Print - Say Hello to Rick Ross - Esquire

Ross and ollie drove around the 'hood, seeing what they could do with this new drug. Eventually they ran into Martin the pimp. Martin demonstrated how to cook the powder into crack — he produced a small nugget that looked like a white aquarium stone.

Then Martin demonstrated how to smoke it. (It made a loud crackling sound when lit; some say that's the origin of the name.)

An hour later, the partners were back at the house on Eighty-seventh Place, stewing on the front porch. The drugs were gone. They owed Mike fifty dollars. Ollie wanted payback.

"Man, you can't kill Martin," Ross said. "That's the OG man, everybody in the 'hood gonna be mad."

Then Martin pulled up in front of the house. He was riding with Big Mouse, one of the original Crips. The two approached the porch. Martin's eyes looked wide and a little crazy. Ross steeled himself.

The old pimp took Ross's hand in a soul shake: "Man, I got you a customer," he enthused.

When Mike had first pulled out the coke in the guesthouse, Ross snorted a couple of lines and was unimpressed. In powder form the effects were subtle. But after watching Martin cook the crack and compulsively smoke it — and return an hour later in an urgent search for more, with financing in tow — Ross knew he'd discovered an opportunity.

At first, Ross middled the coke for Mike, without commission, just to learn the ropes. Then he discovered that his upholstery teacher, who lived in Baldwin Hills, was also into coke. He had connections to Nicaraguan dealers. Ross started buying and selling more and more product. He paid Martin the pimp to cook each batch into crack; in time Ross figured out the simple process himself.

Ross wasn't the first to deal crack — a mass-produced form of what others were calling freebase. Crack was documented by UCLA researchers as early as 1974 in the San Francisco area. At the same time Ross was experimenting with sales of ready rock, so were dealers and users in New York and Miami. Along with a source of heat and some water, "a saucer, a glass, a paper towel, and Arm & Hammer baking soda are about all that is needed" to cook crack, according to a physician who testified in 1979 before a U. S. House Select Committee.

Thereafter, whenever Ross recruited a new subdealer, he'd teach him how to cook. He wasn't afraid to go into a hostile neighborhood to seek out a leader and make a deal. "I wasn't a Crip or a Blood. I was the man with the dope and the opportunity," Ross says.

Eventually Ross was introduced to a Nicaraguan named Oscar Danilo Blandón. A former marketing director in Nicaragua, Blandón and his wife were forced to flee their country in 1979 when the Cuban-aided Sandinista rebels defeated the U.S.-trained army of Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza and took over the country.

Dealing with Blandón, Ross seemed to have virtually unlimited access to drugs. By age twenty-three, Ross says, he was a millionaire. In some respects he was the prototypical drug kingpin. He wore a bulletproof vest and carried a 9mm, fathered five babies with four different women, kept himself surrounded by a posse of workers connected by walkie-talkies, ordered up bootleg designer furnishings for his motel (which he gave to his mom to run), bought an apartment building, sponsored a semipro basketball team, bought new pews for his mom's church, had so much cash he had to hire people to count it.

But he was never flashy. He wore T-shirts and jeans and was driven around in a beater. "Instead of buying cars and fancy stuff, I took my money and I went and bought more and more dope — eventually my dealer told the other guys they was too small-time and had to buy their dope from me. So then I was getting a lower price, plus I was making money on all they shit, too," Ross explains. For a long time, the Freeway Rick Task Force — a squad of hardened drug cops from the L. A . County Sheriff's Department dedicated to his capture — actually had no idea what he looked like.

In 1988, a load of coke bound for his lucrative new territory in Cincinnati was detected by a drug-sniffing dog at a bus station in New Mexico. The drugs were traced to Ross; he was arrested. Federal indictments in Cincinnati, Los Angeles, and Tyler, Texas, were handed down. Ross pleaded guilty to cocaine-trafficking charges and received a mandatory ten-year prison sentence, which he began serving in 1990.

Around this time, a federal investigation into the sheriff's office was uncovering massive corruption. Dozens of narcotics officers were convicted of beating suspects, stealing drug money, and planting evidence. Ross testified for the government. In return he served only four years and nine months of his sentence.

Back home at thirty-four, Rick got a job hauling trash. His major efforts were devoted to an old theater in South Central he wanted to convert into a youth center/recording studio/performance space.While he'd been away in prison, holding on to the theater and his other remaining assets had been costing him nearly fifteen grand a month. With all the money spent on lawyers for himself and his workers, he was nearly broke. He'd paid the owner of the theater $900,000 up front and $6,000 a month while incarcerated. Now Ross was behind in the payments; the owner was threatening to foreclose. Everything else was gone. Ross was determined not to lose the theater, too.

As it happened, right about this time, Ross received a call from his old business partner, Blandón.

In late 1990 or '91, Blandón was arrested by the LAPD with a suitcase full of cash — only to be bailed out by the U. S. Justice Department, which said he was part of a money-laundering case. Then Blandón was arrested by the DEA for conspiracy to distribute cocaine.

While probation officers recommended a life sentence and a $4 million fine, the prosecution argued that Blandón was "extraordinarily valuable in major DEA investigations of Class I drug traffickers," and recommended forty-eight months and no fine. Less than a year later Blandón was freed. In a memo to a judge, the prosecutor wrote that Blandón had "almost unlimited potential to assist the United States … as a full-time, paid informant after his release from prison."

Ross was a little surprised to hear from Blandón, but they'd always done beautiful business. Ross and a friend drove to Blandón's downtown L.A. restaurant. After they chatted and caught up, Blandón got to his point. "The Colombians are on my back," he told Ross. He owed money; he had a shipment he needed to sell. "Why go around begging

all these people for money for your theater when you can make it all at once?" Blandón asked.

Reluctantly or not, Ross found a buyer; as middleman, he was to receive a commission of $300,000 on a hundred-kilo sale. The deal went down in a shopping-center parking lot near San Diego on March 2, 1995. The DEA and local authorities swooped in. Ross's arrest netted Blandón more than $45,000 in government rewards and reimbursements. Ross was found guilty of conspiring to sell cocaine that had been provided by the DEA, in a deal set up by the DEA, a typical drug-war scenario. Ross received what was identified as his third felony strike, and with it a sentence of life in prison without possibility of parole.

Over the next few years Ross, who had learned to read only during his first stretch in jail, painstakingly read every business and self-help book in the prison library — during a fourteen-year period, he boasts, he devoured more than three hundred books. His trilogy of favorites: Think and Grow Rich, by Andrew Carnegie disciple Napoleon Hill; The Richest Man in Babylon, by George Samuel Clason; and Asa Man Thinketh, by James Allen. Eventually, Ross held study groups with other inmates, spreading the word of economic self-sufficiency and can-do capitalism among the brothers. If we can be so successful selling crack, Ross preached, why can't we use the same skills toward legitimate business?

In late 1995, inmate 05550-045 was visited by Gary Webb. Webb's Mercury News series, "Dark Alliance," was published in August 1996, and later became a book. Webb charged that the U. S. government had secretly allowed shipments of cocaine into the country in order to finance the purchase of weapons needed for the contra rebels to fight the leftist Sandinistas who'd taken over Nicaragua. Ross was portrayed as an unwitting pawn in a game of international covert politics.

After leaving his job in disgrace and watching his marriage dissolve, Webb methodically sold off his possessions and committed suicide in December 2004. According to the coroner's report, on his first attempt to shoot himself in the head, the father of three children missed the mark — instead he suffered a nonfatal wound. He placed the muzzle of his .38-caliber pistol against his head a second time and pulled the trigger.

Meanwhile, Ross sued, asking for more than $5 million in damages from the government. Although his case was rejected, his profile was raised mightily in a black community that had seized upon the notion that a government conspiracy was to blame for the plague of crack. In the people's mythology, the kingpin had become the victim, an antihero and a martyr.

Stuck in prison with a life sentence, Ross "started consuming myself with reading law books," he says. "I started reading them the same way I'd sold drugs. When the library opened every morning, I was there standing in line. If I missed lunch, I missed lunch. I would take all of the money I could muster up and make copies of the law books because they wouldn't let us take them back to our cells."

One day Ross found what he thought he was looking for. He'd received the life sentence for being convicted of a third federal crime — his third strike. But technically, he believed, he had only two strikes. Since his charges from the Texas and Ohio convictions had arisen from the commission of the same federal crime, how could they account for two separate strikes?

Excited, Ross called his lawyer, who shot him down. Ross got a court-appointed attorney. In 1998, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals agreed. Ross's life sentence was reduced to twenty years. He ended up serving fourteen.

On May 4, 2009, he walked out of Texarkana prison into the arms of his woman, Sergeant Mychosia Nightingale. She'd seen Ross on a documentary about crack; she'd written, he'd urged her to read his favorite books. Facing a fourth deployment to Iraq, Nightingale quit the Army and drove from Georgia to Texarkana to pick him up. She spent the week sleeping in her SUV, waiting for him with a duffel bag of new clothes. Today they have two toddlers. He's already teaching them how to swing a tennis racket.

The real Rick Ross, Freeway Rick Ross, is southbound on the 110 toward home — this time he's riding behind the driver of a gleaming white Escalade limo provided by the producers of Brand X, wearing a custom REAL RICK polo shirt that his silk-screener had made up special for his appearance on national TV.

Though Ross had fretted the entire day over the producer's request that he cook crack on TV — eager to please, he'd reluctantly given the caller a list of ingredients, including a Bunsen burner and procaine, an anesthetic that in his experience would cook up like crack — Russell Brand never asked him to do so. Instead Ross was trotted out before the studio audience like an old prizefighter and heralded as the "Donald Trump of crack." Though it's not what Ross was looking for — to be at once lionized and lampooned — it is probably somewhat true. At the end of the segment, Brand could be heard blurting out something about cooking crack on national television; clearly, cooler heads had prevailed on this last episode before cancellation.

"All these interviews I do every day, all the meetings I take, all the hands I shake, all the pictures, hopefully it amounts to stuff," Ross says, reflecting on the day's events. He sounds a little tired. It is nearly midnight, another long day.

"I just have to keep pressing and pressing and, you know, fight through all the little things. In the drug business I became an expert at drugs. I knew who sold drugs in Compton, in Watts, on the West Side, in the Jungle. And everybody knew me. But when it comes to Hollywood and this other stuff, I don't know it yet. It's like that Hollywood producer. After that long meeting and we was leaving, he laughed and he said to everybody, 'Why am I shaking hands with this drug dealer?' "

Outside Ross's window, a police cruiser pulls even with the Escalade. The cop riding shotgun appears to be pointing at Ross, though this is impossible, given the fancy blacked-out windows. Ross has a recurring dream in which he's asleep in one of his old rock houses and a battering ram is knocking down the wall. He still wakes up sometimes not knowing where he is — twenty of his fifty-three years have been spent in cells in different facilities. He knows he's lucky he's not still behind bars.

Ross gestures toward the cops. "Don't you wanna know what they're thinking?"

"You don't have to worry about what they're thinking," I tell him.

"Not no more. Not like I used to," he says. In a month's time, he'll finally land a deal for a miniseries about his life — not the deal he wanted, but at least something he believes will pay off. He smiles big and his eyes bug gleefully, a little bit proud of himself. "I ain't going to jail tonight."