vault backup: 2026-05-17 21:47:57

10 - PEOPLE/(N-S)/Ricky Ross.md

@@ -32,7 +32,7 @@ In 1981, Ross discovered why Fisher could afford such a lifestyle on a teacher's
 
 ### First Drug Deals
 
-Their first deal was a disaster. Fisher gave them "a fifty-dollar piece" and "we got beat out of it," Ross said. They regrouped, stole a car from Bret Harte Junior High's parking lot, and sold the wheels for $250. They returned to Fisher and bought "what's called an 8-track of cocaine" — three grams, heavily cut, for $250. They cut it further and sold it for about $600. "An awful lot of money." Instead of spending the profits, they reinvested. "Sold it, made more money," Ross said. "I didn't really know the game. It was like we were just stumbling through, you know what I'm saying? Picking up as we go."[^3]
+Their first deal was a disaster. Fisher gave them "a fifty-dollar piece" and "we got beat out of it," Ross said. They regrouped, stole a car from Bret Harte Junior High's parking lot, and sold the wheels for $250. They returned to Fisher and bought "what's called an 8-track of cocaine" - three grams, heavily cut, for $250. They cut it further and sold it for about $600. "An awful lot of money." Instead of spending the profits, they reinvested. "Sold it, made more money," Ross said. "I didn't really know the game. It was like we were just stumbling through, you know what I'm saying? Picking up as we go."[^3]
 
 Ross sold while Newell provided protection. They kept earnings small to avoid police attention: "We never wanted to get over two or three hundred dollars." Acquaintances selling PCP ("Sherm" or "water") mocked them for choosing cocaine, which had a much smaller market. Ross preferred it: "Cocaine is like, mellow, and it was cool. So I didn't mind doing it." On March 19, 1982, Ross was arrested for grand theft auto after police found a Mercedes in his garage with mismatched parts. He hired Beverly Hills attorney [[Alan Fenster]], who got the charge dismissed.[^3]
 
@@ -54,35 +54,35 @@ Ross had no knowledge of Blandón's political connections. When [[Gary Webb]] in
 
 ### Empire at Its Zenith
 
-During 1984 and 1985, the Ross-Blandón cocaine trafficking empire reached its peak. Ross was selling cocaine so rapidly he stopped converting it to crack himself, instead passing Blandón's kilos directly to smaller crack manufacturers, increasingly members of various [[Crips]] sets from across Los Angeles. Blandón confirmed that Ross was buying 100 kilos per week: "It continued growing, growing, growing, until sometime he buy [from] me 100 a week." Blandón arranged with Colombian suppliers to give Ross cocaine on credit—the initial advance of 20 to 25 kilos was worth approximately $1 million wholesale.[^5]
+During 1984 and 1985, the Ross-Blandón cocaine trafficking empire reached its peak. Ross was selling cocaine so rapidly he stopped converting it to crack himself, instead passing Blandón's kilos directly to smaller crack manufacturers, increasingly members of various [[Crips]] sets from across Los Angeles. Blandón confirmed that Ross was buying 100 kilos per week: "It continued growing, growing, growing, until sometime he buy [from] me 100 a week." Blandón arranged with Colombian suppliers to give Ross cocaine on credit - the initial advance of 20 to 25 kilos was worth approximately $1 million wholesale.[^5]
 
 Ross estimated his average volume at approximately 150 kilos per week, enough to produce roughly 3,000,000 doses of crack every seven days. Blandón and the [[Torres Brothers]] were sometimes sharing approximately $5.7 million per week in cash from Ross. "Sometimes, we'd spend $4 million or $5 million a week with that guy, in our hell days," Ross said. Ross used a South Central apartment as a countinghouse, where drug money was brought, sorted, and wrapped using two or three counting machines running day and night. "Man, my fingers hurt!" Ross told Blandón. "We got to the point where it was like, 'Man, we don't want to count no more money.'"[^5]
 
 ### Diversification of Suppliers
 
-When Blandón became increasingly unreliable—drinking heavily and reluctant to leave his Rialto home—Ross turned to the Torres Brothers, Nicaraguan traffickers who had previously worked for Blandón. Ross used the competition to drive down prices from both suppliers, whipsawing each against the other. Blandón acknowledged that Ross "got the coke from me, from Torres. . .I got a piece of the apple." The rivalry between Blandón and the Torres brothers eventually turned bitter and dangerous.[^5]
+When Blandón became increasingly unreliable - drinking heavily and reluctant to leave his Rialto home - Ross turned to the Torres Brothers, Nicaraguan traffickers who had previously worked for Blandón. Ross used the competition to drive down prices from both suppliers, whipsawing each against the other. Blandón acknowledged that Ross "got the coke from me, from Torres. . .I got a piece of the apple." The rivalry between Blandón and the Torres brothers eventually turned bitter and dangerous.[^5]
 
-Ross had initially been reluctant to find other suppliers, recognizing how much of his success depended on Blandón: "If Danilo had disappeared, we wouldn't have been getting no ounces, no nothing. . .When we got started, if we wouldn't have had him, we wouldn't have been able to have found it nowhere else." Blandón's prices—$38,000 per kilo when others charged $45,000—and his steady supply made him difficult to replace. Blandón also provided Ross with advance warnings of police raids on his stash houses.[^5]
+Ross had initially been reluctant to find other suppliers, recognizing how much of his success depended on Blandón: "If Danilo had disappeared, we wouldn't have been getting no ounces, no nothing. . .When we got started, if we wouldn't have had him, we wouldn't have been able to have found it nowhere else." Blandón's prices - $38,000 per kilo when others charged $45,000 - and his steady supply made him difficult to replace. Blandón also provided Ross with advance warnings of police raids on his stash houses.[^5]
 
 ### Real Estate and Front Businesses
 
-Following Blandón's advice to invest drug profits, Ross purchased houses, apartment buildings, an auto parts store, and a hotel near the Harbor Freeway called the Freeway Motor Inn, which gave him his nickname "Freeway Rick." The motel served as a secure meeting place for dealers and couriers. The auto parts store—called the "Big Palace of Wheels"—was a well-stocked but curiously customer-free front corporation.[^5]
+Following Blandón's advice to invest drug profits, Ross purchased houses, apartment buildings, an auto parts store, and a hotel near the Harbor Freeway called the Freeway Motor Inn, which gave him his nickname "Freeway Rick." The motel served as a secure meeting place for dealers and couriers. The auto parts store - called the "Big Palace of Wheels" - was a well-stocked but curiously customer-free front corporation.[^5]
 
 ### Weapons Acquisition
 
-Beginning in 1984, Blandón supplied Ross and his associates with high-powered weapons through [[Ronald Lister]] and the [[Mundy Security Group]]. Ross's first gun was a .22 pistol with a silencer, given to him free by Blandón. "Everybody that worked with me—everybody—bought a gun from him." Ross bought a silver-plated Uzi submachine gun, and his partner Ollie Newell became one of Blandón's biggest arms customers, eventually possessing enough firepower to equip a platoon, including a tripod-mounted .50-caliber machine gun capable of downing small planes. Ross said his crew acquired more than a hundred guns from Blandón.[^5]
+Beginning in 1984, Blandón supplied Ross and his associates with high-powered weapons through [[Ronald Lister]] and the [[Mundy Security Group]]. Ross's first gun was a .22 pistol with a silencer, given to him free by Blandón. "Everybody that worked with me - everybody - bought a gun from him." Ross bought a silver-plated Uzi submachine gun, and his partner Ollie Newell became one of Blandón's biggest arms customers, eventually possessing enough firepower to equip a platoon, including a tripod-mounted .50-caliber machine gun capable of downing small planes. Ross said his crew acquired more than a hundred guns from Blandón.[^5]
 
 ### National Expansion
 
 As the South Central crack market became saturated, Ross's gang customers started traveling to other California cities and then nationwide, setting up new crack markets using their connections with Ross to supply them. This migration marked the start of an unprecedented cross-country expansion by the Crips and later the Bloods. The Los Angeles Times described Ross's operation as "a coast-to-coast conglomerate that sold more than 500,000 nuggets of the drug every day." One L.A. narcotics detective described it as "a cartel."[^5]
 
-Ross was selling to nearly every big crack dealer in Los Angeles without resorting to attention-getting violence. "The dollar was a powerful persuader," Ross discovered. "There was no limit to the average cocaine dealer's greed. You could buy your way into anything, or out of any disagreement." His distribution system used nondescript decoy cars and load cars, walkie-talkies, stash houses, cash houses, and safe houses—a system that took him two years to perfect.[^5]
+Ross was selling to nearly every big crack dealer in Los Angeles without resorting to attention-getting violence. "The dollar was a powerful persuader," Ross discovered. "There was no limit to the average cocaine dealer's greed. You could buy your way into anything, or out of any disagreement." His distribution system used nondescript decoy cars and load cars, walkie-talkies, stash houses, cash houses, and safe houses - a system that took him two years to perfect.[^5]
 
 ### Identified by Law Enforcement
 
-In August 1986, the flipped Torres brothers told detective [[Jerry Guzzetta]] during debriefings that two Black dealers controlled the entire South Central [[Los Angeles]] cocaine market. Guzzetta's "Project Sahara" report identified them as "Rick and Ollie"—[[Ricky Ross|Ross]] and Ollie Newell—generating "a conservative figure of approximately $10 million dollars a month." The brothers reported the two dealers had established a direct pipeline to the Colombian cartels. This intelligence was passed to the [[LASD Major Violators]] squad and Detective [[Thomas Gordon]], who realized the L.A. crack market was far more disciplined and well organized than anyone had dreamed. Ross confirmed that Blandón had an uncanny ability to accurately predict upcoming police raids but said he was never able to explain Blandón's clairvoyance.[^6]
+In August 1986, the flipped Torres brothers told detective [[Jerry Guzzetta]] during debriefings that two Black dealers controlled the entire South Central [[Los Angeles]] cocaine market. Guzzetta's "Project Sahara" report identified them as "Rick and Ollie" - [[Ricky Ross|Ross]] and Ollie Newell - generating "a conservative figure of approximately $10 million dollars a month." The brothers reported the two dealers had established a direct pipeline to the Colombian cartels. This intelligence was passed to the [[LASD Major Violators]] squad and Detective [[Thomas Gordon]], who realized the L.A. crack market was far more disciplined and well organized than anyone had dreamed. Ross confirmed that Blandón had an uncanny ability to accurately predict upcoming police raids but said he was never able to explain Blandón's clairvoyance.[^6]
 
-Jerry Guzzetta drove through South Central with the Torres brothers, who showed him Ross's operations: a vacant apartment complex used as a cocaine lab, a multistory distribution center near the Harbor Freeway, and the Freeway Motor Inn—which the brothers said Rick had built to his specifications for a million dollars, with his mother Annie working the front desk. Guzzetta realized they had led him to "the legendary Freeway Rick." Ross surmised the Torres brothers gave him up because he had reverted to buying exclusively from Blandón: "Danilo's price was so low, that the Torres brothers simply could not continue to compete." Majors I had been looking for Ross since April 1986, raiding his girlfriend's apartment on May 15 and rousted his cousins in late August—telling them to warn Rick to watch himself.[^7]
+Jerry Guzzetta drove through South Central with the Torres brothers, who showed him Ross's operations: a vacant apartment complex used as a cocaine lab, a multistory distribution center near the Harbor Freeway, and the Freeway Motor Inn - which the brothers said Rick had built to his specifications for a million dollars, with his mother Annie working the front desk. Guzzetta realized they had led him to "the legendary Freeway Rick." Ross surmised the Torres brothers gave him up because he had reverted to buying exclusively from Blandón: "Danilo's price was so low, that the Torres brothers simply could not continue to compete." Majors I had been looking for Ross since April 1986, raiding his girlfriend's apartment on May 15 and rousted his cousins in late August - telling them to warn Rick to watch himself.[^7]
 
 ### The Godfather of South Central