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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His wife, the former Annie Mae Maul-din, left him five years later, taking her own gamble on L.A. It meant separating the children from their father. But she wanted Rick, then four, and David, who was almost eight years older, to live in a place where they could hold up their heads. “I didn’t want them to come up the way that I come up,” she said. Raising the boys on her own, though, was a struggle: She cleaned office buildings, labored as a gardener, scrounged for canned food in the ashes of the 1965 riots. For a time, she moonlighted for an ambulance-chasing lawyer, listening to a police scanner and hustling up accident cases. “Mom would jump up from the table, still eating, and go chase a wreck—the same thing I would do when I started selling drugs,” Rick said. Finally, she went “on the county”—welfare and food stamps. “Ricky never did like that too much,” she recalled. “He’d always say, ‘We can have a car wash’ or ‘We can have a rummage sale.’ He was always the brains, the dreamer, ever since he was born.” Sometimes, during summer vacations, she would take the boys to visit their cousins, the Mauldins, in East Texas. She remembers the time Rick ran into a grocery store for an ice cream, only to be ordered out by the white shopkeeper. For her, it was a painful vindication: “I knew I couldn’t go in there, but he didn’t know any better.”
Rick did not merely shrug off the limits of his parents’ world, he bashed through every obstacle. He wanted cash in his pocket—not later, but now. He wanted to be admired—it mattered little for what. “I couldn’t understand sometimes where he was coming from,” said his brother, David, now in his mid-forties. “Like, ‘What do he see that I don’t see?’ He had a plan for everything.” Rick was a shoplifter by 10, using decoys to distract the security guard at a South-Central five-and-dime while he grabbed armloads of candy bars, shoes, and watches. As a teenager, he earned spending money from the pimps on the neighborhood “ho stroll,” knocking on motel doors and warning tricks that their time was up. He stole bicycles, then cars, stripping and rebuilding them outside his mother’s house by the Harbor Freeway, which is how he got his nickname. When Rick was 20 or 21, an old friend who had been away on a college football scholarship returned home, sporting gold, bragging of women, and flaunting a $50 rock. Rick had never seen cocaine before: “I didn’t really understand what I was doing, but I knew I didn’t want the life my mother lived—welfare, no car, waiting till the first of the month to have milk and cereal. I knew there had to be something in the world I could do, something that I could be the best at.”
Rick’s ascent to the highest echelons of the crack business was swift, based on age-old economic axioms, albeit warped to ominous extremes. To get his foot in the door, he and his best friend, Ollie Newell, a.k.a. Big Loc, stole a car, sold the rims, and bought a $250 bag of cocaine from a vocational school auto-upholstery teacher. By breaking it into smaller rocks, they got a $500 return on their investment and then continued to “double up,” turning the $500 into $1,000, and so on. As with any product, the unit price dropped as the volume increased. Other dealers knew this as well, but they did not always share Freeway Rick’s all-consuming passion to rise to the top. “You called me at twelve o’clock at night, I’d go,” he said. “Another guy, he might be with his girlfriend: ‘Oh, I can’t come tonight.’ You call Rick, Rick’s getting up. It’s just good business. One guy, he be sitting there smoking a cigarette. He can’t do nothing until he finish smoking that cigarette. Rick don’t smoke cigarettes. Rick can move right now. He don’t have a beer can in his hands or a bottle of liquor. That’s the only difference between me and most of my friends in the drug business—my discipline.”
By the mid-eighties, Rick was crisscrossing the country, buying and selling as much as two hundred to three hundred pounds of cocaine a day. He had a network of beepers, cell phones, and walkie-talkies, synchronizing a crew of fifteen to twenty henchmen via his own private channel. He wore a bulletproof vest and took target practice at a firing range with his 9-millimeter Browning. Back in the neighborhood, he had a cook house with a restaurant-quality stove, a money house with currency-counting machines, a retail house with an underground escape tunnel leading from a closet to the street, and a party house with NBA-caliber basketball hoops, a cook, and a maid. He had piles of uncounted cash; once, he took an entire day to tally the $2.8 million that lay on his living room floor. He even had his own police squad, the Freeway Rick Task Force, an elite team of Los Angeles cops whose sole mission was to hunt him down, lock him up, and throw away the key. “My momma would always say, ‘You can’t outthink the white man,’ and there I was—I felt like I was beating the system,” Rick said. “I really thought that, ‘Hey, this is it, my blessing.’ I felt this was the American dream.”
His mother ran the motel. His brother opened a sporting-goods store. “I was the cow of the family,” Rick said. He pretended to be Superfly, just one deal away from going legit. He sponsored his own semi-pro basketball team, named Easy Money. He bought new backboards for the neighborhood courts. The Los Angeles Department of Recreation and Parks even gave Rick a plaque, expressing its “deepest appreciation for your generous donation.”
In his zeal to share the wealth—or, maybe, to remind himself just how far he had come—Rick eventually ventured back to the pine forests and rose fields of Smith County, a place that had changed in the previous three decades, though perhaps not as dramatically as he had. There he reunited with his cousins, Jesse and Johnny Mauldin, now 41, the children of Annie Mae’s older brother, James. They hauled pulpwood for a living, a grueling and often dangerous job (one of their younger brothers would later die in a logging accident). Rick suggested a more lucrative line of work: “I came down and did their research for them, sold their first rock for them, showed them how to cook it, you know, ‘Do it like this, do it like that,’ because they didn’t know nothing. They got all of my training for free.”
Soon the twins were styling—identical brick homes, matching Jaguars in the driveways, a diamond stud in the left ear. By 1988, the year the police busted their Tyler cocaine ring, the Mauldins “were pretty heavy, the heaviest we knew of in this area at the time,” said Sergeant Danny Green, a Texas Department of Public Safety investigator who worked the case. The twins got forty years each but were released after four. The Twelfth District Court of Appeals ruled that defense lawyers had been improperly barred from questioning members of the all-white jury about their feelings toward blacks. Before the trial had even begun, state district judge Bill Coats was accused of revealing his own improper views. During a conference in his chambers, he observed that Jesse Mauldin was holding a briefcase for his lawyer, the noted San Antonio drug attorney Gerald Goldstein. Then, according to an unsuccessful petition to have the judge recused, Coats allegedly smirked: “Everyone should have a nigger to carry their bag.”
Rick went down a year after his cousins, with indictments in Tyler, Cincinnati, and L.A. He could have been nailed for life. But in a turn of the tables worthy of Hollywood, six of his pursuers from the Freeway Rick Task Force also happened to be facing a mess of indictments for their alleged role in a massive corruption and money-skimming scandal that shook the L.A. County Sheriff’s narcotics bureau to its core. At the U.S. attorney’s invitation, Rick testified against the rogue officers and served just four years in the federal pen. Then he went to Tyler and did an additional nine months for conspiring with his cousins. The Smith County district attorney’s office had hoped for a longer term but was content in knowing that Rick now had his second drug conviction—and would be gone for good upon receiving his third. “You didn’t have to be a fortune-teller and look in a crystal ball to tell that Freeway Ricky was destined for failure,” David Dobbs, the chief felony prosecutor in Tyler, recently said. “He’s very engaging, very gregarious, a very likable person on the surface. But it’s a complete facade in terms of who he really is. He’s a master at the art of deception.”
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