At seven 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. 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. 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 20" custom rims. "We fucked up everybody by puttin' rims on these Bentleys," says Fresh, the label's producer and musical mastermind, placing factory speakers with booming subwoofers, jacking up the suspension on twenty-inch custom rims. "We fucked up everybody by puttin' rims on these Bentleys," says Fresh, the label's producer and musical mastermind, with a defiant chuckle. "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."

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. "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. Blige's "Sexy" - before shutting off the engine. "It's a relaxed place. We got a lot of love there; we can lay back and have some fun. No stress. They've got a great mall down there, good clubs, and the women - wait until you see the women in Houston."

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. 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. (At the time of these interviews, Cash Money was building larger new offices nearby.) During 1999, fueled by sales of albums by Juvenile, B.G., Lil Wayne and the Hot Boys - an N.W.A-style tag team that features all three star rappers plus newcomer Turk - Cash Money sold more than 9 million albums and transformed its proudly provincial Southern style into the most explosive new sound in hip-hop.

The office windows are tinted and covered with steel grating, and the only sign of life coming from inside is the music - the thumping, booming, bass-and-synthesizer rhythm of Juvenile's current single, "U Understand," which bangs so loud it rattles the exterior window frames. On the other side of a heavy metal security door, the party is in full swing. A half-dozen members of the road crew, dressed in standard Cash Money garb - Girbaud jeans, oversize T-shirts, white Reeboks - lounge on a beat-up couch and across the dingy gray carpet, eating Popeye's chicken and chugging from bottles of champagne. "This how we do it!" shouts label co-owner Bryan "Baby" Williams, 27, hoisting a Modt bottle in one hand and a drumstick in the other, his wide grin showing off a mouth full of gold and diamonds. "All the way ghetto."

Baby and his brother, Ronald "Slim" Williams, 29, founded Cash Money Records in 1992, though the label didn't start to live up to its name until years later. The brothers are a study in contrasts: Baby is robust and excitable, with the tightly wound energy of a man who could be set off at any time; Slim is tall and gangly, with a pigeon-toed walk and an almost Buddha-like calm. Both exert a benevolent, paternal air over their brood, joking, telling stories and taking a nonstop barrage of calls on the two cell phones they each seem to carry at all times. At one point, Lil Wayne's mother calls, wondering how her son is feeling. Wayne, who at sixteen is the label's youngest star, has the flu, and despite his athletic stage dive during Cash Money's performance two nights ago, he's in no shape to travel to Houston. "I think I been workin' too hard," he mumbles.

When Wayne first asked his mom if he could join Cash Money, she resisted, telling her son the rappers looked like gangsters in their bandannas and low-slung jeans. She relented a year later, as long as Wayne promised not to curse in his songs. (So far, he's cursed only once - in the mournful, angry "F*** Tha World," about the murder of his stepfather, Rabbit.) Not long after he joined the label, Wayne accidentally shot himself in the chest with a Glock at his mother's house. He would have bled to death had the police not heard him kicking the inside of his mom's door. Wayne won't talk about the incident, but he's admitted that he was stoned at the time and distracted by a bag of cookies. "I got the munchies," he told one reporter.

"Where I come from, temptation is a motherfucker," Wayne says tonight in his slow, soft drawl. "But these guys picked me up, set me straight, taught me a lot - they been like fathers to me."

Spend time around Cash Money and it's obvious that the love and admiration its members have for one another is not manufactured. "You got to understand, bruh, we nothin' but a big old family," Slim says. There's something else at work, too - a strict, unspoken hierarchy that Fresh calls "a Mafia kind of thing." Cash Money is a tightly knit, insular organization that, in addition to Slim, Baby, Fresh and the four rappers, includes a staff of twenty that swells to forty-two on the road. The rappers are required to follow rules: Show up at the office every day; be ready to go in the studio or on the road at any time; no drugs. The latter policy is strictly enforced, particularly since B.G., a former heroin addict, got out of prison on a two-year parole that includes weekly urine tests. This is one reason friends from the old neighborhood are not allowed to hang around the office.

"We don't condone outsiders," says Fresh. "We went through a long time where it was hell trying to get these guys to understand that. Because they young kids, and they think everybody's they friend and everybody's cool with them, but we don't know these people, and you might not really know these people, either."

Wayne shrugs when asked about the policy. "I ain't old, but I feel it's too late for me to make new friends, anyway," he says.

"Controlled chaos" is how Slim describes the Cash Money atmosphere. The undisputed chief and, at six feet eight, the most imposing member of the crew, Slim - who also answers to Sugar Slim, the Don and the Godfather - is soft-spoken and intense, with dark, sleepy eyes and long braids hanging over his FUBU jacket. Known throughout the rap industry as a shrewd businessman, Slim has an easygoing, generous manner that friends say can turn fierce when circumstances demand it. And while his more flamboyant brother, Baby, raps in his own group, the Big Tymers (a duo with Fresh), Slim stays in the background. He never appears on albums, in videos or onstage. He doesn't drink, smoke or, to the best recollection of friends, dance. "You got to have a chief to stay on top of things - and that's me, the Godfather," Slim says. "A lot of people lose focus - they get the money and they forget about what made them. They party too much, lose perspective. We like to have fun, we party, but we don't go overboard. I be right on top of everything, all the time. I be the first one to congratulate them and the first one to jump in their chest when they be doing something they ain't got no business doing."

It's almost 2 a.m. by the time we finally hit the road, a surprisingly orderly procession of Cadillacs, Jags, Bentleys and a black Lamborghini 2000 VT - one of the fastest and rarest cars in the world - cruising down Veterans Boulevard to I-10. No one travels above eighty m.p.h., and no one who's had even a little champagne takes the wheel. In the Cadillac Escalade I'm driving, the most dangerous activity is watching Meet Joe Black on DVD. A dozen silver-plated Nokia cell phones serve as CB radios to choreograph pit stops for gas and fast food. At one point, Juvenile's Bentley pulls up next to Baby's and he phones. "Hey, 'd you pack anything? What about clothes? What we gonna wear?"

"Nah, bruh, we don't need no clothes," answers Baby from the backseat, with typical rowdy enthusiasm. "I got money in my pocket - we'll buy clothes when we get there. Shit, we goin' to the mall, ain't we?"

Senior editor Jason Fine prefers a classic Eldorado to the Cadillac Escalade.

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