“Freeway” Rick Ross Speaks at the Boys and Girls Club in Champaign

One of the biggest drug kingpins from the 1980s, “Freeway” Rick Ross, spoke on Thursday night, Dec. 3, 2009, at the Don Moyer Boys and Girls Club in Champaign. Ross appeared for the first time with a Chicago educational group called Hip Hop Detoxx, led by Enoch Muhammad and featuring MCs Phenomenon and Awthentik. The event was organized by CU Citizens for Peace and Justice in the wake of the police shooting of Kiwane Carrington. Ross was released from a federal prison just nine weeks ago. He delivered a powerful message of redemption to a gymnasium full of people from all ages.

“Freeway” Ricky was a pawn in the Iran-Contra scandal. He was supplied with kilos of pure cocaine by the CIA’s front man, Danilo Blandon, and the money that he paid was used to arm the Contras in Nicaragua. Ross was a major supplier for the Bloods and Crips in Los Angeles during the 1980s. He was convicted of drug trafficking in 1996 and given a life sentence. The episode of the BET series American Gangster that featured Ross was the most popular of the series. (Watch the episode here.)

Born in 1960, Ross grew up in South Central LA. As a youth he became an avid tennis player and was one of the top players in high schools across the state. He met an auto mechanic who first turned him on to the drug game. Ross tells his story:

This 19-year-old kid took $125 and at the end of my career I was making a million dollars every single day, some days two, three million dollars. When I started I had absolutely no experience in drugs. When I started I wanted to be the best. I wanted to be the biggest. The same intensity I had in tennis, I took that to the drug game. As everybody knows, the drug game don’t last forever. And everything in the dark comes to light.

The feds come crashing in. The party was over. I was sitting in my jail cell by myself. All my friends were gone. Wasn’t nobody around. Looked bad. My lawyer came to see me, slides me three pages of paper. I couldn’t read nothing on the paper but my name. He said everything in the document explained why I had been given a live sentence. Why I was never going to see my family again.

I took that paper with me and I went to my cell. I laid on my bunk. I sat there and I looked at it, and I looked at it. I wanted to know what was in that paper more than anything. Finally I had the nerve to get up and ask my cell mate, who was reading books all the time. I said, “Can you read this for me?” He looked at me and said, “Why don’t you read it for yourself? That’s your indictment. You’ve got to know what’s on there.”

I got up all my courage and I said, “I can’t read. I got a disorder or something. I ain’t never read.” He said, “You―Rick Ross. You got all these people under you, running the streets, and you can’t read? I don’t believe that. They ain’t never taught you how to read. I’m going to have you reading in two weeks.” Well, he taught me to read in two weeks. But it was a combination of things: one, he really wanted to teach me, and two, I really wanted to learn.

From there, I started to read more books. I learned my ABCs all over again. I had to break myself down. I had to get rid of all of my problems. Sometimes we’re too proud to ask for help. Sometimes, it just takes one time for you to get that information you need. You might have to knock on a hundred doors, but keep knocking, don’t give up.

So I started to read law books every day, five-six hours a day. I started to comprehend the law. I got so other guys were coming to me and they wanted to pay me to do their cases. I debated my case with the justices and the prosecutors in the courtroom. And with that my confidence grew. I wind up winning my case on appeal. After that, I knew I had a date coming. They gave me 20 years. I said, well, you can do this. You’re going to be back on the streets again. What are you going to do? You can’t sell drugs any more.

"What I started to do, I started to read all the business books I could get my hands onto. I wanted know how Sam Walton got started. I wanted to know how K-Mart got started. How McDonald’s got started. I wanted to know how they got financed. I consumed myself with those topics. Then I found out that my story was valuable. People wanted to know about it. When I was in the drug business, I was kind of shielded. I had a few guys that had to let me know what was going on in the streets. I was sheltered. But when I got to prison I found out that rappers were using my name, marketing my lifestyle. I said, what’s this? Then I realized I got a story to tell.

I also watched a video of Minister Louis Farrakhan. We call them “Me-Tapes,” meaning that when I was watching the tapes, I felt he was talking to me. Just yesterday, one of jailhouse friends came to me. Minister Farrakhan invited me to his house. He gave the greatest fatherly hug that any man can give me.

See, I’m like most of y’all, I grew up without my dad. I probably saw my dad ten times at most.
I was mad at him until I was 34-35. When I had all my money, I wouldn’t give him nothing. I know what you’re going through. But I was still able to turn it all around.

Right now, I’ve been out nine weeks. You wouldn’t believe all the stuff I got going on right now. When I was in prison, I wrote my autobiography. I wrote a novel. I wrote a couple movie scripts. I then I studied the movie business. You see, whatever I get into I’m going to study it. I go to these meetings right now with executives at Sony, Universal. But they don’t really know me. They only know what they’ve read in the papers, which ain’t really me no more. See I ain’t a dope dealer. Dope dealing is just something I did. That was just a phase in my life. I got a lot of life to live.

Right now, I signed―not they signed me. See normally you see these dudes on TV say they’re signed. They ain’t signed nobody. They work for them. Instead, they work for me. I got a meeting Monday with Leonardo DiCaprio―I think that’s how you pronounce it. He’s one of the biggest stars in Hollywood. He gets $25 million a movie. He contacted me the other day and said he wants to go into production with me. He wants to be my partner.

So I’m saying, no matter where you’re at, no matter what position you’re in, you can always change. See, when I was in that prison with that life sentence, it was bleak. There was no light. But I kept it in my mind that I would be free again.

Young brothers got to know that dope dealing is a trap. They’ve figured it out. They know there’s dudes out there just like me. Dudes that can sell anything. They can accomplish anything. And I’m here tonight to share with you what I went through.