For Adam Genei, cars were in his blood. Having grown up near Detroit, America’s automotive capital, it was only a matter of time before he opened up his own shop. Having one grandfather who owned a Ford dealership, while the other was a supplier to the Big Three and a father who had his own shop, Genei was always inspired by the automotive industry. The influence of the Motor City was all around him, and Genei became a man of his passion and opened up Mobsteel in Brighton, Michigan six years ago.

“I’m a Michigan boy,” he admits. “Our whole lives revolve around cars. It’s kind of a way of life around here. I grew up in my dad’s shop, wrenching and fabricating stuff, so it’s kind of how I was raised.” Combining Detroit’s rich history of building great cars and mixing it with the harsh reality of what the city has now become known for, Genei wanted Mobsteel to embody these two legacies in the cars they built. “We provide steel with soul and a story,” he says. “The cars we bring back to life are the hard work of all the men and women whom helped make this country so great.”

With a name that conjures up gangsters from the Rolling ’20s, with fedora hats, pin-stripe suits and Tommy guns in hand, Genei came up with the gritty name and its unforgettable logo long before he wanted to open up his own shop. “Mobsteel is kind of like a mob of guys,” he describes. “The name was always in the back of my head. We’re a mob of guys just doing our thing and having fun with it.”

Genei’s laid-back motto toward his shop is exactly what makes Mobsteel different from the rest of the numerous shops across the nation. “We didn’t start this thing anticipating anything. We were just expressing who we are and just rolling with it.” Another unique aspect of Mobsteel is that if you want one of their cars, you’re going to have to have it in black. When they first started, besides only working on black cars, they also only customized Lincolns. Genei is passionate about sticking to his convictions and will not build a Mobsteel car in any other color, even if it means turning down loads of cash for the build.

“We brought something different to the game by starting off with only customizing Lincolns and only doing black cars,” he describes. “We’ve had some opportunities to build colorful cars, but I stuck to my guns and only built black cars. It’s sort of my way of paying homage to Mr. Ford and a bit of my own personal likes. I’m the kind of guy who loves to drive a black car and everybody around us here drives black cars. At the end of the day, when I turn the lights off to the shop, I just want to see black rides in there. We’ve turned down some pretty big names because we didn’t stray. As hard as it was, you gotta have some convictions.”

Not conforming to anyone’s standards, Mobsteel has fought every stop of the way to get to where they are at now. They’ve had companies turn them down because of misconceptions that the shop was all about girls and guns, and the guys were nothing but hoodlums, given their “tough-guy- I-don’t-give-a-sh*t attitudes. “We’re not that way for the most part,” he says. “Maybe the name and persona projects that, but we’re just some dirt bags out of Michigan, making cars and we don’t care. We build black cars, and if you don’t like it, go somewhere else.”