Published in the October 2013 80th Anniversary issue

The real Rick Ross is not a rapper. That's what it says on his T-shirt, silk-screened attractively in two colors. The bold letters in black ink frame his image — bald, bearded, and somewhat bug-eyed with the fervor of his comeback. The gold ink requires a second stencil. Depicted on his head is a crown, cocked just so and perfectly aligned, the kingpin in exile, and below that his autograph, the excessively flamboyant signature of a man who once made millions a day selling cocaine but only began learning to read, behind bars, at age twenty-eight. Eventually he would read himself to freedom.

On a sunny morning in southern California, Rick Ross is driving from his cramped but rent-free apartment along tony Ocean Avenue in Long Beach toward some pressing new business in blue-collar Riverside, an hour away. We're talking here about the real Rick Ross, born Ricky Donnell Ross in 1960, one of three Ricks from 'round the way, this one the Rick who stayed on Eighty-seventh Place where it dead-ended at the 110 Freeway, in the shadow of a massive concrete abutment where you could feel the earth vibrating beneath your feet, hence his nickname: Freeway Rick Ross… as opposed to the rapper known as Rick Ross, a blubbery former college football player and corrections officer whose birth name is William Leonard Roberts II. When Roberts entered the music game, he appropriated the name and tattooed it across his fists: RICK RO$. He rose to prominence rapping about a fictitious criminal past while the real Rick Ross, Freeway Rick Ross, a man iconic enough to have his name jacked, was serving a life sentence without the possibility of parole in a federal penitentiary.

Having brought suit against the rapper for copyright infringement and failed in several courts, Ross came up with the idea of these T-shirts. Over the past five months, with the help of a gangbanger turned silk-screener, he's printed five thousand. Offered in a rainbow of colors, in sizes up to 6XL, they are folded painstakingly and fitted into plastic bags by his older brother in a mini-warehouse to which Ross has managed to secure the key, one in a seemingly endless series of fuzzy handshake arrangements through which he operates his portfolio of legal enterprises.

Everywhere he goes — to give testimony in a storefront church in Ontario; to lecture a law-school class at the University of Southern California; to make a personal appearance at an open-mic night in Inglewood; to have lunch at Denny's in Carson (he's a vegan; the chain features a garden burger); to attend a party for a Korean rapper who worships Ross as an American folk hero; to take a meeting at Warner Bros. studios in Burbank or with an Epic/Sony vice-president in Beverly Hills—Ross rolls behind him unself-consciously a battered suitcase full of merch, the zipper toggles missing, his Willy Loman smile unwavering as he digs through the slippery packages to find the proper size and color, no charge for a photo. If you don't have the twenty dollars, more than likely he'll sell it for less. Taken by the moment, by the recognition and adulation, he'll often make it a gift.

If you meet Rick Ross and you tell him you're broke, broker even than he is at the moment — there is $11.15 left in his savings account—he'll spot you a ten-pack of T-shirts, a $200 value on the streets. (If you live out of town, he'll mail you a ten-pack; someone else donates postage from his company's postal machine.) His manufacturer's price is about four dollars per piece. Wholesale is ten dollars. On the Web the price is twenty-five dollars. Sell those shirts, pay him back a hundred dollars, and you get to keep the profit. If you're smart like Rick Ross, the real Rick Ross, Freeway Rick, you'll reinvest. Just like that you're in business.

Back in the day, Ross would offer the same deal with crack cocaine — to start you out, he'd give you $100 worth for free and you could sell it for $300. Between 1982 and 1989, federal prosecutors estimated, Ross bought and resold three tons of cocaine. In 1980 dollars, his gross earnings were said to be in excess of $900 million — with a profit of nearly $300 million. Converted roughly to present-day dollars: $2.5 billion and $850 million, respectively. As his distribution empire grew to include forty-two cities, the price he paid per kilo of powder cocaine dropped from as much as $60,000 to as low as $10,000. This was partially due to his exponentially increasing network of distributors, as Crips and Bloods struck out across the country to franchise the trade, spreading their gang culture with it… and partially due to his sweetheart connection with a Nicaraguan national who would later be said to have ties to both the CIA and the contra rebels supported during the 1980s by the Reagan administration. (Later this same connect — Oscar Danilo Blandón — would be hired by the DEA as an informant; it was he who would bring Ross into the deal that led to his life sentence.)

Fueled by the findings of an investigation by San Jose Mercury News reporter Gary Webb in 1996, many would come to believe that the CIA had actually created the crack epidemic in America by allowing (or turning a blind eye to) massive shipments of cocaine into the country, the profits from which went to arming rebels fighting a Latin American regime disfavored by our government. Webb also theorized that much of the contra coke (cultivated in Colombia) ended up in the hands of Freeway Rick Ross.

Webb's revelations were aggressively attacked by the country's major newspapers, in reports heavy with unnamed government sources. Webb left the paper in disgrace; he was later found dead with two bullets in his head, an apparent suicide. An earlier inquiry led by then-senator John Kerry supported the substance of Webb's allegations, as did a 1998 report by the CIA's inspector general. Even many of those who vilified Webb now acknowledge that much of what he reported was true. A minority of the citizenry still believes there was genocidal intent in the CIA's actions — that the coke was deliberately funneled toward black ghettos as a way of decimating a troublesome population.

Deliberate or not, crack spread like a brush fire through the desiccated urban landscape, causing what USC law professor Jody Armour calls "the crack plague and its festering aftermath." Today, the ripples are still felt on all sociological levels; 30 percent of African-American males under thirty are currently incarcerated or on probation or parole. Along the way, crack also helped to enrich law-enforcement agencies and private security contractors and to elect politicians; being "tough on crime" became a necessary platform plank, a mind-set that would later dovetail into post-9/11 issues of domestic security. In 1986, when homicide rates due to gang warfare across the country had reached all-time highs, mandatory federal sentencing minimums were established, making the penalties for possession of crack by weight a hundred times more punitive than those for possession of powder cocaine. Many say this is one of the reasons for the disparities of race in our prison population. Only recently did President Obama sign legislation reducing the crack-to-powder-coke ratio to 18 to 1. To date, various estimates place the cost of the four-decade-plus war on drugs between $500 billion and $1 trillion.

The way Rick Ross sees it, he was a banker in a shadow economy, working with the only currency available to a disenfranchised segment of society. By giving out unsecured microloans, he created jobs. By middling large quantities of this once-refined plant (similar to sugar or coffee, only illegal), he made himself and others wealthy — an American capitalist in the grand tradition of our country's rags-to-riches folklore. Working with gang leaders he'd known since grade school, both Crips and Bloods, Ross created a sales model — a foolproof recipe for cooking powder coke into crack using household materials; a chain of organization; an army of Dope Boys; and standardized curbside service techniques that were exported around the country and continued to evolve one step ahead of police and their increasingly well-stocked arsenal.

The real Rick Ross. Freeway Rick Ross. He didn't invent crack. But he probably did more than anyone else to cause its spread. Just Say No. The War on Drugs. Mandatory Minimums. The Wire. RICK RO$. This is his legacy. Say hello to my little friend.

LAT/Robert Gauthier

At the moment, Freeway Rick Ross is sitting behind the wheel of a salvaged Hyundai Santa Fe with 169 grand on the odometer. He is traveling seventy miles per hour in the middle lane of the 110 Freeway, heading for the 91 Freeway, chatting nonstop to a series of callers on a BlackBerry cell phone with a cracked face that the mother of his two youngest children — Mychosia Nightingale, a former Army sergeant who did three tours in Iraq — found for him on Craigslist for twenty-nine dollars. (Ross doesn't do computers.)

The steering wheel vibrates beneath his driving hand. The vehicle is slightly out of alignment; it was purchased at auction on his behalf by another of his partners, this one a reformed bank robber who is helping him learn the business of flipping low-end cars. So far this week, Ross has sold two cars, one of them the sedan his brother was driving; after repair expenses, he's cleared nearly two grand. There's a nice Honda waiting in Riverside; all it needs is a new air bag and it's ready for Craigslist. Prior to jumping on the freeway, Ross stopped at a junkyard and scored.

By any account, going legit hasn't been easy. After his release from prison in 2009 (more on that below), Ross tried long-distance trucking. He was up to seven rigs when the repair bills crippled him. Then, he says, two of his cousins ran off with the last two viable trucks. Next he tried the hair business — human hair for extensions. Another cousin, who was supposed to go to India to buy more hair, ran off with a suitcase full of money.

Ever upbeat, Ross keeps trying. Among projects he's pursuing: a storefront for the T-shirts. A literacy campaign. A social-media campaign (freewaysocialmedia.com) A rap label. (If you want to be signed, you have to sell T-shirts.) A sports training and management agency specializing in troubled athletes. An energy pill. (His potential partner made a fortune selling faux marijuana and bath salts.) By far his biggest hopes lie in Hollywood. Ross has a partnership stake in a documentary about his life, Crack in the System, by the filmmaker Marc Levin; there's been no sale yet. He's also shopping his biopic. It was written by Nick Cassavetes, a cowriter of Blow; Nick Cannon has signed on to play Freeway Rick Ross. So far Ross hasn't found anyone willing to give him $36 million to make the film.

Likewise the T-shirts. He sold $1,500 worth his first month and reinvested everything. The problem he's got right now is re-ups — he is owed something like $4,000. Apparently, his corps of street salespeople have discovered a slight problem with Ross's model — T-shirts don't sell like crack.

Ross's cell phone is set to speaker, propped on his right shoulder to avoid another ticket. There's a spare battery charging in a broken phone in the cupholder; a third battery floats loose in the pocket of his jeans, the same pair the government issued him on the day he walked out of the federal prison in Texarkana, in northeast Texas, after serving fourteen years of a reduced sentence. The calls come in every few minutes: acolytes and sycophants, old homies and new connects, possible business partners, members of the media.

"What up what up what up?" Ross answers, ever upbeat. "Talk to me. Who dat?"

This particular caller has been highly anticipated. He's from Russell Brand's late-night talk show, Brand X. The hugely popular English comedian is taping his last installment of the season tonight. Ross is scheduled to appear.

As Rick has been learning, it's one thing to be mobbed by a crowd of adoring brothers and sisters at the giant City of Hope church, or at Earlez Grille on Crenshaw Boulevard, or at the corner of Eighty-first and Hoover, a former weed and PCP spot where Ross became the first street dealer to offer ready rock for sale to the public. (His initial customers were the D Boys. They liked to mix a little crack into their blunts—street name: coco-puffs.)

But it's quite another to gain acceptance from the mainstream — especially when you're trying to raise $36 million for a film. This shot on national TV is just what he needs, a big-time arena in which to push his shirts and his various campaigns, a chance to explain a little bit about himself, to put things in context, to explain his situation — how he was really more of an entrepreneur giving microloans than a drug pusher peddling death. How the CIA practically put the drugs in his hands.

The caller sounds superfriendly; the two have spoken before. The routine of arrival is explained. The names of Ross's greenroom entourage are locked down. A medium-sized Real Rick Ross T-shirt is requested. Then talk turns to plans for the segment.

"We'd like to have you show the audience how to make crack," the caller says.

Ross's large and expressive eyes seem to bulge out of their sockets. "You want me … to come on your show and cook crack?" He looks as if he's about to cry.

"Yes!" enthuses the caller. His tone is reminiscent of a cheerleader pumping a fist in the air. "Can you tell me what we'll need?"

The 110 Freeway links the port of Long Beach with downtown L. A. It runs through the eastern side of the city, paralleling the coastline, passing near the Watts Towers, the L. A. Memorial Coliseum, the USC campus, and the Staples Center before merging with Interstate 10, a gateway to the rest of the nation. Leaving Long Beach, the 110 runs through blighted communities that once housed hundreds of thousands of blue-collar workers, many of them African-Americans who'd immigrated from the South in successive waves after World War II, seeking jobs and a better life. Today the area is best known for gangs, drugs, and economic despair. After the 1992 riots, people of color began to refer to a place called Soweto South of Pico Boulevard — the geographical line of demarcation between the haves and have-nots in Los Angeles.

A number of years ago, the 110 Freeway was widened. By eminent domain, construction claimed the house, at 430 West Eighty-seventh Place, where Ross grew up. Today if you go there, the ground still trembles. Homeless people live in makeshift tents beneath the overpass.

Back in 1979, when Ross was nineteen and the house still stood, he would arrive home with his buddy Ollie "Big Loc" Newell to find the usual friends and family hanging out in the garage that Ross and his brother had converted into a bedroom.

The house was shared by Ross's aunt and his mother, Annie Mae Mauldin, the daughter of an east-Texas sharecropper. Ross's father, Sonny Ross, a former Army cook and later a pig farmer, came from similar roots. Rick would have no relationship with him until after Rick's first stint in prison.

Ross and his mother came to South Central in 1963, when he was three. At first, they lived with her brother, George, and his wife. One night George became enraged and attacked his wife and sister. As little Ricky looked on in terror, Annie Mae Mauldin pulled a handgun from her purse and killed Uncle George. After what Ross remembers as a long and painful separation, Mauldin was released from jail and mother and son were reunited.

Throwing in with George's wife, Mauldin bought the house on Eighty-seventh Place. Mauldin cleaned office buildings, did landscaping, worked for a lawyer soliciting auto-accident cases. Eventually, the family went on welfare. Ross remembers collecting canned food from looted stores after the Watts riots. Mauldin is now in her mid-eighties, a sprightly woman with a quick laugh who drives a minivan and likes to gamble in a nearby casino. She remembers Ricky being embarrassed by government handouts, always hustling. He cut lawns, sold lemonade, pumped gas for tips, shoplifted, ran errands for neighborhood pimps. At Manchester Elementary, Ross wasn't so industrious. He fought with classmates, sassed teachers — the little guy with the big temper. Even though he couldn't read, he was promoted every year.

"There weren't no bankers or lawyers in my neighborhood to learn from," Ross says. "The pimps and the hustlers was my role models. There was experts on burglary, there was experts on how to rob somebody at the ATM, how to get a gun, how to file off the serial numbers — all this information was readily available in our community. Criminal enterprise was the only work we had."

Ross attended middle school during the early seventies, around the same time the Crips street gang was being founded. Started initially as a sort of neighborhood-watch brigade by muscleheads who prided themselves on a fly style of dress, the Crips would mutate across South Central (and further spawn the Bloods). One day at Bret Harte Junior High, after putting his books into his locker, Ross turned around to find himself staring down the barrel of a .38-caliber pistol. Somehow his homies defused the incident, but Ross was deeply shaken. He resolved to never join a gang. "I figured there had to be something better for me out there. I just didn't know what it was yet."

As it happened, his answer came in the unlikely form of a tennis racket, when a man showed up to hold a clinic at nearby Manchester Park. Ross went to the park nearly every day, despite the fact that he and his pals had once discovered a mutilated body floating in the swimming pool. (The memory would haunt him for years, as would his uncle's shooting, crippling him at times with debilitating symptoms of post-traumatic shock. In later years Ross would never be known for violence. If someone beat him on a deal, he didn't order a hit. Instead he'd think, That motherfucker gonna be sorry when I blow the fuck up.)

Too small for football or basketball, the quick and tenacious Ross found in tennis a legit place to excel. By ninth grade he was recruited to play for Dorsey High School, a magnet school in Baldwin Hills, an exclusive residential area known as the black Beverly Hills.

Ross dropped out before receiving his diploma. As his jock friends went off to college scholarships, Ross ended up playing for the tennis team at Los Angeles Trade-Technical College while he was studying auto upholstery, inspired by his newfound passion for lowriders. He bought a 1966 Impala convertible and set about restoring and customizing it — juiced, lifted, and sporting fancy rims, the vehicle could hop three feet off the ground. To pay for his hobby, Ross fell into a network of auto thieves who became known as the Freeway Boys. He also became part owner of a chop shop.

Around the spring of 1982, Ross was arrested for the first time and charged with possession of stolen auto parts. Free on bail and awaiting trial, he got a call, as Ross tells it, from his old friend Mike, a running back who'd left town for a football scholarship to San Jose State University.

Mike was staying in the guesthouse of a nice place in Sugar Hill, an area popular with wealthy black folks prior to Baldwin Hills. It had its own kitchen and everything. Ross had never even had his own room.

Greeting Ross and his boy Ollie at the door, according to Ross, Mike pulled out a plastic baggie filled with white paper bindles. He removed one and opened it—inside was a small amount of white powder that sparkled beneath the lamplight. At the time, the most common drugs to use or sell in the ghetto were black-tar heroin, marijuana, and PCP — phencyclidine, a powerful anesthetic. The only time Ross had even heard of cocaine was in the movie Superfly.

"This is worth fifty dollars," Mike said.

"Stop lying," Ross laughed.

"Man, no joke. They going crazy over this stuff. All of the entertainers are doing it. All the white people are doing it."

"Well, if it worth that much, I'm gonna find a way to get rich," Ross proclaimed.

"Take this and see what you can do with it," Mike said. He handed over the half-gram bindle.

Now Ross and Ollie arrived home to find the usual suspects collected in the garage bedroom/clubhouse. In Ross's mind, "these guys was supposed to be the ones in our little circle who knew what was going on in the streets. The players, the down hustlers, the street-smart guys—these was them."

Ollie bolted the interior door and Ross produced with some ceremony the little packet of cocaine. He opened it on the table.

The scent was vaguely medicinal, like something you might smell in the emergency room. Everybody stood dumbfounded, just looking at one another.

Finally, Cruz Dog spoke. He was one of Ross's oldest homies, a fleet wide receiver turned fearless Crip soldier Ross had known since Manchester Elementary.

He pushed back his cap and scratched his head. "What is it, cuz?"

Ross and ollie drove around the 'hood, seeing what they could do with this new drug. Eventually they ran into Martin the pimp. Martin demonstrated how to cook the powder into crack — he produced a small nugget that looked like a white aquarium stone.

Then Martin demonstrated how to smoke it. (It made a loud crackling sound when lit; some say that's the origin of the name.)

An hour later, the partners were back at the house on Eighty-seventh Place, stewing on the front porch. The drugs were gone. They owed Mike fifty dollars. Ollie wanted payback.

"Man, you can't kill Martin," Ross said. "That's the OG man, everybody in the 'hood gonna be mad."

Then Martin pulled up in front of the house. He was riding with Big Mouse, one of the original Crips. The two approached the porch. Martin's eyes looked wide and a little crazy. Ross steeled himself.

The old pimp took Ross's hand in a soul shake: "Man, I got you a customer," he enthused.

When Mike had first pulled out the coke in the guesthouse, Ross snorted a couple of lines and was unimpressed. In powder form the effects were subtle. But after watching Martin cook the crack and compulsively smoke it — and return an hour later in an urgent search for more, with financing in tow — Ross knew he'd discovered an opportunity.

At first, Ross middled the coke for Mike, without commission, just to learn the ropes. Then he discovered that his upholstery teacher, who lived in Baldwin Hills, was also into coke. He had connections to Nicaraguan dealers. Ross started buying and selling more and more product. He paid Martin the pimp to cook each batch into crack; in time Ross figured out the simple process himself.

Ross wasn't the first to deal crack — a mass-produced form of what others were calling freebase. Crack was documented by UCLA researchers as early as 1974 in the San Francisco area. At the same time Ross was experimenting with sales of ready rock, so were dealers and users in New York and Miami. Along with a source of heat and some water, "a saucer, a glass, a paper towel, and Arm & Hammer baking soda are about all that is needed" to cook crack, according to a physician who testified in 1979 before a U. S. House Select Committee.

Thereafter, whenever Ross recruited a new subdealer, he'd teach him how to cook. He wasn't afraid to go into a hostile neighborhood to seek out a leader and make a deal. "I wasn't a Crip or a Blood. I was the man with the dope and the opportunity," Ross says.

Eventually Ross was introduced to a Nicaraguan named Oscar Danilo Blandón. A former marketing director in Nicaragua, Blandón and his wife were forced to flee their country in 1979 when the Cuban-aided Sandinista rebels defeated the U.S.-trained army of Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza and took over the country.

Dealing with Blandón, Ross seemed to have virtually unlimited access to drugs. By age twenty-three, Ross says, he was a millionaire. In some respects he was the prototypical drug kingpin. He wore a bulletproof vest and carried a 9mm, fathered five babies with four different women, kept himself surrounded by a posse of workers connected by walkie-talkies, ordered up bootleg designer furnishings for his motel (which he gave to his mom to run), bought an apartment building, sponsored a semipro basketball team, bought new pews for his mom's church, had so much cash he had to hire people to count it.

But he was never flashy. He wore T-shirts and jeans and was driven around in a beater. "Instead of buying cars and fancy stuff, I took my money and I went and bought more and more dope — eventually my dealer told the other guys they was too small-time and had to buy their dope from me. So then I was getting a lower price, plus I was making money on all they shit, too," Ross explains. For a long time, the Freeway Rick Task Force — a squad of hardened drug cops from the L. A . County Sheriff's Department dedicated to his capture — actually had no idea what he looked like.

In 1988, a load of coke bound for his lucrative new territory in Cincinnati was detected by a drug-sniffing dog at a bus station in New Mexico. The drugs were traced to Ross; he was arrested. Federal indictments in Cincinnati, Los Angeles, and Tyler, Texas, were handed down. Ross pleaded guilty to cocaine-trafficking charges and received a mandatory ten-year prison sentence, which he began serving in 1990.

Around this time, a federal investigation into the sheriff's office was uncovering massive corruption. Dozens of narcotics officers were convicted of beating suspects, stealing drug money, and planting evidence. Ross testified for the government. In return he served only four years and nine months of his sentence.

Back home at thirty-four, Rick got a job hauling trash. His major efforts were devoted to an old theater in South Central he wanted to convert into a youth center/recording studio/performance space.While he'd been away in prison, holding on to the theater and his other remaining assets had been costing him nearly fifteen grand a month. With all the money spent on lawyers for himself and his workers, he was nearly broke. He'd paid the owner of the theater $900,000 up front and $6,000 a month while incarcerated. Now Ross was behind in the payments; the owner was threatening to foreclose. Everything else was gone. Ross was determined not to lose the theater, too.

As it happened, right about this time, Ross received a call from his old business partner, Blandón.

In late 1990 or '91, Blandón was arrested by the LAPD with a suitcase full of cash — only to be bailed out by the U. S. Justice Department, which said he was part of a money-laundering case. Then Blandón was arrested by the DEA for conspiracy to distribute cocaine.

While probation officers recommended a life sentence and a $4 million fine, the prosecution argued that Blandón was "extraordinarily valuable in major DEA investigations of Class I drug traffickers," and recommended forty-eight months and no fine. Less than a year later Blandón was freed. In a memo to a judge, the prosecutor wrote that Blandón had "almost unlimited potential to assist the United States … as a full-time, paid informant after his release from prison."

Ross was a little surprised to hear from Blandón, but they'd always done beautiful business. Ross and a friend drove to Blandón's downtown L.A. restaurant. After they chatted and caught up, Blandón got to his point. "The Colombians are on my back," he told Ross. He owed money; he had a shipment he needed to sell. "Why go around begging

all these people for money for your theater when you can make it all at once?" Blandón asked.

Reluctantly or not, Ross found a buyer; as middleman, he was to receive a commission of $300,000 on a hundred-kilo sale. The deal went down in a shopping-center parking lot near San Diego on March 2, 1995. The DEA and local authorities swooped in. Ross's arrest netted Blandón more than $45,000 in government rewards and reimbursements. Ross was found guilty of conspiring to sell cocaine that had been provided by the DEA, in a deal set up by the DEA, a typical drug-war scenario. Ross received what was identified as his third felony strike, and with it a sentence of life in prison without possibility of parole.

Over the next few years Ross, who had learned to read only during his first stretch in jail, painstakingly read every business and self-help book in the prison library — during a fourteen-year period, he boasts, he devoured more than three hundred books. His trilogy of favorites: Think and Grow Rich, by Andrew Carnegie disciple Napoleon Hill; The Richest Man in Babylon, by George Samuel Clason; and Asa Man Thinketh, by James Allen. Eventually, Ross held study groups with other inmates, spreading the word of economic self-sufficiency and can-do capitalism among the brothers. If we can be so successful selling crack, Ross preached, why can't we use the same skills toward legitimate business?

In late 1995, inmate 05550-045 was visited by Gary Webb. Webb's Mercury News series, "Dark Alliance," was published in August 1996, and later became a book. Webb charged that the U. S. government had secretly allowed shipments of cocaine into the country in order to finance the purchase of weapons needed for the contra rebels to fight the leftist Sandinistas who'd taken over Nicaragua. Ross was portrayed as an unwitting pawn in a game of international covert politics.

After leaving his job in disgrace and watching his marriage dissolve, Webb methodically sold off his possessions and committed suicide in December 2004. According to the coroner's report, on his first attempt to shoot himself in the head, the father of three children missed the mark — instead he suffered a nonfatal wound. He placed the muzzle of his .38-caliber pistol against his head a second time and pulled the trigger.

Meanwhile, Ross sued, asking for more than $5 million in damages from the government. Although his case was rejected, his profile was raised mightily in a black community that had seized upon the notion that a government conspiracy was to blame for the plague of crack. In the people's mythology, the kingpin had become the victim, an antihero and a martyr.

Stuck in prison with a life sentence, Ross "started consuming myself with reading law books," he says. "I started reading them the same way I'd sold drugs. When the library opened every morning, I was there standing in line. If I missed lunch, I missed lunch. I would take all of the money I could muster up and make copies of the law books because they wouldn't let us take them back to our cells."

One day Ross found what he thought he was looking for. He'd received the life sentence for being convicted of a third federal crime — his third strike. But technically, he believed, he had only two strikes. Since his charges from the Texas and Ohio convictions had arisen from the commission of the same federal crime, how could they account for two separate strikes?

Excited, Ross called his lawyer, who shot him down. Ross got a court-appointed attorney. In 1998, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals agreed. Ross's life sentence was reduced to twenty years. He ended up serving fourteen.

On May 4, 2009, he walked out of Texarkana prison into the arms of his woman, Sergeant Mychosia Nightingale. She'd seen Ross on a documentary about crack; she'd written, he'd urged her to read his favorite books. Facing a fourth deployment to Iraq, Nightingale quit the Army and drove from Georgia to Texarkana to pick him up. She spent the week sleeping in her SUV, waiting for him with a duffel bag of new clothes. Today they have two toddlers. He's already teaching them how to swing a tennis racket.

The real Rick Ross, Freeway Rick Ross, is southbound on the 110 toward home — this time he's riding behind the driver of a gleaming white Escalade limo provided by the producers of Brand X, wearing a custom REAL RICK polo shirt that his silk-screener had made up special for his appearance on national TV.

Though Ross had fretted the entire day over the producer's request that he cook crack on TV — eager to please, he'd reluctantly given the caller a list of ingredients, including a Bunsen burner and procaine, an anesthetic that in his experience would cook up like crack — Russell Brand never asked him to do so. Instead Ross was trotted out before the studio audience like an old prizefighter and heralded as the "Donald Trump of crack." Though it's not what Ross was looking for — to be at once lionized and lampooned — it is probably somewhat true. At the end of the segment, Brand could be heard blurting out something about cooking crack on national television; clearly, cooler heads had prevailed on this last episode before cancellation.

"All these interviews I do every day, all the meetings I take, all the hands I shake, all the pictures, hopefully it amounts to stuff," Ross says, reflecting on the day's events. He sounds a little tired. It is nearly midnight, another long day.

"I just have to keep pressing and pressing and, you know, fight through all the little things. In the drug business I became an expert at drugs. I knew who sold drugs in Compton, in Watts, on the West Side, in the Jungle. And everybody knew me. But when it comes to Hollywood and this other stuff, I don't know it yet. It's like that Hollywood producer. After that long meeting and we was leaving, he laughed and he said to everybody, 'Why am I shaking hands with this drug dealer?' "

Outside Ross's window, a police cruiser pulls even with the Escalade. The cop riding shotgun appears to be pointing at Ross, though this is impossible, given the fancy blacked-out windows. Ross has a recurring dream in which he's asleep in one of his old rock houses and a battering ram is knocking down the wall. He still wakes up sometimes not knowing where he is — twenty of his fifty-three years have been spent in cells in different facilities. He knows he's lucky he's not still behind bars.

Ross gestures toward the cops. "Don't you wanna know what they're thinking?"

"You don't have to worry about what they're thinking," I tell him.

"Not no more. Not like I used to," he says. In a month's time, he'll finally land a deal for a miniseries about his life — not the deal he wanted, but at least something he believes will pay off. He smiles big and his eyes bug gleefully, a little bit proud of himself. "I ain't going to jail tonight."

Mike Sager Mike Sager is a bestselling author and award-winning reporter who's been a contributor to Esquire for thirty years.

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