On the streets of Southwest Detroit, Layton (The Beast) Simon garners just as much, if not more, respect and reverence than that of more high-profile Southwest Detroit drug dons Demetrius (Big Meech) Flenory and Walter (The Black Fox) Cason. According to Motown underworld lore, a beef between Simon and Big Meech drove Flenory from Detroit in the 1990s leading him to headquarter his burgeoning drug empire in Atlanta and not his hometown of “The D.”
Walter Cason controlled the drug trade on the near Southwest side of Detroit and several of its surrounding factory-community suburbs in the 1970s. The far Southwest side of the city is primarily Hispanic in population opposed to the Delray neighborhood in the shadow of the Ambassador Bridge to Canada and closer to Downtown Detroit, which is mostly African-American.
Simon came up under Cason and when Cason went away to prison in 1978, he grabbed the territory for himself. It was in that capacity in the late 1980s and early 1990s, he began butting heads with the aspiring Flenory brothers.
Today, even though far away from his days as the area’s preeminent crime lord, Simon’s name holds weight on the block in Southwest Detroit and in low-income, smoggy suburbs like Inkster, River Rouge, Romulus and Ecorse. Southwest Detroit rapper Psyke Sconi put out a song called “OG Layton Simon” in 2014, releasing a video on Youtube with Simon himself making an appearance talking into the camera at the end.