Former Drug Kingpin Rick Ross Pens Book

Rick Ross was a drug kingpin in the 1980s and early '90s running a multi-million-dollar operation that spanned across the U.S. His world came crashing down when he landed in prison during a federal sting operation after he'd left the business and gone legit. But he was lured back in by his main source, who was working for the feds.

Now, Ross has teamed with bestselling crime writer Cathy Scott and released a book that is a unique behind-the-scenes look at how a kid born into poverty in rural Texas ended up a high-profile player in the drug game. It's titled Freeway Rick Ross: The Untold Autobiography, and it is a powerful read. It's a thought-provoking memoir that holds nothing back while making no excuses for Ross's past actions. Here is an excerpt of the just-released memoir.

The San Diego skyline was the vista from my cell on the maximum-security floor of the federal high-rise where I was housed. The Million Dollar View, inmates called it. Looking out at the skyscrapers across San Diego Bay offered me time to reminisce. And reflect.

I ran from poverty, turning to drug dealing to get a head start as an entrepreneur. That was always the goal: Get into the drug business and go legit.

As a young kid in grade school, I wanted to be a Crip, but my mom wouldn’t have it. I never became a gangbanger, though I got close.

At Dorsey High School, playing tennis on the varsity team was the ticket out of the ‘hood. The dream of a tennis career after I made All City took a major shot, however, when

Coach discovered I’d never learned I couldn’t read or write. I wasn’t going to college after all, and I wasn’t gonna be the next Arthur Ashe, so there was no point in staying in school. I put down the tennis racquet and picked up a gun.

I kept a low profile with my street cred. I never joined a gang, never flashed colors. But I always had key relationships with people who did.

One day, I sat on my porch, dead broke and working out ways in my head to earn cash when Mike McLoren, one of the neighborhood homies, dropped by.

“I have a deal for you,” Mike said.

He pulled out a bag with some kind of white powder in it.

“It’s the new thang, man.” He waved the clear Baggie in front of me. “I can sell this for fifty dollars.”

The powder was cocaine. The real shit. Coke was right in front of me, just like in the movie Super Fly. Mike, who’d left South Central Los Angeles to attend college, explained how he’d been selling powder cocaine to students at San Jose State to make extra money. I barely heard the words “students or “San Jose,” or even “cocaine.” I was totally focused on “extra money.” I wanted in on the game.

It was 1979 and I was 19 when Mike introduced me to the drug that would forever change my life. Powder cocaine appeared as a bright, shining star of opportunity. I bought my first Baggie and doubled my money. Powder cocaine appeared as bright shining star of opportunity. I had no doubt it would take me to being rich in a way that up to that point I’d only imagined.

My instinct on breaking into the drug trade was on point: I was a millionaire by my twenty-third birthday. “Rick Ross” became a household name throughout the black ghettos of South Central L.A. and reached halfway across the country. A bunch of homies worked for me, and they had even more people selling for them. We cooked like a hundred kilos every night. We didn’t call it crack. We called it Ready Rock. We maintained houses where buyers drove up to a window to be served, just like at McDonald’s. We had money-counting houses, cook houses, rock houses, apartment buildings, a Laundromat, and a body shop.

I had everything I needed: money, cars, women, and a thriving business. As time progressed, I was making millions every day. By 1985, record executives were chasing me through South Central trying to invest in their artists. I was the man.

I approached the drug dealing as a businessman, even though the government associated me with gangs, like the Hoover Crips. It’s even in my federal file, because the feds said nobody could have sold drugs and made that kind of cash without being a gangster, so I must have been one. They had it backwards and thought the game was tied to gang violence. It was always about business, never about gangs.

Crack was not in the ‘hood before the ‘80s, so none of us knew the side effects that could and would occur amid the crack epidemic that would sweep over black neighborhoods across the land. Even the cops in the area didn’t know what crack was; they didn’t associate the small white rocks they saw on homies as illegal drugs. All we knew was people wanted it; back then, it was a party drug, recreational. Crack was the upper. And it was all about supply and demand. I was a young entrepreneur making a good living and building a business. I wasn't thinking about the repercussions or even that any existed.

Something else I didn’t know: My supplier was a paid federal informant for the CIA.

Most people are still unaware of what really went down in South Central with crack. My raw materials came from Oscar Danilo Blandón, a Nicaraguan national who, unbeknownst to me at the time, had ties to the CIA and sent his proceeds to fund Iran-Contra rebels. I was the first black drug dealer in South Central Los Angeles to forge a tie with a Colombian. I knew him only as Danilo. He supplied me with cocaine at bargain-basement prices that I converted to crack, and I passed on the savings to my clientele.

The U.S. government didn’t sell the drugs, of course, but they did supply the dealer, turning a blind eye to the operation and allowing massive shipments of coke into the U.S. until it became public and they needed a scapegoat—namely, me. The government wanted to put a face on the War on Drugs, and Rick Ross became the image of the kingpin behind it all.

Danilo was hired by the DEA as an undercover informant with the goal of taking me down. He set me up in a sting operation orchestrated by the feds, who arrested me. By my 37th birthday, I was in the pen serving a life sentence without the possibility of parole. While inside, I kept thinking, “What can I do to better myself?” The one nagging thing that always came back to me was to learn to read. It was a second chance. I wanted to get out and help my community, to try and prevent kids from making the same mistakes I made. I couldn’t do that if I couldn’t read and write.

My self-education began by visiting the prison law library every day. I read more than 300 books. Each day I read the Wall Street Journal, Time magazine, or Forbes. Most nights I fell asleep with a book on my chest or next to my pillow. It paid off: While behind bars, I went from being illiterate to over literate.

My name is Ricky Donnell Ross. People know me as Freeway Rick. This is my story.

Freeway Rick Ross is available in paperback and on Kindle and Nook. Click here to learn more.

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Medicinal Marijuana Laws on Trial

by Diane Dimond

In November 2007, Steele Smith and his wife Theresa were arrested by federal DEA agents in Orange County, California, for cultivating and selling marijuana. But the Smith’s aren’t your run-of-the-mill drug dealers, and the federal government has left them in legal limbo ever since.

The backstory:  In the summer of 2001, Steele was a successful self-employed marketing man who was felled by a gut-wrenching mystery illness.  He couldn’t eat and quickly dropped 40 pounds from his already thin 6-foot, 7-inch frame.  His doctors were stymied about what caused the debilitating condition.  After four excruciating months, a rare-disease specialist diagnosed a condition called Zollinger-Ellison syndrome, which pockmarks a victim’s upper gastrointestinal tract with multiple, painful ulcers.  Morphine was prescribed for Steele’s constant pain and he lived in that legally induced drug dependent state for the next three years eventually becoming an opiate addict.

In the summer of 2004, his devoted wife guided him on a journey toward detox. “It was either going to kill him or me,” Theresa told me. “I was black and blue from his outbursts. He couldn’t help it, of course, but something had to be done!”

It was an agonizing time, but Steele finally found the strength to wean himself off morphine. But Z-E is a lifelong affliction, and he was still hobbled by the lack of nourishment and the incapacitating pain. The Smith’s desperate search for alternatives brought them to information about the benefits of medicinal marijuana, made legal in California in 1996. The Smith’s sought and got a medical recommendation for Steele to try marijuana. (Under federal law, an actual prescription isn’t allowed for a so-called schedule 1 drug like heroin and, yes, marijuana)  They were directed to dispensaries in Los Angeles, an hour's drive away.

“All we found were drug-dealer types. They were all long haired, tattooed … basically drug dealers who got a store front--intimidating, like your typical head-shop,” Theresa explained.

But, miraculously, the medicinal marijuana worked. For the first time in years Steele was able to eat and manage his pain. His marketing ideas flowed again, and the couple decided to fill the void in Orange County and open their own medicinal marijuana dispensaries to bring relief to others. Their lawyer says they did everything right under California law.

“Mr. Smith set up a legitimate 501 non-profit corporation and he paid all applicable taxes,” a legal brief written by Smith’s attorney Eric Shevin asserts. “He issued patient ID cards, followed pharmacy labeling requirements. He even provided free medical equipment to his customers, like wheelchairs, walkers, porta-potties and wheelchair racks for cars. Mr. Smith allowed the Fullerton Police to document his grow operation thoroughly … and the lead officer even complimented him on the cleanliness and legitimacy of the operation.” By 2006, more than 1,000 patients were registered in the Smith’s database.

So, why were the Smiths arrested and threatened with 10 years in prison?  Because, back then, the U.S. Justice Department decided that the federal law against cultivating marijuana should trump the California law.   The Smith’s were caught up in a classic battle of a state’s right to pass its own laws.  Theresa spent two months behind bars.  The ailing Steele was held in a maximum-security jail for 10 months. Upon release, he was 20 pounds lighter and again hooked on narcotics given to him for pain.  The Smiths lost everything, including their home, cars, their savings, and they had to borrow money from Theresa’s widowed mother, who died a short time later.  They’ve lived under a terrible cloud of legal uncertainty for three years, all the while still grappling with Steele’s disease.

Today’s Justice Department looks at the state’s rights issue differently, and the Smith’s trial will surely be a landmark case closely watched by the 15 states that currently allow cultivation and sale of medicinal marijuana. It will be a milestone verdict because federal Judge Cormac J. Carney has made the unprecedented decision to allow a federal jury--for the first time ever--to hear affirmative testimony about California’s medicinal marijuana law.  This won’t just be about someone having been caught growing pot. The Smiths will be allowed to give groundbreaking testimony about why their interpretation of the state’s law led them to believe they were acting legally.

In 2008, candidate President Barack Obama told an interviewer, “I think the basic concept (of) using medical marijuana in the same way, with the same controls as other drugs, prescribed by doctors (is) entirely appropriate.” Fourteen months ago, his Justice Department instructed all federal prosecutors not to arrest medical marijuana users and suppliers as long as they followed state laws.

So, now, the feds are left squarely between a rock and a hard place with their three-year-old case against the Smiths.

Perhaps, because Judge Carney has a track record of ruling against prosecutors who he sees as overstepping their authority, the feds decided late last week to ask for yet another delay in the December 21 trial, postponing it until late March 2011.

“It’s the eleventh or twelfth delay,” Theresa Smith said in a weary voice. She sees the fight as a state’s rights issue, but also, she says, “as a patient’s issue. If it was meth or heroin or some opiate, I wouldn’t say that. But this is a plant that God put here for a reason. It helps people--so many people.”

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Antiquated Drug Laws Cost Us Plenty

by Diane Dimond

Come sit down with me. Let’s have a chat - a meaningful and productive chat. You comfortable, you want some tea?

Here’s what I’m thinking. With all this change in the air, this idea that we really can shake up the status quo and attack our nation’s problems from a different angle - we probably should take a look at our drug laws. Don’t you think?

Remember back in 1969 when President Nixon declared a “War on Drugs”? We were going to wipe out the illegal drug trade that stopped so many of us from being productive citizens! Wow, that sure sounded like a great plan. But, here we are 40 years later and we’re still struggling with what to do about those who either sell or get addicted to illegal drugs.

It’s important to make the distinction here. Drug addicts vs. drug dealers. The first are surely breaking the law but no one aspires to become an addict, right? They’re sick and in need of medical and mental health attention. The dealers, of course, are felons making loads of money off the weak. Yet we lock up both groups as if they are the same kind of criminals. That doesn’t seem right.

Now, I don’t want to make this a political conversation, you know, Democrats vs. Republicans, liberal vs. conservative. I want to talk about what’s best for our country, our economically strapped country.

Since that “War on Drugs” declaration we’ve gone way past the billion dollar mark to somewhere in the trillion dollar area. I read the other day that it costs us a collective 69 billion dollars each year to keep up this war. Why do we keep doing the same things over and over if it’s not getting rid of the problem?

It costs society so much in terms of court and prison costs, lost productivity and damage to families. So sad, isn’t it?

We’ve spent years tinkering with prison rehabilitation for convicted addicts. There’s been no great breakthrough. Maybe we need special hospitals just for them. I wonder if we could do that for less than 69 billion a year? As for the drug dealers, well, we keep slapping them with mandatory and harsh sentences and as fast as we lock ‘em up there are more arrested every day. Our prisons are bursting at the seams!

We’ve got a federal Drug Enforcement Administration and each state has a drug task force, and local law enforcement has undercover operations to try to smoke out the bad guys. Drugs continue to stream across our borders, mostly from Mexico but also from Canada. Countless homegrown drug labs dot the country’s landscape. The problem never seems to end. We don’t have a handle on it – it has a handle on us!

You know, there’s a group of 11 thousand law enforcement types, called L.E.A.P., Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, that says if we just legalized all drugs the massive profit margin would disappear. They liken it to 1933 when the prohibition on booze stopped and put Al Capone out of the bootlegging business. L.E.A.P. thinks drug kingpins would find the government taxes and regulations so stiff they’d just fold their tents.

I’ll have to have another cup of tea and think about that. I don’t think I’m for legalizing all drugs. But, it sure would be a tempting new tax revenue stream, wouldn’t it?

Look, I don’t pretend to be smart enough to figure out the whole big national drug problem but, you know, we’ve got to start somewhere. I’ve been thinking that one way to cut down our costs is to weed out (pardon the pun) those 872,720 Americans who the FBI says were arrested for marijuana in 2007. There might have been a million marijuana arrests last year – the figures aren’t in yet.

I mean who are we kidding? Millions of Americans admit they’ve smoked grass, ganja, pot - whatever you want to call it – including at least two of our Presidents, CEO’s of top companies, Olympic athletes and countless other productive members of our society. Spending all this money to arrest and prosecute these cases seems to be getting us nowhere. Isn’t it weird that we approve using marijuana for medical purposes but not for those who’d like to substitute it for a glass of vodka once or twice a week?

Yep, that’s what I’m thinkin’. We have to start somewhere and so we might as well de-criminalize things for all those Americans who, despite the law, are smoking marijuana anyway.

It sure is nice to be able to chat about this without someone going off accusing the other of being a kook or a commie or some other name. Want some more tea?

Now, let’s talk about changing the I.R.S. …

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