The Rise and Fall and Rise and Fall of Ricky Ross
He left the piney woods of East Texas for the mean streets of Los Angeles and became one of the nation's most notorious drug dealers. Now in jail for the rest of his life, he says yet again that he’s a new man. Why do I believe him?
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MAYBE YOU CAN SEE WHERE THIS IS HEADED. I obviously recognized it as a possibility but never imagined that it would happen so soon. Six months after we sat in that Dairy Queen, Freeway Rick was back behind bars, snared by the feds in an undercover sting. In the fall of 1994, while I was still writing my article about his quest for redemption, he was making collect calls to one of his longtime connections in Nicaragua. They finally settled on a deal—one hundred kilograms of cocaine for $170,000 down—and met in a Denny’s parking lot near San Diego. Rick had been set up. His old supplier, a 43-year-old Managua native named Oscar Danilo Blandon Reyes, had been released from jail just three weeks after Rick. Now he was wearing a hidden microphone, poised to earn a $40,000 reward. An army of agents from the Drug Enforcement Administration swooped down. Rick peeled out in a truck, crashed it, dove out, and tried to run. “What a goddamn fool!” I shouted when I got the news. I was yelling at him, but I might as well have been yelling at myself.
Rick called from jail, crying entrapment. But you took the bait, I insisted. More than a few friends used the occasion to remind me that he was a liar and a creep. My disappointment, though, was soon dwarfed by a far more explosive turn of events, a scandal that would thrust Rick into the world’s headlines and join us together again, only this time as heated adversaries. The new story was this: that the Central Intelligence Agency had introduced crack to America’s black neighborhoods in the eighties to secretly finance the contras in Nicaragua, that Blandon had been a key figure in that operation before getting a sweetheart of a deal and turning on Rick as an informant, that Rick was the victim of a racist plot. “Basically, I was selling drugs for the U.S. government,” he told me later in a phone call from jail. “They exploited me, and they made me exploit my community.”
All hell broke loose in August 1996 when the San Jose Mercury News published its controversial “Dark Alliance” series, which purported a connection between Blandon and both the Nicaraguan rebels and the CIA. Angry rallies erupted across the country. Airwaves and computer lines sizzled with conspiracy theories. Black leaders paid jailhouse visits to Rick, greeting him as if he were a political prisoner and demanding congressional hearings. The CIA vowed to investigate itself. Although I had become a national correspondent by then, assigned to the L.A. Times’ Houston bureau, I was flown back to Los Angeles to help sort through the allegations and make my own pilgrimage to Rick’s cell. I made an effort to greet him sympathetically, hoping he would recount his early forays into the cocaine trade—dealings that I knew, from our previous conversations, had nothing to do with the Nicaraguans. Rick obliged. Then I skewered him with his own words. As part of a three-day series on the origins of the cocaine epidemic, I wrote that Blandon’s tenuous ties to the contras already were severed by the time he met Rick, that Rick already was a big player by the time he met Blandon, and that no evidence could be found to link either of them to the CIA or a scheme to poison the ghetto. The two appeared to be nothing more than a couple of greedy drug dealers, using each other to enrich their own coffers.
Rick called me one more time, in a rage. He was about to be sentenced to life without the possibility of parole, and my story—which revealed that he had been introduced to cocaine not via some Latin American cartel but by one of his own homeys from the ’hood—had just blasted his only hope for leniency.
“You played me—” he shouted.
“You’ve got to be kidding,” I retorted.
“—just like the government played me.”
“If anyone did any playing, it was you who played me!” I was angrier than I knew.
“You walked in here with a smile on your face, pretending to be my friend, just like Danilo.”
“How dare you compare me to him!”
“Then you turned around and stabbed me in the back!”
We went on hollering, then hung up on each other for more than a year.
During that time, I thought a lot about my relationship with Rick, about the fact that I even had a relationship with a drug-dealing felon. I found myself replaying our conversations—dozens of them, from East Texas to Southern California—checking them for signs of mutual deception, for hints of genuine compassion. The issue was kept alive for me by a slew of blistering articles, including one in the Columbia Journalism Review, that accused me of being inconsistent in my reporting on Rick. They argued that my early coverage in 1994 built him up as the “Wal-Mart of cocaine,” then my later coverage in 1996 deflated him as just another pusher in “a cast of interchangeable characters.” These critics, most of whom thought the L.A. Times had been too quick to dismiss the CIA story, wanted to show that my work was as flawed as the work I was assailing—even though the Mercury News later backed off its original claims. (I let most of the attacks slide, but my response would have been this: Rick was huge, probably the biggest retailer of his day. Still, he controlled only a small percentage of the entire crack market. The Mercury News wanted us to believe that the Nicaraguans used him to open “the first pipeline” between the Latin American cartels and South-Central Los Angeles. I tried to point out that cocaine was flowing in from a variety of sources and that it was being marketed by a variety of competitors, despite Rick’s undeniably large contribution to its spread.)
To the extent that, in print, I was less generous to Rick, it probably had something to do with the disheartening change I saw in him. Two years earlier, when we had just met, he was on top of the world, the architect of his destiny. He never made excuses. He never blamed “the system” for his plight. He had become a big dope dealer because he had wanted to. He had worked his butt off; now he was going to do the same for a legitimate buck. I liked his cockiness, his sense of self. If it was all an act, it was being performed with sensational flair. Then, not long after I met him, he seemed to become someone else. Suddenly, his entire crack-dealing career was the fault of the CIA, or the Nicaraguans, or some other mysterious co-conspirator. Poor little Ricky Ross was far too vulnerable a creature to fend off their sinister hand. “I feel now just like the slaves, when they used to hang them for nothing,” he lamented.
I did not care so much anymore if Rick was playing me—I knew he had to have been, if not as the dreamer in 1994, then as the pawn in 1996. But I was curious to know which Rick was the real Rick. What did he really believe and when did he believe it? Did he honestly think he was in as much control as he first claimed? Did he truly consider himself as lame as he later insisted? And if I found an answer, now in 1998, could it possibly permit me to see him in a redemptive light again or would it force me to dismiss him as a hopeless case?
TO GET TO WHERE RICK IS TODAY, you need to go back to East Texas. His mother and father were both born of the Depression, Smith County natives with roots in the soil. Each grew up tilling the white man’s land, renting what they could not own, and paying their debt in crops. They grew corn and squash, peanuts and peppers. When that was not enough, they took in laundry, scrubbing and ironing the white man’s shirts. They attended Negro schools and drank from Negro fountains. They learned to use the back door, to lower their gaze, to say “Yes, sir” and “No, ma’am” even if others called them Sonny and Annie Mae long after they were grown. “My daddy always told me one thing: As long as you black, you better act like it,” said Rick’s 68-year-old father, a former Army cook who still raises hogs and sings in the Galilee Baptist choir near Tyler. “Act like black people’s supposed to act,” he added. “I don’t care where you go. That’s the way you gonna be treated.” As a young man, Sonny Ross dabbled in contraband himself, brewing moonshine under cover of the East Texas pines. “If you’re poor and ain’t got nothin’, naturally you want to make you a little money,” he said. But one too many run-ins with the liquor man persuaded him to stop selling corn whiskey at $25 a gallon. “He said, ‘Shorty, I’m gonna get you.’ So I quit. You can’t beat the system.”
He decided to try his luck in Los An-geles, ending up on the graveyard shift at an all-night gas station in South-Central. Early one Sunday morning, two women walked in and stuck a gun to his head. “They took sixty-eight dollars and sixty-seven cents,” he recalled. “I never will forget that day.” It was 1959, a year before Rick was born. “I said to myself, ‘This ain’t the town for me. I’m goin’ back to Texas. I just can’t cut it in California.’”
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