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 SWAT trucks 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.
At the time of Williams’s arrest, Fani Willis, the district attorney of Fulton County, was less than two years into her first term, and swinging big. She was also targeting Donald Trump in a case on election interference, employing a strategy originally used to curtail Mafia activity: the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, which holds each member of an alleged conspiracy responsible for the crimes of the rest. Georgia’s RICO statute, created in 1980, is unusually broad. In 2013, Willis had used it to charge more than a hundred and seventy Atlanta public-school educators whom she accused of systematically altering answers on their students’ standardized tests. Some had taken part in what they called “changing parties.” Eleven were ultimately convicted. “I’m very comfortable with using RICO,” Willis later said.
In 2016, Williams had founded a record label called Y.S.L., an acronym for Young Stoner Life that was also a play on Yves Saint Laurent. (Williams had worn such fashion labels in his youth, and was called “the king of white-boy swaggin’.”) Willis said that Y.S.L. was actually a violent gang known as Young Slime Life, headed by Williams, a.k.a. King Slime, and affiliated with the Bloods. Her office put together a slide show that described an escalating gang war between Y.S.L. and another local Bloods faction. It contained dozens of pictures, many taken from Instagram, of young Black men, including Williams (whose first name is misspelled on numerous slides). The men pose with stacks of money, flipping the bird; they hold machine guns and peer through window blinds; they lean against cars; they show off jewelry and tattoos.
Young Thug has six children. “One of them sing, one of them rap,” he said. “I tell every one of them to be a lawyer.”Photograph by TNS / ABACA / Reuters
The prosecution argued that Williams was running a Mafia-like crew in which underlings did his criminal bidding. Twenty-eight people were indicted on fifty-six charges, including armed robbery and carjacking. One man had apparently shot at the tour bus of the rapper Lil Wayne, Williams’s idol turned rival. Another was accused of “seriously disfiguring the buttocks” of a woman with a rifle. Williams himself allegedly made “terroristic threats” to a mall cop. Among these incidents, an unsolved murder stood out. In January, 2015, Donovan (Peanut) Thomas, a twenty-six-year-old man, was killed in a drive-by shooting outside a barbershop in downtown Atlanta. During subsequent questioning, Kenneth (Lil Woody) Copeland, a Y.S.L. associate with a criminal record, suggested that Williams was involved. Rumors spread that Thomas’s last words were “Thug had me killed.”
Williams denied the charges, and awaited trial in the Cobb County jail. He was held alone in a cement room with a bed, a toilet, and an overhead light that never turned off. At one point, from jail, Williams rapped to a nephew by phone. “I tried to cry, but ain’t nothing left—yeah,” he said. “I contemplated doing myself in—yeah. . . . But let’s not forget that this ain’t Hell.” His only visits came from his longtime attorney, Brian Steel, a fifty-nine-year-old from Queens. The two men did pushups and prepared for what would become the longest criminal trial in the state’s history.
Until recently, the legend of Brian Steel was a provincial story, known mainly by his Georgia peers. That began to change with Williams’s case. This month, it takes on a new chapter: Steel will defend Sean Combs, the music mogul and former billionaire known as Diddy, who has been charged with sex trafficking, racketeering, and various violent crimes. The allegations have inspired comparisons to Bill Cosby, R. Kelly, and Jeffrey Epstein. Combs awaits trial in a Brooklyn detention center, where he has access to TV, Ping-Pong, yoga mats, and, until a few weeks ago, the company of Sam Bankman-Fried. (“He’s been kind,” Bankman-Fried told Tucker Carlson.) Whatever the outcome, the trial will further raise Steel’s profile. Williams, who is now thirty-three, has six children. “One of them sing, one of them rap,” he told me recently. “I tell every one of them to be a lawyer.”
You’re charged with a crime in Georgia, and you can afford the best defense. Whom do you hire? Well, there’s Drew Findling, the so-called “billion-dollar lawyer” with a quarter of a million Instagram followers, who has represented the rappers Gucci Mane and Offset, and has been likened to “Robin Hood with Jesus swag.” Or you could try Bruce Harvey, the High Times-reading, memorably profane barrister once described as “Atlanta’s preeminent long-haired, left-handed, anti-establishment liberal lawyer.” (His business cards shout: “STOP TALKING.”) There’s also Steve Sadow, a combative, cowboy-booted attorney who is representing Trump in his Georgia election-interference case. And then there’s Brian Steel, whose sole flashy trait is his surname. Steel does not have an Instagram account, or a ponytail, or a Porsche with a license plate that reads “ACQUIT,” as Harvey once did. He looks like a tax guy, which he nearly was, and he drives an electric car painted off-white, inside of which he keeps fruit and water for whoever may need it.
“Brian doesn’t drink, doesn’t smoke, and can’t believe anybody would,” David Botts, an Atlanta defense attorney who has known Steel for thirty years, told me. “He won’t curse, even in court—even if he’s reading from a transcript. So when he’s cross-examining he’ll say, ‘So-and-so F-word.’ The court will say, ‘Mr. Steel, you can read that word.’ But Brian still won’t do it.” Botts went on, “Brian only drinks water. His lunch is tofu or salmon, maybe, and a salad. No bread. I’ve never seen him eat out. And he’ll bring a toothbrush to court. A toothbrush! He exercises daily, before or after court. Running. Swimming. Weights. And he’s got a great family—three kids, a wonderful wife, Colette, who is also his law partner. They kind of idolize each other.”
When reading alphabetized documents in court, Steel will arrive at the third letter: “C,” he’ll say, “as in ‘Colette.’ ” Steel has other quirks: he superstitiously kisses a finger or taps a table any time death is mentioned. He peppers tragic sentences with “God forbid.” He prefaces the names of everyone in court with “the Honorable.” Reporters are “Mr. Journalist.” A prominent judge said that Steel’s formality is “bordering on unctuousness,” but he was inclined to believe that Steel, whom he’d once seen cry in court, really means it.
Steel’s children described a man of almost unbelievable purity. “I get a text every single morning,” Jake, his adult son, told me. “He’ll say: Place a smile upon your face. Look forward to the opportunities. Laugh. Be compassionate, prepared, focussed, determined, organized, energized, well rested. I believe in you. Enjoy every day. I love you so much.” Young Thug’s mother now gets a text, too. Jake’s sister Alisa compared her dad to Morrie Schwartz, the titular Morrie in the book “Tuesdays with Morrie.” Morrie, however, probably couldn’t have bench-pressed three hundred and twenty-five pounds, as Steel, who is five feet nine, once did. These days, he runs marathons. “We gave him a marathon-medal holder that says ‘Man of Steel,’ ” Bari, his other daughter, told me.
Scott McAfee, the superior-court judge who is presiding over the election-interference case, recalled a slide show that was shown at a recent meeting with two hundred of his colleagues. The first slide was about avoiding the kinds of errors that lead to an appeal. “The next one was: What happens if you don’t do this?” McAfee told me. “And it just had a picture of Brian Steel’s smiling face.” Javaris Crittenton, a former N.B.A. player whom Steel defended against a murder charge, told me, “It’s almost like an angelic sound when he speaks. It’s all eyes focussed on him. He has a halo over his head.” By the time I reached Danny Corsun, one of Steel’s childhood friends, his canonization seemed nearly complete. “Brian would call my mother every year to thank her for giving me to him,” he said. “My mother lived for those phone calls.”
Steel was born in 1965; he described his childhood as “utopia,” and then mentioned getting beat up. (He eventually ended the hostilities by landing a blow with a heavy textbook.) His sunny outlook was rooted in perspective. When he was a teen-ager, his father, an accountant, took him to a Lower East Side tenement similar to the one where his great-grandparents had lived after fleeing Eastern Europe. “It was a room with no water, no kitchen, no bathroom,” Steel told me. “My great-grandmother couldn’t read or write. They worked at seltzer factories where people lost fingers.” His father told him, “You may sweep the streets of Manhattan, but your streets will be the most talked about.”
Steel went to Fordham Law, then became a tax attorney with Price Waterhouse. The job paid well, but he was distracted. A Fordham professor had allowed him to assist in the retrial of a young man who had been convicted, at thirteen, of choking another boy to death. “He was found guilty again, and I couldn’t believe it,” Steel told me. “I’ll go to my grave believing he was innocent.” Corporate-restructuring deals, by comparison, felt pointless. In 1991, he took an internship with the Fulton County Public Defender Office. Shandor Badaruddin, who started there around the same time, said, of Steel’s approach to clients, “He was pretty sure they were all innocent.”
In 1992, Steel was assigned the case of Greg Shephard, an illiterate man charged with the attempted murder of an Atlanta railway officer. “It’s a dead-bang loser,” Steel recalled a colleague telling him. “You need to understand what losing is about.” Steel met with Shephard, but the man wouldn’t talk. So Steel slept in the jail with him, and Shephard slowly opened up. He was innocent, he eventually said. After his arrest, police brought witnesses by, and the witnesses said, “It’s not him.” Shephard recalled that one of them had worn a fast-food uniform. “I subpoenaed everybody working at fast-food restaurants within five miles,” Steel told me. He remembers eventually reaching a woman who had seen the attempted killing, and she said that Shephard was not the shooter. Other witnesses backed up her assertion. “Our agreement was: if we get him home, he has to learn to read and write,” Steel told me. Shephard eventually landed a job with the Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s distribution department. “He used to come to my office every Thursday,” Steel told me. “And he’d read to me.”
