It was hard to miss Jose “Chenel” Medina Teran driving a lime-green Lamborghini Aventador around West Phoenix. With its butterfly doors and leather interior, the garish sports car, which costs upward of $390,000 new, could often be spotted parked outside nightclubs, restaurants and even Walmart. For locals, it served as a quasi-tracking device for Teran’s whereabouts and was a neon reminder of his sudden, outsize wealth. “You knew where he was eating [by where] he was parked,” says Ricardo (a pseudonym to protect his identity), an accomplished entrepreneur in the Arizona city’s growing Latin music business.
Teran’s rise from middle-class comfort to Lamborghini-level luxury represented a stark shift for those who knew him as a small-time music producer, engineer and the owner of Digitlog, a local recording studio. They thought the same about his business partner, Dominican Republic-born Webster “Yenddi” Batista Fernandez. Like Teran, Batista went from getting by as a local bachata artist and music video director to driving his own Lamborghini — albeit a comparatively subdued gray model — and sporting diamond-encrusted chains made by Bad Bunny’s jeweler du jour, El Russo.
Their newfound flashy lifestyles understandably sparked considerable gossip among those who work in Phoenix’s music business, like Ricardo, who couldn’t fathom why Teran and Batista were suddenly living so much larger than everyone else. “Phoenix is one of the main points for…
