I first met Freeway Rick in 1994, between his second and third convictions, as he walked out the doors of a Texas jail. He took my hand and slipped it into a soul brother shake. The scene was almost clichĆ©: the journalist and the drug lord, the white professional and the black felon, each of us practiced in the art of persuasion. I had been at the L.A. Times for almost a decade by then, most recently as the gang reporter. I had reason to be wary, but I was drawn to Rick, to his effervescence and accessibility, to the confounding disconnect between his outlandish deeds and his modest habits. To be granted a front-row seat to his turnaround was to feel my cred go through the roof. From summer into fall, Rick and I were homies. We tooled around the Piney Woods, visiting the abandoned shack, in a field buzzing with cicadas, that his dad had built for his mom, then resumed our courtship in L.A., appraising the ruins of his crumbled empire, debating, ribbing, validating. What felt like a coup, though, soon proved the most fraught chapter of my writing life. I have been accused of romanticizing a criminal, of caving to the government, of being both a sucker and a pawn. I have felt betrayed by Rick; Rick has felt betrayed by me. I have written about him in ways that were truthful but not entirely honestāthat satisfied the imperatives of journalism without quite reflecting what I wanted to say. Nineteen years ago when I tried to capture all his contradictions, Rick as Yoda and Rick as Scarface, the paper balked. I was told that my initial drafts made him appear too sympathetic, and me too gullible. To get the story in print, I needed Rick to be the devil. āIf there was an eye to the storm,ā I finally began, āif there was a criminal mastermind behind crackās decade-long reign, if there was one outlaw capitalistā¦.ā Well, you get the idea. It was not wrongāif you had to pick the most influential L.A. crack dealer, Rick was the guyābut it was hyped, a glib summation. I was interested in his psychology, the degree to which any one of us is in control of our fate, and instead I was nudged into ranking his exploits. This feature was originally published in the June 2013 issue of Los Angeles magazine When I learned that Rick had been snared in an undercover sting, that he had begun talking to Blandon before my story even ran, I was furious, at him and at myself. Although I had not vouched for himāthe paper had spared me that indignityāI had still given him a platform. Rick had sworn he was too smart to sell drugs again. Now he would be another black man in a cell, a confirmation of every bias and statistic. When āDark Allianceā erupted a year later, I wanted no part. I was embarrassedāI knew nothing of Rickās supply chaināand distrustful of any narrative that Rick could exploit as a defense. Let Gary Webb be his new homie. But the story would not die. Although I had relocated to the L.A. Timesās Houston bureau, the paper summoned me back to sweep up the mess. Webb had relied on my portrayal of Rick to bolster one of his theories: that the Nicaraguans supplying Rick had opened the āfirst pipelineā between Latin America and black L.A. To show that Webb was making a facile leap, I had to dial back my own overheated depiction of Rick, to reframe him in more nuanced terms. Sure, he was big, probably the biggest of his day, but that was still only a small share of the total market. Crackās genesis, I wrote in 1996, involved āa cast of interchangeable charactersā¦none of whom is central to the drama.ā As the Columbia Journalism Review noted, āthe same Jesse Katzā had managed to elevate and deflate Ricky Ross in the span of two years. I took a stab at a more transparent account in 1998, when I made the pilgrimage to Lompoc for a first-person piece in Texas Monthly. I assumed it would be the final word: Rickās story was over. Journalism, in any case, was like that. We parachute into peopleās lives, root around for something that can be distilled and packagedāwith accuracy and empathy, at our bestāthen move on, to the next event, the newest superlative. We do not often maintain the relationships that were so urgent while they lasted. We almost never reopen our files, reevaluate our perceptions. There is no way that Rick and I should still be at it today, doing the dance all over again. But I have never met anyone who has survived so many incarnations, whose life is such an irresistible puzzle. When I called him last fall, to see how he might feel about a story, Rick was already a step ahead. āJesse Katz!ā he said. āWhat took you so long?ā //// We are on Vine, in the basement of a halfway house, for the morning 12-step meeting. Rick has arrived early, spry and jaunty, lugging a bag of āReal Rick Rossā T-shirts. āWhen I was in prison, I felt like I was trapped inside this concrete box,ā Rick tells the parolees who have gathered, scarred and tatted, on plastic chairs. āIt starts to close in on you. It starts to get real small. My cell was basically my graveyard.ā If he was going to die in prison, Rick figured, he should at least try to understand how it happened, what caused him to give up his life. āI wanted to know me, how did I get in this position? Where did I turn wrong? Why did I die? What did I die from? What killed you, Rick?ā In prison he took refuge in the library, reading day after day, year after year, 300 books in all. Three stuck with him, books that he has read over and again, that he buys for young people who remind him of himself. Far from the literature of the oppressed, Rickās reading list is the can-do canon of early 20th-century AmericaāThink and Grow Rich, As a Man Thinketh, The Richest Man in Babylonāthe propaganda of the industrialists, a blueprint for the Carnegies and the Rockefellers. In the burning optimism of the robber barons, in their undying belief that all limits are self-imposed, Rick found his lifeline. āThose books showed me that anything I got myself into, I could get myself out of,ā Rick tells the 12-steppers. āBut I had to start thinking for myself. I had to start using my mind to get what I want.ā āBless you, brother,ā someone injects. Rick is preaching, not as his mother would wish but as only Rick can. He was never an addict, at least not like the people who smoked his cocaine, but he was just as much a slave to it. He sold drugs habitually, around the clock, and when finally he understood the damage he was doing, to others and to himself, he did not stop. He could not. While in prison, he sent me a page from an addiction handbook, with a passage on the āemotional logicā of the compulsive gambler highlighted. It is not hard to recognize Rickās feverish pace today, his serial scheming, as some kind of entrepreneurial Nicoretteājust enough of a rush to keep him from slipping. āYou control the switch,ā he says. āDonāt let nobody turn your switch on and off but you.ā āHeās got the fire,ā someone else exclaims. In the parlance of recovery, the addict surrenders to his enemy, then turns to a creator for sanity. But Rick is pure hubris. Up or down, in the joint or on the outs, he trusts in nothing more than his own tenacity, in his own stubborn, fantastical self. He will conquer or he will perish. When the last testimonial has been shared, after the applause and the backslaps, Rick bounds up the stairs and out to the Kia, still carting his shirts. Whether he forgot, or whether he thought twice, he never tried to make a sale.