a firearms conspiracy. A judge gave him 63 months, just over 5 years. He got out early on October 6, 2025 on credits and home confinement.
And he came home to a hero’s welcome. His first song out, FDO, shot all the way up to number 12 on the Billboard Hot 100 in January of 2026. The comeback was perfect. The label flagship was free and he was bigger than ever. And then, the whole thing flipped. On April 2, 2026, federal prosecutors in Texas indicted Pooh Shiesty.
The allegation is almost too wild to say out loud. They charged him in connection with the kidnapping and armed robbery of Gucci Mane himself, the man who signed him, the man who made him. According to the federal indictment in January 2026, A crew forced Gucci at gunpoint inside a Dallas studio, choked one of his associates nearly unconscious, and took jewelry and cash, allegedly trying to force paperwork that would release Pooh Shiesty from his contract.
Among the people charged alongside him were his own father and another labelmate. A judge denied him bond. He is sitting in a Texas county jail right now, facing the possibility of life in prison, and he has pleaded not guilty. I have to be clear here. These are allegations. Pooh Shiesty has not been convicted of any of it, and he is entitled to his day in court like anybody else.
But, the charge alone tells you how far the loyalty had cracked. Gucci responded with a song that everybody in the culture read as a message to his former flagship, taunting him that even after all of it, the label that built him still owns him. The man who signed him, the contract that made him, allegedly the very thing he is accused of pointing a gun at the boss to escape. Exhibit four.
And this is the one that shows you the whole machine at once. Before he was Young Thug, before any of it, Jeffrey Williams was a kid out of Cleveland Avenue on the Atlanta southside. Remember PeeWee Longway, sitting in federal custody right now. PeeWee is the one who walked Thug into the room. The story goes that Gucci pulled $25,000 cash out and signed him on the spot.
His first real project was literally called 1017 Thug. Thug took that start and built his own world. YSL Young Stoner Life. It It a record label. It launched real careers. It made real money. Now, pay attention to this next detail because it explains everything. In May 2022, the state of Georgia did not just charge Young Thug with a crime.
They charged YSL under RICO. And on paper, they did something the culture is still arguing about. They took a record label and relabeled it. The state argued that YSL was not really a music company. It was a criminal street gang. Read that back slowly. The same RICO law written to take down the Italian Mafia was now being used to say that a rap label was an organized criminal enterprise.
The logo became a gang sign. The roster became a conspiracy. The company became a body count. And then, prosecutors did the thing that should scare every artist in America. They put the lyrics in the indictment. They took the songs, the bars these men wrote to get famous, and they read them to the court as evidence of crimes.
The art became the confession. This was not the only place it was happening. Around the same era, federal prosecutors went after other major artists and pointed to their lyrics, too. When they came after Lil Durk in a federal case, the words in his music became part of the conversation about his guilt.
A handful of artists and a few civil rights lawyers tried to warn everybody that this tactic was a crack in the foundation. That if your songs can be used against you, then the more honest your music is, the more dangerous it becomes. Most people did not listen because the music kept getting bigger.
Young Thug’s case dragged on into one of the longest trials in Georgia history. In October 2024, he took a plea. He walked out with time served and a long stretch of probation. He is technically free. But the thing that made him a legend, the realness, the detail, the willingness to put his actual life in the music, is the exact thing the state tried to hang him with.
Visibility was the career. Visibility was the case every single time. So far, we have counted three endings: dead, in prison, or out but marked for life. There is a fourth one, and it is the one the streets hate the most. Remember the cold open, the rapper who walked into a federal courtroom and started naming his own.
That was not anybody from 1017. That was Tekashi 69 in 2019 testifying against the very gang he claimed in his own videos, the Nine Trey Bloods, to save himself from a long federal sentence. He was never a Gucci artist, but he became the symbol of the fourth ending. You can die, you can do the time, or you can talk.
And once you line all of it up, the separate tragedies stop looking separate. The deaths, the sentences, the cooperation deals. They are not a string of bad luck that happened to land on one label. They are the same machine running on the same fuel. The fuel was attention. The streets gave these young men attention by making them stars.
The state used that exact same attention to build the cases. The phones that made the careers were the phones that made the evidence. The label that made them visible made them targets. Everything that lifted them up was the same thing that pulled them down. That is not a coincidence. That is the design. Now, let me be honest with you because this audience can smell it when somebody stretches the truth for a thumbnail.
It is not literally every single artist. Waka Flocka Flame is alive and doing fine. Artists like Big Walk Dog and Big Fetti came through that world and are out here free and working right now. There was even a kid named Baby Racks who Gucci signed and then dropped the very next day after a bad social media post.
Gucci joked that he was the first artist in history to get signed and dropped in 24 hours. Some of them just made music and went home. That is real and you deserve to hear it. And the man at the top, the one who actually went to federal prison, is the one who came home, got married, got healthy, and got richer than all of them. The boss survived.
A whole lot of the soldiers did not. So, which was it? Was 1017 cursed? Was it a label where the system was always going to swallow whoever signed that paper, no matter what they did? Or was it a room full of grown men who each made their own choices, signed their own names, and have to answer for them? I will tell you what I have learned doing this.
Both of those things can be true at the same time. The system was built to take and every man still picked up the pen. You can hold both in one hand. Go back to that corner in East Atlanta where the four roads meet. We said it at the start. One corner runs to the studio. One runs to the trap.
One runs to the courthouse and one runs to the cemetery. Now, you know the names that landed on each one. Big Scarr and Enchanting, and Slim Dunkin, and KO Redd, and Young Scooter took the road to the cemetery. Frenchie, and Hotboy Wes, and Peewee Longway, and Pooh Shiesty took the road to the courthouse and through the gate. Fugiano, and Ralo, and Hoodrich, Pablo Juan walked the courthouse road and made it back out the other side.
And almost nobody almost nobody in this entire story got to just be a musician and go home at night. In most industries, you age out. You get older. The work slows down, and you walk away. In this one, you get sorted onto one of four corners. And the only man who managed to walk off the corner completely and live to talk about it is the same man whose name is on the label.
What that says about the streets, about the music, about a law written for the mafia and used on the block, I’m going to leave that to you. You have lived more of this than I ever could. Put it in the comments. Tell me which corner you would have ended up on. And tell me whether you think the label was cursed or whether everybody got exactly what the choices added up to.
