It was a bold move by an ambitious, young rap mogul.

At a time when authorities suspected he controlled a vast cocaine operation in Southwest Philadelphia, Alton Coles decided to shoot a video about that very world.

New Jack City: The Next Generation would depict the violent rise of a fictional Southwest Philadelphia cocaine ring that used fear, intimidation and murder to take over the streets.

Coles, under his hip-hop nickname "Ace Capone," would star in the 2003 rap music drama as a ruthless cocaine kingpin.

It was, federal authorities now allege, a role the rap music impresario knew well.

"He was already living that life when he made that movie," says John Hageman, spokesman for the Philadelphia office of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF).

But it would take hundreds of hours of surveillance, thousands of wiretapped conversations, scores of undercover drug buys, and the testimony of more than a dozen cooperating witnesses for police and ATF agents to make their case against Coles.

Set in an underworld of drugs and guns, greed and power, their investigation offers insight into a violent street-corner culture that is ripping some Philadelphia neighborhoods apart.

In January, Coles is to go on trial in U.S. District Court in Philadelphia, charged with running one of the largest drug operations ever prosecuted in the city - a $25 million network that authorities say flooded the streets with crack and powder cocaine.

"This gang was responsible for about 100,000 individual doses' hitting the streets each week over a seven-year period," said U.S. Attorney Patrick L. Meehan.

The 197-count case, involving 22 defendants, includes charges of money laundering, weapons offenses and drug dealing. The organization, the indictment alleges, moved a ton of cocaine and a half-ton of crack onto the Philadelphia market between 1999 and 2005.

Coles, who has been charged with heading the criminal enterprise, is named in 64 of those counts. He has pleaded not guilty.

According to ATF agents, that enterprise was responsible for 21 shootings and seven murders, though only one shooting is listed in the indictment.

Five codefendants are set to be tried with Coles. Sixteen others either have pleaded guilty or are to be tried later. Several are believed to be cooperating.

"The government got a lot of people into a big case and created a conspiracy that don't exist," Coles said in a telephone interview from the Federal Detention Center in Philadelphia last week.

"These are serious charges, but I'm not the guy that they allege me to be. . . . I'm not no boss of a street organization running a big, giant drug conspiracy."

He called New Jack City: The Next Generation "a street movie."

"It's not a story of my life. . . . You wouldn't take Denzel Washington and indict him for being a drug dealer because he played one in American Gangster."

Prosecutors see it differently.

By the time Coles, 33, started to make his video, federal authorities say, he had already blurred the lines between the make-believe world of gangsta rap videos and the take-no-prisoners street life of a cocaine trafficker.