The army's financiers - who met with CIA agents before and during the time they were selling the drugs in L.A. - delivered cut-rate cocaine to the gangs through a young South-Central crack dealer named Ricky Donnell Ross.
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If they'd been in a more respectable line of work, Norwin Meneses, Oscar Danilo Blandon Reyes and "Freeway Rick" Ross would have been hailed as geniuses of marketing.
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Federal lawmen will tell you plenty about Rick Ross, mostly about the evils he visited upon black neighborhoods by spreading the crack plague in Los Angeles and cities as far east as Cincinnati.Tomorrow, they hope, Freeway Rick will be sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

But those same officials won't say a word about the two men who turned Rick Ross into L.A.'s first king of crack, the men who, for at least five years, supplied him with enough Colombian cocaine to help spawn crack markets in major cities nationwide.
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Crack's Kroc was a disillusioned 19-year-old named Ricky Donnell Ross, who, at the dawn of the 1980s, found himself adrift on the streets of South-Central Los Angeles.

A talented tennis player for Dorsey High School, Ross had recently seen his dream of a college scholarship evaporate when his coach discovered he could neither read nor write.

A friend of Ross' - a college football player home at Christmas from San Jose State University - told him "cocaine was going to be the new thing, that everybody was doing it."Intrigued, Ross set off to find out more.

Through a cocaine-using auto-upholstery teacher Ross knew, he met a Nicaraguan named Henry Corrales, who began selling Ross and a friend , Ollie "Big Loc" Newell, small amounts of remarkably inexpensive cocaine.

Thanks to a network of friends in South-Central L.A. and Compton, including many members of various Crips gangs, the pair steadily built up clientele.With each sale, Ross reinvested his hefty profits in more cocaine.

Eventually, Corrales introduced Ross and Newell to his supplier, Blandon.
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"At first, we was just going to do it until we made $5,000," Ross said."We made that so fast we said, no, we'll quit when we make $20,000.Then we was going to quit when we saved enough to buy a house . . ."

Ross would eventually own millions of dollars' worth of real estate across Southern California, including houses, motels, a theater and several other businesses. (His nickname, "Freeway Rick," came from the fact that he owned properties near the Harbor Freeway in Los Angeles.)

Within a year, Ross' drug operation grew to dominate inner-city Los Angeles, and many of the biggest dealers in town were his customers.When crack hit L.A.'s streets hard in late 1983, Ross already had the infrastructure in place to corner a huge chunk of the burgeoning market.

It was not uncommon, he said, to move $2 million or $3 million worth of crack in one day.

"Our biggest problem had got to be counting the money," Ross said."We got to the point where it was like, man, we don't want to count no more money."

Nicaraguan cocaine dealer Jacinto Torres, another former supplier of Ross and a sometime-partner of Blandon, told drug agents in a 1992 interview that after a slow start, "Blandon's cocaine business dramatically increased. . . . Norwin Meneses, Blandon's supplier as of 1983 and 1984, routinely flew quantities of 200 to 400 kilograms from Miami to the West Coast."
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"He was one of the main distributors down here," said former Los Angeles Police Department narcotics detective Steve Polak, who was part of the Freeway Rick Task Force, which was set up in 1987 to put Ross out of business.
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But Ross is the first to admit that being in the right place at the right time had almost nothing to do with his amazing success.Other L.A. dealers, he noted, were selling crack long before he started.

What he had, and they didn't, was Blandon, a friend with a seemingly inexhaustible supply of high-grade cocaine and an expert's knowledge of how to market it.

"I'm not saying I wouldn't have been a dope dealer without Danilo," Ross stressed.
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The secret to his success, Ross said, was Blandon's cocaine prices."It was unreal.We were just wiping out everybody."

"It didn't make no difference to Rick what anyone else was selling it for.Rick would just go in and undercut him $10,000 a key," Chico Brown said.
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Boom - Rick would go in and sell it for 20.If he was selling for 20, Rick would sell for 10.Sometimes, he be giving (it) away."
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That turn of events both amuses and angers "Freeway Rick" Ross, L.A.'s premier crack wholesaler during much of the 1980s and Blandon's biggest customer.
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"They say I sold dope everywhere, but, man, I know he done sold 10 times more dope than me," Ross said during a recent interview.

Nothing epitomizes the drug war's uneven impact on black Americans more clearly than the intertwined lives of Ricky Donnell Ross, a high-school dropout, and his suave cocaine supplier, Blandon, who has a master's degree in marketing and was one of the top civilian leaders in California of an anti-communist guerrilla army formed by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency.
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After Blandon crossed paths with Ross, a South-Central teenager with gang connections and street smarts necessary to move the army's cocaine, a blizzard engulfed the ghettos.
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They formed the Freeway Rick Task Force, a cadre of veteran drug agents whose sole mission was to put Rick Ross out of business.
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Ross, as usual, was quick to spot a trend.He moved to Cincinnati and quietly settled into a woodsy, suburban home.

"I called it cooling out, trying to back away from the game," Ross said.
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A manic deal-maker, Ross found Cincinnati's virgin crack market too seductive to ignore.
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"There's no doubt in my mind crack in Cincinnati can be traced to Ross," police officer Robert Enoch told a Cincinnati newspaper three years ago.
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In 1988, one of his loads ran into a drug-sniffing dog at a New Mexico bus station, and drug agents eventually connected it to Ross.He pleaded guilty to crack trafficking charges and received a mandatory 10-year prison sentence, which he began serving in 1990.

In Miami, Blandon's retirement plans also had gone awry as his business ventures collapsed.

He returned to the San Francisco Bay Area and began brokering cocaine again, buying and selling from the Nicaraguan dealers he'd known in his days with the FDN.In 1990 and 1991, he testified, he sold about 425 kilos of cocaine in Northern California - $10.5 million worth at wholesale prices.

But unlike before, when he was selling cocaine for the contras, Blandon was constantly dogged by the police.

Twice in six months he was detained, first by Customs agents while taking $117,000 in money orders to Tijuana to pay a supplier, and then by the LAPD when he was in the act of paying one of his Colombian suppliers more than $350,000.

The second time, after police found $14,000 in cash and a small quantity of cocaine in his pocket, he was arrested.
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Records show Ross was still behind bars, awaiting parole, when San Diego DEA agents targeted him.

Soon after Ross went to prison for the Cincinnati bust, federal prosecutors offered him a deal.His term would be shortened by five years in return for testimony in a federal case against Los Angeles County Sheriff's detectives that included members of the old Freeway Rick Task Force.

Within days of Ross' parole in October 1994, he and Blandon were back in touch, and their conversation quickly turned to cocaine.

According to tapes Blandon made of some of their discussions, Ross repeatedly told Blandon that he was broke and couldn't afford to finance a drug deal.But Ross did agree to help his old mentor, who was also pleading poverty, find someone else to buy the 100 kilos of cocaine Blandon claimed he had.

On March 2, 1995, in a shopping-center parking lot in National City, near San Diego, Ross poked his head inside a cocaine-laden Chevy Blazer, and the place exploded with police.

Ross jumped into a friend's pickup and zoomed off "looking for a wall that I could crash myself into," he said."I just wanted to die."He was captured after the truck careened into a hedgerow.He has been held in jail without bond since then.
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On the strength of Blandon's testimony, Ross and two other men were convicted of cocaine-conspiracy charges in San Diego last March - conspiring to sell the DEA's cocaine.Sentencing was set for today.Ross is facing a life sentence without