#freewayrick

Special shout-out & thanks to the former kingpin & author, #FreewayRick/#FreewayRickRoss @freewayricky for like my artwork of himself on Instagram. He's officially to become my artwork customer. God bless him. (at Harlem) https://www.instagram.com/ellis.craddock/p/CX-Qk0QA1V7/?utm_medium=tumblr

Here's 1,276th photo art that I create to honor the former kingpin & author, @freewayricky #FreewayRickRoss/#FreewayRick. (at Harlem) https://www.instagram.com/p/CX7nZHaM7La/?utm_medium=tumblr

A New Chapter

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 cliché: 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 honest—that 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. “If there was an eye to the storm,” I finally began, “if there was a criminal mastermind behind crack’s decade-long reign, if there was one outlaw capitalist….” Well, you get the idea. It was not wrong—if you had to pick the most influential L.A. crack dealer, Rick was the guy—but 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 him—the paper had spared me that indignity—I 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 “Dark Alliance” erupted a year later, I wanted no part. I was embarrassed—I knew nothing of Rick’s supply chain—and 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. Times’s 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 “first pipeline” 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. Crack’s genesis, I wrote in 1996, involved “a cast of interchangeable characters…none of whom is central to the drama.” As the Columbia Journalism Review noted, “the same Jesse Katz” 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: Rick’s story was over. Journalism, in any case, was like that. We parachute into people’s lives, root around for something that can be distilled and packaged—with accuracy and empathy, at our best—then 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. “Jesse Katz!” he said. “What took you so long?” //// 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 “Real Rick Ross” T-shirts. “When I was in prison, I felt like I was trapped inside this concrete box,” Rick tells the parolees who have gathered, scarred and tatted, on plastic chairs. “It starts to close in on you. It starts to get real small. My cell was basically my graveyard.” 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. “I 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?” 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, Rick’s reading list is the can-do canon of early 20th-century America—Think and Grow Rich, As a Man Thinketh, The Richest Man in Babylon—the 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. “Those books showed me that anything I got myself into, I could get myself out of,” Rick tells the 12-steppers. “But I had to start thinking for myself. I had to start using my mind to get what I want.” “Bless you, brother,” 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 “emotional logic” of the compulsive gambler highlighted. It is not hard to recognize Rick’s feverish pace today, his serial scheming, as some kind of entrepreneurial Nicorette—just enough of a rush to keep him from slipping. “You control the switch,” he says. “Don’t let nobody turn your switch on and off but you.” “He’s got the fire,” 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.