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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AND SO IT WAS THAT RICK WALKED OUT of the Smith County jail on August 31, 1994, looking more like a skinny college kid than a kingpin in his green Guess? jeans and shiny white Nikes, a toothy smile bursting from his jet-black beard. An ex-girlfriend once explained her first glimpse of him this way: “I was expecting this big, six-foot-five, fire-breathing asshole, and instead, here’s this little, tiny guy with big, bright eyes and dreadlocks.” As someone who had spent the previous three years writing about gangs, I did not exactly think of myself as putty in his hands. I had interviewed plenty of bad guys who claimed to be decent at heart, just a little twisted by their environment. There may be some truth to that—I believe that the line between right and wrong gets blurred when survival is at stake—but I also came to believe that change is a long struggle, one that depends less on sincerity than on concrete alternatives to the identity and respect found in the underworld. It seemed that every time I got hooked by a redemption tale, the protagonist let me down. Some of my sources—guys I had shared beer and barbecue with—ended up getting killed by their slipups. Others got locked up for killing. I did not want to make the same mistake with Freeway Rick.
I suppose the easy answer is that I did, that I was swayed by his sureness and charm, by the notion that a drug dealer really could be just like any other businessman, if only given the chance. Although I never vouched for the legitimacy of his pie-in-the-sky projects, my stories did give him a platform by which to promote himself (just as I suspect this one is doing, to some degree, now). L. J. O’Neale, the assistant U.S. attorney who later put Rick away for life, believes that I got scammed from the start. He feels certain that Rick was plotting his return to the drug business and that, by writing about his supposed turnaround, I provided him with a convenient cover. “At the very least, it was insurance,” O’Neale told me—a public record of Rick’s good intentions, to be offered in his defense, if and when his nefarious self was exposed.
Rick, of course, denies this, insisting that he genuinely believed he would never deal drugs again and that, if he had wanted to, he never would have spent so much time palling around with me, detailing his rise in the crack trade on hour after hour of tape, posing for color photos. “That ain’t the way I sell drugs,” he said. “It’s easier for nobody to know nothin’ about me.” If that is the case, then Rick would seem to be at least as guilty of self-deception as he is of deceiving me. After our first meeting in Texas, we spent a month together in Los Angeles, surveying his old haunts, scouting out young tennis players (Rick had been a high school star before dropping out), and visiting the broken-down theater that was to be the focal point of his comeback as a community leader. By the next month, October 1994, he was on a pay phone, calling Nicaragua collect. The calls continued into 1995—his old supplier, Blandon, had the bills to prove it. He also had tape recordings; Rick can be heard discussing price and quantity in a voice that is anything but reluctant. When asked by his lawyer to explain this apparent willingness to do business, given his pronouncements to the contrary, Rick never sounded more vapid. “It was just something that just . . . just came out of me,” he testified at his 1996 federal trial in San Diego.
After being convicted and sentenced to life without parole, Rick had the gall to concoct a self-styled lawsuit, seeking more than $5 million in damages each from Blandon and O’Neale, as well as from Attorney General Janet Reno, Immigration and Naturalization Service Commissioner Doris Meissner, and a roster of other federal agents. He called himself an “innocent bystander” whose civil rights had been violated by those officials—“at his weakest point psychologically in his life.” Come to think of it, his entire seventeen-year criminal career had been a government fabrication. “At no time was Mr. Ross his own person,” Rick wrote about himself. In short, the war on drugs was so corrupt, and the U.S. authorities were so complicit, that nobody should be convicted of selling dope. The government’s rebuttal was merciless. “Ross is making one last-ditch effort to escape liability for his crimes, and is reckless of the consequences,” O’Neale wrote in a sentencing memorandum. “Just as Ross poured the poison of drugs into his community for his personal advantage, now he is pouring in the poison of hate and disturbance for his own advantage. The United States suggests that Ross knows well that the tale is false, but cares not what ills its spread causes, so long as it pays Ricky Ross to spread it.”
The thing that struck me most about Rick’s newly purported powerlessness was how closely it mirrored the religion of his parents. Sonny and Annie Mae Ross are both fervent believers that God has a divine plan for each one of us, that it is vanity for a mortal to presume he commands his own fate. “In my life, a lot of things have changed, but you know who changed it? Not mankind. The good Lord did,” his father said. “We just pilgrims traveling through this barren land.” His mother, now 69 and living in the Los Angeles suburb of Carson, put it this way: “You don’t have nothing to do with your life. The way has already been planned for you.” That may help explain why she allowed herself to share in Rick’s wealth, despite knowing that his money was tainted. Besides putting her in charge of the motel, Rick spent $50,000 remodeling her old house by the freeway and even donated new pews and an air-conditioning unit to her church. “You know how I feel? What’s to be will be,” she said. “This was his life. It had been cut out for him. It was the special plan that God had for him to go through.” And why would God want Rick to sell drugs? Although they live 1,500 miles apart and rarely speak, both parents told me, in separate conversations, that their son was being girded for a higher calling. “Ricky will preach before he dies,” his mother said. “I already preach,” he fired back when I told him, several years ago, of her prediction.
I WAS THINKING ABOUT RICK AND HIS FAMILY when I went to interview him earlier this year at the maximum-security federal penitentiary in Lompoc, about three hours north of Los Angeles. Except for a brief exchange of letters to arrange for the appointment, we had not communicated since our 1996 blowup on the phone. As the road weaved between towering coastal bluffs and the vast Pacific sea, I considered how Rick, for all his vision and moxie, really was a product of his environment, how he had not traveled so far from the fatalism of that vacant yellow shack on FM 346. Yes, our legal system is predicated on the notion that we all have free will, that everything comes down to a choice. But those choices are never made in a vacuum. They are not scientific equations. They cannot escape the histories—of a family, of a people, of a place—that shape every one of our lives, histories of which we are not always even conscious. It is quite a feat to master those forces, to carve our own destiny, to transcend all the demons of our past. If we could, would that be true power? Or would that be the greatest self-delusion of all?
“Right now,” Rick announced when he saw me, “I might be more freer than I ever was.”
This time, I had come prepared for a confrontation, to force Rick to define himself once and for all. But he was already on to a new incarnation, pulling the rug out from under me before I could even try to pin him down.
“Bodywise, I’m confined,” he went on. “But we’re all confined, in so many words, you know what I’m saying? . . . I’m reading a lot faster. I’m writing a lot better. I’ve matured a little more. My mind is growing. My dreams are huge now.” And what about his bout with victimization? “I guess I was feeling sorry for myself, you know, ‘Oh, man, how did this happen?’ I cried when I was in court, you know, ‘Wah-wah, boo-hoo, this and that.’ I mean, I was down. I was in shock. I didn’t know what I was going to do. But I’m like the Energizer Bunny now. I’m amped. I can’t wait till the door is open every morning and I can get a book and read and stuff. I want to become as knowledgeable as I can in as many ways as I can. I think I’m the one who’s going to bring my whole community up.”
He said he was taking classes in contract law so he could negotiate his own entertainment deals. One of his companies, Freeway Entertainment, was selling a screenplay. Another of his inventions, Freeway Records, was producing a rap album. With the help of his erstwhile running buddy—Ol’ Newell, who was paroled last year from federal prison—Rick was also writing an autobiography. He was launching his own line of clothing. He wanted to handpick the next congressman from South-Central L.A.
He was still inmate #05550-045, locked up for life, no chance of parole.
“It’s gonna be a wild story,” he said, flashing one of his movie star smiles.
“It’s already a wild story,” I replied.
“The wild part hasn’t even started yet,” he insisted.
That same crazy rap again, selling confidence, tailoring his hustle to whatever hurdles stood in his way. The vibe was pure Anthony Robbins, positive thought, unlimited power. I knew, because I had begun reading Awaken the Giant Within, looking for the keys to Rick’s head. Despite its smooth-talking tone, I found that I liked the book, its rejection of self-pity and its celebration of possibility. Rick’s track record was not so good. He had sabotaged himself and caused his community irreparable harm. But fools sometimes turn into visionaries, Robbins likes to point out, especially if they do not fear making more mistakes. Few great leaders were ever “realistic” at the outset. Instead, they created their own reality—sometimes relying on imaginary or even distorted ideas to get where they wanted to go. Rick never forgot that lesson.
“I might be fooling myself,” he said. “I think like that sometimes. That’s possible. But I got the right to do that. I can do whatever I want to with myself. This is America. We can dream. That’s one thing they didn’t take from me. They didn’t say, ‘You can’t dream no more, Freeway Rick.’”
I had my old Rick back. He was a lost cause. I never liked him so much.
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