Big Face Mike, born Masoud Jolfaie, 28, was bred on the notorious East Side of Memphis, Tennessee where countless acts of violence such as gang related activity, drugs and murder habitually plagued the community.  As a product of single parent household, his mother, Gail Stewart, provided a modest living for her three children.  With Mike being the oldest, he regularly played father to his younger siblings, brother and sister.  Despite being under the strict supervision of his mother, Mike regularly found himself hustling in the streets while being mentored by the elder gangsters of the city.

At the age of fourteen, Gail became suspicious of the crowd that her oldest son we running with and made several attempts to separate him from his peers.  Regardless of the efforts she made, Mike’s bond with his crew remained in tact.  She often stressed to him that the thug mentality and gangster lifestyle only has two sentences, death or jail.  After being knowledgeable of his mothers’ suspicion, Mike always stayed one step ahead of her inquisitive nature.  Little did he know, after peddling weed and other drugs that his mothers’ prophecy would soon come to past. 

In January 1999, approximately a week after his eighteenth birthday, Mike was arrested for marijuana and gun possession.  During booking his Aunt seen him downtown at the infamous Shelby County Detention Center located on 201 Popular.  She immediately called his mother and that is how she found out about her son’s extracurricular street activities.  He received one year probation and violated shortly thereafter.  For the next month he resided as a state inmate on the Lower Level in the county jail.  A few weeks later, the state transferred him to another detention center where he would finish serving the last five months of his sentence.      

During the next year, Mike’s life would be constant turmoil from dealing with a variety of personal issues.   Soon afterward, Gail was diagnosed with Cervical Cancer.  Sorry to say, his beloved mother would later succumb to her illness on Monday, March 20^th 2000.  Mike intimately reveals, “I literally died when I lost her.  My mom was my everything. My inspiration.  She always wanted the best for me and my siblings.  Regardless of the life course I took, my moms always supported me and I am forever in debt to her.  For every breath I take and every decision I make I strive to make her proud of her first born.”

While undergoing a host of mental, physical and spiritual metamorphosis, his life would soon be introduced to a new profound responsibility.  On June 3^rd 2001, Mike welcomed the birth of his newborn son, Micheal Jolfaie.  With fatherhood taking first priority and hustling becoming a secondary function, he began to explore his entrepreneurial spirit by opening up his own independent record label, Money In The Building Entertainment.  Since his early teens he frequently toyed with the idea of rapping but never pursued it as a career. 

Mike has  always been submersed in the gangster way of life, because it often paralleled his daily lifestyle. He elaborates, “Since the establishment of gangster rap, I’ve been a fan of the art form.  The Ghetto Boys and Dr. Dre are two of my favorites.  When it first hit the scene I was drawn to it, like bees to honey.   I wanted to be a part of that culture because the artists in this genre rapped about the things that were going on in my life.  I could identify with their struggles because I was going through it myself.”

With success on the horizon, Big Face Mike is seeking to establish himself as a major artist and mogul within the music industry.  In the coming years, he looks forward to developing up and coming talent and releasing their music under his upstart imprint.  The former street hustler is now a budding entrepreneur and is solely focused on creating profitable opportunities and capitalizing on them when presented.  In retrospect, one’s perseverance from past struggles is the gateway to a promising future.