"Freeway" Rick Ross

Ross began selling cocaine after his illiteracy prevented him from earning a tennis scholarship for college. He began spending time with an upholstery teacher at a Los Angeles community college who revealed he dealt cocaine and offered Ross a small amount to sell.[14] Ross used his profit to purchase more cocaine to sell, expanding his small operation.[15] Ross eventually began to ask for quantities to sell that exceeded what the teacher was willing to procure, so he turned to find a new dealer.[16]

The teacher referred Ross to his supplier, Ivan Arguellas, who offered to keep Ross supplied. Arguellas was able to provide larger quantities at a better price, and Ross quickly went from dealing in grams of cocaine to dealing in ounces.[17] About eight months after becoming Ross's supplier, Arguellas was shot in the spine, resulting in months of hospitalization that forced him out of the cocaine business. His brother-in-law Henry Corrales took over the business, but was not enthusiastic about the trade and had failed to make any connections of his own to suppliers.[18]

A Nicaraguan exile and cocaine distributor named Danilo Blandón was acquainted with Arguellas and Corrales, and although he did not know him personally, was impressed with the amount of cocaine that Ross was moving. Blandón offered to supply cocaine to Corrales to sell to Ross, for a fifty-fifty split of the profit.[19] Eventually, Corrales lost his appetite for the cocaine business and retired, at which point Ross became a direct customer of Blandón.[20]

Through his connection to Blandón, and Blandón's supplier Norwin Meneses Cantarero, Ross was able to purchase Nicaraguan cocaine at significantly reduced rates.[21] Ross began distributing cocaine at $10,000 per kilo less than the average street price, distributing it to the Bloods and Crips street gangs. By 1982, Ross had received his moniker of "Freeway Ricky" and claimed to have sold up to US$3 million worth of cocaine per day, purchasing 1,000 pounds of cocaine a week.[8]

Ross initially invested most of his profits in houses and businesses, because he feared his mother would catch on to what he was doing if he started spending lavishly on himself. In a jailhouse interview with reporter Gary Webb, Ross said, "We were hiding our money from our mothers."[22] He invested a portion of the proceeds from his drug dealing activities in Anita Baker's first album.

With thousands of employees, Ross has said he operated drug sales not only in Los Angeles but in places across the country including St. Louis, New Orleans, Texas, Kansas City, Oklahoma, Indiana, Cincinnati, North Carolina, South Carolina, Baltimore, Cleveland, and Seattle. He has said that his most lucrative sales came from the Ohio area. He made similar claims in a 1996 PBS interview.[23] According to the East Bay Times, "In the course of his rise, prosecutors estimate that Ross exported several tons of cocaine to New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania and elsewhere, and made more than $600 million in the process."[9] Adjusting for inflation using the Consumer Price Index, this becomes more than a billion dollars in 2013.[24]

Much of Ross's success at evading law enforcement was due to his ring's possession of police scanners and voice scramblers. Following one drug bust, a Los Angeles County sheriff remarked that Ross's men had "better equipment than we have."[25]

According to the October 2013 Esquire article, "Between 1982 and 1989, federal prosecutors estimated, Ross bought and resold several metric 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 gross and $850 million in profit. As his distribution empire grew to include forty-two cities, the price he paid per kg of powder cocaine dropped from as much as $60,000 to as low as $10,000."[7]

The memoir was nominated for ForeWord Review's IndiFab Best Book of the Year Award 2014 in the true crime category.[38] In June 2015, winners were announced, with the book named as a Foreword Reviews' 2014 INDIEFAB Book of the Year Award Finalist, True Crime.[39]

Ross was a key figure in filmmaker Kevin Booth's documentary American Drug War: The Last White Hope. The second episode of the first season of BET's American Gangster documentary series was focused on the story of Ricky Ross and his connection to the Iran–Contra scandal.[40]

Ross was a guest interview on VH1's Planet Rock History of Crack and Hip Hop Documentary.[41]

Ross is featured in the 2015 two-part documentary Freeway: Crack in the System, which details various levels of the drug trade, the Iran–Contra scandal, and mass incarceration.[42] In 2016, the documentary was nominated for an Emmy for Outstanding Investigative Journalism: Long Form.[43]

Since 2013, Ross has been a regular guest on The Joe Rogan Experience.[44][45][46] In the 2014 film Kill the Messenger, Ross is portrayed by Michael K. Williams.

• Webb, Gary (1999). Dark Alliance. Seven Stories Press. ISBN 978-1-888363-93-7.