[Does this post belong in Silverback Digest? I don’t know. I didn’t think so when I started reading it, but I changed my mind by the time I finished. Now I see it as a valuable lesson in contemporary evolution. SB SM]
Today’s selection– from When Crack Was King by Donovan X. Ramsey. The story of “Freeway” Rick Ross.
“Cocaine was extremely profitable for anyone who could get his or her hands on enough to sell. The barrier for entry was about $150, the wholesale price for an ‘eight ball.’ That eight ball could then be divided into smaller amounts and sold at a small profit, especially if ‘cut’ with another, cheaper stimulant like caffeine powder. Once cut, the product was less pure but the difference was undetectable to the average user.
“Richard Donnell Ross didn’t know there was that much money to be made from cocaine when he made his first sale. All Ross knew was that the small bindle of powder given to him by an old friend was supposed to be worth fifty dollars. He would learn in no time, however, just how lucrative the drug business was, as he earned millions of dollars within just a few years, changing the American sociopolitical landscape in the process.
“Ross was part of the Second Great Migration, a mass exodus of five million Blacks from the South to the North, Midwest, and West between 1940 and 1970. He and his mother moved to South Central Los Angeles from Troup, Texas, in 1963, when he was three. Ross’s mother supported them on what she earned cleaning offices and landscaping. The two struggled despite her hard work and spent much of Ross’s childhood receiving government assistance.
“He grew up ashamed of his family’s poverty. He was embarrassed, for example, that they were so poor they had scavenged canned goods from busted-up stores after the Watts Riots, so he started hustling as a child. He cut lawns, pumped gas for tips, ran errands for neighbors to earn extra money. Making money was his main objective, so he didn’t hesitate when, while playing roller derby with friends in a neighborhood park, a man offered him an opportunity to win a quarter for every tennis ball he could hit into a box.
“The man was Richard Williams. Not to be confused with the father of Venus and Serena, this Williams was also a prominent tennis coach in Compton with a reputation for finding and developing athletic talent in South Central through his California Tennis Association for Underprivileged Youth. Williams saw potential in Ross and took the boy under his wing. By ninth grade, Ross was so good that Williams recruited him to join the tennis team at Susan Miller Dorsey High School, where Williams helped run the tennis program.
“Ross advanced as a player at Dorsey, making it to the semifinals in a few tournaments and even earning the attention of a recruiter at Cal State Long Beach his senior year. A scholarship to Cal State was a clear path out of poverty. The one holdup, however, was his academic performance.
“Ross had been skating in school, it turned out, passed from grade to grade even though he could barely read or write. The Cal State recruiter backed off when he learned that Ross might not graduate, let alone score high enough on the SATs to qualify for admission. Discouraged, Ross dropped out of high school in 1979, at the age of nineteen.
“Not ready to give up tennis or school, he enrolled at Los Angeles Trade Technical College, where he learned to bind books and reupholster car seats and continued to play tennis as part of the L.A. Trade-Tech tennis team. Ross quickly came to the realization that trade school wasn’t going to launch him into professional sports or out of South Central. He was devastated. It didn’t take long for him to turn to crime.
“Led by his love of lowriders, Ross fell in with a small group of car thieves. He was arrested for the first time in 1982 and charged with possession of stolen auto parts. While awaiting trial, he received a call from Michael McLaurin, a childhood friend who had left South Central on a football scholarship to San Jose State University. McLaurin had something to show him and wanted to meet up. Ross ventured north to the West Adams section of L.A., where McLaurin was staying in a guesthouse. Inside, McLaurin showed him a plastic bag filled with small paper bindles. Each package contained about half a gram of cocaine, or fifty dollars’ worth.
“Ross had never seen the white powder in real life and knew very little about it outside of what he’d seen in movies like Super Fly. Nevertheless, he agreed to sell it, for a small cut.
“Along with a friend named Ollie ‘Big Loe’ Newell, Ross went to the Algin Sutton Recreation Center at Eighty-eighth and Hoover, just blocks away from their old middle school. There, they ran into a customer, a pimp named Martin who was known around the neighborhood. Martin produced a small kit and demonstrated for Ross and Newell how to cook the powder into a rock, which he proceeded to smoke. Without their product or payment for it, Newell and Ross returned home wondering what to do and what they would tell McLaurin. While they were still searching for an answer, Martin pulled up in front of Ross’s home. He had one hundred dollars and wanted to buy more.
“It was the beginning of Ross’s career as a drug dealer. He worked as a low-level cocaine dealer for McLaurin for a short period but struck out on his own once he met an auto upholstery instructor at the Venice Skills Center who could connect him to a wholesale cocaine supplier. The instructor introduced him to Henry Corrales, a Nicaraguan trafficker who began selling to Ross and Newell. Through Corrales, Ross met Danilo Blandon, another Nicaraguan who could secure even more weight. Little by little, they assembled a small crew of dealers to help sell the product and graduated from ounces to kilos.
“By 1982, just three years after dropping out of high school, Ross was a major dealer selling cocaine primarily to wealthy customers across L.A. Business was booming but customers were starting to ask for what he’d seen Martin the pimp make: freebase. To keep business going, Ross paid Martin the pimp to cook his cocaine until he finally mastered the process himself. In a move of marketing genius, he called the product ‘ready rock’ and sold it in twenty-dollar hits. He taught the recipe to every new recruit on his growing team of dealers.
“Freebase was identical to the powder from which it was derived on a molecular level. It was the rapid onset of the substance’s high and its low cost that made it popular, especially in poor communities that did not previously have access to cocaine. News of an easier, cheaper method for consuming the nation’s most in-vogue drug spread rapidly by word of mouth. It started first with a small group of dealers and wealthy individuals and expanded out to their associates, and eventually reached the streets. In L.A., that meant the street gangs.
“A gang culture had always existed in Los Angeles and some gangs sold drugs—PCP, marijuana, amphetamines. A gang’s primary purpose, however, was to protect the young men who joined it from other gangs of young men across the city. But the culture shifted in the late sixties as the gangs started to consolidate. Members of gangs associated with two South Central high schools came together in 1969 to form the Crips. According to legend, the name was a reference to the walking sticks members used to style themselves. Just four years later, in 1972, a handful of other gangs from nearby Compton combined to combat the Crips. They called themselves the Bloods, as in ‘blood brothers.”
“Growing up in South Central in the sixties and seventies, Rick Ross had a front-row seat to the birth of the Bloods and Crips, gangs whose memberships swelled into the thousands by the time he started dealing. Ross leveraged his childhood friendships with Crip and Blood leaders to become a major supplier to the gangs. Through the Crips and Bloods, he established a distribution network so powerful that it brought down the wholesale price of cocaine even further, a savings he passed on to dealers and ultimately to users.
“For his central role in the rise of crack, ‘Freeway’ Rick Ross is often miscredited as its inventor. That dubious distinction probably belongs to the mysterious Bay Area college students and hippies who experimented with cocaine throughout the sixties and seventies. Ross, however, is the man who popularized the substance by helping make cocaine, freebase in particular, ubiquitous in Los Angeles. Where cocaine had been a substance reserved for the elite, Ross used his unique connections to both Nicaraguan traffickers and L.A.’s street gangs to create a drug enterprise that made cocaine cheap, widely available, and easy to consume. With ready rock, Ricky Ross did for cocaine what McDonald’s did for beef.”