Freeway Ricky Ross

• 1. Introduction

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  Ricky Donnell Ross, better known as Freeway Ricky Ross, was born on the 26th of January 1960 and learned to read at the age of 28. That happened during his first stint in prison. He then spent much of his time behind bars studying law. The education mattered because Ross had once built a cocaine empire in Los Angeles. How does a teenager who could not read end up running such an operation? Who sold him the cocaine, and what did one journalist claim about where it really came from? And how did a man serving a life sentence find a way back out?

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• 2. A Scholarship Lost

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  At Susan Miller Dorsey High School in Los Angeles, Ross played on the tennis team and hoped a college scholarship would follow. It never came. He could not read well enough to qualify, and the door to that future closed.

  In 1979, as a teenager, Ross saw crack cocaine for the first time. He has said he did not immediately believe it was a drug, because it looked so unlike the others he knew.

  At a community college in Los Angeles, an upholstery teacher told Ross that he dealt cocaine. The teacher gave him a small amount to sell. Ross used his profit to buy more, and his little business grew. Before long he wanted larger quantities than the teacher was willing to obtain, so the teacher pointed him toward his own supplier.

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• 3. A Chain of Suppliers

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  Ivan Arguellas agreed to keep Ross supplied, and the arrangement changed the scale of everything. Arguellas offered bigger quantities at a better price. Ross quickly moved from selling grams to selling ounces.

  About eight months after he became Ross's supplier, Arguellas was shot in the spine. Months in the hospital ended his time in the cocaine business. His brother-in-law, Henry Corrales, took over, but Corrales had little enthusiasm for the trade and no suppliers of his own.

  Danilo Blandón, a Nicaraguan exile and cocaine distributor, knew both Arguellas and Corrales. He had never met Ross, but the amount Ross was moving impressed him. Blandón offered to supply Corrales, who would sell to Ross, with the profit split fifty-fifty. Corrales eventually lost his appetite for the business and retired. Ross then became Blandón's direct customer.

  Blandón's own supplier was Norwin Meneses Cantarero. Through both men, Ross could buy Nicaraguan cocaine at sharply reduced rates. He began selling at $10,000 per kilo, a price well below average. He also sold to the Bloods and Crips street gangs. The Nicaraguan origin of that supply would later set off a political storm.

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• 4. Freeway Money

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  By 1982, Ross had picked up the name Freeway Ricky. It came from his properties along Interstate 110 in Los Angeles, which is also called the Harbor Freeway. He claimed to be selling as much as $3 million of cocaine in one day. He said he was buying 1,000 pounds, or 454 kilos, every week.

  Ross put most of his early profits into houses and businesses. He feared his mother would notice if he started spending lavishly on himself. He later told journalist Gary Webb in a jailhouse interview, "We were hiding our money from our mothers." Part of the money also went into the first album by the singer Anita Baker.

  Federal prosecutors estimated that between 1982 and 1989, Ross bought and resold several metric tons of cocaine. In 1980 dollars, his gross earnings were put above $900 million, with a profit of nearly $300 million. The Oakland Tribune reported that prosecutors believed he made more than $500 million in 1983 and 1984 alone. They said he exported several tons to New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania and other places.

  Ross has said thousands of employees worked for him. They sold cocaine in Los Angeles and in cities such as St. Louis, New Orleans, Kansas City, Cincinnati, Baltimore, Cleveland and Seattle. He also named Texas, Oklahoma, Indiana, North Carolina and South Carolina. He has said his best sales came from the Ohio area, and he repeated similar claims in a 1996 PBS interview. As the network grew to forty-two cities, the price he paid per kilo of powder cocaine fell from as much as $60,000 to as low as $10,000.

  Police scanners and voice scramblers helped his ring evade the law. After one bust, a Los Angeles County sheriff remarked that Ross's men had "better equipment than we have." A journalist would later propose a second, far more explosive source of protection.

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• 5. Life Sentence and Appeal

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  In 1996, Ross was sentenced to life imprisonment under the three-strikes law. The conviction rested on a sting operation. In it, he had bought more than 100 kilograms of cocaine from a federal agent.

  His case later reached a federal court of appeals. The court found that the three-strikes law had been applied in error and ordered that he be resentenced. The new sentence was 20 years.

  On the 29th of September 2009, Ross was released from Federal Correctional Institution, Texarkana. Back in 1996, the year of his sentencing, a newspaper series had already pulled his name into a national controversy.

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• 6. The CIA Question

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  In 1996, journalist Gary Webb published a series of articles in the San Jose Mercury News. They described a link between Danilo Blandón, one of Ross's cocaine sources, and the CIA. Webb placed the link inside the Iran-Contra affair.

  Webb went further. He alleged that the CIA was sponsoring Ross's operation as part of its effort to finance the Contras. If true, that would have given Ross another layer of protection from the law. The claim has since been disputed.

  The Iran-Contra connection would follow Ross for decades, appearing in documentaries and in a 2014 feature film.

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• 7. Life After Prison

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  On the 18th of June 2010, Ross sued the rapper Rick Ross, whose real name is William Leonard Roberts II. He filed a copyright infringement suit in Los Angeles County Superior Court over the use of his name. He sought $10 million. Jay-Z was called to testify because he was President of Def Jam when the rapper signed with the label.

  The suit was dismissed on the 3rd of July 2010, and the rapper's album Teflon Don came out as scheduled on the 20th of July 2010. A federal judge ruled the case belonged in California state court. Ross refiled there in 2011 with publicity rights claims, while appealing the federal ruling. A federal appeals court upheld the dismissal in 2012. In July 2012, a motion went in Ross's favor regarding Warner Bros. Records and its use of the name and image.

  A trial against the rapper and Warner Music Group was set for the 27th of August 2013. The California trial court ruled for the rapper, allowing him to keep the name. In December 2013, a state appeals court upheld that ruling on First Amendment grounds.

  On the 17th of June 2014, a standing-room-only crowd filled the Eso Won Bookstore in Los Angeles for the launch of Freeway Rick Ross: The Untold Autobiography. Author Cathy Scott co-wrote the memoir with him. KCET TV called it "fascinating for its unsentimental, inside look at his career on the streets of South Central." It was a finalist in the true crime category of the 2014 INDIEFAB Book of the Year Award from Foreword Reviews, announced in June 2015.

  In October 2015, police found $100,000 in cash during a traffic stop and arrested Ross on suspicion of possessing drug proceeds. Ross alleged that he had been racially profiled. He said he was carrying the money to buy a home. Charges were ultimately dropped, and he explained that the cash came from book sales and speaking fees.

  In January 2022, it was reported that Ross had founded a boxing management company called Team Freeway Boxing. It had four professional boxers under contract. He also took an advisory role with light welterweight contender Anthony Peterson. In a June 2024 interview on The Joe Rogan Experience, Ross said he owns a marijuana dispensary.

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• 8. Ross On Screen

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  Filmmaker Kevin Booth made the documentary American Drug War: The Last White Hope, and Ross was a key figure in it. The second episode of the first season of BET's American Gangster focused on Ross and his link to the Iran-Contra scandal. He also gave an interview for VH1's Planet Rock History of Crack and Hip Hop Documentary.

  In 2015, Ross appeared in the two-part documentary Freeway: Crack in the System. It examines levels of the drug trade, the Iran-Contra affair and mass incarceration. In 2016 it was nominated for an Emmy for Outstanding Investigative Journalism: Long Form. In the 2014 film Kill the Messenger, Michael K. Williams plays Ross. The band The Coup also sings about CIA involvement in his rise in their single My Favorite Mutiny.

  Ross claims his lifestyle and cocaine business shaped Franklin Saint, the protagonist of the FX drama Snowfall. He also points to his suspected involvement in Iran-Contra. He says he and the show's creator, John Singleton, agreed to "partner up to make a movie," but that Singleton "disappeared" before making Snowfall. Singleton died in 2019 and never confirmed Ross's claims.

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