Original Gangster; MOBSTEEL CREATES A SET OF WHEELS ANY MODERN WISE GUY WILL LOVE.(NEWS)

Byline: NATALIE NEFF

i F YOU SQUINT JUST right, you can see them spilling from the vehicle, trench coats tied tight and fedoras tipped low over their eyes, tommy guns held not so discreetly at their sides as they quickly step away from the splaying suicide doors and disappear into an inky, rain-soaked night. Gangsters, old-school, on a job. This is their ride, and not just for all the badges that read "Mobsteel.

Blink. The fedoras make way for bandanas and knit caps, the trench coats for black T-shirts and grease-stained jeans slung loose and low, the tommy guns for tattooed arms crossed tightly across chests. As you check out their ride, their eyes stay glued on you.

Except for Adam's. The owner and founder of Mobsteel, in Brighton, Mich., Adam Genei has an affability that belies his ruffian image, and he talks easily about his latest creation, the Mobsteel Flex, while his crew quietly hangs back, watching.

The stock Ford Flex "is a little more realistic for middle America; it's no Porsche Cayenne. But it's still a girl's car, says Genei, smiling. "It has to have some sort of toughness for me to want to drive it.

The Flex lends itself to a lot of toughening up, with its naturally strong lines and square stance and proportions that tend toward the long and lean. Genei started by dressing up his SEMA show car in Mobsteel's trademark all-black palette.

The triple-black treatment is at once understated and graphic, a simple, declarative sentence punctuated thrice: a glossy jet-black body and a flat hot-rod-black roof, courtesy of SEM Products' Color Horizons, with a full black leather interior, custom-stitched by C&S Stitch Works.