The Wild, 100% True Story Of Freeway Ricky Ross.

There is no other Freeway Ricky Ross, despite the rapper Rick Ross taking his stage name from the aforementioned subculture icon. You can take a name, but the rest, the story, heart, and grit, well that, one would have to earn.

Freeway Ricky Ross has earned every bit of what he is.

Ross built an empire of drug dealing and real estate in the mid-’80s from the streets of LA. His reputation preceded him- yet evaded legal trouble for years. His ability to stay one step ahead of law enforcement put him in a position to amass $900 million, all while cloaking his nefarious activities from his mother. Unfortunately for Ross, one misstep cost him everything. This is the true story of legendary Freeway Rick Ross.

Young Ross was a tennis star who attended a high school in the Crenshaw district of LA, but his illiteracy prevented him from his dream of going to college. He abandoned his dreams & innocence- instead wandering the mean streets under the 110 Freeway in LA, mixing with the gangsters & drug dealers who ran them. When he first saw crack-cocaine in the late 70’s he didn’t even believe it was a drug, as it looked so different from cannabis, a “drug he was familiar with.”

However, it didn’t take long for Ross to stumble upon the reality of the money that comes with cocaine. He met a teacher at a local LA Community College who revealed to him that he really supports himself by selling  coke. After a bit of swaying, the teacher agreed to flip low quantities of cocaine to Ross to resell.

As it were, Ross was so skilled at selling the drug that he began returning to the teacher more and more frequently with demands of higher and higher amounts the teacher could not obtain. The teacher made an introduction to someone who could supply those amounts, and the introduction pipeline would lead to a man named Oscar Danilo Blandon, accompanied by partner Norwin Meneses Cantarero, both Nicaraguan refugees- and the course of history would change.

Blandon would act as the conduit to large amounts of cocaine for even cheaper prices that Ross would distribute throughout the streets in tandem with LA’s Bloods & Crips- making millions of dollars so quickly that he had to invest it in real estate along the Hudson Freeway housing district in LA so his mother wouldn’t know his real business.

Ross’s empire grew, with Bladon & Cantarero supplying him endlessly. He made $3 Million dollars in a day in the mid 80’s. He had hundreds of people on his payroll by 1985, and a complex spiderweb matrix of runners stemming from South Central LA and reaching the Pacific Northwest to Philly, NYC, NoLa, Cinci & many other major US markets. Over the course of his run he made almost a Billion dollars.

By the mid-eighties, Rick was zooming about America, flipping as much as two hundred to three hundred pounds of blow each day. He had an arsenal of devices like walkie-talkies and hip side beepers- synchronizing a crew of fifteen to twenty henchmen via his own private channels. He rocked a bulletproof vest and took target practice at a firing range with his 9-mil. Back in Compton, he had a trap house with multiple restaurant quality stoves, a cash house with currency-counting machines, a chill house with an underground escape tunnel that emanate from a broom closet to a back street, and a party house with NBA-regulation hoops, a private chef, 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. Everyone knew who Freeway Ricky was, but no one could catch him.

He was both a heroic Robin Hood and the villainous Devil.

By the late 80’s, the ball of yarn that is often the drug dealer reality started to unravel. There were whispers of where Blandon was actually getting his cocaine from, and who, and more importantly what, Blandon actually was.

During this era, there were almost two Americas, divided starkly by race and class. Reagan’s “War On Drugs” was an absolute farce, an exercise in diversion and Roman “Bread & Circuses” at work. While Reaganomics set Wall Street ablaze for most of the 80’s, empowering the generationally white and wealthy under the guise of “Trickle Down Economics” - Black America had been largely ignored if not despised. Left to their own devices in squalor in major cities (See: Bronx, Compton, Southside Chicago, NoLa in 80s), - they were at best, brushed aside and at worst, used as guinea pigs in an en-mass Squid Games where the stakes were life and death.

Freeway Rick would soon learn he was a pawn in these games.

Blandon and Meneses were informants, and acting on behalf of the U.S Central Intelligence Agency, funneling millions in drug profits to a Latin American guerrilla army run by the CIA known as the Contras - a Nicaraguan right-wing rebel outfit that fought against the communist, Marxist “Enemy of America” Sandinista Junta” government. This entire affair was carried out in secret from the American public and Congress, and they needed a way to fund it.

Enter a down on his luck  journalist who would become the ultimate whistle blower & change the course of American history. His home life was in disarray, he smoked two packs a day and fretted over an ant crawling along the concrete. This man had nothing else to do but follow rabbit holes. Where they would lead, no one could have guessed. This savior's name was Gary Webb.

"For the better part of a decade, a San Francisco Bay Area drug ring sold tons of cocaine to the Crips and Bloods street gangs of Los Angeles and funneled millions in drug profits to a Latin American guerrilla army run by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency. [This drug ring] opened the first pipeline between Colombia's cocaine cartels and the black neighborhoods of Los Angeles [and, as a result,] the cocaine that flooded in helped spark a crack explosion in urban America."

Said Webb, the late, great journalist who blew this once in a lifetime story wide open in his seminal work, Dark Alliance.

Blandon had strong relationships with both the Contras and the CIA, and that law enforcement agencies failed to successfully prosecute them largely due to their Contra and CIA connections. The CIA was using Blandon and unbeknownst to Ross, Ross- to fund their meaningless war. They decided the Black community would be the casualty. Collateral damage, fuck it, the “War On Drugs” was a front. The crack epidemic that destroyed urban America for two generations was supplied by the US Government.

Everyone but Ross was in on it. Including the President.

The LA Police tried setting him up multiple times, once in 1987 they planted a brick of blow in his path on the way to the airport as he fled, and the charges did not stick. Again a few years later, they tried with a new scheme and failed. It was never the police who Freeway should have been worried about, it was his partner, Blandon, as it were.

When Bladon fled his home country, he set off to America to raise money. He had now idea how it would end. He set Freeway Rick up to be arrested in 1989 for dealing crack, serving five years, and then given a second sentence in 1996 after being set up by Blandon- the ultimate knife in the back.

That’s when he was hit with life with no option for parole.

That was the penultimate, soul crushing gavel bang. Ross had made major changes during his prior stints- educating himself immensely, using his time behind bars to learn all he could about the law, history, self improvement and social justice. He became obsessed with making everything right for the generations to come.

The rest of those involved, including all of the CIA’s cocaine importing pipeline & General Oliver North, who most considered to be absolutely instrumental in crafting all of this evil in the first place, walked free and clear.

In 2009, Freeway walked after winning an appeal, after serving 20 of his life sentence- and the public outcry of how unfair the trial was. The prosecutor and judge hated each other personally for years prior. Racism played a massive role. The CIA tried interfering on multiple occasions to hide their deep rooted connections in the matter, and throughout his incarceration, Ross remained calm & steadfast, reading hundreds of books, studying classic literature and art, social justice, politics, religion, culture, and self-empowerment.

Freeway Ricky Ross built arguably what became the world’s largest drug empire. He stayed miles ahead of the authorities, scaling his operation to heights never before seen using tech, a complex system of communication and secret code, and security. For a kid who couldn’t get into college and follow his dream of playing tennis at a university, he possessed an incredible intelligence. While the product he moved is questionable, his acumen in no way is. He reached heights unattainable even with a degree of any kind.

Ross earned his own exoneration from prison by studying legal textbooks while incarcerated. Not bad for an illiterate kid from below the 110 freeway. And now he’s changing lives, shining a light on the same streets he once ran in darkness.

Speak with Ricky 1-on-1 on five:   https://five.me/freewayricky